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ou can argue all over the place about what the issues are; the best way to solve our economic problems; fix the infrastructure; who is right and who is wrong; and how the government ought to be run. But if you are talking about pure logic, and reason, from a human perspective, and how we should operate in a compassionate way as a culture, that's where we run into big trouble. One needs to understand that the neo-conservatives despise the notion of The common good. Mere mention of the common good and a Republican begins to snarl, or adopt either a dismissive attitude; or else become belligerent, saying, "What do you mean," they said, "by this thing you call common good?"
Never mind that the concept has been around from the beginning of Western Civilization and that a single moment of reflection shows that without a strong sense of the common good we would fail, utterly, as a civilization. Republicans are in love with Ayn Rand's fantasy novel, "Atlas shrugged". And Ms. Rand was no lover of the common good. The Common Good has far too many collectivist overtones for her. And for the Republicans who, by the way, are incapable of critical thinking. A self evident fact since if they could think they would not for another minute be Republicans in the first place. They would find Atlas Shrugged to be the insufferable rant that it is. And Mitch McConnell, for example, would be lost without Frank Luntz to tell him what nasty little phrase of the day, to say that will scare the most number of conservatives. Take the phrase, "Job Killing". That has the ring of Frank Luntz. Another is Tax Relief.
Pure Frankie boy.
But the problem for Republicans is that they are far more collectivist than Progressives. The Republican party whip has very little problem keeping his people marching, like The Borg, in lockstep. My own dark suspicion is that because of parental abuse, physical and/or emotional, they were molded into their authoritarian mindset.
Once one understands the profile, the rest falls into place.
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Republicans hate the Occupy Wall Street movement and its people for several reasons which they cannot and will not articulate. Most of the reasons proffered are totally bogus.
The list of reasons is long, predictable, and trivial:
- The protesters are dirty, unwashed.
- They are merely envious of "successful" people like banksters and overpaid insurance execs.
- They the protesters are nothing but hippies who sleep in tents and where exactly do such people go to the bathroom?
- The Occupy movement in the parks is totally inconvenient for everyone. They are messing up the parks the conservatives or real people don't ever go to, but someday they might want to, and these people making a mess of everything.
- "And furthermore, by God, I always lived within my means. I never had any debt. And all these people being foreclosed on should only blame themselves."
The Occupy Wall Street movement has less of a problem with that view, than that they have seen the crime and injury to the rest of us which such policy inevitably engenders. Men, and women, obviously, left to their own devices, without limitations, anywhere near a large pile of money, tend to gravitate to criminal behavior. And I don't mean simply showing the underbelly of their unfettered greed.
Research shows how otherwise upstanding people will go wrong if allowed for any length of time near a lot of money. That answers a lot of questions about the Too Big to Fail banksters. And the big thing we need to remember about the Big Bad Banksters is that rather than repent their crimes in a responsible way, they seek to make their crimes into not-crimes, retroactively, by buying our Congress and our DOJ. What they are doing, in fact, is compounding their crimes.
If you haven't read the novel or seen the movie, Lord of the Flies, you might do yourself a favor and and rent the movie; but first, read the book; get it from the public library or, at this point, buy it for a few bucks second hand.
The story is an allegory of how humans act when the grown ups are not around. The young boys and the book is all about a small group of boys who survive a plane crash, during a nuclear world war, and land on a small uninhabited island. The boys revert to an uncivilized authoritarian law of the jungle mode. Piggy, fat, weak, asthmatic, dependent on his thick lenses glasses, and very intelligent, the symbol of the intellectual, is killed by the other boys. The voice of reason, and law and order, which Piggy represented cannot be tolerated in an authoritarian culture. The boys situation continues to deteriorate until the grown ups show up at last to rescue them.
Do persons charged with responsibility under criminal or tort law fail to recognize the wrongfulness of their actions and beliefs because of cognitive dissonance? Does ego bordering on hubris, work in such a way that cognitive dissonance prevents them absolutely from seeing the wrongfulness of their actions?
The question almost answers itself. The answer is yes. The egoistic blindness regarding a sense of right and wrong is so strong in even the most responsible of persons that it produces a susceptibility to the spell it casts on the unconscious mindset.■
