Irony, Projection, Crowds, & Fear

"Very true he had promised to lend her a book. A novel was the only thing worth considering for her. But no mind ever grew fat on a diet of novels. The pleasure which they occasionally offer is far too heavily paid for: they undermine the finest characters. They teach us to think ourselves into other men's places. Thus we acquire a taste for change. The personality becomes dissolved in pleasing figments of imagination. The reader learns to understand every point of view. Willingly he yields himself to the pursuit of other people's goals and loses sight of his own. Novels are so many wedges which the novelist, an actor with his pen, inserts into the closed personality of the reader. The better he calculates the size of the wedge and the strength of the resistance, so much the more completely does he crack open the personality of his victim. Novels should be prohibited by the State." Elias Canetti, Auto-da-Fé 42

Diabolical. Canetti, the novelist, uses his protagonist, Peter Kien eminent Sinologist, to lampoon and, indeed, undermine his (C's) own project. Quite a feat of critical self-examination, I'd say. But it is the feat of someone versed in the arts of critical thinking. Not everyone is, and this is an argument I've been making around here since WoW's beginnings some 3 years ago!

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Remember the great controversy last year around this time concerning health care: DEATH PANELS! "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil." quoth Sarah Palin.

Politifact called it the biggest lie of 2009.

Now, the conservative Republican congress of Arizona and Jan Breuer, Governor, have instituted the very sort of thing they feared the Democrats wanted to institute.

"Starting in October, [2009] a measure passed by the Republican-led state legislature began denying Medicaid funds for organ transplants such as bone-marrow, lung, heart and liver transplants, which can be very expensive and are often performed in life-threatening cases.

The New York Times reports that Arizona doctors deem it a "a death sentence for some low-income patients, who have little chance of survival without transplants and lack the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to pay for them."

Is that irony? Sort of, but it's more than that; something more insidious and, some might argue, pathological.

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This is not the only incident of this sort of thing. The latest iteration? The Democrats are trying an unprecedented power grab when they talk about reforming the rules of the Senate.

And the constant propagandistic repetition of the use of the words 'government takeover' to describe anything that smacks of regulation or consumer protection.

Why is this disingenuous? Think back to the actual power grabs by the conservatives when they were in power: e.g., the PATRIOT Act; Newt Gingrich's shut-down of the Federal Government in a fit of pique at Pres. Clinton; the impeachment of Pres. Clinton and the series of Republican Speakers of the House who, during their pursuit of Clinton for a sexual indiscretion, had to abdicate power because of their own peccadillos.

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Why the need to lie? I'm not sure they are lies.

To explain, I have to draw on some earlier posts here about the nature of the authoritarian personality: the whole series of posts on swarms, crowds and power, etc. [There are several pages of posts.]

I think these are all fairly clear examples of psychological projection. There's nothing earth-shaking about that observation. "Projection" is:

"a psychological defense mechanism where a person unconsciously denies their own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, such as to the weather, or to other people. Thus, it involves imagining or projecting that others have those feelings.

Projection reduces anxiety by allowing the expression of the unwanted unconscious impulses or desires without letting the conscious mind recognize them.

An example of this behavior might be blaming another for self failure. The mind may avoid the discomfort of consciously admitting personal faults by keeping those feelings unconscious, and redirect their libidinal satisfaction by attaching, or "projecting," those same faults onto another."

I made a fairly clear argument to that same effect here with respect to V.Pres. Cheney and Sarah Palin and the Tea Party on the issue of whether Pres. Obama should use war as a tool of domestic politics:

"arguably the two top Republicans in the country are debating whether the President should use war as a political tool. Palin says yes. Cheney says Palin should be careful what she says; presidents should never think this way—out loud. ...Clearly, they think about these things. And that should give us all pause." 

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A recent article claims that conservatives have a larger fear center in their amygdala. [N.B. It's not clear whether greater fear causes bigger amygdalas or bigger amygdalas cause greater fears, but it's an interesting observation.]

This makes sense: the anxiety produced by being subject to so much fear must be repressed, especially if that fear is of one's own dark side—the impulse to dominate. The authoritarian personality, as I've pointed out, requires both leaders and followers; it does not, however, allow for critical thought. And by critical thought I mean the ability to evaluate something on its merits in a rational, disinterested judgment—including one's self and one's intentions, goals, actions, merits, faults, etc.

It's easier to lay one's faults and flaws, one's worst impulses, off on an 'other', to blame others for one's failings. Projection.

For the Freudians, the dynamic of projection is unconscious. The projector is incapable of examining themselves and their own impulses and desires—that applies and is, in fact, amplified in the situation of crowd behavior where the desire to be swept up in the emotion of the crowd overpowers any sort of moral reasoning or rationality.

The more authoritarian the personality, the greater the tendency to project (i.e., defend the insecure self). [Gives an interesting twist on the "Project for a New American Century", eh?]

Projection: watch for it. Watch out for it.

Crowd Kristol

"Crowd crystals are the small, rigid groups of men, strictly delimited and of great constancy, which serve to precipitate crowds. Their structure is such that they can be comprehended and taken in at a glance. Their unity is more important than their size. Their role must be familiar; people must know what they are there for. Doubt about their function would render them meaningless. They should preferably always appear the same and it should be impossile to confound one with another; a uniform or a definite sphere of operation serves to promote this.

The crowd crystal is constant; it never changes its size. Its members are trained in both action and faith. They may be allotted different parts, as in an orchestra, but they must appear as a unit, and the first feeling of anyone seeing or experiencing them should be that this is a unit which will never fall apart. Their life outside the crystal does not count. ...

The clarity, isolation and constancy of the crystal form an uncanny contrast with the excited flux of the surrounding crowd. ... Whatever the nature of the crowd it gives birth to, and however much it may appear to merge with it, it never completely loses the sense of its own identity and always recombines again after the disintegration of the crowd. ...

Another astonishing thing about these crowd crystals is their historical permanence. It is true that new ones continually arise, but the old obstinately persist side by side with them. They may, for a time, withdraw into the background, lose something of their edge and cease to be indispensable; the crowds belonging to them may have died away or been completely suppressed. But, as harmless groups, without effect on the outside world, the crystals go on living on their own." Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power pp. 73-74.

This passage struck me as I read George Packer's essay, "The Fall of Conservatism," in the May 26, 2008 New Yorker.

The Project for a New American Century ("PNAC") is (was) just such a crowd crystal. Essentially, PNAC formed in the void created by the fall of the Soviet Union. The members believed America needed to project its hegemony globally. To do this, the group's imperial goals must be officially sanctioned—that is to say, it must have a government/administration that adhered to its ideology—and the country must be unified behind them. Thus, a new enemy had to be created, found, articulated—the "war" on terror, Saddam Hussein, Islamo-fascists, etc. As early as 1998, the PNAC was spoiling for further war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Their chance came after the 'election' of 2000—of course, leading one to wonder if we'll ever know the true role of Justice Anthony ("Oh, just get over it") Scalia, hunting partner of Cheney, in all this. Then, after the airline attacks on the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon, with PNAC members Cheney and Rumsfeld in place, they diverted America's grief and desire for justice/revenge for this 21st Century "Pearl Harbor" to an irrelevant (and disastrous) invasion and occupation of Iraq, squandering whatever "peace dividend" we would have derived from the abatement of the Cold War (does anyone remember the remarkable economy of the 1990s?). Meanwhile, the real perpetrators of these 9/11 atrocities have yet to be brought to justice. And the U.S. economy is only just now beginning to realize how costly this Mesopotamian (mis-)adventure is. This is to say nothing of the war crimes and crimes against humanity associated with pursuing a 'war' of aggression on fraudulent pretenses.

Will the individuals who constituted this (apparently now defunct) "crowd crystal" ever be held accountable for its larcenous, murderous policies? Will it reform in a few years around a similar set of hegemonic principles, mobilize around a 'leader' who either shares its aims or is a willing dupe , and attempt (again) to bring down a U.S. President that does not share its goals?

For more information, see here and here. There's tons more info available on the web, but it appears with the abject failure of both their ideology and their political implementation they are trying to slink off unnoticed and, hopefully, unremarked.

The complete list of signatories to the various documents issued by the Project for the New American Century can be found here. Recognize any of these names?

• Elliott Abrams
• Kenneth Adelman
• Richard V. Allen
• Richard L. Armitage
• Gary Bauer
• Jeffrey Bell
• William J. Bennett
• Jeffrey Bergner
• John R. Bolton
• Ellen Bork
• Rudy Boschwitz
• John Ellis "Jeb" Bush
• Linda Chavez
• Richard B. Cheney
• Eliot Cohen
• Seth Cropsey
• Midge Decter
• Paula Dobriansky
• Thomas Donnelly
• Nicholas Eberstadt
• Steve Forbes
• Hillel Fradkin
• Aaron Friedberg
• Francis Fukuyama
• Frank Gaffney
• Jeffrey Gedmin
• Reuel Marc Gerecht
• Charles Hill
• Fred C. Ikle
• Bruce P. Jackson
• Eli S. Jacobs
• Michael Joyce
• Donald Kagan
• Robert Kagan
• Zalmay Khalilzad
• Jeane Kirkpatrick
• Charles Krauthammer
• William Kristol
• John Lehman
• I. Lewis Libby
• Tod Lindberg
• Rich Lowry
• Clifford May
• Joshua Muravchik
• Michael O'Hanlon
• Martin Peretz
• Richard Perle
• Daniel Pipes
• Norman Podhoretz
• J. Danforth Quayle
• Peter W. Rodman
• Stephen P. Rosen
• Henry S. Rowen
• Donald Rumsfeld
• Randy Scheunemann
• Gary Schmitt
• William Schneider, Jr.
• Richard H. Shultz
• Stephen J. Kantany
• Henry Sokolski
• Stephen J. Solarz
• Vin Weber
• George Weigel
• Leon Wieseltier
• Marshall Wittmann
• Paul Wolfowitz
• R. James Woolsey
• Dov Zakheim
• Robert B. Zoellick

More Swarms

The profundity of my disorientation while in the midst of the swarming bait ball, I'm sure, was a function of the amount of fish, the intensity of their swirling behavior, and their proximity to me. Tens of thousands of silvery fish engulfed me in a flickering whirlwind of erratic activity. I panicked. What's more, no matter how hard I tried I couldn't follow them with my eyes, much less keep up with them. I was a radically alien species and could neither receive whatever signals kept them moving in unison nor react and move as efficiently through the clear blue Caribbean waters. My neurons did not fire nearly so rapidly.

Our premise is that these simultaneous behaviors in fish, swallows, and bats (and others such as lemmings, locust, jellyfish, bacteria, etc.) are somehow evolutionarily akin to human emotions. More primitive, perhaps. More direct. More powerful. But different only in degree, not kind.

The swarm, it seems, perceives and responds as one. It makes sense that in the human animal—whose responses are capable of being mediated by thought or imagination or memory, for example—for the response to come close to being so unified, the stimulus must be powerful and primitive. Put another way, the more direct and primitive the emotion stirred, the more unified the community of feeling (to borrow Scheler's term).

What are the more primitive emotions? Awe, surely. Fear, yes. Anger, likely. Lust. Pride. Distrust. Disgust. Sorrow. Joy. All these are good candidates. But we're not so much interested in a taxonomy of the primitive emotions as in the power of these intense emotions to provoke an unmediated response in us.

The significance of human emotional responses, it seems to me, is governed by two factors: intensity and proximity. The more intense the cause, the less proximate it needs to be to arouse our sympathy. Thus, the shock of 100,000 instantaneous deaths in a flood or tsunami occurring anywhere in the world will affect us strongly and prompt a response, though the deaths of 10 or 100 or even 1000 occurring remotely might not. Whereas, one person killed in a swollen creek in our own neighborhood catches us up.

Similarly, intensity is a feature of two factors: time and presence. Thus, 150,000 deaths in England or France or China (any country which has a media presence and an ability to publicize its disaster—one whose affairs are deemed 'newsworthy') will affect us more than, say, half a million deaths in Rwanda or Congo. Or, 150,000 instant deaths in Southeast Asia will affect us more than, say, 150,000 deaths in the U.S. this year due to lung cancers resulting from cigarette smoking or 43,000 deaths due to automobile accidents in one year. Though, one death to a family member or close friend or work colleague due to any one of these causes affects any of us profoundly.

We end today with a quote from Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power:

Men's feeling for their own increase has always been strong. The large numbers of the herds they hunted blended in their feelings with their own numbers which they wished to be large. They expressed this feeling in a specific state of communal excitement which I call the rhythmic or throbbing crowd.

Their excitement grows and reaches frenzy, until they are all doing the same thing. They all swing their arms to and fro, and shake their heads. In the end, there appears to be a single creature dancing, a creature with fifty heads and a hundred legs and arms, all acting in exactly the same way and with the same purpose. When their excitement is at its height, these people really feel as one, and nothing but physical exhaustion can stop them.

The fact that wars can last so long and may be carried on well after they have been lost arises from the deep urge of the crowd not to disintegrate; to remain a crowd. This feeling is sometimes so strong that people prefer to perish together with open eyes rather than acknowledge defeat and thus experience the disintegration of their own crowd.

[More to follow]