In which I conceptualize modern Leftist political leanings as inversions of and gestures against the natural human ties of affection and affiliation. These inverted displays are superficial, though, and are not reflected in the real relationships or concerns or behavior of the people in question. The inversion is, essentially, a dishonest showing off, in order to gain social status.

People love their families, deeply. Our families are smaller and weaker and more scattered than at any time in history, but the statement still applies. People are bound to their friends. Ideally that friendship should make a person willing to sacrifice in order to honor that loyalty. This also seems to be waning these days. People care for their communities. The idea of the ‘community’ has suffered badly in the past few decades, to the point where it’s a word that’s often misused to refer to political coalitions (“the LGBTQ community”) or online groups. Nevertheless, we generally belong to real communities-even if that belonging is weaker and more conditional than ever before-and we reserve special care for those people and the places they’re tied to.

Are these bonds of affection and affiliation being inverted in certain parts of our society? Do people now care for the marginalized, the lumpen, the migrant, with especial zeal?

Never before has there been a civilization in which the natural human bonds of family, friendship, community, and tribe were widely questioned or repudiated in toto. Nevertheless, we live in such a civilization. Sometimes pro-family and nationalist and communitarian movements and personalities are actually called ‘fascist’ these days. It happens more often than you might think.

To be sure, just because something is called ’racist’ or ‘fascist’ doesn’t mean that many people believe them to be. In the past month I’ve heard large posteriors (on women), caring for one’s own children, bedtime reading, and math called “racist”. I’ve heard voting laws, conversations about birthrates, immigration restrictions, the German AfD, and colorful Madison Square Garden electoral events called “fascist.” In none of these cases was the racism or fascism of the concepts/event on offer convincingly demonstrated.

Survey the range of contentious political issues that are out there: immigration, foreign aid, homelessness, bail reform, etc. All of these break down across consistent and ideologically categorical lines: there is the greater mass of people (in the United States and across the world) who take a traditional, ‘common sense’ approach to these issues.

• Immigration - should be controlled and law-abiding, and assimilation and the national benefit of the home countries are important factors to consider.

• Foreign aid - large quantities of money shouldn’t be disbursed by the government to foreigners, except perhaps in very dire need, and the concept of mass funding of extranational cultural programs and media companies and political actors (especially in secret) is aversive.

• Homelessness - homeless people should be given no more than a minimal level of assistance and should be subject to laws concerning public disorder and antisocial activities. Homelessness shouldn’t be subsidized and people who persist in choosing homelessness as a strategy to divert money to drugs and crime shouldn’t be helped.

• Bail reform - should be foregone if it erases many of the near-term disincentives for crime

‘80/20’ issues are reflected throughout our society. This issue involves a similar distribution. This poll was published this week (late February, 2025)

Then there is a (minority) cohort of educated, mostly urban, professional citizens who learned to think and speak in certain ways and to evaluate concepts using certain theoretical lenses in college. For these people, the tendencies learned in adolescence have been consolidated by years of life without contact (save for the most superficial) with the more ‘traditional’ believers, and by cultural and professional incentives that discourage open discussion of issues or public skepticism. Surely, even in the most elite and distant circles, many people doubt some of the claims of the new elite… but they almost never express these doubts. Such expressions are reliably punished and acknowledging that this system of penalty and discouragement is in place is also verboten. It’s a vast and interlocking web of silence and doublethink, inculcated over years. It simply doesn’t exist in the working classes, or across most of the world, and it’s possibly the starkest and most consequential class-based cultural dividing line in the modern world. Naturally many people have convinced themselves and others that they don’t know the line exists. In fact, they have no idea what you’re talking about! Fine-then praise two parent families for being especially good at raising children! Proclaim that homeless people tend to shifty and deranged drug addicts. These are trivially uncontroversial statements among ‘normal’ people. Bring up the possibility that many crimes attributed to native-born citizens in studies MIGHT be committed by illegal immigrants. Just mention the idea to your peers. Actually… just use the word ‘illegal immigrant’. Work it in naturally, casually. Go ahead!

What are the things that this minority cohort believes? It’s important to understand that these ideas are formulated, in large part, as reactions to the mainstream and as advertisements of reflectiveness and virtue. How much they’re sincerely and deeply believed (they often seem to make little difference to the behaviors or spending priorities of the believers, as we’ll see) is up for debate. People do claim to believe these things, though, and they vote accordingly. You’ll notice that these beliefs don’t exactly address the mainstream opinions. They’re oddly tangential, as if the believers are intentionally missing the point. They rather reflect feelings and affiliations, rather than facts or concrete policies. That’s an important observation.

• Immigration - immigrants are worthy and suffering folks who should be helped by our policies. They should be welcomed and supported by our government and not deported or treated as if they’re ‘illegal’.

• Foreign aid - foreigners are worthy and suffering folks who deserve our help, and any effort to constrain or limit aid is a mean-spirited attempt to appeal to greed and (probably) racism/xenophobia.

• Homelessness - the unhoused are worthy and suffering folks who deserve our help. More funding should be allocated, and it’s quite likely that capitalism is, in some sense, to blame.

• Bail reform - criminal suspects are worthy and suffering folks caught in the gears of a fearsome and racist machine. They shouldn’t be treated poorly or made to sit in jail simply because they were arrested. Many of them are poor (and that is a huge part of the reason they commit crimes) and a huge number are BIPOC, reflecting the racist character of our criminal justice system. Suspects who can’t pay bail should be released, save for the most violent crimes, (even if this leads to much higher crime rates overall).

That last clause was my own addition, and not something they’d be likely to say (although many of them do believe it). Aside from that, though, all of these claims are faithfully written and are as accurate as I can make them in representing what the minority believes.

Do you notice anything about these ideas, any common theme? They all elevate the needs and characters of marginal groups of people, based no doubt on their perceived status of marginalization. There’s no recognition of policy costs or risks or distinctives.

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Luxury Beliefs are Status Symbols

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3 years ago · 595 likes · 22 comments · Rob Henderson

God’s love is infinite and there is nothing in creation that is not touched by it. That is perhaps an accurate image of Divine Love as certain pre-Christian thinkers might frame it. But this is not love as it is revealed to us in Sacred Scripture. It is not the way of things from the Judeo-Christian perspective. In addition to this general love, there is also a particular and special love and this love has an order. It follows a path. It is structured and intentional, like a river carving its way through the land.

Human love reflects this duality. Particular and personal love follows what the Catholic tradition calls the ordo amoris—the order of love. Not all are loved the same, nor should they be. If love is to be true, it must first be rightly ordered.

-Fr. Joseph Hudson

The principle of a natural hierarchy of loves and loyalties (beginning with the closest and most intimately connected people in a life, and working outward in concentric rings of care and willingness to sacrifice) is the ancient concept of ordo amoris, extant in Christan writing for centuries.

The left makes a virtue out of reversing the principle of ordo amoris. Rather than reserving their loyalty and affection for people in their families, communities, and nations-and regarding the larger and undifferentiated mass of humanity with the benign equanimity that is normal-they have constructed a worldview in which outsiders, miscreants, and marginal characters are given artificially high priority in their ideological scheme.

Last week ‘ordo amoris’ achieved the kind of momentary, viral notoriety which seems to happen to an endlessly rotating cast of memes and allegations and personalities these days. The concept has already more or less faded from view, but it ignited the normal self-righteous and mocking and certain claims and counterclaims which basically comprise our entire culture at this point. J.D. Vance said something about ordo amoris, and critics responded that it’s inconsistent with Christianity, or something. I’m not very interested in those exchanges.

I am interested in the concept, though, and how it relates to our current memetic landscape.

Does Christianity sanction or reject ordo amoris? I mean it is a Christian term… but who cares? You’ll notice a suspicious pattern that ‘Christianity’ tends to affirm exactly those things that an individual believer thinks or feels. Then ‘Christianity’ will be used to bolster and defend a radically different set of propositions, believed by someone else.

I want to restate the fact that the opponents of ordo amoris (I’ll just call them the left, even if that’s not necessarily sufficient or precise) do not, in fact, hold that everyone should be treated equally. They usually support preferences and special considerations for their talismanic groups (in order to balance out systemic barriers, they would say). This is something rather different than the Buddhiest concept of Metta, or loving-kindness, a spiritual discipline of actively wishing for the enlightenment and happiness of every being in existence. A Buddhist (in this context) would find no distinction between a blessing bestowed upon a white person or one upon a black one. There’s a fundamental equality of all beings here in samsara, according to this idea. Buddhist prayers are offered for the benefit of all beings. That equality is absent, indeed repudiated, in the leftist cosmology. Instead, there’s an inversion of ordo amoris (the victim hierarchy, in other words). Intersectionality gives people and groups extra consideration and credibility and status. I cannot think of a great religious or ethical tradition which has promoted that, for a very good reason: it’s not workable (or intuitive) and would probably lead to total social collapse.

What’s going on here? I would speculate that the leftist worldview has become so enamored of the downtrodden and the marginalized (in the abstract) that this concern has warped an entire ethical system. Just as life in a Soviet bureaucracy could quickly inure you to the cries of tortured kulaks and the sight of train cars full of political problems heading to ‘re-education’ in Siberia, and numb you to the humanity of dissidents and accused counter-revolutionaries, the process can work in the other direction.

When the punishment of certain groups and the reward of others becomes more about emotional impulses and self-gratification you can be sure that bad policies will result.

An artificial set of ideological concerns can make a person especially sensitive to the needs of entire (abstract) groups of people. A powerful sense that the poor and the foreign and the gay (etc.) have been more redeemed than others, through their suffering and their marginalization, and more deserving of respect and care can shift an entire cultures’ emotional and psychological default setting. It can warp the ways that people see the world. These changes are not just discrete opinions or beliefs. They are deep-seated tendencies that affect every attitude and bias that a believer has.

Research seems to validate this inversion of sympathy and its connections to political persuasion. Look at the diagram below (‘conservative’ / ‘liberal’).

Heatmaps indicating highest moral allocation by ideology, Study 3a. Source data are provided as a Source Data file. Note. The highest value on the heatmap scale is 20 units for liberals, and 12 units for conservatives. Moral circle rings, from inner to outer, are described as follows: (1) all of your immediate family, (2) all of your extended family, (3) all of your closest friends, (4) all of your friends (including distant ones), (5) all of your acquaintances, (6) all people you have ever met, (7) all people in your country, (8) all people on your continent, (9) all people on all continents, (10) all mammals, (11) all amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds, (12) all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae, (13) all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms, (14) all living things in the universe including plants and trees, (15) all natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks, (16) all things in existence.

researchgate.net/figure…

Research seems to indicate a Leftist inversion of natural concerns and affiliations. They care more for strangers and abstract groups than they do for the people in their lives and communities.

These people are living in a digital make-believe. Their empathy makes them heroic (or at least virtuous) in their own minds… meanwhile they do/risk/sacrifice nothing.

What are the consequences of having millions of people who fervently love, and support people furthest located from them in society and geography? Honestly, I’m not sure…

Because this is all complete bullshit.

I think it would be a fascinating and powerful development if millions of our fellow citizens began to attach themselves to outsiders and foreigners in a real and organic fashion (I’m not going to do that though-I love my family and my friends and I’m proud of where I come from). I also think it would be a fascinating and powerful development if millions of our fellow citizens began to conceptualize their privilege (racial, sexual, etc.) as ill-gotten, and worked diligently to flatten hierarchies. I’m not sure those would be positive things, on the balance, but they might be. They’d certainly make for a more interesting society.

Instead, we have a vast professional class that’s pretending to believe these things and care for these people. They announce their views on X and advertise their ‘beliefs’ like baubles, at HR meetings and parties, and use their misapprehensions to guide their voting patterns… and then they do nothing. This isn’t sincere conviction. This is a shallow status game, with tragic real-world consequences. This is the answer to the mystery of how entire cities and states of voters can support catastrophic policy changes which remove penalties for theft, or protect violent migrants in city jails from transfer to ICE (and deportation), or decide to impose billions of dollars of tax burden on the poorest citizens in order to fund environmental non-profits and queer learning events for educators.

An ideology’s metric of potency is the degree of change it is able to effect in the world. For individuals, ideologies are potent inasmuch as they constrain lifestyles and direct behavior. Islam, despite its brutalities, still has substantial vigor. The seemingly arbitrary rules and dietary commandments actually strengthen a belief system (provided they’re observed). Christianity is in a much weaker state. Obviously, it’s a global religion, but viewing only the United States one gets the sense of a kind of identity badge and a set of feel-good stories and morals… and little else. There are fairly unambiguous rules and norms within Christianity (abjure wealth, associate with outcasts, don’t tolerate homosexuality) but they are generally ignored. Instead, we have a kind of set of gentle suggestions and admonitions which are prostrate before the tide of culture and financial interest. How many Christians have taken the commandment to spurn wealth seriously? In the richest country on Earth?

The really interesting cases emerge when we find belief systems with radical claims and commandments… and followers who are too weak and superficial to carry them out. That brings us back to ordo amoris and contemporary American culture. People simply do not behave as if progressive ideas are true, or at least they don’t let those ideas constrain their own behavior and self-interest. People work to accumulate as much money and professional acclaim and social status and legal protection as they can and then they make empty verbal gestures toward radical egalitarianism. It’s much the same with ordo amoris. The left isn’t truly treating outsiders and immigrants and the marginalized with the love and concern of people they care about. rather, they maintain the same general hierarchies of affection as everyone else (just slightly weaker, and more neurotic, and more selfish). They care about their families and reserve special concern for their kids’ schools and their communities and their workplaces. Then they pretend to care about distant groups, and erect a structure atop those pretensions in order to advertise attributes to friends and coworkers, and to people online. Unfortunately, this warped picture of reality deeply affects voting patterns and policymaking.

In brief, these people lack the courage of their convictions (to either maintain beliefs consistent with their lifestyles, or to change their lifestyles to accord with their beliefs). These are not brave people; rather they are superficial. And they know it.

The examples of this are now endless:

Many people work entirely from home. Millions of shoppers have everything delivered to their doors. Socializing, dating, attending class-all digital. We maintain solitary and confusing lives (fervently dedicated to ideas of validation and self-actualization and ‘vibes’). In other words, we live in a complicated modern world in which beliefs and policies barely seem real (except to the people on the bottom of the pile) and millions of our fellow citizens seem to think that ideas and values are a kind of plumage, to be displayed for social credit. So it is with the ordo amoris debate. I would bet that none of the people attacking J. D. Vance (on the basis of compassion, or public concern, or Christianity doctrine) actually behave as if they care about immigrants and strangers more than their friends and families. I would further bet that at least 99% of them have never made any real sacrifice or run any risk for such people.

The perfect example of this sort of ridiculous play-acting was the bussing of dozens of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard in 2022. After realizing that these people needed more than second-hand clothes and boxed lunches, they were promptly moved en masse to a nearby military installation. Of course migrants need housing and jobs and community… but those things will have to be supplied by other people.

If people really care about people, groups, causes, and values, they will be willing to sacrifice for them. That’s what care MEANS. Survey the range of progressive causes and ask yourself: how many people are sacrificing their own time and money and status (beyond purely superficial donations and volunteer hours) in order to make change? These are radical proposals. They would require radical action in order to manifest them. Who, exactly, is supposed to execute this radical action?

Just as the power of an ideology is measured by the influence it has over its believers’ lives, the power of a political conviction is directly tied to the willingness of its believers to sacrifice.

The problem is not that we have millions of people who have inverted their hierarchy of concern and are treating immigrants and prisoners and queer people as if they’re friends and family. The problem is that we have millions of people who pretend to feel this way, and then live their selfish, myopic, alienated lives according to the plan mapped out by our culture: credential collection, property accumulation, status games, selfish romantic and professional relationships, mercenary self-interest.

It’s not that people believe strange things-it’s that they’re too cowardly to live according to their stated principles. If you want to care for illegal immigrants, or working-class black folks, or prisoners, you’re probably going to want to meet a few of them. Obviously, that’s never going to happen.

This isn’t fundamentally an epistemological problem or an ideological one. It’s a moral one. People lack courage.

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