"Suffering? I'll show you suffering!" - and the leftist impulse

Insofar as it has any positive program (and in fact this is a double-negative, not a positive) the alleviation of suffering could be regarded as the focus of leftism - arising at its early roots in abolition, pacifism, socialism, feminism etc. 

My Glasgow friend, the writer Frank Kuppner, used to intone the phrase "Suffering? I'll show you suffering!" whenever some leftist, feminist journalist (invariably upper class, public school, Oxbridge educated; then straight into a prestigious and high profile newspaper job) embarked on yet-another account of the abuses, adversity and prejudices of her hellish life...

For modern people the problem of suffering in the world; and the socio-political intent to eliminate or reduce suffering (or, at least, the suffering of particular groups such as workers, women, or blacks), has come to seem The Primary problem of Life - the primary objective of life. 

Yet, suffering cannot coherently be made the centre of a moral system. And indeed 'suffering' itself is an incoherent abstraction of billions (at least) of individual responses to billions of different - labile, fluctuating and often utterly specific - situations. 

As so often, there is a colossal but unacknowledged and denied assumption at work here - that all these billions of adverse feelings to billions of specific instances and circumstances - can, should and ought to be considered together; and dealt-with by one or a few generalized socio-political solutions of the type that constitute leftist politics and ideology. 

And, even give that all these assumptions were true and reflected reality; the resulting ethic of diminishing suffering is one that has many consequences which would be considered self-contradictory if clearly apprehended and comprehended. 

Because when reducing the suffering in this-life becomes the priority, it trumps life-itself; as with the mainstream acceptance and advocacy of abortion; where the priority is to reduce the suffering of the mother and or the child - even at the cost of killing the child. 

It is quite normal to express the ethic that it is better not to be born, than to be born to suffer; not to live, than to live in (presumed) great suffering - and this also justifies the grossly sub-replacement reproductive rates that characterize the entire developed world.   

It is quite normal to envisage a massive (but suffering-free!) reduction in global human population ("giga-death") as a mechanism for reducing global suffering due to some imputed cause or another; or even to save the 'suffering planet'. 

There is no great mystery to all this. Suffering (like pain, fear, humiliation or any other of its subtypes) is a consequence of many possible causes of many types; and furthermore is not a fixed quantitative result but varies according to attitude, explanation and treatments. 

A person can be - often is - made to suffer by evoking resentment against real or imagined persecution for supposedly class, race or sex (etc.) reasons. And then more people can be made to suffer 'vicariously' by empathic identification with (alleged, often fictional) supposed-instances of such suffering! 

The left has developed an 'economy' of suffering. Suffering can be imputed to some groups while others are blamed for that suffering; suffering can even be imputed to the planet, biosphere, ecosystem or environment. 

After a couple of centuries of expanding and permeating leftism, and especially since the explicit emergence of a leftist world government last year; Suffering is now Big Business.

Indeed, suffering is now the biggest of all world enterprises! With multiple and linked agencies and bureaucracies engaged in the identification/ creation/'raising awareness', validation, and allocation of suffering on one side...While on the other side is a vast and ramifying state-media-charitable-corporate apparatus for (allegedly) preventing and alleviating suffering. 

Leftism has become a global machine for creating, amplifying, and spreading suffering; even as it claims to be alleviating - or, at its transhumanist extreme actually abolishing - suffering. 

Modern Leftism is - insofar as it has any positive content - a meta-ideology of suffering. 

We can regard this 'meta-ideology of suffering' as an almost inevitable consequence of abolishing God, the spiritual and the after-life. 

If this mortal life really is our only experience - then its rationale can only be related to our current state of experience. 

The ideology of suffering has therefore been made public and socially-manipulative by the bridging concept of altruism; so that ethical persons are supposed-to-be concerned primarily to alleviate the sufferings of as many others as possible. (i.e. the philosophical system termed Utilitarianism.) 

But when the transcendental and spiritual have been wholly removed from public discourse and life (ignored, excluded, denied, forgotten); now we can observe an accelerating centripetal tendency towards short-termist certainty rather than long-term strategy; and a focus on the experienced-self rather than the inferred and alleged suffering of others. 

Therefore the terminus of the leftist ideology of altruistic is selfish negative impulsive hedonism. 

And the only way to be sure of avoiding suffering is to die (either immediately or as soon as suffering is too great) - die painlessly and quickly. 

Hence my prediction of a (imminent) mass epidemic of fear-motivated, resentful-spirited and despairing suicide. 

And this leads to damnation - not because it is suicide as such; but because such attempted self-annihilation was motivated by the sins of fear, resentment and despair; which amount to rejection or  denial of the reality and Goodness of our loving God the creator.