# Posted 2:15 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

A GUIDE TO POLITICAL NEUROSES: The following is an excerpt from an essay by Arthur Koestler, best known as the author of Darkness at Noon. It appeared in the inaugural issue of Encounter in 1958:

Eternal Adolescents

The young radical intellectual of Bloomsbury, St. Germain de Pres, or Greenwich village is a relatively harmless type. Often his radicalism is derived from adolescent revolt against the parents or some other stereotyped conflict which makes him temporarily despair of the world. But some of the young radicals never grow up; they remain the eternal adolescents of the Left.

One variety of this type is frequently found both in the United States and in France, though rarely in England. Young X. stars as an enthusiastic Communist, is soon disillusioned, found a Trotskyite opposition group o ten people, discovers that six of the ten form a secret "opposition bloc" within the group, is disillusioned, founds a little "mag" with a hundred per cent true anti-capitalist, anti-Stalinist, anti-pacifist programme, goes bankrupt, starts a new little mag, and so on. All his struggles, polemics, victories, and defeats are storms in a tea cup, confined to the same small circle of radical intellectuals -- a kind of family which thrives on quarrels and mutual denunciations, and yet coheres by virtue of some unique dialectical glue. A classic example is the group of Marxist-Existentialists around Sartre's Les Temps Modernes, with their perennial quarrels and schisms. The sectarian may be said to suffer from the incestuous type of political libido.

A different type is Y., the busybody, whose name is on every "progressive" committee, whose voice is raised in protest against every injustice, who has embraced every good cause under the sun, and has never achieved anything on earth. Y. is the political equivalent of the nymphomaniac; he suffers from an excess of political libido. This kind of neurosis, too, flourishes chiefly in the climate of the Left, -- for, generally speaking the Left is politically over-sexed.

Finally, there is Z., the political masochist. With him, the parable of the mote and the beam has been reversed. The slightest injustice in his own country wrings from him cries of anguish and despair, but he finds excuses for the most heinous crimes committed in the opposite camp. When a coloured tennis player is refused a room in a London luxury hotel, Z. quivers with spontaneous indignation; when millions spit out their lungs in Soviet Arctic mines and lumber-camps, Z.'s sensitive conscience is silent. Z. is an inverted patriot, whose self-hatred and craving for self-punishment has turned into hatred for his country or social class and yearning for the whip that will scourge.

Coming across Koestler's thoughts in the midst of the great Michael Moore publicity fest, it is hard to escape the thought that the radical left, down to the midst specific details of its personalities, has changed not at all over the past fifty years.

On the other hand, Koestler's polemic provides an important reminder that responding to such critics often brings out the worse in us. Read in context, it is far from apparent that Koestler intended his guide to political neuroses as a satire of the left, even though that is how it will strike the modern reader. Surely, it would not be hard to identify the political neuroses of conservatives as well.

The final lesson to be taken from Koestler's writing is that we have nothing to fear. Even at the height of the Cold War, when Communism presented an existential threat to Western civilization, the radical left was a source of amusement rather than a meance. Now, as we confront the dangerous but hardly overwhelming threat of Islamist terror, we would do well to remember that Michael Moore & Co. are nothing more than comedians, regardless of their intentions. (1) opinions -- Add your opinion