Americans have
always expected national television broadcasters to steer clear of
degrading epithets. On April 14, 2009, CNN's Anderson Cooper
established a new low in television journalism when he labeled millions
of Americans in the Tea Party movement with a vulgar sexual term. Other
mainstream media journalists and personalities gleefully followed suit.
There was no outcry from the "anti-hate community." Many liberals do
not merely tolerate contumelies against conservatives, but they delight
in them.
In the years
after World War II, psychologists (many of whom were European Jews who
had escaped Nazism) intensively studied how fascist and authoritarian
states could bring ordinary people to commit extraordinary crimes
against minorities. The two dominant personality theories of the
twentieth century, the Freudian and Adlerian psychoanalytic models,
provided theoretical frameworks for understanding bigotry and fascism
as forms of individual and collective neurotic delusions. The Freudian
model attributed these neuroses to a frustrated "will to pleasure,"
while Adler pointed to an unhealthy _expression_ of the "will to power"
over others.
For the most
part, psychologists today deny or ignore anti-Christian prejudice in
the American conversation. This is because psychologists are
overwhelming politically liberal and spiritually humanist. In social
science, bias in is bias out. In addition, America's dominant
psychological model, behaviorism, has always been anti-theoretical and
has not produced an integrated theory of personality equal in influence
to either Freud or Adler.
Although Freud
and Adler agreed on the existence of unconscious fear as the core of
neurotic anxiety, they had different explanations for it.
Freud posited that bigotry arises when a child internalizes the
prejudices of the father in order to resolve unconscious sexual
conflicts in the process of superego formation. This thwarted "will to
pleasure" is projected as hatred onto a scapegoat minority. Culturally,
fear becomes fascistic, involving rigid group conformity against a
common enemy. Freud's model is obsolete. Anderson Cooper, and the
Manhattan micro-niche he typifies, is not anxiously reacting to an
overbearing father-figure. It is the extreme opposite. Mr. Cooper is
the son of a fantastically permissive brand of humanism. The only thing
he has to feel guilty about is guilt itself.
But the
Freudian model does have utility in one dimension. The aggression
resulting from thwarted narcissism is gratified when projected onto a
devalued minority -- e.g., Tea Party participants. The core phobia is
that non-approving conservatives are thwarting the "will to pleasure."
The need for perfect admiration and approval is the hallmark of
narcissism, which is by definition insatiable. Narcissistic pleasure is
the precursor to inevitable narcissistic rage. In the narcissistic
liberal imagination, Christian conservatives stand in the way of a
human heaven of sexual freedom.
Alfred Adler
coined the term "inferiority complex." He held that the neurotic
complex arises from harm inherent in the "will to power" over others.
His model explains liberal prejudice as an overreaction against
unconscious self-doubt that projects intellectual, moral, and cultural
inferiority onto others. Uppity and unmanageable conservatives, who,
oblivious to their own stupidity, doggedly stand up for their inferior
beliefs anger the narcissistic liberal.
Applying
either Freudian or Adlerian analysis to liberal phobic structure
requires updating the concept of individual anxiety, or neurosis, to
the contemporary concept of group-based social phobia. Both Freud and
Adler were middle-class Jewish men who assumed that neurosis developed
in reaction to imbalances in the paternalistic nuclear family -- the
only normative child-rearing form either had ever seen.
In 1980, the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III
dropped neurosis as a diagnosis and replaced it with culturally based
phobias. The father-led nuclear family was no longer the social
structure for incorporating values, morals, and role expectations.
"Inadequacy adjustment" in relation to that family system was no longer
the source of mental imbalance. Values, norms, and the power of social
conditioning were moving outside the home and into the hands of
"experts," government schools, universities, and mass media -- in other
words, liberals.
Liberal phobic
structure is a fascinating innovation in the history of prejudice and
cultural fascism. It is a dread of specific forms of sin-cognizant
religious belief.
Both
anti-Christian phobia and narcissism result from the humanist denial of
sin, heaven, and hell. Liberals believe the narcissogenic idea that
they create their own heaven or hell on earth. The denial of
God-defined sin leads to self-deification and the anxious business of
high-stakes, self-directed life-styling. Liberals live with their eyes
glued to mass media to learn what is and isn't sin this season. People
who believe that such behavior can lead to a nasty outcome beyond this
life are detested. Although liberals accuse Christians of being
homophobic, true Christians are hellphobic. Regardless of
religious self-identification, people who are betting their immortal
souls on a denial of sin and its effects beyond this life have to be
crazy not to be phobic.
Every
permanent theistic religion of the last seven thousand years --
Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam --
provides an understanding that spiritual wastefulness is sin. These
religions seek to protect people from the consequences of sin beyond
this life. Traditions that assume reincarnation, such as Hinduism and
Buddhism, teach that sinfulness in one life leads to suffering in the
next. Religions that do not incorporate reincarnation, such as Judaism,
Christianity and Islam, explain life as a fleeting preparation before
divine judgment.
The
pathognomic sign that the liberal reaction to sin-cognizant belief
systems is a symptom of phobic complex is that it selectively rejects
the teachings of its own traditions -- Judaism and especially
Christianity. These cultural heritages pose a threat to the liberal
wills to pleasure and power. Liberal phobia includes a complex
delusional system that exempts some sin-cognizant religions. For
example, liberals adore their own version of a morally permissive,
designer Buddhism. Nor are they phobic toward Islam, which is based on
fiercely sin-cognizant scripture. Liberals maintain mechanisms of
denial regarding Islam that rise to the level of psychotic
dissociation.
G.K.
Chesterton wrote, "Bigots are people who have no convictions at all."
Screaming-meemies like Keith Olbermann, Rosie O'Donnell, Sean Penn, Janeane
Garofalo, and all the porn-thumping preachers railing against the
sin of sin-cognizance are the voices of the new cultural fascists,
spittle-flinging celebrities unconsciously raging against their own
fear.
I recently
evaluated a 53-year-old man who has been unable to recover
psychologically or physically from what appeared to be a minor
accident. He was born into a devout Christian family in a small
Midwestern town. He was also born gay. At about 30, he adopted a gay
mode of life. His family continued to love him, but they did not alter
their religious beliefs. When he discovered in 1990 that both he and
his partner had contracted HIV, his family took this as a sign of the
sinfulness of his lifestyle. This man's friends, counselors,
therapists, and humanistic-Christian pastors have for twenty years
encouraged him to believe that his family is bigoted. His family has
visited him through the years. They sit in the front room and do not
stay the night. He acquired a settled resentment toward his people and
never went home again. By the grace of God, he and his partner have
survived for twenty years, while all of their friends have died.
Ironically, he believes that this is because his family back home is
praying for him. This man moved from an unyielding belief system based
in divine forgiveness to a man-made culture that does not seem to value
it.
