They include: delusions of persecution, delusions or grandeur, nihilistic delusions, psychotic beliefs, phantasm orgasms, etc…
Dan Collins on the subject:
A couple of days ago, a writer at IBD tackled the story of the sudden spike in sales of George Orwell’s 1984 at Amazon by providing a bare plot outline of that book, then suggesting that readers interested in dystopias might want to go to Huxley’s Brave New World, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and threw in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish for good measure, for its discussion of the panopticon. Douchily, that writer says that he’s giving us a plot outline so that we can pretend to know what we’re talking about when we invoke Orwell’s novel, for he is an intellectual and we are shmoes. For a pointed comparison of Orwell and Huxley’s visions, I direct you here, but including The Handmaid’s Tale in such a list is absurd. In that story, a post-nuclear holocaust United States has been seized by repressive, hypocritical Christofascist Godbags who have instituted the sort of police state that Progressives always said they would, using women as reproductive chattel, because of fertility problems brought about by radiation. Only it’s not the Christian right that’s actually in the political ascendancy and installing a repressive police state, is it? Instead, it’s the Progressives themselves.
Ace picks up the same bias in Aaron Sorkin’s HBO drama, "The Newsroom." In the second season, the major plot development is the rise of a TEA Party-like outfit that is committing acts of violence across the US. They’re characterized as "the American Taliban." Ace holds that this psychotic leftist combination of wish fulfillment and paranoia is responsible for the IRS targeting of the TEA Party. Given the Southern Poverty Law Center’s extraordinary influence over the folks at DHS, who have been sending their version of BOLO to law enforcement agents all across the country regarding so-called ‘patriot groups’ and other dangerous fringe outfits such as the Catholic Church, it’s not hard to see where these strange leftist representational conventions are headed, although it might be true that Occupy Wall Street resembled to some extent the Arab Spring ("strong enough for a man, but if we find a woman using it, we’ll stone her"). As Ace notes, the show seems to be a fantasy representation of MSNBC, were MSNBC an actual news organization, and were all of its biases based in reality rather than projection.
Do take the time to click here and read the whole of Dan’s post.
None of this is surprising to the student of Leftist Thought because their whole Ideology [like all Ideologies, but this one more so than any of the others] is based on a fantastical view of the world.
Leftism is a set of ideas developed in the sterile laboratories of the minds of it’s members, far away from the Real World. It is a constructed world, derived from viewing Life via a funhouse mirror.
As Richard Pipes wrote in The Russian Revolution [Chapter 4]:
For intellectuals of this kind, the criterion of truth was not life: they created their own reality, or rather, sur-reality, subject to verification only with reference to opinions of which they approved. Contradictory evidence was ignored: anyone inclined to heed such evidence was ruthlessly cast out.
This kind of thinking led to a progressive estrangement from life….
…Live reality was treated as a perversion or caricature of “genuine” reality, believed to lurk invisible behind appearances and waiting to be set free by the Revolution. This attitude would enable the intelligentsia to accept as true propositions at total variance with demonstrable fact as well as common sense…. To understand the behavior of the intelligentsia it is imperative to keep in mind at all times its deliberate detachment from reality: for while the revolutionaries can be ruthlessly pragmatic in exploiting, for tactical purposes, the people’s grievances, their notion of what the people desire is the product of sheer abstraction. Not surprisingly, when they come to power, revolutionary intellectuals immediately seize control of the means of information and institute a tight censorship: for it is only by suppressing free speech that they can impose their “sur-reality” on ordinary people bogged down in the quagmire of facts.
Mr. Pipes was describing the Leftist Intelligentsia [I know, I repeat myself] in Russia, but it applies to all Leftists everywhere in the world.
You will have to admit that the best description of the situation in America today is ‘surreal’, eh?.
