There are many ways to measure cultural decline, but the most important one might be emotional regression to infancy.  This idea is old, but it has been studied carefully since Sigmund Freud saw it in Vienna.  Freud himself came home one day and saw his house surrounded by Hitler thugs.  He went at them with his heavy walking stick, and they scattered.

Freud was already in his sixties, but the family realized that Vienna was no longer safe.  Freud and his daughter Anna moved to England, a land he had always loved.  The Freud Museum today is not in Vienna, where he lived, but in London.

Since that time, social scientists have taken a serious look at emotional "regression," as it's called, because it shows grownups falling back into infantile rage and "splitting."  Mature coping includes problem-solving in the real world, and also rationalizing one's emotions and working out personal issues through the arts and work.  Nobody was ever killed by rationalization, or by the arts and music.

But regressive people live in a kind of nightmare, like infants in the Terrible Twos, switching between fits of rage and demanding love and worship.  Normal parents start to wonder what they did wrong, but it's not they; it's the kid going through a phase.

The Harvard psychiatrist Georges Vaillant ran in-depth studies of the emotional defenses.

Humans can grow up to become balanced and reality-based adults, or they can become infantile and primitive.  You might know people like that.  I do.

Photo credit: Max Pixel.

It's pretty obvious that the American left is now showing the classical signs of infantile regression, falling back to the Terrible Twos.  In our universities, the civilized values of "lux et veritas" (light and truth) have been under mob attack for years.  "Postmodernism," so called, is an assault on modernity, including respect and tolerance for the beliefs of others, and on science, reason, and mental balance.

This assault was planned by the sexually manipulative Frankfurt School and the Alinsky left.  Saul Alinsky told his gang to "pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."  The "target" in that lingo means a scapegoated human being; freezing "it" means to smear the scapegoat, "personalize it" means to tag just one witch as the cause of all the trouble in the world, and "isolate" the target means scaring everybody else.

This is the formula for murderous mobs that persecute indiscriminately.  Every revolution in the 20th century used those tricks, and it's now going on in Venezuela.  Obama taught Alinsky tactics in Chicago.  The newest lefties are out to target scapegoats, and that means you.

These are mob tricks through history, and they are not "progressive."  They are deeply regressive and infantile.

Cultural breakdown is not unusual.  The Weimar Republic saw an endless assault on traditional culture.  Germany at one time was thought to be the most educated country in Europe, the most religious, musical, and philosophical.  The Germans produced Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Handel, Goethe, Brahms, and others who celebrated high culture and peace.

Then Wagner came along, and he was different.

In philosophy, they had a mixed crop, with Kant teaching the Golden Rule in the Enlightenment, then the Prussian philosopher Hegel, then Karl Marx, an unapologetic hate- and murder-monger, and Nietzsche, who gave a mixed message.  A few decades later, Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party.

In two centuries, they went from Kant, the Enlightenment humanist, to Heidegger, the opposite.

Something happened to that culture even before Hitler, who exploited an already crippled culture.  He used Alinsky tactics to persecute the Jews, but also to kill Christians and social democrats.  In 13 years, the Nazis tore down the reputation of Germany, perhaps forever.

Europe is still afraid of the Germans.  The European Union rose by claiming to bring peace forever to Europe, but it made America the scapegoat.  The welfare state was supposed to solve everybody's problems, and then the E.U. imported millions of unassimilated Muslims to split European populations.  Now the E.U. looks like a fascist throwback.

Here is a checklist of primitive emotions.  You can check off whatever you are seeing today.

Infantile defenses.

1. denial of reality

2. unrealistic celebration of self

3. living in a fantasy world, between nightmares and utopian dreams

4. splitting others into total good or total evil

5. major loss of emotional control, especially rage and hatred

6. witch-hunting: scapegoating against any victim available (see Alinsky)

7. rage-driven group violence, killing and destroying heedlessly

8. rise of narcissistic, violence-prone leaders

There are other features like loss of traditional faith and loss of self-discipline and tolerance and the like.  But this is a start

You might check off whatever you are seeing today.