>>2257849>bizzare idea of social darwinism "might make rigth" … what really got me was the sheer hate against women, jews, and people that don't follow their idea of how people should be and behave, it's bizarre and it's frighteningYeah that's very common. I'd add a prevailing spirit of irrationalism. I think one pathology on the right can come from people seeing themselves as like knights on a heroic quest, which leads to them becoming increasingly unmoored from reality. There's the phrase "tilting at windmills" from Don Quixote about a guy who becomes so enthralled by books about romantic chivalry he goes off imagining himself as a knight and fighting imaginary enemies (like seeing windmills off in the distance and imagining dragons). The novel was written during the Renaissance was a satire of the Middle Ages and contributed to emphasizing the clash between tradition and modernity to a ludicrous effect. "The morning star is Satan and the first thing you do when the sun rises is that you wake up… woke."
A hardcore example is a neo-Nazi group. They come to see basically everything as out to destroy them personally and the white race generally, but they don't even like most white people who they see as race traitors or too gay or whatever. They see Jews everywhere too. Like certain things they don't like (which is a lot of things actually) are "Jewish." It can be anything.
It can be explained as a combination of those things. It's a little island of vision, duty and idealism surrounded by an ocean of threats: women, the crowds, communists, chaos, fun! Children! Basically everything.
Klaus Thewleit said these people were "noch nicht geboren." They were psychologically "not yet born" so they only felt real in a uniform. These people were so paranoid of things they can't control they create a generalized "them or us" situation. In a religious context this is a Manichean universe that splits everything into good and evil.
>>2257922I think cults are the thing to watch out for among communists. They'll turn you into a zombie, enlist you in some Stalinoid bootcamp, or drag their membership into all sorts of disasters because a dynamic develops around a megalomaniacal "great leader" whose ideas are fairly unpredictable and who surrounds himself with a core of sycophants who repeat his gibberish. They don't necessarily start out this way, there's a tendency for people – especially those with psychological weaknesses and those who feel estranged by the dominant institutions of class society – to look for moral support from others so disposed, but then negative group dynamics set in which squash independent thinking. It can also occur (or seems to) after defeats, and the left loses a lot, so the problem compounds.
And that's disastrous for the left. You have to think for yourself. But you also have to act in concert with others and that's the ultimate contradiction of revolutionary politics.
Another tendency is towards dogmatism. Like, say a million or so fast-food workers go on strike, how many read any Marx before doing it? Not so very many. But that's because it's not "Marxism" which holds sway but objective reality. Now, Marx would have predicted many of the workers' complaints, but it's not the Marxist axioms which created the workers' movement once they began following them dogmatically. "Marxism" here really is more of a guide to action, a compass or guidepost.