It's Epidemic
We went to our local Town Hall Meeting last week (in Hagerstown MD), and spent the time outside the actual meeting, interacting with the other people who didn't make it into the auditorium. It was more civil than some we have seen televised (notwithstanding the guy who was “detained” for waving a “Death to Obama; Death to Michelle and her two stupid kids” sign). However there was plenty of unpleasantness, misinformation and invective. As i saw it, two sorts of people on the anti-reform-bill side emerged (with some overlap): The Frightened ones and the Mean ones.
The Frightened people are alarmed about specific sections of the bill (either fictional or an extremely warped interpretation), or terrified that the country is about to become Russia (etc.) due to some broader action of the Obama administration. Many of them really DO care about the fate of uninsured strangers. I had a positive conversation with one or two of them, and it was actually surprisingly easy to find common ground. If the crowds were only made up of them, and if the correct information could be revealed to them in such a way that they would accept it, there would be hope for working out a bill we could all support. The Mean ones are the real problem. They clearly don't care AT ALL about the people who don't have insurance. Their attitude is that it's people's own fault if they don't have sufficient coverage (they should join the military, get a job, etc. etc.), and they clearly take pleasure in saying nasty things to other people. You can see the delight in their faces when they think they've scored a point, or offended someone. I was struck by the illustration their behavior provided of this fascinating lecture i read recently entitled ”Personality Disorders in the Paranoid-Narcissistic Spectrum” by Dr. T. O'Connor (http://www.angelfire.com/zine2/narcissism/paranoidnarcissismspectrum.html):
... Paranoia occurs in two forms: (1) the “bad me” paranoid; and (2) the “poor me” paranoid. Paranoia affects .5 to 2.5% of the population. The “bad me” type tends to be more rageful and sadistic than the other type. ... Paranoia is an insidious disease which develops slowly as a secondary personality characteristic, fuses into a more or less dysfunctional coping style, and may or may not become the dominant pattern. .... A full-blown “bad me” paranoid perceives threats in everything other people do, often exploding in manic, counterphobic episodes. A full-blown “poor me” type views the world as basically unfair and persecutory, countering their anticipation of discomfort with either antisocial behavior or grandiosity.
... Psychologists suspect that the cause of narcissism [which is seen here as part of the same spectrum as paranoia] is severe mental or physical pain in childhood at the hands of a powerful, idealized mother-father figure. ... they believe that the “good” is usually changeable and fickle while “bad” is stable and predictable. They live life by idealizing those who satisfy their narcissistic needs and systematically devaluing and denigrating those who do not. Underneath their superficial charm, they feel they have a right to control, manipulate, exploit, and be cruel to others.
...Most Personality Disordered people are prone to anger. Their bottled-up anger is always sudden, raging, frightening and without apparent provocation by an outside agent. It would seem that people suffering from personality disorders are in a CONSTANT state of anger, which is effectively suppressed most of the time. It manifests itself only when the person's defenses are down, incapacitated, or adversely affected by circumstances, inner or external. In a nutshell, such people were usually unable to express anger at “forbidden” targets in their early, formative years (parents, in most cases). The anger, however, was a justified reaction to very real abuse or mistreatment. The patient was, therefore, left to nurture a sense of profound injustice and frustrated rage. Healthy people experience anger, but as a transitory state. Personality disordered anger is always acute and permanently present. Healthy anger has an external inducing agent (a reason), and is directed at another (coherence). Pathological anger is neither coherent, nor externally induced. It emanates from the inside and is diffuse, directed at the “world” or “injustice” in general.
... The psychopathic argument with reality that is present in all personality disorders is a narcissistic pleasure of lying and deception. They don't lie to everybody, only those people (good-bad, strong-weak, females, strangers, authority figures) that they have differentiated as worthwhile or not. Each dichotomous split and pattern of lying is indicative of a different personality disorder, but the most common pattern is a desire to dupe or deceive those perceived as “good” people, to rob them of their “goodness”, as it were, and to further deprive them of any moral right to feel victimized. Identification is always with the aggressor or with evil -- as powerful, bad, and ideal. In many cases, there are fantasies or interests about animal predators or archetypal evil demigods.
Well. If that doesn't sound like a widespread sociological phenomenon in this country, i don't know what else to to say. An upbringing that included “severe mental or physical pain in childhood at the hands of a powerful, idealized mother-father figure” and being “unable to express anger at ‘forbidden’ targets in their early, formative years (parents, in most cases) ... [in] a justified reaction to very real abuse or mistreatment” certainly fits with the “traditional”, strictly religious, and/or extremely patriarchal subcultures which generally lean to the right politically.
My thesis is that the “Mean ones” i observed, are of the same psychological bent as many of the corporate/political/media individuals that are fanning these protester flames. They have that 'desire to dupe or deceive those perceived as “good” people, to rob them of their “goodness”'. And the “good people” they are duping are the "Frightened ones”. The most powerful individuals in insurance, pharmaceutical, religious, and FoxNews-type media industries are very successful at depriving easily manipulated powerless people “of any moral right to feel victimized” by them, and instead convince them that the real villain is "the Government”, particularly Democrats, or all non-whites, or all non-Texans, or non-Christians, or whomever it suits them to demonize.
I know that's way too simplistic, but i have that human habit of looking for patterns, and that's one that i think i see.Now if i had a clue what to do about it, i'd write about that too. But i don't. Do you?