Open thread, January 25- February 1

NancyLebovitz

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

I meant alienated from society at large, not from LW, although the influence of society at large obviously affects discussion on LW.

One aspect of my feeling is that I increasingly suspect that the fundamental reason people believe things in the political realm is that they feel a powerful psychological need to justify hatred. The naive view of political psychology is that people form ideological beliefs out of their experience and perceptions of the world, and those beliefs suggest that a certain category of people is harming the world, and so therefore they are justified in feeling hatred against that category of people. But my new view is that causality flows in the opposite direction: people feel hatred as a primal psychological urge, and so their conscious forebrain is forced to concoct an ideology that justifies the hatred while still allowing the individual to maintain a positive pro-social self-image.

This theory is partially testable, because it posits that a basic prerequisite of an ideology is that it identifies an out-group and justifies hatred against that out-group.

There is a quote commonly mis-attributed to August Bebel and indeed to Marx: "Antisemitismus ist der Sozialismus des dummen Kerls." ("Antisemitism is the socialism of the stupid guy", or perhaps colloquially, "Antisemitism is a dumb-ass version of socialism") That is to say, politically naïve people were attracted to antisemitism because it offered them someone to blame for the problems they faced under capitalism, which — to the quoted speaker's view, anyway — would be better remedied by changing the political-economic struct... (read more)

1NancyLebovitz12y

Tentatively: Look for what "and therefore" you've got associated with the feeling. Possibilities that come to my mind-- and therefore people are frightening, or and therefore I should be angry at them all the time, or and therefore I should just hide, or and therefore I shouldn't be seeing this. In any case, if you've got an "and therefore" and you make it conscious, you might be able to think better about the feeling.

3Viliam_Bur12y

The part where the emotional needs come first, and the ideological belief comes later as a way of expressing and justifying them, that feels credible. I just don't think that everyone starts from the position of hatred (or, in the naive view, not everyone ends with hatred). There are other emotions, too. But maybe the people motivated by hatred make a large part of the most mindkilled crowd. Because other emotions can be expressed legitimately also outside of the politics.