For a long time, I have harbored a deep impression that, for all their evil and stupidity and spite, the forces of reactionary conservatism, conformity, and opposition to social progress are, essentially, child-like.

When you think about it, the desire to suppress individuality, freedom, and diversity is essentially a desire to force the world to be like you thought it was when you were a kid, before you learned that the world was a far more complicated, scary, and dangerous place than they ever could have known when they were small.

No wonder these people have such a huge problem with sexuality. Their entire philosophy is essentially a rejection of adolescence. In our teen years, we get the balance of our sexuality and sexual development, and the balance of our mental and psychological development as well. We lose our childlike innocent and become painfully cognizant of the world outside our little slice of the universe. We find out just how big the world is, and how small we are.

Social conservatives are simply people who have failed to make the transition to a mature adult acceptance of these truths, and instead, like mad gods, seek to cut the world down to size until it fits into their immature minds, rather than expand their minds to include the real world.

If you have to expand your mind one iota, the terrorists have won.

The true crux of the tragedy, of course, is that they, as hard as this is to believe, actually think that the world really was like they thought it was as a child. They think that it really was a safe, nice, gentle, orderly world where bad things never happened and everything was wonderful all the time. They lack the most basic of faculties required to grasp the world : the simple ability to recognize we were wrong in the past, and we know better now.

Often, these are people who cannot ever admit being wrong about anything, ever. Like the child who continues to insist he did not take a cookie from the cookie jar when the cookie is right there in his hand, they have a magical faith that if they don’t admit it’s true, it’s not true. That’s how naive these people truly are, and how philosophically bankrupt. They think and act as though their personal reality is reality, and therefore if they never admit they were wrong and never believe they were wrong, they were never wrong, period.

Doesn’t that sounds like an angry and spoiled child to you?

If you can’t even grasp that when you were a child, you were ignorant of the world and unable to really grasp it and hence got a false impression of its nature through no fault of your own, you are tragically and vastly under-equipped to handle even the most basic hurdles of adult life.

And to compound their ignorance, these failed adults don’t just think life really was like they thought it was when they were kids, they think the world was like how they remember it being, after the transition to adulthood and many painful years of responsibility and obligation have caused nostalgia to wipe away all the bad parts of childhood and make them think that when they were kids, everything was great all the time, and hence, something must have changed in the world since then.

Of course, nothing has changed all that much in the world. They just grew up… or failed to do so.

But no, it must be the world that has changed. After all, they have never been wrong in their life, even when they were barely old enough to walk upright. Logically speaking, it’s the world’s fault.

And doesn’t this explain a great deal about conservatives in general? The incoherent anger is just a temper tantrum on the adult scale. They think they can bully reality into being what they want it to be if they just shout loud enough and stomp their feet and hold their breath till they turn blue.

And the more evil old reality creeps in as their fragile and ridiculous world view is steadily eroded by sanity, reason, and that part of their mind which is still trying to grow up, the louder they shout and the harder they stomp their feet and the tighter they plug their airs, and the greater the pain they experience from the massive cognitive dissonance they are so tightly repressing. This enormous conflict grows and grows over time, like an infected tumour, and as it grows, it gets more and more tender and sensitive, so that even the slightest breeze of disagreement across its surface hurts so bad that all they can do is scream and lash out in primal rage at the thing that hurts them and try to KILL IT KILL IT MAKE IT STOP!

So the next time some rabid ranting ridiculous right winger is making you want to commit a very un-liberal act of violence upon their person, just remember that they can’t really help themselves.

They are just little children, after all.