From a discussion of optimism & stoicism
Optimism and desire are likely to prove adequate to carry most people through a protracted struggle against powerful and oppressive forces.
Eric Hoffer argued that hatred was a far better organizing tool for mass movements than optimism:
Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.
[....]
Common hatred unites the most heterogeneous elements. To share a common hatred, with an enemy even, is to infect him with a feeling of kinship, and thus sap his powers of resistance.
–ERIC HOFFER, The True Believer
“The average person is a facultative sociopath,” argued David Sloan Wilson in Evolution for Everyone. “There is ample psychological evidence that we are hardwired to distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and to behave inhumanely toward ‘them’ at the slightest provocation, as science journalist David Berreby recounts in his book US and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind.
We spend a great deal of time speaking about the godless and selfish individual, but the Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in Moral Man and Immoral Society argued that societies (groups of individuals) are far more immoral:
As individuals, men believe that they ought to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial, economic and national groups they take for themselves, whatever their power can command.
I would add corporations to the groups Niebuhr listed above.
Yesterday, Tim Mason linked to an outstanding lecture by Shadd Maruna, “What are psychopaths for?”
http://lx.iriss.org.uk/content/what-are-psychopaths
It seems humans go to great lengths to deny the psychopath within, and to focus on individual psychopaths (to which I would add psychopathic out-groups), which they scapegoat and project their own immoral acts upon.
As Maruna points out, defining the “out-group” is an exercise in social constructivism, a completely arbitrary and artificial act. The out-group can be psychopaths, it can be black people (as with Richard Nixon and the racist propagandists at TalkLeft or emptywheel), or it can be Muslim Terrorists (as with President Obama and Rep. Mike Rogers).
As far as TPTB are concerned, I think they are happy if the out-group is anybody, just so long as it isn’t them.
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/07/a-pox-on-optimists.html#3cxCGccBe6Tvzfi0.99
Karl Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time,” the other great book from 1944, the anti-Hayek.
And to help Paul Krugman out, in his poor understanding of what he criticizes as the “Great Morality Play” of the Right (its actually built into “The American Dream,” or the main version of it, at least, James A. Morone’s “Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History,” from 2003. While the title and ostensible subject matter may make NC readers cringe a bit, with all due respect to their secular sensibilities, it’s not what you think. Morone is secular, and modern; he’s trying to understand the Right and the mainstream of social and economic morality in the US. It’s a wonderful read, every, chapter, and I maintain you can’t understand either the American Dream or neoliberalism without its take on economic morality.
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/07/a-pox-on-optimists.html#pB21lZ4OwEHMsO8f.99
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posted by dave @ 11:03 PM
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