Required Re-Hash of Ancient Lore: Ideological Idealism
Over five years ago, I wrote an LJ entry provocatively titled "The Hate Comes First". The title came from an article that I quoted regarding the psychological phenomenon called "splitting." This article more thoroughly outlines the psychological causes and impacts of this tendency to demonize without analysis. Take, for example, this exposition on "splitting:"
Splitting-reducing the other person to a binary abstraction of all good or all bad, is a primitive, or regressive, defense mechanism used when the emotional level and complexity is greater than a person's capacity to interpret it. For example, once your boyfriend cheats on you, he becomes a jerk, completely. Even things he had done that were good-- like give money to the poor-- are reinterpreted in this light ("he only did that to get people to like him.") Who splits? Someone with a lot of unfocused rage and frustration, i.e. the "primitive" emotions.
Currently, our social psyche has three main targets of splitting: President Bush, terrorists, and liberals. Depending on your political bent, two of those are often conflated.
Splitting says: Bush is all bad, period. Nothing he does is good, and if it is good, it is from some malicious (or) selfish motivation, or an accident related to his incompetence to even be self-serving. Similarly on the other side, liberals are weak, corruptible, treasonous.
Splitting is always polar; once something is declared "all bad," an opposite is necessarily declared all good. Importantly, this isn't a comparison between the two-- he is bad, but she is better; it's perceived to be two independent, unconnected, assessments, even though to anyone else looking from the outside, they are so obviously linked. So hatred of, say, liberals is thought to be independent of your preference for Bush, but in reality it is only because you hate liberals that you like Bush. The hate comes first.
For some reason, I've long recognized the tendencies this article discusses, but have had a bitch of a time articulating my thoughts on the topic. Especially nowadays. It's gotten so bad I've set myself a goal: I refuse, when I can, to declare anything good or bad. "Good" and "bad" designations lead to tortured logic and train-wreck conclusions such as those noted in the article. I've found it intensely frustrating to declare myself someone who refuses to believe in Good or Evil. People naturally assume me to be nihilistic, a conclusion I find misses the point entirely. I'm just trying to analyze from a factual perspective, trying to weigh as many relevant factors as possible before reaching a judgment: Is this situation beneficial or detrimental? How can it be tweaked toward providing benefit?
I find myself alone, still, when it comes to the "Good or Evil: Do They Exist?" debate. Some simplifications never go out of style, as evidenced by this cartoon:
For me, there's an inherent flaw in the cartoon's message: When it comes to what motivates people, hate works better than "love." There's evidence to back this up. Lots of evidence. For example, I've long been fascinated by a story from the days just before WWII. Intrigued by how Hitler rose to power and brought Germany back from an economic basketcase, the Japanese sent some envoys to learn if the same could be done in their country. The envoys returned with bad news: What Germany did to unify the country wouldn't work in Japan because Japan, being 99% Japanese, had no Jews.
The lesson: Hate unites. People band together to fight a perceived enemy. Without an enemy, they don't band together nearly as well. Even the Free Love hippie crowd worked only because "Love is the answer" was seen as a reaction against perceived haters of love, an attitude that rallied those who hate haters, if you will. In the same way, anyone who states early and directly that they are "non-judgmental" and "accepting" often prove to be anything but; they simply need to separate themselves from those they perceive to be rigidly dogmatic and judgmental.
Here's a question: How did all those protests and sit-ins and love-ins and other-ins work out against Vietnam? Also from years ago, not so much. They may have perpetuated our conflict in Vietnam, not hastened its end.
First of all, let's encapsulate "protest" within definitional boundaries. I am not referring to a protest one puts in a court of law. Someone in a casual conversation, likewise, might protest a line of conversation or point made by others; this person is registering a difference of personal opinion in a social setting. No, when I talk of "protest" as a failed medium of mass persuasion I refer to a movement designed to not only register the opinions of the participants to the general public, but to further persuade that public into changing its collective mind on a vital topic (like a war) and thus the "mind" of its leaders. We're talking about marches, sit-ins, choreographed disruptions and other tools of the guerrilla theater movement, not just cocktail party banter and formal legal proceedings.
Secondly, let me state for the record that for the most part I support the politics of protesters. That's what's galling for me. I see them marching to end one travesty or another, or to support a positive path for the future, but simply cannot fathom why they've taken a path that, as far as I know, has not only never worked, ever, but has in many cases galvanized opposition against my own beloved and cherished beliefs about What Is Right.
I think it would be illustrative to think of protest in terms more of us can understand. Let's stipulate that protest is a means attempting to change a target audience's opinion on a given situation. Now, let's stipulate that this is fundamentally similar to persuasions aimed at others in far more mundane situations. Let's take the clearing of parking spaces, something to which most of us can relate. We've all been there. We're heading to our cars after shopping, eating, whatever, when in the crowded lot someone spies our impending departure. Seeing that someone else needs the space, do we help them by hurrying?
No. No we don't.
According to the author of a Penn State paper on the topic, "Most people think they leave faster, but in reality, they take more time to leave when another car waits near their space." And when the waiting car exhibits impatience, say, by honking? The departing driver actually slows.
"Even though people were leaving the parking space, departing drivers took longer when someone else wanted the space than when no one else wanted the space," the sociologist said. "This reaction is counterproductive because it takes more time and the driver's entire goal was to leave the space anyway.
"But our research shows that people do become territorial in the face of another driver and become even more territorial when the driver acts very intrusively, such as honking the car," Ruback said. (Emphasis mine.)
To relate this to protest, we have stipulated that protest's goal is to change minds. People tend, though, to be very territorial about their opinions. A madding crowd marching through the streets-and, importantly, impeding the progress of folks just trying to use those streets to go about business they feel is more important-causes the bystanders not to change their minds about the issue at issue in the protest, but to harden their stance against the protester like someone would at a honking hothead in a parking lot.
I always wondered as a kid why the US military allowed Saigon to fall. Looking back on the situation, it's fairly easy for me to see the military leaders may have continued the impossible struggle just to spite the protests and derision leveled against them. "Fuck 'em," they seemed to say, "fuck 'em all. March all you want. We're staying the course, bitches."
That doesn't sound like the outcome suggested in the comic, does it? Yet it seems to have happened that very un-comic way. Of course, don't try to tell that to anyone who embraces the simplifications, the Idealizations, expressed in that darned comic.
I may have found some answers to why I feel the way I do and, perhaps more importantly, why others just a few years older than me feel the way they do. Ah, but that will have to wait for another rambling of mine at a later date.
Splitting-reducing the other person to a binary abstraction of all good or all bad, is a primitive, or regressive, defense mechanism used when the emotional level and complexity is greater than a person's capacity to interpret it. For example, once your boyfriend cheats on you, he becomes a jerk, completely. Even things he had done that were good-- like give money to the poor-- are reinterpreted in this light ("he only did that to get people to like him.") Who splits? Someone with a lot of unfocused rage and frustration, i.e. the "primitive" emotions.
Currently, our social psyche has three main targets of splitting: President Bush, terrorists, and liberals. Depending on your political bent, two of those are often conflated.
Splitting says: Bush is all bad, period. Nothing he does is good, and if it is good, it is from some malicious (or) selfish motivation, or an accident related to his incompetence to even be self-serving. Similarly on the other side, liberals are weak, corruptible, treasonous.
Splitting is always polar; once something is declared "all bad," an opposite is necessarily declared all good. Importantly, this isn't a comparison between the two-- he is bad, but she is better; it's perceived to be two independent, unconnected, assessments, even though to anyone else looking from the outside, they are so obviously linked. So hatred of, say, liberals is thought to be independent of your preference for Bush, but in reality it is only because you hate liberals that you like Bush. The hate comes first.
For some reason, I've long recognized the tendencies this article discusses, but have had a bitch of a time articulating my thoughts on the topic. Especially nowadays. It's gotten so bad I've set myself a goal: I refuse, when I can, to declare anything good or bad. "Good" and "bad" designations lead to tortured logic and train-wreck conclusions such as those noted in the article. I've found it intensely frustrating to declare myself someone who refuses to believe in Good or Evil. People naturally assume me to be nihilistic, a conclusion I find misses the point entirely. I'm just trying to analyze from a factual perspective, trying to weigh as many relevant factors as possible before reaching a judgment: Is this situation beneficial or detrimental? How can it be tweaked toward providing benefit?
I find myself alone, still, when it comes to the "Good or Evil: Do They Exist?" debate. Some simplifications never go out of style, as evidenced by this cartoon:
For me, there's an inherent flaw in the cartoon's message: When it comes to what motivates people, hate works better than "love." There's evidence to back this up. Lots of evidence. For example, I've long been fascinated by a story from the days just before WWII. Intrigued by how Hitler rose to power and brought Germany back from an economic basketcase, the Japanese sent some envoys to learn if the same could be done in their country. The envoys returned with bad news: What Germany did to unify the country wouldn't work in Japan because Japan, being 99% Japanese, had no Jews.
The lesson: Hate unites. People band together to fight a perceived enemy. Without an enemy, they don't band together nearly as well. Even the Free Love hippie crowd worked only because "Love is the answer" was seen as a reaction against perceived haters of love, an attitude that rallied those who hate haters, if you will. In the same way, anyone who states early and directly that they are "non-judgmental" and "accepting" often prove to be anything but; they simply need to separate themselves from those they perceive to be rigidly dogmatic and judgmental.
Here's a question: How did all those protests and sit-ins and love-ins and other-ins work out against Vietnam? Also from years ago, not so much. They may have perpetuated our conflict in Vietnam, not hastened its end.
First of all, let's encapsulate "protest" within definitional boundaries. I am not referring to a protest one puts in a court of law. Someone in a casual conversation, likewise, might protest a line of conversation or point made by others; this person is registering a difference of personal opinion in a social setting. No, when I talk of "protest" as a failed medium of mass persuasion I refer to a movement designed to not only register the opinions of the participants to the general public, but to further persuade that public into changing its collective mind on a vital topic (like a war) and thus the "mind" of its leaders. We're talking about marches, sit-ins, choreographed disruptions and other tools of the guerrilla theater movement, not just cocktail party banter and formal legal proceedings.
Secondly, let me state for the record that for the most part I support the politics of protesters. That's what's galling for me. I see them marching to end one travesty or another, or to support a positive path for the future, but simply cannot fathom why they've taken a path that, as far as I know, has not only never worked, ever, but has in many cases galvanized opposition against my own beloved and cherished beliefs about What Is Right.
I think it would be illustrative to think of protest in terms more of us can understand. Let's stipulate that protest is a means attempting to change a target audience's opinion on a given situation. Now, let's stipulate that this is fundamentally similar to persuasions aimed at others in far more mundane situations. Let's take the clearing of parking spaces, something to which most of us can relate. We've all been there. We're heading to our cars after shopping, eating, whatever, when in the crowded lot someone spies our impending departure. Seeing that someone else needs the space, do we help them by hurrying?
No. No we don't.
According to the author of a Penn State paper on the topic, "Most people think they leave faster, but in reality, they take more time to leave when another car waits near their space." And when the waiting car exhibits impatience, say, by honking? The departing driver actually slows.
"Even though people were leaving the parking space, departing drivers took longer when someone else wanted the space than when no one else wanted the space," the sociologist said. "This reaction is counterproductive because it takes more time and the driver's entire goal was to leave the space anyway.
"But our research shows that people do become territorial in the face of another driver and become even more territorial when the driver acts very intrusively, such as honking the car," Ruback said. (Emphasis mine.)
To relate this to protest, we have stipulated that protest's goal is to change minds. People tend, though, to be very territorial about their opinions. A madding crowd marching through the streets-and, importantly, impeding the progress of folks just trying to use those streets to go about business they feel is more important-causes the bystanders not to change their minds about the issue at issue in the protest, but to harden their stance against the protester like someone would at a honking hothead in a parking lot.
I always wondered as a kid why the US military allowed Saigon to fall. Looking back on the situation, it's fairly easy for me to see the military leaders may have continued the impossible struggle just to spite the protests and derision leveled against them. "Fuck 'em," they seemed to say, "fuck 'em all. March all you want. We're staying the course, bitches."
That doesn't sound like the outcome suggested in the comic, does it? Yet it seems to have happened that very un-comic way. Of course, don't try to tell that to anyone who embraces the simplifications, the Idealizations, expressed in that darned comic.
I may have found some answers to why I feel the way I do and, perhaps more importantly, why others just a few years older than me feel the way they do. Ah, but that will have to wait for another rambling of mine at a later date.