I have been told regularly–many times daily, or as often as I dipped my foot in these polluted streams–that I am a racist, a hater, a bigot, an apologist for rich, an apologist for the power elite, a dupe, a sap, a homophobe, an Islamophobe, a transphobe, a light bulb. Maybe not that last one. Those shed light.
These are projections, in a clearly, purely, and unambiguously psychodynamic sense. They see in others what they fear in themselves. How do they deal with these? They say that conservatives see in others what they fear in themselves.
Well, how many of us have you attempted to talk to in a rational, civil, human way? My experience is that if they have attempted to interact with any conservatives, it was to yell, cajole, insult, and denigrate them. To understate things, this is not a path well suited to building mutual understanding.
They don’t want understanding. As I have said, true understanding would deprive them of their enemies, and thus their raison d’etre. They fear this latent existential crisis, and this drives them deeper into the expression of outwardly directed fear and hate.
And I will add that it puzzles me how many psychotherapists fail to see this. I guess they swim in such small and shallow waters that they forget the horizon exists, and that people live there too.
More likely: in developing the habit of expressing compassion, which people like, and in avoiding judging–which people dislike–they have forgotten that the spiritual path consists not only in being nice, but also in being right. There are countless congenial lies, comforting to our souls, easily told among like-minded people, which work to make life worse for most if not all.
An obvious example would be the lie that the Islamic people–many of whom are not refugees at all, but opportunists where they are not outright agitators and aspiring terrorists–who are flooding into Europe will not work over the next 30 years to devolve all the humane institutions they have developed at great cost and over time, into relics of a primitive past. The same people who agitate for the rights of women or gays will in the next moment agitate for the rights of “refugees”. This is stupid. And this stupidity, again, is the result of unprocessed emotions, of unfinished psychological work.