A lot of heavyweight thinkers have offered explanations of the irrationality of modern political behavior -- you know, behavior like Medicare recipients at town halls screaming about the evils of government-run health care, or otherwise-reasonable people likening President Barack Obama's plan to Nazi eugenics.
George Lakoff theorizes that conservatives interpret reality through metaphors and meta-narratives modeled after authoritarian family structures.
Drew Westen argues that they interpret facts according to emotional investments in conclusions they already hold, bypassing cortical centers of reason altogether.
These and other analyses are powerful and helpful. But they aren't satisfying to me because they aren't specific enough to account for both the passionate urgency and self-destructiveness of the right-wing rejection of a program that will obviously benefit them.
In both my consulting room and my writing and teaching about organizational and political change, my focus is on understanding the often unconscious causes of irrational and self-destructive thinking and behavior.
However, whenever I ascribe such motivations to political attitudes, I often encounter two types of negative responses: First, the people I'm "studying" -- in this case, the Right -- feel demeaned (much like campus radicals did in the 1960s and 1970s who were told they were simply working out their "issues" with authority). And second: People on my side of the political aisle tell me that I'm using psychological mumbo-jumbo to unnecessarily complicate something quite simple. In this case, the simple truth turns out to be some throwaway line like "They're just racist idiots," or "They've been manipulated by the radical right."
While I personally share the anger at the right of my progressive detractors, I would point this out to them: Just because we all have unconscious minds that irrationally interpret and react to the world, it doesn't mean that we aren't motivated by other feelings and attitudes as well, or that we shouldn't be held accountable for the damage we do in the process.
It simply means that when people routinely act against their own best interest, it's worth understanding all levels of their motivation.
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The current language of the right in this debate is all about the perils of government taking over our lives, robbing us of freedom, and even threatening our survival (or that of our aging parents).
After wending its way through our minds and picking up steam from hot-button symbols like Nazi Germany and communism, the picture of government that emerges looks increasingly like a tyrannical parent who wants to control us. It's not simply an authoritarian parent, but one who wants to suffocate and rob us. Lakoff has argued that we need to redefine this metaphor into one of a family based on care, and he's right.
Still, it remains a puzzle how people who dearly depend on government maintain a view of it as an inimical force that wants to colonize and exploit them. I think that one answer to this puzzle lies in the psychological perils of helplessness and dependence, defenses against which lead to anti-government paranoia. The process by which this occurs is complicated and takes a bit of explaining.
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At this point in the story, however, we don't yet have much of an explanation for anti-government hostility and paranoia. What we have are people threatened by feelings of helplessness, dependency and innocence who are, as a result, inclined to blame themselves for their own suffering.
We need to take one more step, and that is to recognize that these feelings of self-blame, of guilt, are also very painful to feel. No one likes to hate him or herself, to feel the shame connected to feeling that "you have only yourself to blame" for your frustrations and pain.
But self-blame and guilt are the automatic and natural byproducts of our intolerance of helplessness and our belief in freedom and choice. So, what do we do with these toxic feelings of self-recrimination that are continually stirred up?
Most of my patients tend to project them. In other words, to blame others. "It's not my fault, it's yours or hers or his." While only a transient solution, it's a compelling one. It momentarily restores some sense of innocence. I'm an innocent victim. I had no choice. I'm back on the moral high ground.
Blame is a powerful antidote to guilt, albeit a temporary one. Because it's not a real solution, the innocence it creates is not based on an accurate view of ourselves. These feelings of guilt, these irrational feelings of responsibility and self-blame, don't go away. They're still there. They have to be projected over and over.
Government is a good target for these projections. For the right, it's the perfect target. It's big and powerful. It's anonymous. It interacts with our lives everywhere, all the time. What other institution does this? What other force is there in our lives that is so ubiquitous, so full of laws, rules, restrictions, restraints, obligations, demands, all backed by force?
The logic goes: "I'd be happy (translated: not self-blaming and/or hating) if government would just stop getting in my way, stop trying to hold me down and hold me back with its regulations and taxes! If government would just get out of my life, I could be free, autonomous, and successful."
More:
http://www.alternet.org/politics/142439/the_psychology_of_the_right-wing%27s_anti-government_%27death-panel%27_delusions/?page=entire
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