“Meaning the core sentiment of the Left is entropy production such as to maximize the upward mobility of any given leftist individual.”

Bingo.

Sometimes they don’t understand whether action XYZ is good for them. Just as an investor sometimes picks a bad stock. However, they are not in the stock market for charity and neither is the leftist in politics for charity.

But I think what’s really going on with leftist thought is not deductive reasoning, but abduction (troubleshooting logic). Start with the conclusion (e.g. my lawnmower won’t start), and work backwards to find candidate premises that could lead to the known result (gas or spark?). The desired conclusion in this case is leftist moral superiority over everyone else. The particular premises that lead to this (e.g. Republicans are racist, misogynist, greedy, etc.) are not important, and can shift at a moment’s notice. American nationalism goes from good to bad the moment the American leftists perceive a need to distance themselves from their nationalistic German and Italian peers, circa 1940.

But people on the right can be sanctimonious, too, so we can’t use sanctimony as a defining characteristic of “left”.

One possibility of that myth is something like the Noble Savage. Living in harmony with nature, without posessions or property, just eating the lotus and screwing like a bunny. If you had to put it in terms of ideas, then, the key idea here is a denial of original sin. Generalizing more broadly, the key idea is a denial of reality where reality means limitations, friction, opportunity cost, and the perverse obstinacy of things.

Somewhere along the line, designing men tricked us all and created institutions and habits that made us liive unhappily, with poverty and inequality and rules. These designing men justified their oppression by reference to ‘reality’ which allegedly was intractable. But this would be unacceptable! So it must be untrue.

This myth ties together several elements of Leftism. It has the environmentalist component, the hatred of insttitutions and rules (which is why the Left is so destructive and entropic), the dislike for inequality and ownership, and it even explains the confidence in central planning and environmental influences–because if schemers could somehow forcibly disrupt utopia and warp all our mentalities, a small group of counter-schemers is justified in getting us back.

It occurs to me that this Leftist myth is suspiciously Christian (a fall from Eden) and Gnostic (with the state of nature replacing the one and society replacing the demiurge).

The myth is also suspiciously similar to a modern childhood. You live a cossetted existence and then, boom, you have a mortgage and your poetry degree is for shite and there is all this complicated superstructure that supposedly explains all of it, a lot of absttract guff about capitalism or something, or else you find yourself in a financial firm committing acts of incredible rapacity just to get ahead, and surely its not because you never developed any moral fiber, no, it must be the system that forces idealistic you to act badly. If so, then the real leftist ratchet is that in conditions of prosperity people will tend to raise their kids more sheltered, and have less kids, which causes them to invest in them even more. The underclass aren’t real leftists, they’re just barbarians, and if they persist in being icky once all the outside causes of their condition are removed, the left will happily eliminate them.

Apologies if this is all incredibly obvious. I sometimes use your combox for thinking out loud.