This may be a recycle, but as I mention from time to time, I hope my recycles change the details and add new features.
First off, note the reflexive reaction which may have happened in you, seeing that tagline. Seriously, stop for a moment.
Anxiety? Dear God where is this going?
I KNEW IT: HE’S A HATER?
As a metacomment, prior to making my point, I will submit that we have been taught to hate hate. If I call someone a hater, and direct hate at them, I am rewarded. That this is a fundamentally contradictory stance would require the sort of insight and introspection which is PRECISELY denied by the process.
Here is my claim: nobody is capable of pure evil, and to deal with this fact, in a world filled with violence and conflict, we learn to hate people so as to be able to maintain a consistent opinion of our enemies.
What led me to this logic was the realization that I had to fight, in my youth, literally every member of my family. I recall sort of rotating, thinking “these two are bad, but I can trust this one”. This is how you deal: you don’t tell yourself the truth of the whole thing.
But all of them wanted to reduce me in some way, belittle me, make me more like them: miserable, ineffective, lazy. I stood out in a house of slobs as someone who at least made an EFFORT at picking up, cleaning up, organizing. My children used to tease me when I told them I was the neatest one, saying: if this is organized, what was your house like? My answer: worse. Much worse.
Here is the thing: all of them had good moments. All of them would from time to time, as if awakening from a sleep, treat with something resembling respect. I never felt love, but I guess it would be most reasonable to say the conflict would sometimes cease. I would stop feeling attacked at an existential level. When this happens, some part of you says “why can’t it be like this all the time?”, and you trust that it is possible. Then they fuck you over again. And so it goes.
The benefit of hate–and I will note I don’t hate any of them, but it likely would be more useful for me if I did, although less honest–is that it allows you to feel all the time the worst in the cycle, rather than the best.
Think of the Christmas Armistice in WW1. All of those soldiers were basically the same. All of them–or most of them–would have gotten along fine if they had met in bars. There was nothing to hate about the other side, EXCEPT that they had orders to try and kill you.
But that’s a big BUT. You can’t effectively defend yourself if you think: this guy is basically like me, he likely has a wife and kids and house and job, and life he was trying to create before the war.
No: psychologically, you have to act as if that guy is evil incarnate. It makes everything easier. If you do kill people, it makes dealing with it much easier. It’s much less like murdering your neighbor.
So if I apply this analysis to our current political predicament, I would say that psychologically most Leftists KNOW on some level that we are basically like them. We are, let us say, ordinary Germans, caught in a war we don’t want to fight, arrayed against ordinary Frenchmen, who are also arrayed in a war we don’t want to fight. Actually, I would flip that. I was trying to be generous, but the reality is that the “invasion” was initiated by the Left, and conservatives are defending our homes and way of life.
Either way, though, what the Left is REALLY defending is membership in what has gradually evolved into a cult of sorts. It is what gives them meaning in life. It is their family. They have cast away all their anchors, all the traditional points of grounding which their culture of birth gave them (weak as many of them may have been, in America at least). They are all embarked on a ship they can’t steer, and which they cannot easily get off of without paying a psychological cost.
They are trapped, in other words, without consciously realizing it. All of this happens at the unconscious, or semi-conscious level.
They HAVE to fight us, then, and do so KNOWING we are not monsters. Shit, they see us at work and even church and in the grocery store and everywhere else, at least in sane States.
So what is the answer? They need to MAKE US INTO MONSTERS to protect their own way of life, their own church, their own religion. They NEED us to be racists. They NEED us to hate homosexuals. They NEED us to denigrate women.
And so out of sheer psychological necessity, if we don’t play into their fantasies of us, they simply make things up. They fabricate assaults. They simply assume the worst, then refuse dialogue because of who we supposedly “are”.
I think this contains much of the truth.
Trump, of course, was an existential threat to their religion. Their religious leaders had TOLD them he could not be elected. When he was, it was like a prophesied Second Coming failing to appear. It cast into doubt all they had been told. This is why they cling so furiously to meager threads of thoughtfully prepared deceits left by Obama and his cronies.
Life makes sense. It has rules. People invariably act rationally, based on their emotional needs and the beliefs which they lead to. The only sense in which life is irrational is that in which people claim they want one thing, but then invariably pursue actions which lead to something else entirely.
One example: claiming to value justice, then lying cheating and stealing every chance you get.
A respect for the rule of law is completely inconsistent with attempting to remove Trump based on lies, all while ignoring completely large, egregious, and well documented crimes by Democrats. They can’t be logically squared. This is purely emotional logic.
And it occurs to me an equivalent phrase to emotional logic is emotional need. It is not only children who have emotional needs, and most “adults” retain most of the needs which were imperfectly met in their actual childhoods.