I really find the exploration of how the contemporary American right wing mind "functions" fascinating. Of course, the place one has to start if one wants to understand how the right wing "mind" "works" is with its binarism.
American right wingers conceptualise the world, thanks to their Christian cultural heritage, in terms of boxes. They imagine that there is one box for them and another box for the other. As a consequence, right wingers seem incapable of understanding reality and the reality of human complexity. The seem incapable, in other words, of grasping that life is more a spectrum or continuum than two little binary boxes.
American right wingers are also manichean. They see themselves as saints and everyone else as profane sinners if not demons. They see themselves as sacred victims and everyone else as those evil nasty blue meanies who persecute them and victimise them.
As a consequence America's right wingers can only put those who disagree with them, even those who are citizens of the same nation-state they are, in the other box, in the bad guy box, in the demon box. They perceive the world as a theatre that is hosting a cosmic action-adventure or wild west drama in which they are the good guys in the white hats and every one else is one of those dastardly Boris and Natasha Badonov baddies in the black hats. Life, for them has become, as it was for the equally paranoid, conspiracy theory laden, and apocalyptic and eschatological early Christians, a battle between good and evil. For right wingers, life is an action adventure horror movie or TV show which bears, like film and TV, only a limited relation to reality.
To quote Kurt Vonnegut, "and so it goes".
No comments:
Post a Comment