It's in their nature to do so....
http://www.theimaginativeconservativ...uth-alone.html
The yankee is inherently a meddler that is full of himself:What is there about us that has made us so offensive to them? Or, conversely, what is there about them that has compelled them to meddle in our affairs? The late great Richard M. Weaver, in The Southern Tradition at Bay, addressed himself to analyzing the qualities that distinguish the South from North, and for the nineteenth century he was perfectly on target. “The North had Tom Paine and his postulates assuming the virtuous inclinations of man,” Weaver wrote; “the South had Burke and his doctrine of human fallibility and of the organic nature of society.” The North embraced rationalism and egalitarianism; the South had a “deep suspicion of all theory, perhaps of intellect,” and clung to a hierarchical and deferential social order. The North bowed down before science and material progress; the South “persisted in regarding science as a false messiah,” an remained into “our own time” (the 1940s) “the last non-materialist civilization in the Western World.”
Penetrating as Weaver’s analysis was, however, it is accurate for only one phase of Yankee history. The Yankees were the way they were long before they began to worship the Almighty Dollar, and their intellectual heirs are still that way even though most of them now espouse socialism or some approximation of it. The psyche of the Yankee—by which I do not mean all Northerners, but only of seventeenth-century New England Puritans and their descendants, both genetic and ideological—has roots that run deep, and ultimately to the Yankee’s ever-changing concept of the nature of God; thus it is that, in regard to the shaping of the New England character, various errors, heresies, nay even blasphemies, figure prominently. To get a handle on the Yankee, it is helpful to begin with his original Calvinism, and especially with the doctrine of predestination: The belief that most men are doomed and a few are elected for salvation, not by faith or works or any other act of human volition, but only in accordance with a preordained and unknowable divine plan. It might seem that the premise precludes speculation by the puny human intellect, that is logical disputation and inspires unlimited arrogance.
That is the first thing to understand about the Yankee: He is a doctrinal puritan, characterized by what William G. McLaughlin has called pietistic perfectionism. Unlike the Southerner, he is constitutionally incapable of letting things be, of adopting a live-and-let-live attitude. No departure from his version of Truth is tolerable, and thus when he finds himself amidst sinners, as he invariably does, he must either purge and purify the community or join with his fellow saints and go into the wilderness to establish a New Jerusalem. In other words, he must reform society or secede from it; and though he has long since been thoroughly secularized, the compulsion remains as strong in the twentieth century as it was in the seventeenth.Progress at the expense of humility....A second and related characteristic of the Yankee is that, as others have pointed out, he is a gnostic. Adherents of this heresy in ancient times regarded themselves as privy to “knowledge of the divine mysteries reserved to an elite;” the original puritan counterpart was the Elect. The essence of gnosticism as a mindset is the absolute, unquestioning certainty that one is possessed of the Truth. Now it may be objected that there is nothing peculiar to the Yankee about this, for many and possibly most Southerners are unquestioning in their religious faith. But there are profound differences. One is that Southerners have always confined their belief in their certain knowledge to a few simple points of religious faith which are accessible to all, whereas the content of the Yankee’s Truth was esoteric and perennially shifting, even before it was secularized.
It is here that the last main theology-derived Yankee characteristic becomes relevant: the Yankees are millennialists. Once again, so are many Southerners, and once again the differences between the two varieties are vast. Traditional millennialism of the sort adhered to by several Southern denominations is based upon the apocalyptic books of Daniel in the Old Testament and Revelations in the New. The first prophesies a steady worsening of life on earth over the course of a thousand years and through a succession of four kingdoms, each more evil than the last, then the sudden reversal of the course of earthly history by divine will and the establishment of God’s earthly kingdom under a ruler called the son of Man. The prophesies in Revelations are more complex but again things grow steadily worse until history is reversed by God, the ruler of His kingdom now being Christ in His second coming.
An entirely different kind of millennialism, usually known as progressive millennialism, emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that is the kind embraced by the Yankee. In this version there was no need for God to reverse the course of human history, for history represented a progression of human triumphs over evil: When the thousand years were done, man himself would have established God’s kingdom on earth. Jonathan Edwards, in the 1740s, reckoned that man had made it about three quarters of the way through, and thus that the millennium would arrive toward the end of the twentieth century. In Edwards’ time, of course, progress toward the heavenly city was directed by God, man acting merely as the instrument of His will; but it was only a matter of time before people of the Yankee persuasion would become convinced that they could build the city without God’s help. After they became so convinced, they began to notice and inform the world that God was dead.
I said at the outset that the Yankees’ latest campaign to remake us in their own image is well under way. It is easy to believe otherwise, for Southerners qua Southerners are clearly not under such specific pressure as in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Moreover, Yankees have not of late been pointing the accusing finger at us, but have indeed been chanting mea culpa. But these signs are misleading. As for the absence of specific pressure, one need only check the Yankees reform agenda—a host of particular items which add up to a wholesale onslaught against conventional morality, the family, and religion to perceive that they have in mind a more drastic overhaul of our society than any that Thaddeus Stevens ever dreamed of.
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Originally Posted by tobismom
"I'm a rebel, from a family of rebel's we've always rebelled against unjust authority." a point of pride, why attacking the paradigm hurts them so much. It is a point of cognitive dissonance with their current submissive reality. When CD is involve, expect people to react in any 1000 which ways.
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