John Jay Ray, MA, PhD, Psychometrician of some note, has done me the signal honor of addressing yesterday's post and has taken issue with my thesis:
To be a little crass about it, Shrinkwrapped argues that antisemitism sends you mad. That argument is of course not a new one. There are several versions of it and “The authoritarian personality” version of 1950 is perhaps the best known.
It is however basically an “armchair” theory. As far as I can tell, the people putting it forward have little if any personal knowledge of actual antisemites. For some reason, however, I have always had the compulsion to test theory against reality — which usually does nothing for my popularity. And much of my research career was devoted to testing inferences derived from “The authoritarian personality” theory.
Readers who know my skeptical stance on global warming and health science will not be surprised to hear that I regularly found inferences from the theory not to be supported by the data.
And one of the things I did was to apply the characteristic methodology of anthropology to an examination of antisemitism. Anthropologists have the view that you can never understand a group “from the outside” — You have to join the group and become accepted into it before you will ever have any chance of understanding it. I did that with the neo-Nazi group in my city. In other words I got out of my armchair and had a close-up look at what I was talking about. My resultant observations were published in The Jewish Journal of Sociology.
And what I found was actually something extremely common — perfectly normal sane people who had just got hold of a wrong theory — not unlike most Global Warmists today and not unlike the hordes of grade school teachers who think that just looking at words without any mention of phonics is a good way for kids to learn to read.
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So I disagree with Shrinkwrapped in seeing antisemites as being in some way psychologically abnormal. I think they are all too normal in fact. And it is precisely their normality which makes me despair of changing their views.
So in the end I am more pessimistic about antisemites than Shrinkwrapped is. He seems to think that psychological “help” could change their views whereas I doubt that anything will change their views. Israel can kill the antisemites that surround it but it will not change their minds.
John Jay Ray spent many years studying Australian neo-Nazis and his conclusions, published in The Jewish Journal of Sociology, are illuminating:
IS ANTISEMITISM A COGNITIVE SIMPLIFICATION? SOME OBSERVATIONS ON AUSTRALIAN NEO-NAZIS
In one sense, then, what these people believe is simple. There is only one enemy to their kind of civilization -- the Jews of Wall Street who control the United States and the Bolshevik Jews who control Soviet Russia. On the Australian scene, too, this picture is replicated. On the one hand the State Governor and the Prime Minister are to be seen attending Jewish public functions, and on the other the leader of the Communist Party of Australia bears the hardly ambiguous name of Aarons. This view of the world, however, is simple only in a rather trivial sense: it is simple in so far as it is a belief that there is only one enemy. In that sense and for that reason Dr. Goebbels provided beleaguered Germany with a single focus for its fear and hate -- and thus enabled a readily intelligible explanation for the actions of his own regime.
When Goebbels and Hitler first spoke, however, their contention that there was only oneenemy was a plausible one. Germany had just waged a world war with herself on one side and Russia and the 'Allies' on the other. France, Britain, and the U.S.A. were disliked because they were the gloating victors, while Russia was disliked not only for historical reasons but also because it was Bolshevik. All were united in opposing Germany. In the need to find a connecting link between two disparate enemies who, on any obvious criterion, should not be allied, Jewry represented a godsent and accessible solution. By the one stroke the shame of Weimar could be expunged and Germany could be portrayed to its people as the aggrieved victim --not the aggressor. Russia and the West were in fact united against Germany; the 'Jew- controlled' thesis provided a palatable explanation for that unity.
In the modern-day world the situation is vastly different. To see Israel, Russia, and the United States as unified is in fact perverse and necessitates an extraordinarily complex and devious view of world affairs -- a view that not only receives no support but is violently contradicted by almost every news bulletin and information source. And yet among 'the Right', the slogan 'Communism is a Jewish plot' rings out as bravely as ever. If it is comforting to unify the twin enemies of Communism and Jewry, this comfort is bought at the expense of simplicity -- not in furtherance of it. The most devious and implausible explanations are needed to support such a belief, given the present state of world affairs.
I would urge you to read both papers, the latter much more specific and complete with sources.
In reading John Jay Ray's critique and paper, and in thinking as well about Gloria's comment, I realized that my post was unclear about something fundamental. My analogy was between a Psychiatric patient suffering from a psychotic disorder in which a delusion contaminated all of his thinking and anti-Semites for whom their anti-Semitism, a quasi-delusional construct, contaminated all of their thinking. I did not mean to imply that the anti-Semite is psychotic or mad. In fact, John Jay ray does an excellent job explaining just how anti-Semitism contaminates thought in the bolded section I quote above!
In John Jay Ray's paper, he makes the point that by forcing all of reality and all perceptions to be filtered through an anti-Semitic lens, the holders of the beliefs use their rational minds to construct increasingly byzantine and unstable world views that typically, but not always, lead to disaster.
Here is the gist of my argument. Anti-Semitism, a shared quasi-delusional system, disturbs the thinking of the group that adopts the ideology. Historically, whenever a large group has adopted Anti-Semitism, as time passes, the delusions of anti-Semitism become increasingly central to the functioning and thinking of that group. It serves to contaminate the "thinking" of the large group (which can be an organization, a terrorist group, or a nation state) and causes them to behave in irrational ways in the same way that a paranoid delusion eventually causes the psychiatric patient to behave irrationally.
With this framework it becomes clear, for example, that those nations most in thrall of Anti-Semitism are likely to behave most irrationally. The Palestinians can no more make Peace with Israel through mutually acceptable compromise than they can stop breathing; their Jew hatred could never allow such an outcome. Iran will almost certainly not stop attempting to produce nuclear weapons, even though their efforts are likely to lead to their destruction. England, in thrall to its own traditional and resurgent anti-Semitism, is allowing the rule of law to erode in fundamental ways that endanger their future, all because they cannot repudiate anti-Semitism (though they are not as far down the road as parts the Arab/Muslim World.) Once a large group has entered the road to anti-Semitism they have committed themselves to outcomes that are self destructive and irrational. The individuals who comprise such bodies share the full range of normal and abnormal psychology that can be found in any group, but the effects of anti-Semitism on the group do indeed mimic the effects of delusions on the disturbed individual.
Once again, a blog post is insufficient to do the subject justice, but I hope I have been able to make the distinction between the individual anti-Semite, who is perfectly rational, and the anti-Semitic large group (using the term as per the American Psychoanalytic Association panel on Terror and Societal Regression) which loses its reason by virtue of its contaminated thinking.
Finally, I am in complete agreement with John Jay Ray on his conclusion. I do not think any kind of psychological "help" could change the views of the anti-Semite and I am just as pessimistic as he is. As he notes "Israel can kill the antisemites that surround it but it will not change their minds."
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