The Frictionless Souls Addicted to the Cause
What the obsession with the Ukraine war really says about Americans.
Fri Mar 11, 2022 Daniel Greenfield 50 comments
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the
Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer
focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Ukrainian flags are flying on buildings across the country and
Russian vodka is being poured into drains. Concerts are being
canceled and books are flying off shelves over a cause that the
vast majority of Americans would not have cared about and did
not even know existed last year.
In a matter of weeks everyone has come around to having a
passionate opinion on the subject.
And when the war in Ukraine has come and gone, some other
cause will arrive to fill that void, and the outrage, blue and yellow
accessible
3/11/22, 11:29 AM The Frictionless Souls Addicted to the Cause | Frontpagemag
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flag waving, and all the rest of it will be gone with the vodka.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was perfectly timed to fill the
emptiness left by the collapse of COVID restrictions. And what
the reaction says about us matters more than what it says about
Ukraine.
The desperate hunger for new causes is a spiritual vacuum. The
Ukranians and the Russians believe in what they’re fighting for.
We believe in the need to believe in something. The conflict over
Ukraine stretches back centuries while our fervent investment
in it goes back a few weeks.
It is quite likely that a few weeks from now we will be just as
invested in something else.
It is no coincidence that the least religious parts of America are
the most invested in this war, much as they’re the most invested
in wokeness, in the COVID culture wars, and all the culture wars
that have come before and that will come after to fill the void in
their souls.
People without a purpose to their passions rush from one cause
to another in search of a momentary sense of meaning.
Conspiracy theories make the world meaningful and nurture
their sense of outrage because it distracts them from the aching
emptiness within.
Radical politics acts as a substitute religion with its own
theology, momentous destiny and personal commitment, but
accessible
3/11/22, 11:29 AM The Frictionless Souls Addicted to the Cause | Frontpagemag
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without any sense of personal connection or enduring
continuity. What is true in politics one week may not be so the
next. Political touchstones shift and the partisan who is at the
heart of the cause may find that a few years later he’s an outside
enemy.
The Left’s purity tests and radical transformations force its
followers to run to catch up or be left behind as reactionary
bigots still protesting that we had not always been at war with
Eastasia or that men have not always been considered the best
possible women. Insecure social mobs embrace new causes
because they have a deep fear of being left behind the
bandwagon.
Politics provides them with external validation and internal
purpose. To politically dissent is both the equivalent of losing
their religion and their place in society. That is why cancel
culture is dreaded at a psychological level, not just because of
the loss of employment and educational opportunities, but
because the affected party loses their society and their soul.
Herd behavior is a rational response to this threat. Virtue
signaling protects their place in the herd. And offers a sense of
temporary security in an extremely insecure sociopolitical order.
The seeming randomness and irrationality of some of the causes,
the lack of personal connection to the mostly white upper class
people who embrace them, are an asset. If a cause may have to
be left behind at any time, it’s easiest if the cause, black people, a
accessible
3/11/22, 11:29 AM The Frictionless Souls Addicted to the Cause | Frontpagemag
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country thousands of miles away, mask culture, strange sexual
fetishes, is impersonal.
A frictionless world in which family, sexual partners, friends,
homes, and careers can be abandoned at short notice also
requires frictonless causes that are equally disposable.
Replacing religion with politics has made for more frictionless
souls who never grow. The emotional retardation can be seen
everywhere as adults behave like teenagers and teenagers
behave like children. No one ever grows up, instead they feign
maturity through politics.
Advocating for causes makes them seem like they care about
something more than themselves. The right politics bestows
membership in a community based on politics, but behind all the
virtue signaling is the fundamental immaturity of people who
only truly care about themselves.
That is the dirty secret of leftist politics whose egocentrism is
thinly masked as altruism.
Leftism is not an act of conscience, but an escape from
conscience. Its causes, legitimate or illegitimate, are manifold,
but what they all have in common is an underlying denial. The
only form of liberation that their politics truly offer is the
liberation from moral accountability and personal growth. The
more radical the politics, the more radical of an escapism it
represents. accessible
3/11/22, 11:29 AM The Frictionless Souls Addicted to the Cause | Frontpagemag
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True religion is an ongoing act of conscience while false religion
evades the internal accountability and externalizes it into
political causes. The external virtue signaling projects a false
righteousness to mask the underlying failure to struggle for
internal rightness.
Radicals jump from one unfulfilling cause to another because
escape requires motion. The causes themselves are external and
ultimately unfulfilling. No matter how hard leftists struggle to
change the world, they fail to change what is truly within their
power to change: themselves.
The addiction to causes is, like all addictions, initially a rush only
to gradually become unfulfilling, frustrating, and debilitating.
The rage is the suffering of the addict who is increasingly unable
to recreate the seeming purity of their initial political
involvements except by upping the dose and escalating the
emotional and physical violence of their commitments.
Radicalization, like higher doses of any substance, don’t address
the anhedonia of the abuser.
Every cause gives way to another cause and then the original
cause is often forgotten, occasionally to be picked up later when
convenient. When the cause has its moment, then it eclipses all
others, and for a week, a month or a year, nothing else deserves
to be mentioned.
The cause fills all the airwaves, swallows up all other
considerations, and becomes the single greatest issue in the
accessible
3/11/22, 11:29 AM The Frictionless Souls Addicted to the Cause | Frontpagemag
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universe. And then a little time passes and it’s forgotten and
discarded.
The cause was never the true cause. It was only ever an effect.
