In July of 2004, I had donned my Star Trek uniform and was off to a Star Trek convention. It was also at this time that I had just read for the first time Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson and became a libertarian. As a new convert, I was enthusiastic to have political discussions but was horrified by what I encountered.
The majority of the actors commenced their talks by professing a love of left-wing politics and the response from the audience was as enthusiastic as a Nuremberg rally. Everyone I encountered confessed to jealousy of my being Canadian due to our free health care – despite it not being free, nor healthy, nor caring. There were discussions of a $30/hour minimum wage.
I went home and verified this experience with other science fiction fans online. They were thoroughly to the left. It was odd because science fiction typically praises the human intellect and the belief that scientific rationalism can fix our problems rather than brute force.
I had associated left-wing politics with emotionalism and right-wing politics with rationalism. For example, I emotionally hate price gouging but with sober second thought, rationally support it due to the laws of supply and demand.
There’s a reason for the gravitation of left-wing minds to science fiction and I believe it’s for a contrapositive reason that right-wing minds gravitate toward reading history. People on the right enjoy romanticizing about the past and yet it’s often a fictitious past that never existed.
Make America Great Again implies a form of greatness to the past. There were certainly periods with presidents who possessed superior financial acumen along with superior foreign policies. These were also times of intense racial segregation enacted by the government. It should be noted that by the majority of metrics, a lower-middle-class person today is far wealthier than John Rockefeller.
The left, especially my science fiction-loving friends on the left, is likewise infatuated with a concept of the future that doesn’t exist. Their Marxist ideology will never come into fruition in a positive way.
People on the left are forward-looking, this is why they have adopted the moniker progressive. People on the right wish to appraise the greatness of their own culture and retain the elements that had them arrive at this place, this why they adopted the moniker conservative.
The right is so infatuated with their own culture, so patriotic, such they admire the shared language, shared values, shared borders, shared history (often times a mythological history if the culture is old enough), and they wish to preserve this.
The left is open to a shift. People who travel more tend to be on the left. People who don’t look back tend to be on the left. Sometimes change can be a good thing. Sometimes it can be a terrible thing. As C.S. Lewis noted, it doesn’t make sense to continue moving forward when traveling along to a destination if one is traveling in the wrong direction.
Star Trek has a new show out, Discovery. It appears to have been written for, and by, social justice warriors. Try as hard as I may, I have a difficult time envisioning someone exhorting others to check their privilege and then going on to successfully fight ISIS, let alone the Klingon Empire.
Science fiction is on the left because it’s designed to be on the left. There is a very real concept, a velleity – a wish unaccompanied by meaningful actions to obtain the thing desired for. The fat person that wants to lose weight but doesn’t do anything about it.
This is the left. They wish for a future they themselves do nothing to obtain. Marxism has offered them a shortcut. It’s the five-minute abs program that only the foolish are naive enough to adopt. Science fiction allows them to continue on with their dreams, never waking up to reality.
Brandon Kirby
Latest posts by Brandon Kirby (see all)
- Bad Guy Pro Wrestle Psychology: Why Do You Hate Justin Trudeau? - March 7, 2022
- Donate to the Freedom Convoy - February 7, 2022
- The Dunning-Kruger Effect in Politics - January 22, 2022
Thank you so much for this. I haven’t had a good laugh in a while. Keep up the good work, comrade!
[…] Why SF Fans Are (Mostly) Left Wing […]
Comments are closed.