jannotes

The paper Conservatism and Motivated Social Cognition (Jost et al., 2003) is the landmark on the psychology of conservatism. It primarily notes temperamental personality variables that tend to fit in with conservatism. If, as I believe, fear is the master emotion of all animals, then conservatism is inherent in all of us. Political conservatism is specifically about how one believes we should be governed, and the authoritarian paradigm fits well in the fear box because of its tendency to promote certainty (i.e., lack of fear). Other related traits include group exclusiveness and dominance (xenophobia), intolerance of ambiguity, avoidance of uncertainty, need for clear structure, closure, aggression: these all are deeply fear based traits. I would think that most of the center of the bell curve holds these traits fairly strongly. George Lakoff makes an important point in pointing out that most of us are what he calls biconceptual, meaning that we all have liberal and conservative tendencies in different domains of our lives, and those can conflict within our own political leanings. There are religious conservatives who are politically liberal; one may be a fiscal conservative but a social liberal; few of us are without these conflicting domains. But here is something we should keep in mind. There are also people who, especially nowadays, are called conservatives, usually radical conservatives, who I believe don’t have those fear based motives: the libertarians. They believe in a totally emasculated government that has no power over its citizens except in handling violent crime. It’s other function is border defense. These people believe in absolute individual freedom, especially from any intrusion of responsibility towards the nation or its citizens (like all absolutes, it can only lead to paradox and logical invalidity). The virtue of selfishness is their moral code and restrictions on financial gain is for them the greatest of all injustices, something that brings out in them hatred and aggression like nothing else can. They understand freedom as so absolute, that any violence done to another can only be that other person’s fault since they should have been prepared and “taken the responsibility” in advance to prevent it. Ron Paul preaches this: we have no responsibility to help others out, we have no responsibility to our government after the army and police are paid for; all social or financial status is one’s own doing, or at least one’s moral responsibility to undo it. They pray to the alter of St. Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman is their God. Friedman stated unequivocally that the most egregious thing a government can do to a person is to put any restraints a person’s ability to make money; this, he said, would lead to the collapse of civilization. Those who don’t have the capital, in Ayn Rand’s words, (i.e., working people) are merely parasites. We call these people conservatives; I don’t know if that is what Jost et al. are describing. They are describing the little people whose temperaments find them desiring the leadership of these elites, who bring them into the fold with promises of group dominance, certainty, unambiguous conditions, a homogeneous culture, aggression towards those who are other, etc. Religion is used as is a sense of class warfare, not against wealth but educational level and life-style. The Koch brothers, who are clandestine, secretive and totally committed to the all out war they are waging (note the tapes that Mother Jones published) are at the forefront of this. Chris Christie, by the way, is in league with them, so all of his supposed independence and forthrightness is a sham. He attended the secret meeting secretly which tells us all we need to know about him. The message that is obvious in their actions and is explicit in their words is one of all out destruction of the US government. When reading The Shock Doctrine, we understand that the Friedman-John Galt revolution is no joke, and brutal psychopaths such as Pinochet and the Argentine , Uruguayan , and Brazilian dictatorships were specifically brought about for the sake of implanting Friedman’s Utopian Millennium of Market Culture (not just economy); this has all the earmarks of the same violent imposition of the perfect human world that the most doctrinaire Marxists attempted. This is what is going on, and to call it conservatism is to stretch things a bit, since conservatism is an attempt to maintain the status quo. I would add that in judging the rank and file Tea Partiers, they shouldn’t be demonized. They are ignorant and totally under the thumb of a cynical cartel of brutal and determined elites. Note how easily they were brought into a rage by the supposed destruction of Medicare and Social Security that Obama’s Health Care bill was going to cause. That more than anything else, along with the general xenophobic and theocratic mood it was wrapped in, brought us this wonderful bunch of representatives, and brought the Kochs and their minions closer to their goal of utter destruction of the power of the US Government. This is not political conservatism, it is sedition. Finally, even though we see the TP’s as “insane,” we should really ditch that trope. Irrational is not insane. It is the human condition. They are generally people like ourselves who are easily led into their nonsense by charlatans. Stalin fooled a few brilliant ones (Sartre and much of the 1940s Left) as did Hitler (Heidegger and Heisenberg come to mind), so we can expect the less brilliant to be even more pliant. I’m not sure combatting them with hateful rhetoric (as opposed to strong, censorious rhetoric) is in our best interest, especially for our own moral state.

What, not where, is the ego is the relevant question. It has no location. I’m working on a definition – it still needs work, but here it is so far.
Ego: the state of a salient feeling of one’s total isolation from others. This state is necessary in moments of imminent individual threat (it simplifies the informational confusion into a functional packet) but acts only to isolate one dangerously from others when the threat is exaggerated or wholly imaginary. Under those conditions, all manner of evil can be let loose upon society or one’s loved ones. Ego feelings can emerge in wholly non-threatening circumstances, but the state of perceived threat is always a component part of the phenomenon. Its salience can vary but not vanish. The ego is not “in” the brain but is “of” the brain-body system in which signals loop into a configuration of conscious unifying value to the organism, tightening the strings and pulling it together, so to speak. The message being spun around the loop is: me against all else. Bring the wagons into a circle. It is not an existential gestalt but rather a shift of figure and ground analogous to the experience of an optical illusion. Our actual existential gestalt is defined by body within environment (all that surrounds the body that is not explicitly it), or being in the world (Heidegger’s working model). That brings our unit of being into a necessary social and physical inclusion.
A state of feeling has varying and shifting degrees of salience and is not in a single location, but is a systemic emergence from a congeries of signals in a certain relation to each other designating one’s condition of the moment that emerges from the homeostatic state of the organism. Oxygen, nutrition, and underlying perceived safety are factors in maintaining optimal homeostatic flow. The feeling we feel, positive or negative, is a function of that measurement, working to motivate, consciously or unconsciously, actions to return the dynamic as close to equilibrium as possible (which cannot be fully attained or else we would be dead).

A scientist that does not read novels or poetry is not qualified to make statements about human nature. Likewise, a literary critic who does not seriously take the time to understand science lacks the same qualification. The duality of the two cultures is antithetical to any understanding of the unity of human nature. As one who finds a detailed understanding of science necessary to making good decisions that will solidify into important beliefs, I also require literature and art of all kinds to process and expand on those beliefs. Read http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/quixote-colbert-and-the-reality-of-fiction/

Those who are educated, have critical faculties, and broadly receptive minds just don’t understand the ignorance of the hoi polloi; they puzzle us. They shouldn’t – they are what it is to be human when considering the species as a whole. They are the slaves that Nietzsche talks about and they utilize their will to power in slave-like ways. Slaves’ greatest purpose is to serve and empower their masters. Ayn Rand , with typical masterly contempt, considers her slave supporters parasites. I see this as basic human nature. Fear, need for supernatural fantasy for self-control, and the power that violence or fantasies of violence are perceived to give them are all delusions they require for daily existence. They are the best argument against democracy. Unfortunately, since they are the main mass of humanity, the only alternative to democracy is fascism, which harnesses their passive power dreams and uses them as a foundation to totally shut down freedom for the more enlightened. This supports the “conservative” mind, which demands absolute stasis in human development and, of course, absolute power. Nietzsche, when closely and seriously read, has the great insights into this condition. (NB – Note the Sermon on the Mount, which preaches against spiritual hypocrisy, promotes humility and non-materialism, is ignored by all of these so-called Christians).

Dawkins’s argument is with the mainstream nonsense of religious belief – in his book on atheism he explicitly says that if the problem were about more sophisticated thought like that of Paul Tillich, he wouldn’t have written the book – not that he agrees with Tillich, but that there is a problem in the societal and political sense with utter ignorance and Biblical literalism as a basis for important decision making that affects the society as a whole. I think we could all do to rediscover Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus” as a start for understanding the dilemma our personal smallness in the big scheme along with our terror of death, our individual need to be significant – psychological needs must be reframed in our understanding of them, and those needs don’t entail any necessity that what we want is what is true about reality. The religious view is based on the idea that an individual psychological state is proof of cosmic dimensions, when in fact it is only a subjective state and can always be reinterpreted for what it is qua psychological state – an emotional event – spirituality is usually deemed to entail the supernatural when in fact it is merely an important psychic condition that all experience, atheist and believer alike, in which we feel our connection with whole of nature as well as our fellow beings. Camus and the Tao Te Ching give me the answers I need, and God doesn’t enter the picture – his presence in any discussion of utlimate meaning is superfluous, easily removed by Ockham’s razor – the possible answers are already with us, but our terror of being alone in the universe and our personal return to oblivion will usually trump any reality that appears unacceptable to us. Acceptance of reality is very difficult when it is clear that our own existence is short, comes to a full stop, and is utterly insignificant.

I am always so inspired to hear responsible Republicans repudiate the vile ideologies of the present powers within the party. I never was a Republican, but I respected the views of many of their politicians. I believe in the intellectual market place, where free speech is a requirement for freedom to flourish. I feel as betrayed as do many responsible Republicans in the way the GOP has become the party of hatred, injustice as a basic moral principle (talk about Orwellian!), and with an agenda to destroy the power of the federal government to serve its citizens and protect them from the predations of unprincipled actions by irresponsible individuals. The party of Lincoln has become the shame of nation.