In many ways, Washington Post writer Taylor Lorenz is a perfect example of today’s consummate leftist. She’s blinded by her own ideology to the point where self-awareness is now out of reach. She’s hypocritical to an absurd degree, self-important, and entitled.
But more so than any of that, she’s hopelessly humorless.
Case in point, her reaction to colleague Matthew Yglesias making light of having COVID-19 was to finger-wag in his direction and attempt to make him feel as if he shouldn’t be joking at all.
Wash Post still working out the struggle I guess. pic.twitter.com/DIDtZKnrrf
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) June 19, 2022
As an aside, whistling in the dark is a perfectly reasonable response to a negative event happening to you. Taking things too seriously only makes the problem worse. Humor has been a way to dispel the darkness in one’s life for ages, and it’s good for the spirit, and what’s good for the spirit is good for the body. But I digress.
Lorenz is engaging in some real virtue signaling here. Her position is that Yglesias can’t laugh while others are in pain. It’s supposed to give the illusion that Lorenz is far more concerned about the plight of the poor and unfortunate souls that constitute the “have-nots” in our society. You can see the folly of this thinking pretty easily, however. All you need to do is take this thought to its absolute end.
No one may feel joy so long as someone out there is suffering. If that’s the case then no one would ever feel joy because someone will always be in pain and/or suffering. Moreover, since today’s primary currency in our socio-political climate is “victimhood,” you can bet that pain and suffering would be used as a way to force control over others.
C.S. Lewis wrote of this very concept in his book “The Great Divorce” where one of the characters was attempting to enforce control over another by way of perverting sympathy:
“To demand of the loveless and the self-imprisioned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven…Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. I know it has a grand sound to say ye’ll accept no salvation which leaves one creature in the dark outside. But watch that sophistry or ye’ll make a Dog in the Manger the tyrant of the universe.”
This is, by and large, the left’s position on almost any given subject. The poor, sick, and oppressed must not only have your sympathy but your loyalty. You must feel some sort of guilt that you are not them and that all that you do must be in service to them.
It’s a perversion of charity.
The solutions and “service” to them are all the same; give the left more power because they’ll be able to fix everything. In the end, it’s never about service in a real sense, it’s about handing over yourself.
Naturally, this will sap everyone of their individuality, their humor, their creativity, and eventually the very sympathy the left sought to exploit. Lorenz is, effectively, a social tyrant attempting to enforce her will on others just like every other consummate leftist in our society. People will naturally turn away from them because, frankly, they’re ridiculous people who have no solutions.
But more than that, they’re just no fun.
