The Mystery of the English Riots

I've been struggling to understand the arson, looting, and senseless violence in England over that last four days. That sort of behavior is so alien to me that this is like understanding beings from another planet. This article, though tainted by the shortcomings of the author's Tory priorities, seemed helpful to me. He says, in effect, these people are not from another planet, they are from the future. The may or may or may not be from your future. For sure they are out of a futuristic novel and movie call A Clockwork Orange. Say hello to Alex and his droogies!

The idea is that the system, one of the wealthiest welfare states on Earth, has created a large underclass of young people with no marketable skills and little or no interest in being productively employed, kept in useless idleness on the dole.

The distinguished political philosopher John Rawls claimed that if we arrange social institutions so that inequalities are in the interest of the least well-off people this will boost their self-esteem because it will show that we care about and value then. He never went into just what institutions fill this bill (with commendable humility, he figured he is not qualified to do this, not being an economist) but it seems to me that for this particular point, he would have to accept as an example of such a system getting a monthly check in the mail of money taken from the most well-off people. The stuff the system gives them, just for being the worst-off brings a convincing message: you are good.

No it doesn't. The message it carries is more like: "So sorry you can't seem to fend for yourself! Well, here's some stuff produced by people who, unlike you, can fend for themselves. Hope things start lookin' up for you! Cheers!" How self-esteem-boosting is that?

Rawls was a brilliant man, but he was a rotten psychologist. Much better were Dostoyevsky (in Notes from the Underground), Nietzche, and Erich Hoffer. These people would tell you that people don't get a sense of dignity and self-worth by being paid for nothing. They get it from a sense of efficacy (that is, power), and this can only come from their own action. And if for some reason they can't or won't act constructively, then they will act destructively, if only to prove that they are still human beings and have to be taken seriously.
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Update: For an interpretation similar to the above-linked article (but in the leftist Guardian) see this.

Who is Charlie Sheen and Why is He Exploding Before Our Eyes?

I once shocked Noel Carroll by telling him that I never, ever watch a movie just because I like some actor in it. Apparently, even Noel, one of the most brilliant film theorists around today, suffers from the delusion that actors are artists.

I think of them as sock puppets that certain artists -- writers and directors -- use to express their passions, their ideals, and their visions. It is true enough that the great actors -- Garbo, James Dean, the early John Barrymore -- are also brilliant at expressing passions and ideals, but they are the exceptions. And look at Sheen's IMDB page. Take away the movie sequels, the voicework, the TV sitcom, and there isn't much left. This is not Barrymore we are looking at here. This is an ordinary person -- but with one huge, fatal difference.

I've always been a freak-fancier myself and before I became a professor had more than my share of insane friends. (Professors aren't allowed to be insane.) Watching Sheen's interviews this week brought back a lot of old memories. They are not pleasant memories. We are seeing a sight I have seen before: a human mind disintegrating before our eyes.

If Sheen had a boss who terrifies him and $10,000 in credit card debt, he would be in better shape than he is. Unfortunately for him, he has infinite amounts of everything. There are no hard constraints on his behavior. He has all the ordinary appetites and urges, and for all practical purposes an unlimited capacity to satisfy them. So instead of merely disintegrating, he is exploding.

I think this is why so many highly successful actors have such screwed up lives. They are ordinary people, with no more wisdom and insight than most have, but with no constraints on their behavior. Most actors -- the ones who are not hugely successful -- are not like that at all. But their life-circumstances are like yours and mine and not like Sheen's. They have to get along with others. They have to figure out how to pay their bills and taxes. We are always under a certain amount of pressure to figure out what the right thing to do is and do it. The pressure is so constant that we don't usually even notice it -- until we see a life in which it is virtually absent, such as Sheen's.

Note also that, compared to other lines of work that involve rare skills and talents, acting requires very little self-discipline and self-control. If you have a basic knack for it, it is a very easily-acquired skill. Learning to play the violin, or mastering calculus, are incomparably more arduous. Even professional violinists must spend many lonely hours, week in and week out, in front of a music stand, developing and maintaining their skills. Actors don't have to do that. If actors learn self-discipline, it probably won't be from the "work" they do.

I think what is happening to Sheen is sad, and that the proper reaction is not laughter or even anger, but pity.

Explaining the "Climate of Hate" Theory

Wow. Sheriff Dupnik admits he hasn't got a shred of evidence that Loughner even listens to right wing radio or other sources of right wing rhetoric, and yet repeatedly says that he has "no doubt" that this is what caused him to commit mass murder.

Why are so many people on the left so convinced that the "climate of hate" theory is true?

There are three features of this sort of talk that I think are relevant to finding the correct explanation:

1. As the Sheriff's comments suggest, this idea is probably not rooted in concrete evidence. There actually is an academic literature that advances this idea -- it is the basis of "speech codes" and "hate speech laws" -- but as far as I know, none of it ever cites actual, scientific studies that correlate "bad" speech with actual violence.

2. The theory is never applied to liberal, socialist, feminist, or environmentalist rhetoric. When the Unabomber killed 3 people and wounded 23 others, no one said "Boy, these environmentalists had better tone down their rhetoric!" The theory is not really about overheated rhetoric at all. It is about overheated right-wing rhetoric.

3. Though the belief in the theory is no doubt sincere, it seems to me that the avowals of fear are not. Though people like Dupnik are talking about things that are supposed to be scary, they do not actually seem to be frightened. Look at Dupnik's face and listen to his tone of voice. What do you perceive? Me too. Their tone is generally one of scolding, preaching, hectoring, and complaining -- not one of sincere cries of fear. Cong. Giffords famously claimed that Palin's "gunsight" web page put her in danger -- yet on the day she was viciously attacked, she was at an event in front of a Safeway supermarket, completely open to the public and with no security at all. This is not the behavior of someone who feels she is in any danger.

I think this is a very interesting phenomenon, and calls for some sort of special explanation. What is the explanation for this curious behavior? I'll post my answer in the next day or so.

I hope the suspense of waiting is bearable!

Halloween Under Attack

This post is a re-run. I published it last year and am inclined to repeat every word of it today. So I will:

A school near me has announced that for a Halloween even this week students are only allowed to come to school in Wisconsin-themed costumes: you know, like dairy farmer. I'm sure Ed Gein would not qualify.

To some extent, I would imagine, this is due to a desire to avoid complaints from religious nut-jobs who think Halloween is about worshiping evil. (In the world of government schooling, everyone has veto-power. Hence the bland tediousness of the product they dispense.)

I think, however, that this is also part of a wider trend, to take the fright out of Halloween. This of course destroys the whole point of it, which is to be frightening. I see this trend as in interaction between two of the most repellent aspects of our culture today: our cowardly yearning to eliminate all causes of fear and anxiety, and our sentimental, diaper-sniffing worship of children. Together they have produced many results, including the virtual extinction of chemistry sets, the near-impossibility of kids wandering off and playing without the supervision of an adult who maintains a play-date calendar, the doomed efforts of many educated Americans to turn their boys into girls, and -- over many years -- the gradual erosion of the spirit of Halloween.

The universe is a dangerous place and everything is bad for you. Even if we have a rational response to objective occasions for fear, there is still the subjective one of remaining fears themselves. Coping with fear is something we need to learn early.

The Halloween approach to fear is, not to run away from it and censor those who remind you of it, but to confront it and master it. Halloween is when kids get to be scary. A scary kid is not a scared kid. Being scary and grossing your friends out is empowering. Also, pretending to be the thing you fear tends to demystify it. Familiarity breeds not fear but contempt.

In a world where people are continually trying to manipulate you through your fears, turning fear into a game can actually be liberating. I think Halloween is good for kids and should be bigger and scarier than it already is.

(Hat tip to Uncle Eddie for the vintage postcard illustration.)

The Real Southers Problem

Here is Obama's TSA nominee Erroll Southers answering a question, in 2008, about which home-grown terror groups we need to be afraid of. Oh, the problems are all going to come from anti-government Christian identity people and folks like that. In the blogosphere, conservatives and libertarians are saying "Yikes! You're saying I might be a terrorist!" Leftist bloggers are saying "You lie!" Christian identity, they point out, refers to a very specific sort of political extremist, and not to the people who stand in line to get Sarah Palin's autograph.

I think they are both missing the real story, which is that this guy is making a prediction, and this prediction, so far, has turned out to be completely wrong. I am no sort of terror alarmist but it is true that we have had some home-grown terror concerns during the last year. By far most of them -- including the Little Rock shooter, the Fort Hood shooter, and the five young men who disappeared and soon popped up in Pakistan -- were not anything like rightwing Christians.

I don't want to be too hard on him for this. People tend to attribute bad moral and psychological traits (like violent and crazy) to people whose political views are opposite theirs. Yes, liberals do it too. They tend to worry about Christian anarchist terrorists, while conservatives worry about leftist and anti-American terrorists. It's just that the conservatives happened to be predicting right in 2008, while Southers was flat-out wrong.

Still, this tendency is a) irrational and b) ignoble. It ought to be resisted. If I thought a TSA nominee were unable to do so, I would vote against him (or her).
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Added later: As I write, it has just been announced that Southers has withdrawn his nomination. The real reason, probably, was an issue that is much more important than the one I posted about here: it was widely suspected that he intended to unionize TSA workers (which was actually an Obama campaign pledge).

The "Climate of Hate" Theory

Just before 11:00 am, on November 22nd of my senior year at Montgomery High School in Santa Rosa CA, I was hurrying to my civics class. The hallway was packed and I was weaving between students and open locker doors when suddenly I heard the shattering news: the President had been shot, and probably killed. Once in class, we all sat in devastated silence. Suddenly Mr. Johnson, our teacher, shouted, as if to an unseen presence in the room, "I hope you are happy, Fred Schwarz!!"

Fred Schwarz?? Schwarz, whose death at the age of 96 earlier this year went completely unnoticed, was at the time a prominent speaker and giver of seminars on the evils of Communism. Liberal commentators and politicians had been grimly warning the activities of Schwarz and other anti-Communists was dangerous as they create a "climate of hate" in America that could cause violence. Mr. Johnson's instinctive reaction was to assume that it was this right wing climate of hate that killed the President.

Strangely enough, the "climate of hate" theory persisted, even after we found out that Kennedy was murdered by a Marxist defector to the USSR who was angry about Kennedy's belligerent policy toward Cuba. Within a year, Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby's attorney, described Dallas, the site of the assassination, as "a city of hate" and quoted Dist. Judge Sarah T. Hughes saying that “a climate of hate here in Dallas...contributed to President Kennedy’s assassination.” They were referring to the fact that Dallas was a center of right-wing activity of various sorts. They were not referring to the hatred in the nasty little mind of Lee Oswald himself.

When I first saw Nancy Pelosi saying that "we" should curb "our" rhetoric, I thought for a fraction of a second she meant to include rhetoric like her earlier suggestion that the town hall protesters include overt Nazis, or Jimmy Carter's claim that the "overwhelming" preponderance of their motivation is pure racism.

Of course, that's not what she meant at all. The vague comment about the late seventies probably is meant to convey the notion that former San Fransisco Supervisor Dan White (a Democrat) was moved to murder Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk by the anti-gay rhetoric of activists like Republican State Senator John Briggs. She's invoking the climate of hate theory.

This theory, as I understand it, consists of two parts:

1) Angry rhetoric on the part of various mass movements has a powerful capacity to inspire violence, even on the part of people who are not members of the movement, more strangely yet, even on the part of ones disagree with it. It creates a generalized atmosphere in which unstable individuals just sort of explode, rather like popcorn kernels in a puddle of hot oil.

2) The rhetoric of liberal, socialist, and environmentalist movements does not have this capacity. Only that of non-leftist movements has it.

Part 2 obviously does not deserve serious comment. Part 1 is also rather odd. Why do big government liberals (as opposed to the classical, J. S. Mill type) find it so obvious? It sure isn't obvious to me. Pelosi's apparent explanation of White's evil deed is the first cousin of the explanation offered by his lawyer: that White was pushed over the edge by munching sugary snacks.

The answer is probably systemic: I think the reason big government types are so prone to this idea has to do with other aspects of their Weltanschauung. There is something about their system of ideas and feelings that requires or enables this one, an idea that seems so goofy to those of us who view their mindset from the outside.

They Killed Him and "Kept Shopping"

It was a 5:00 am sale on Black Friday at a Wall-Mart in Nassau County on Long Island. Thousands of eager shoppers were lined up outside. According to AP, when a store employee tried to open the doors and let them in, they broke through the doors, knocked him down, and trampled him to death. He was stepped on dozens of times.

The witnesses in this video seem to attribute this bizarre action to greed, but that can't be the whole explanation. People who kill for greed are criminals, and these people are not criminals.* Everyone who knows Gustave Le Bon's classic book, The Crowd will immediately think of another explanation. This is a classic case of crowd psychology. Le Bon says:

The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, ... the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation. ... The psychological crowd is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly.

Le Bon held that people in crowds do things that they would never be capable of when acting alone. And he did not mean that in a nice way. "In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated."

The difference between crowd behavior and individual behavior is of course that in crowds individuals interact, resulting in a whole that is not a mere sum or average of parts. This interaction, he held, is conditioned three principal factors: people in crowds feel powerful and hence unconstrained, they fall into a state of heightened suggestibility, and this results in emotional contagion. Basically, they make each other stupid and drive each other mad.

I would add another factor, at least as obvious as these: the dissolution of responsibility. Individuals in crowds do not feel responsible for what they do, a factor that makes crowds a powerful conscience-solvent, a sort of moral sulfuric acid. When the horrified Wall-Mart management announced that they were closing the store for several hours, many of these shoppers, according to the AP story, "kept shopping." Some angrily complained, shouting that they had been waiting in line since Thanksgiving Day. It's pretty obvious that though they had just participated in a collective act of homicide, they did not feel that they had done anything.

Though people can act as groups they only seem to be able to think of themselves as individuals, so a mob is a way of doing something and yet not doing it.

It is mainly as individuals that human beings deserve our admirationg and respect. In crowds, decent human beings can transform into cowards, bullies, or mad psychopaths.
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* Some academics have said, at least in sound bites given to the press, that the explanation is not merely greed, but fear, fear of missing out on bargains. This of course has the same problem as the greed explanation. Only a monster would kill or even seriously hurt someone out of fear of missing a great deal on a flat-screen TV.
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Added Later: Reason Hit & Run reports on a New York Times editorial blaming this incident on Wall-Mart. It seems their sale drove the consumer mad with greed. Thus to the excessive individualism of the greed explanation they add the excessive socialism of ... oh God, I can't go on. It's too horrible.

Character is Relevant!

This country has gone through some deep changes about this issue: is a politician's sex life "private" in the sense that it is irrelevant to what we should think about the things he or she does or will do as a "public" official?

During the agony of the Clinton sex scandals I tried to interest a class I was teaching on moral character in writing a term paper on this issue, and they were struck dumb -- literally -- by the suggestion that there is a discussable issue here. When I prodded them with a few questions, I was told that the idea that a politician's sexual behavior is relevant to our moral or political judgments about them as politicians is a myth invented by cynical Republicans, who are pursuing their own political ends. In other words, as a philosophical issue, it is utterly beneath contempt. Well, then, I said, what do you think of the Mother of All Character Issues: Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. If these allegations are true, do they give us some reason to chisel him off Mount Rushmore? Or not? What do you think? Anybody? Anybody?

No one wrote on that issue. I concluded that the students' view was probably the standard one among Democrats at the time, including those who constitute almost 90% of my esteemed colleagues at the university. I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and I can only gain insight into how such people think in the same way that an anthropologist finds out about the beliefs of distant tribes: by observing the behavior of others. Introspection is less than no help at all. Today, using the same methods, I conclude that things have changed. During the flap about Edwards, it became obvious that many of his supporters (or former supporters) it were genuinely disappointed by his behavior. Today, his political status seems to be somewhere in the category of damaged goods.

What do I think about this issue, other than that it really is an issue?I have actually written on theoretical issues that bear on this question but every time it pops up I find myself thinking about -- not some theory or argument but -- a comment someone made to me while we were watching a movie.

He was a Russian scientist, here to do research, and we were watching the original airing of a made-for-cable biopic about Stalin, in the early years of the Clinton agonies. During a scene in which Stalin (Robert Duval) was treating his wife, Nadezhda, in a particularly beastly way (she later committed suicide), my companion became very upset and said something like: "This is what drives be crazy. How can people say that the way Clinton treats women has nothing to do with what we should think of him as a politician? What Stalin was doing to his wife, he later did to the whole country! The same thing!"

A similar point is made about Hitler's relationship with Geli Raubal in a fairly good novel by Ron Hansen. I hope it is obvious that I am not comparing Clinton and Edwards to Hitler and Stalin -- the issue here is the (in some broad sense) logical one of whether the "private" realm of a person's life is a separate compartment from the "public" one, with no inferences (not even probablistic ones) allowed from one to the other.

To accept the compartmentalization idea is very close to denying that there is such a thing as moral character at all. The idea of character is the idea that there is a certain kind of connection between one's acts: that people act from traits, like courage and cowardice. If you do a brave thing, that is evidence that you have the trait of courage and are a courageous person. Not conclusive evidence, because acting out of character is possible. Compartmentalization is also possible. A person can be a hero in the face of physical dangers and a coward about moral ones. I don't deny for a minute that this sort of looseness and independence between the parts of one's life is possible. But the compartmentalization idea implies that such things are not merely possible but necessary.

In effect, the compartmentalization idea says that, necessarily, there two Stalins: the one who abused Nadezhda, and the one who abused Russia. It is simply a coincidence that they were both abusive. But why only two? Applied consistently, the idea would disintegrate the person into an infinitude of homunculi, with no connection between them. That, of course, is not how things are.

Kinderarchy: It's the Thought that Counts

Joseph Epstein published a piece about a month ago that seems to have reverberated sympathetically with a lot of people. His main idea is that kids grow into little tyrants because they get too much attention from their parents. Parents nowadays make kids the center of their lives, a thing that his own parents certainly did not do. The result is kinderarchy, rule by children

I see a fallacy here, and I see the same fallacy in some discussions of "helicopter parents." These of course are parents who hover over their kids even in a doomed effort to prevent them from ever failing or suffering. It is sometimes discussed as if the root of the problem is that the pay too much attention to them: they email them or talk to them on their cell phones ever week if not (gasp!) more often than not, and some of these kids even go to a college in the same town their parents live in (oh no, not that!).

I agree that there is a problem here to be addressed. As an anarchist, I am opposed to every sort of _archy -- including kinderarchy. Some kids -- and many adults (many of whom vote!) -- think they are entitled to the fruits of other people's pains and exertions and to massive amounts of self-esteem. But is the cause of this the attention they get from their parents?

There is a simple, logical distinction, which these arguments ignore, between quantity of attention and quality.

As to quantity: I am convinced, both by theory and my own experience, that, for kids, especially for small children, there is simply no such thing as too much attention. Nor can there be too much love or affection. Of all these things, the more the better. And as far as making them "the center of your life" is concerned, if you weren't prepared to do that, why did you bring them into the world in the first place?

It's not the quantity of attention that is a problem, but the quality. That might seem to mean that good parenting is something that is impossibly subtle. What kind of attention is the right one, and how do you monitor it? But it's not really all that subtle. The right kind of attention, I would say, is the kind that is given, automatically, by someone who thinks everyone has rights that are not to be violated -- including not only the kids but the kids' teachers and the parents themselves. When I say "thinks everyone has rights," I am not talking about some superficial political opinion, but about how you live your life from day to day. Good attention is the kind you get from someone who treats everyone -- including themselves! -- as persons with rights that have to be respected. If that is your mindset then go ahead and love your kids and make them "the center of your life." They will grow up to make you proud.

Parents who do not have this mindset, I predict, will often have children who think that the world owes them everything they desire -- because that's what their parents think! Where's the mystery there?

In either case, it is the thought that is the active ingredient, not the sheer brute quantity of attention or affection. Humans are very good at reading other humans, starting at a very early age. Your kids can sense where your actions are coming from, and that is what makes the big difference.

The New Politics of Fear

H. L. Mencken said it:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Today, both American political parties are inflaming the fears of the populace in ways that are more or less obvious. The Republican party is dominated by people who appeal to your fear that you will be killed by a Middle Eastern terrorist. The Democratic party is more and more under the influence of people who appeal to your fear that a vast, diffuse, sometimes contradictory array of catastrophic results will follow from human-caused global warming. (For a remarkable piece of Chicken-Little-ism, see this website, which is overseen by Bill Clinton's former chief of staff.)

I will never forget what it was like to be a small child at the height of the Cold War. I remember lying awake at night wondering what would happen to our house if they dropped The Bomb. There was a naval base in our town and San Francisco was just on the other side of the hills to the west, so there wasn't much chance of the Russians missing us. I hoped that the fact that I slept on the bottom bunk of our bunk bed might afford me some protection. The collapsing ceiling would regrettably crush my little brother to death, but at least I might have a chance to climb out of the rubble....

It's a terrible thing that anybody, especially children, should have to live in an atmosphere of politically-caused fear. In 1989 Communism collapsed, and with it our fear of it, and of nuclear annihilation. I thought the millennium had arrived: at last, the Freedom from Fear that politicians had been promising us!

Hardly more than a decade later, these two new fears had taken deep root, almost as if they had always been there. They are spreading like crabgrass. No sooner had the very real (though government-produced) danger of nuclear annihilation receded into the background than people began to obsess about these new grounds for worry. It's as if people find life without fear hardly worth living.

I sometimes think that humans have a deep, thanatos-like urge to scare themselves silly. But something tells me this can't be right. Humans are not masochists. A more likely explanation, less counter-intuitive in its assumptions, is social and not psychological. This explanation holds that this phenomenon is, as Mencken half-hints, a byproduct of the state. Like nuclear terror, the new fears are government-produced, though in a completely different way.

The state is a massive instrument of coercion. It is a way to gain power and wealth, and quickly. But in a democracy, you can only use this coercive apparatus if you justify it to your fellow human beings, to the very people who are to lose their freedom and their wealth for your benefit. This is of course difficult to sell.

My hypothesis is that the most effective way to do this is to generate fear. Clearly, the best strategy will be to appeal to some emotion or other. Emotions rivet one's attention to the desired goal and jam up one's ability to put the goal into context and see the big picture. An emotional reaction is always an overreaction. It is always a context-dropping reaction. That is of course just what you want, if you are trying to get people to let you take away their freedom or their hard-earned wealth. It seems to me that all of the emotions are either irrelevant to this goal (eg., lust), to difficult to arouse (eg., love of truth), or too weak (eg., pity for the sufferings of our fellow human beings) -- except for fear. I predict that all political factions and parties will compete at all times to scare themselves and each other into a witless stupor.

What this theory predicts is of course that people will act as if they actually want to be scared, that human life will resemble one continuous Halloween, a non-stop, self-generated fright fest. Well, that is pretty much what it is, isn't it?

If Mencken and I are right about this, this system is one huge protection racket. What Bush and Gore are selling is relief from fear -- a fear you wouldn't have if it weren't for them! There is one big difference, though, from a criminal protection racket. If you ignore the gangster's offer of protection, they really will blow your store up. If you ignore Bush and Gore, then your chances of being killed by a terrorist, or a human-caused hurricane are, well, much less serious. Basically, you have nothing to lose but your mental chains.

Having said that, I suppose I'd better add a qualification: I'm not suggesting that either terrorism or human-called global warming don't exist. Nor do I advocate "doing nothing" about them. What I am suggesting is that we do our best to ignore the enormous amount of shamelessly obvious fear-mongering on these issues. Fear-mongering on the terror issue has already cost us horribly, and continues to do so. Environmental fear-mongering promises to be disastrous as well -- unless we cast off those mental chains.

People want to live in peace and tranquility, yet they have created a system that traps them in a state of perpetual alarm and even at times of craven hysteria. Voters of the world, unite!

Karl Kraus and Tom Szasz Go After Sigmund Freud

Karl Kraus, the great Viennese journalist and scourge of everything phony and cowardly, has always been one of my heroes, ever since first reading about him in Wittgenstein's Vienna, as a student in 1973. (As I recall, I read a copy borrowed from my ol' buddy, Treebeard.) I've been reading this amazing little book about him, Karl Kraus and the Soul-Doctors, by Thomas Szasz. Szasz has long been another of my heroes. How did I miss knowing about this book all these years? It was published in 1976, the year I got my Ph. D. and my first full-time teaching job. Maybe I was just too busy with other things!

Anyway, the book is all about Kraus's war of words against psychoanalysis. It's full of brilliant flashes that make unexpected objects leap out of the void, like lightning-bolts at midnight. (All the quotations that follow are from Kraus, as translated by Szasz.)

I have to admit that one reason I like this book is that it expresses a conclusion I have come to lately. This is the idea that the worst harm done by psychoanalysis was not done to their patients. There the harm consisted mainly in getting huge amounts of money which they simply did not deserve. After all, those patients wanted to waste their money. As libertarians, the three of us (Kraus, Szasz, and I) have to respect that!

One feature of psychoanalysis that is particularly salient is that it promises an understanding of human life by a very particular means: the interpretation of symbols. This led very naturally to the interpretation of the arts by Freudian methods. Here, as Kraus points out, the victim is often dead and unable to defend his honor.

"Victim?" you say, "how can interpretation be a form of victimization?"

To see this, you need only understand how psychoanalysis interprets human life. As Kraus says, it "accounts for the anguished soul of the adult by reducing it to the anxious longing of the infant". Inevitably, this method of interpretation is "reductionist" in the deflationary sense of the word. Faced with the great riddle of human life, the Freudian looks for the answer in the nursery and the toilet. "God made man out of dust. The psychoanalyst reduces him to it." Thus: "In the case of Goethe's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, [analysts] disagree only on whether the work is the product of sublimated masturbation or bedwetting. If I tell the [them] to kiss my ass, they tell me that I have an anal fixation."

The fact that it turns giants into dwarfs is one of the two most obvious features of this method. The other follows from the fact that it explains by interpreting: it promises that you can understand without complicated mathematical reasoning or doing any field studies or experiments. Just learn a certain manner of thinking. "Psychoanalysis is a method for making a layman into an 'expert' rather than for making a sick person well."

Thus, Freudianism is an easily developed method that enables the analyst to shrink other people, to be the (comparative) giant. (Hence the expression, "headshrinker," or "shrink" for short.) "Psychoanalysis is, in fact, an act of revenge through which the analyst's inferiority is transformed into superiority." It is the dwarf's revenge against the giant.

For this reason, it also serves as a way to bring meaning and value to your life: "Despite its deceptive terminology, psychoanalysis is not a science but a religion -- the faith of a generation incapable of any other."

Conspiracy Theories: What's Really Going on There?

I’ve been reading a really interesting book: Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in the United States, by historian Robert Allen Goldberg (Yale U. Press, 2001). I’m trying to figure out what these seemingly mad ideas are so powerful, and so popular. What the Hell is going on there?

Conspiracy theories have popped up many times in history, Goldberg tells us. You might think that it all began with the Jewish plot to take over the (nineteenth century) world, but what about the Antichrist, and the grand-daddy of them all, Satan and all his devils? And in the eighteenth century there was the Adam Weishaupt and the fabulous Bavarian Illuminati. But recent decades do seem to represent something new in history: conspiracy theories have been multiplying like mad. Among them are: JFK was killed by a conspiracy that did not include Oswald (or in which he was “just a patsy”), ditto for RFK/Sirhan and MLK/James Earl Ray. The Oklahoma City bombing was perpetrated by the government – with Timothy MacVeigh as the patsy! The Moon landing took place on a Hollywood sound stage. Marilyn Monroe was murdered, Elvis’s death was faked so he could avoid publicity, Princess Di’s death was faked so she could get away from the paparazzi. Vince Foster was murdered because he knew too much. Then there are Roswell and Area 51. In fact, JFK was killed because, like Foster, he knew too much, but in his case it was about – UFOs! The Elian who was sent back to Cuba was a ringer. And of course, every time a reduction in the supply of petroleum results in an increase in the price of gas at the pump, it isn’t because of some abstruse, hard to understand “law” of supply and demand, it’s because of a conspiracy of oil companies fixing the prices. And, since Golderberg's book was written, the dawn of what may turn out to be the Golden Age of conspiracist lunacy. The WTC towers and the pentagon were hit by cruise missiles, cleverly disguised as passenger planes (which were somehow spirited away and disappeared). Light and telephone poles next to the Pentagon that seem to have been sheared off by a large passenger plane were actually stage props. The cellphone messages from United 93 were fakes concocted by actors. And on it goes.

What do all these ideas have in common? Goldberg points out that they all weave together disparate facts into a consistent, unified structure. They also promise one power: to find the behind-the scenes cause of things feels very empowering.

Also, as Goldberg points out, conspiracists tend overwhelmingly to be male. Joe MacCarthy, Robert Welch, Mark Lane, Louis Farrakhan, Oliver Stone, Fetzer and Barrett. The leading Roswell nut-cases and Area 51 wack-jobs – all men. Conspiracism is a testosterone-rich environment. I would add that this can be partially explained by the fact that conspiracist thinking is a power-grabbing fantasy. This is something that men seem to be more interested in than women.

I would also add, though, that both these functions are filled by real theories. Boyle’s law and the law of supply and demand integrate diverse phenomena and promise to empower us through understanding. But I maintain that conspiracy “theories” are not real theories. What is the difference?

For one thing, real theories mean work. It takes work to understand them. They are abstract, difficult. They always use often use a highly specialized conceptual aparatus, and math symbols that only those who have spent long, boring hours of study can understand. And even after you understand them, they assign you more work. The law of supply and demand means that, if you don’t like gradually rising gas prices, you have to get off your butt and find more sources of fuel. (Damn! That could take years! Let’s just sit here and hate the oil companies some more!)

Of course, once you realize that everything is the fault of Big Oil or the Jews, there is nothing at all that you can do about it. But that is actually liberating: Nothing to do! You’re off the hook! The power rush was from the insight itself, realizing what the real cause was. You’ve penetrated the Veil of Maya. Actually gaining and using real power – that’s just more work!

There is one more huge difference between conspiracism and real theory. Conspiracies make good stories, as Goldberg reminds us. Think how many movies depict conspiracies, from Birth of a Nation through Meet John Doe and and The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May to dozens of current offerings. By contrast, a real theory is a cold minuet of bloodless abstractions. No story there.

In addition, I would point out that a conspiracy theory appeals to a common and pervasive human emotion: namely, hatred. Conspiracies have the two characteristics that separate the Hateful from all other things: they are powerful, and they are very, very bad. If your dominant emotion is a haunting, free floating hatred, and you need something to fasten it to and justify it, try a conspiracy theory! If might be just what you were looking for!

So conspiracy theories are the sort of theory that would naturally appeal to someone who is intellectually lazy, prefers instant gratification, thinks in terms of concrete images instead of abstractions and mathematical symbols, and needs to feel more powerful; someone who is troubled by nasty emotions that do not seem to be appropriate responses to the world that they actually see around them.

So my explanation has to be that conspiracism is so popular because there are a lot of people like that -- or there is a lot of that in people!

The Psychology of the Academy Awards Audience

Luis Bunuel, one of the greatest filmmakers, says somewhere that the Academy Awards may be the world's only perfect democracy, because it is run entirely by idiots. (Being a member of the Academy himself, it was okay for him to say that.)

Here's a problem that may be as profound as that of the psychology of political correctness (see below). Every year at this time the web produces more top ten lists on the the most ridiculous oscar snubs ever grows and grows. Many of my favorite filmmakers never got one: Greta Garbo, W. C. Fields, the Marx brothers, Fritz Lang, Joseph von Sternberg, Orson Wells (for director or best picture), James Dean, John Barrymore ... most of them, come to think of it. (Democracy is so unfair!) Most people who are seriously interested in movies can tell a similar story.

That's on the one hand. On the other hand, I keep seeing articles in which people try to predict who will win the awards this time, and in some cases the predictions are based on claims about how good and deserving the films in question are. As if the awards are based on merit, and are not prizes for moral uplift and cronyism.

What gives? Above all, why do so many people watch the show itself? It's just a slow-paced variety show, with a small amount of suspense to spice it up. Why don't the ceremonies get the utter contempt that they have earned so many, many times over?

Its one of the biggest unsolved mysteries of life in this great Republic.

The Psychology of Political Correctness

Conservative essayist Theodore Dalrymple made a comment in a recent interview that I found very disturbing, even terrifying. It is either a paranoid delusion or the most profound statement on freedom of speech that I've read since J. M. Coetzee's Giving Offense (Univ. of Chicago Press) appeared in 1996. Here is what he says:

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

To get an idea of what he is talking about, I think you first need a reasonable definition of "political correctness." I would say that any such definition has to have at least two parts. PC consists, first, of a certain method, which is coercion. This can be a speech code, a national "hate speech" law, or a brow-beating kind of moral disapproval. Second, there is the behavior being coercively repressed. This consist in expressions of opinions that denigrate members of various groups, which can be a race or a sex or a sexual preference or a national or ethnic group, which has historically been oppressed.

There is also a possible third part, which I have never been sure of. This is the theory that is sometimes given as the justification for political correctness. It states that a significant part of the cause of the continuing hardships of these historically oppressed groups is the spread of denigrating opinions about them by means of disapproving speech.

The problem I have always had about this is, frankly, that it seems so silly. Does anybody really think that we can change the world be changing what people say about it? That a main cause of the problems in the world are the negative thoughts we transfer from one brain to another by means of disapproving words?

What Dalrymple is doing is to offer an alternative to the third aspect of political correctness. Don't look at the silly theory that backs it up, look at reality, look at what it actually accomplishes. What it accomplishes is to create a generation of people whose speech does not match their actual view of the world. No one can make sure that all their disapproving thoughts are about men, Americans, white people, Republicans, capitalists, and other oppressor groups. We know we have incorrect thoughts all the time. But we stifle any negative thought we might have about anybody else because we don't want to be pounced on for our insensitivity. The result is a population whose bright shining outward behavior masks a nasty inner world, a population of compulsory hypocrites or, as Dalrymple says, a "society of emasculated liars."

This is what inevitably happens whenever we coercively repress people's expression of their wrong thoughts, instead of having it out with them in an environment of rational discussion. But how could this be the point of the coercion? Who could possibly profit from such a situation? Isn't this just one more example of how the coercive schemes of world-savers always seem to have unintended consequences that make the world all the more lost?

This of course is Dalrymple's point. This situation is highly profitable to anyone who wants the have power over these guilt-riddled hypocrites. That is his frightening proposal.

I'm really not sure what to make of this proposal. I can see four alternatives to it.

First, there is the unintended consequences idea, which I've already mentioned. Don't underestimate human short-sightedness. It is a very powerful explanation.

Second, there is a more moderate version of Dalrymple's view. It isn't that PC is intended to make us weaker and easier to dominate, but it obviously does make people more hypocritical, and the perpetrators of PC don't mind this. Why not? Because even hypocrisy can serve their cause, so who cares if that's what it is? Call this the callous indifference explanation. Explanation via callous indifference isn't the same thing as explanation via intention.

Then there is the third possibility: The hypocrisy explanation. That PC is perpetrated by people who are genuine, spontaneous, uncoerced hypocrites themselves. They use "correct" discourse to hide their own incorrect, unkind, hierarchical thoughts from their own awareness. So they don't see, or don't care about, the hypocrisy they breed in others.

Finally, there is the possibility that people do seriously, sincerely believe the official theory behind political correctness, that injustice is actually caused by bad words spreading bad thoughts. After all, there is some truth to this theory, and it is the one that is actually used by PC advocates to identify their motives. It must be part of the explanation.