The last several days have treated us to a number of articles and posts that examine the tendency of so many people to blur the distinction between reality and fantasy. On Friday, Peggy Noonan suggested that the New Republic editors could only buy Scott Thomas Beauchamp's fantasies because the closest they had ever come to the military was through the lens of anti-war movies. During the fabled 60s and 70s, movies which depicted the military reliably took as reality the left-wing point of view that the military took ordinary young men (hereinafter referred to as "victims") and turned them into amoral killers and torturers.
On Saturday, Mark Steyn suggested that conspiracy theorists have ongoing difficulties separating fantasy from reality:
It's the same with all those guys driving around with "9/11 Was An Inside Job" bumper stickers. That aligns reality with every conspiracy movie from the past three decades: It's always the government who did it – sometimes it's some supersecret agency working deep within the bureaucracy from behind an unassuming nameplate on a Washington street; and sometimes it's the president himself – but when poor Joe Schmoe on the lam from the Feds eventually unravels it, the cunning conspiracy is always the work of a ruthlessly efficient all-powerful state. So Iraq is Vietnam. And 9/11 is the Kennedy assassination, with ever higher percentages of the American people gathering on the melted steely knoll.
There's a kind of decadence about all this: If 9/11 was really an inside job, you wouldn't be driving around with a bumper sticker bragging that you were on to it.
There is something protective about such conspiracy theories (which I explored in Political Deification.) The idea that the world includes truly random events and that humans are capable of truly monstrous behavior is exceedingly frightening to people who have been raised in a pampered, safe, and secure environment in which fairness has come to mean that no one gets ever hurt or feels bad.
This tendency continues to accelerate in our culture, under the influence of a relatively narcissistic parenting cohort who believe their primary job is to protect their fragile offspring from the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" and ensure their success in all endeavors. If that requires not keeping score in soccer games or outlawing dodge ball in order to protect tender sensibilities, so be it. The loss of reality testing inherent in such protective impulses may only be seen from outside of the cocoon of safety constructed by the well meaning and deeply insular parents.
John Hinderaker adds a lawyer's perspective to the situation; he cannot believe that people do not recognize the contradictions in their beliefs:
It is the luxury of knowing they are bullshitting that allows American liberals to claim that their freedoms are going up in smoke and that dissent is being suppressed, when in fact, "dissent" is socially mandated in polite society from Manhattan to Marin County.
I would add this parallel: any survey of Europeans you look at will say that they think the United States is the biggest danger to world peace, worse than North Korea or the Islamofascists. But they don't mean it. If they did, they would be clamoring for their own countries to re-arm. But the very people who claim to believe that the U.S. is bent on world domination are the same ones who don't want their own governments to spend a dollar on defense. They are entirely content to let us keep the peace. Which means that what they tell pollsters about threats to world peace, like what liberals say about threats to their civil liberties, is, to put it politely, disingenuous.
John Hinderaker is probably correct about some liberals but that is the smaller fraction of those who adhere to and advocate the liberal line. I suspect most liberals actually believe everything they say which raises the question, how does one reconcile belief in such contradictory positions?
In my post from Friday, I remarked upon the Narcissist's difficulty in distinguishing what they wish from what they need:
... the Narcissist unconsciously accepts that there exist no greater needs than his or her own instinctual drives. There is little distinction for the Narcissist between needs and desires. This is because a frustrated desire is a severe injury to their self-esteem; they need the confirmation of gratification to feel loved and worthwhile.
It is hard to over-estimate the power of this dynamic. A person with a surfeit of Narcissistic pathology needs the external environment to support his self-esteem and will struggle mightily to ensure such environmental sustenance continues to flow. If part of one's self-esteem includes the idea that one is a peace loving person who cares deeply about the less fortunate, then anything that threatens that self-representation (or self-concept, if you prefer) is treated as a psychological danger. The failure of environmental sustenance leaves the Narcissist drained and depleted; if the failure is internalized, despair and depression follow; if the failure is externalized, anger and rage ensue. Thus, for the Narcissist, failure to obtain needed emotional supplies from the environment leads to either depression (anger turned inwards in Freud's terms) or rage (anger turned outward upon those imagined to have deprived the needy infant of nurturance.)
Recognizing that the world is a dangerous place filled with angry, violent people interested in harming the peace loving, virtuous, and relatively wealthy Western liberal, is incompatible with the need to see the world as a potentially Edenic place where all can be gratified without angst or risk. To recognize the "other" (as the multiculturists love to say) as an enemy, is incompatible with the sense of one as a champion of the down trodden and victimized. Better to focus on the dangerous man who has a gun (even if his job is to protect you.) The fantasy is that a world without guns would be a safe and peaceful place and that it is those who carry the guns who are the only thing standing between us and Utopia. The dangers of dark skinned haters motivated by religious ideology is simply impossible to countenance. If they are recognized in any way, they are seen as either not particularly threatening ("your risk of being killed by a terrorist is less than the risk of being struck by lightening" which may be true but is irrelevant) or as simply reasonable responses to Western depredations upon the poor victims (and thus, ultimately under our control.)
What John Hinderaker notes, that attacking America, and Israel, is also much safer than standing up to the Islamists, is safely tucked away in the unconscious, where it does not risk destabilizing the Liberal mind set.
Our minds are marvelous structures. They contain an impressive array of mechanisms which serve primarily to allow us to disregard and ignore unpleasant aspects of reality. We are able to quite easily remain blithely unaware of our own failings and in a pinch can just as readily fail to see those aspects of reality that would discomfit us. It is frustrating that we can only on very rare occasions convince people to question their assumptions; in reality, it is a miracle that we can do that at all.
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