Cathy Young: Hysteria From the Right and Left

by Roy C | June 17, 2009 at 11:06 am

190 views | 40 Recommendations | 5 comments

This is a theme that several of us have been trying to bring to light here at NowPublic.

When you look at what is happening in Iran or here, while the level of strife is different, the methodology is the same.

What you need are people so completely taken by their perspective (about which they have little, by the way) that only their side leads to Salvation, the Light, and peace, happiness and good will. It usually involves embracing one ideal to the detriment of its complementary ideal, with no spirit of compromise and no balance. This lack of balance arises out of the failure to realize that some essential aspect of the opposition needs to be heard, the "third force" that makes the triangle, the context in which opposites come into balance.

The other side can only be wrong or if it can be right, it is in way that has no real weight in the present situation and, complementarily, we, on our side, can only be right, and where we are wrong is of little or no consequence. This is a point of view loaded with what Gurdjieff called "buffers", psychological mechanisms that keep us from experiencing the shock of conscience.

There is an element of hysteria behind the campaign which helps turn it into an inquisition as well. This is where the emotional center, as GI Gurdjieff called it, takes over for the intellectual center, demanding results now, action now, without thinking through what we should do and what its real outcome could be.

Unconscious lying to one's own self is another essential aspect of this, which sets the stage for becoming possessed by the most difficult defense mechanism of all- projection.

Projection, a much-used defense mechanism, allows the person to displace his own tendency to do evil onto others. Projection allows you to deny history and even the facts, to yourself, that is, as the emotional center just jumps right over those fine points and discards the work.

Projection is the penultimate rejection of the idea that "There but for the grace of God, go I".

The idea of this, that the "Hatfields and the McCoys" feuds are based on projection to a large extent, and establishment types and reformers do the same, has been around for years. The Who are among those who have said it best, with "the new boss, same as the old boss", along with George Orwell in 1984 and Animal Farm.

Hysteria From the Right and Left

Political hate speech has been all the rage in recent days. After the shocking attack at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC by a white supremacist, New York Times columnists Paul Krugman and Frank Rich have charged that the right-wing media are creating a dangerous climate of hate in America. Meanwhile, conservative outrage has focused on David Letterman's nasty jokes about former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family's trip to New York - more proof, many commentators argue, that enlightened liberals condone hateful sexist slurs as long as the target is a conservative woman.

The charges on both sides are wildly overblown, but they also point to a real problem - one to which, unfortunately, both sides respond with stones thrown from its own glass house.

For starters: the actions of 88-year-old James von Brunn, who fatally shot a Holocaust Museum security guard, had exactly nothing to do with Krugman and Rich's chief villains: Rush Limbaugh, the king of right-wing talk radio, and Glenn Beck, the clown of Fox News. Neo-Nazis are not part of the following of mainstream or even far-right conservatives; they are people who see the United States government, under Republicans or Democrats, as a tool of Zionist puppet-masters. As conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg points out on the website of National Review magazine, one could at least as convincingly link anti-Semitism to the animus toward Israel and its American Jewish supporters in certain quarters of the left. Indeed, Von Brunn's list of possible targets included The Weekly Standard, a leading conservative magazine.

While the right-wing pontificators are not responsible for von Brunn, that doesn't quite get them off the hook. Limbaugh, Beck, and quite a few other talk show hosts, journalists, and bloggers on the right have undoubtedly trafficked in political paranoia and hate. There has been much irresponsible, over-the-top scaremongering about looming fascism or (Soviet-style) socialism, the imminent loss of our freedoms and even federally run concentration camps. Barack Obama has been cast as Hitler, Stalin, and a radical Muslim mole. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was the target of an assassination joke read over the air on the Rush Limbaugh show by substitute host Mark Davis.

Even if none of this ever leads to violence, it is toxic stuff. But the liberals who rightly deplore it rarely acknowledge the equally toxic stuff on the left - including, not long ago, Bush assassination jokes, Bush/Hitler comparisons, and hysterical claims that Bush's America was five minutes away from fascism if not already there.

The left has its own Glenn Beck in writer Naomi Wolf, who published an essay titled "Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps" in 2007 and then a best-selling book called The End of America. Wolf got to make her case on National Public Radio and the Colbert Report; later, The Huffington Post, a leading left-wing website, published her article calling Sarah Palin "the muse of the coming police state."

I don't know how it is that National Pubic Radio has gotten this privilege of using taxpayer funds to run some of the most one-sided programs I have ever heard. One would assume that it had to be the epitome of balance because it represented all the people, not just one side.

KPFA, of the SF Bay area, has had the most just awful programs featuring 9/11 "truthers" who went unchallenged, along with a pseudo-historical program comparing 9/11 to the fire in the Chancellory in Berlin and claiming that Bush was repeating the series of events that took Hitler to power.

0 See all footage | View Slideshow

Share: email story | add to any | | facebook | stumbleupon

recommend This comment thread is now closed

Amy Judd

at 13:07 on June 17th, 2009

It is so true... 'people in glass houses.....'

I think it's so easy to get caught up in a certain way of thinking and belief system that when something happens that could support that, many will jump all over it and try to make it work and fit in, even if it really doesn't, as long as they believe it does perhaps that will be enough (is what I believe some to think anyway).

I used to do the same thing in my BA degree for my papers, before I knew what it was to write a proper paper. I would find some vague facts or events that could kind of support what I wanted to say and then I would twist them to make them say it; it's a very bad practice to get in to.

I think this is mostly the practice of a select few, but sometimes those few have the loudest voices.

Roy C

at 13:32 on June 17th, 2009

Thanks for your comment. It is a wise and valuable one. I still work to make sure that I am being fair. Sometimes you just can't tell. You have to wait. I have to ask myself if I am wrong on this one.

There are evil people. All strife is not just the result of misunderstanding. Sometimes we must use force to stop evil being acted out.

Where lines are drawn is not a mathematical formula, but the result of conscience with its basis in feeling, reinforced by what is called "thought" but which is actually pondering.

For Gurdjieff, conscience is actually the Higher Emotional Center. It is the capacity to reflect objectively on one's own heart.

Being able to admit to multiple motivations for an attitude or behavior is important, a key problem.

Sometimes we do things for good and bad reasons. I don't stop myself if my motivation is "selfish", if I have good reasons for doing the behavior.