Kerry wondered, in a comment on my post yesterday, Hollywood, the Mediacrats, & the War, what makes it so difficult for people to change their minds:
What do you make of the split in reporting from Iraq/Afghanistan? That is, there are surely some pivotal facts, were they more widely known, well reported, and trumpeted by the Dinosaur Media, which would change perceptions mightily. For example, how many Americans know there is an Iraqi Military Academy now? I'm not expressing this very well. It seems there is a huge split in the American people-I wish the rift could be torn open in one big, "I didn't know that, that changes everything" moment. As a psychiatrist, could you remark sometime on this facts gulf?
I wish it were as simple as showing people a fact or a collection of facts, which would suddenly lift the veil from over their eyes and allow them to see. In fact, much of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis deals with exactly those forces which interfere with people's ability to perceive and react appropriately to reality.
I have written a great deal about "mental models", also known as templates, or symbolic representations. For example, the word "dog" is a mental concept or symbolic representation, that encapsulates multiple aspects of what "dog-ness" means; we use the word because it conveys the meaning of "dog-ness" to those who share our language and assumptions without having to describe all of the dog's attributes every time we want to say we saw a dog. Children, when first learning language, will commonly call any four legged animal a "dog" until they are able to differentiate what is common, necessary, and sufficient for the concept of "dog-ness".
As we become more sophisticated in our language, our concepts become larger and more sophisticated. For the last 30-40 years, to a 1960's coastal baby boomer, "progressive" symbolized everything good in politics. Whether correctly or not, we believed that progressives were simply better people than curmudgeonly Republicans (was there ever anyone who looked more like a curmudgeon than Richard Nixon?) who only cared about profits for themselves and their friends.
Tom Lehrer captured the spirit accurately in his incisive song from "That was the Week That Was", The Folk Song Army:
We are the folk song army,
Every one of us cares.
We all hate poverty, war, and injustice
Unlike the rest of you squares.
Tom Lehrer's point was to shame the left/liberals who marched against social injustice but didn't actually get very involved in doing anything about it. In my post on Political Deification, I presented the same ideas, though a bit more prosaically:
Being a leftist and/or a liberal in the modern world means we are smarter, more ethical, more caring (holier than thou, even); more importantly, if we can only share our innate goodness with other rational people, and try to help them solve the root causes of their distress, (send them money because they are poor, give up our rights so they won't feel offended) they will see we are friends and will no longer try to harm us. The fact that none of this works is irrelevant; it is not meant to work in reality, but to make us feel more comfort and security.
It is important to recognize that the kinds of meanings attached to being a liberal or a progressive can become very powerful buttresses for the maintenance of one's self-esteem (for more on this see my ongoing series on Narcissism, Disintegration, Suicidality & the Fall of the West, starting with the Introduction). Once one's political label has become integrated into one's self-concept, changing one's opinion in the light of new data becomes fraught with danger. At such times, the threat is that if you find out you are wrong, you are likely to feel terrible shame and humiliation. As neo-neocon most recently pointed out, this triggers compensatory rage, which if directed outward is dangerous to others, and if directed inward, can be suicidal.
Other elements can become conflated with self-esteem as well. If you receive applause, money, power for your political stand, this adds to your need to hold onto your "label" and maintain its purity. Wretchard wrote today about political labels and pointed out that in the area of environmentalism, one area the left has insisted they have the moral and ethical high ground, their words (music, to Tom Lehrer) are noble but their actions are, at best ineffective, at worst hypocritical. He indirectly supports the idea that self-esteem is an important factor in denial:
People buy on the basis of labels; people vote on the basis of labels, and sometimes they are misled. The power of labels creates an opportunity for hucksters to substitute fiction for reality, as anyone who has ever bought a Rolex made in Pakistan knows. For years the United Nations presented itself as a saintly organization bent on saving the whales when it wasn't preserving world peace. Reality fell somewhat short of this ideal, and the process of disillusionment is always painful to watch. In a way, even those who didn't believe in the fake labels can feel a sense of loss at watching the hope, and then the belief fade from the faces of those who have been suckered. The truth will set you free; but first it will make you miserable.
For some, especially in the press and the Democratic party, who are also threatened by irrelevancy and loss of power and income, the threat of misery (which is highly motivating) is enough to trigger near delusional denial. This can lead to such absurdities as Frank Rich apparently finding himself unable to stop from repeating the lie that "Bush lied"; the New York Sun does a good job fisking his nonsense today:
Those who charge President Bush and Vice President Cheney with lying to get America involved in the war in Iraq, as the New York Times columnist Frank Rich did yesterday, have a special obligation to get the truth correct themselves. It's one thing for Mr. Rich to disagree with the decision to go to war in Iraq and to blame Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney for the decision. It's another for Mr. Rich to accuse our elected leaders of misleading the country while the columnist himself goes about misleading readers of The New York Times.
In more hopeful news, No Pasaran has a translation of an article by a Romanian writer, Traian Ungureanu, who, recently freed from state control, still recognizes the difference between freedom and tyranny. He discusses the "secret CIA prisons" that has the Utopian Europeans and media leftists in a twist:
We are experts in prison facilities and we have no problem in telling the difference between a holding cell that destroys freedom and a holding cell that protects it.
And finally, for a little levity, Dr. Sanity invokes "truth in advertising" to re-label some of the worst of the reality-perverters.
Tomorrow, Narcissism, Disintegration, Suicidality & the Fall of the West: Part III
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