The denial of of pleasure is one of the things that makes liberalism so bloodless, so blind. Of course the racists love racism, and the liberals in their denial can’t grapple with it. For them everything is ignorance, like oxford & Harvard haven’t nurtured a million genocidaires

— Adrian Fernandez Baumann (@AdBaumann) July 25, 2020

Denialism of pleasure. Huh, that’s a good point. I had not considered that about modern liberalism and its prudish puritanism trend lately. I think this commenter is on to something!

You can see this proclivity in the “everyone who doesn’t stay inside for years is evil” opinionating. You can see it in the “live in the pod and eat bugs” malarkey; in the “no woman could possibly enjoy the (rather tame) sexual things I don’t enjoy” claptrap; in the idea that you should only date people just like you and no more than two years apart if you are a man (Yeah, I understand that math can’t work. Liberals don’t.); in the belief that even outside the pandemic, people should not travel and definitely should not enjoy it if they do; in the denial of the idea that drinking alcohol and using drugs is pleasurable; in the general idea that no one should ever do anything that is at all risky.

Liberals just plain dislike pleasure. Sure, not all of them, but enough of them and strongly enough that it leads to what you’re seeing. I wonder, is the huge prudishness emergent from that or vice versa? I lack evidence enough to answer.

I’d written before about the antonian asceticism of liberals, but I’d never really connected to it to the above. This new insight helps me to understand it a lot better.

The liberal denial of pleasure means the movement has grave problems it probably can’t overcome. I’ve been done with it for a long time, but this means it’ll fall of its own accord.