What strikes me is how impossible it would be to find a way IN to these minds. It’s like a fevered swamp surrounded by brambles. What if you tried to talk to Mrs. Jo Hinman or her ilk and say ‘what are the facts? Why do cities need planning? Why would someone support such a plan? What if people democratically decided they wanted fluoride, or a walkable city, etc. etc. because they preferred not to get cavities or they dislike auto pollution and car accidents and walking is more healthful...?’ (I actually forgot the details of the 1313 plan so I don’t know what her terror was caused by.) You can’t do it. But how does someone get like this? How does a whole group of people get like this? I think it’s racism maybe? I don’t know what causes the primal fear that wrecks the minds of people but I do wonder about it. My gut says it IS caused by a profound distrust of other people, and that racism and antisemitism is one of the first seeds of causing such a profound distrust. Once you create the divisions and solidify them enough, then you get profound distrust on many sides because people subject to the racism also have a profound distrust (reasonably so but it can make people unreasonable in insular communities I suspect). I can’t prove it--it just makes sense to me.
The strangeness of this mindset is what keeps me fascinated by the subject, and I'm not sure I'll ever unravel it (if there is even is one unified answer to be found). I think the radical individualism espoused by most of these folks goes some way toward explaining their hysteria around issues that force them to acknowledge their inescapable embeddedness in social structures that they can't control. Once one takes on board the complexity of the industrial food system or climate change or public water supplies, let alone the possibility of global nuclear war, one can either learn to live within that vulnerability and the limits of one's individual agency, or one can run screaming into an imaginary world where anything you can't control and which you don't like gets transmuted into an intentional plot hatched by an identifiable set of ill-intentioned individuals. Once that imaginary plot is revealed and squashed (which of course never happens because it's unreal), then one can return to that imagined nostalgic world (which never existed) of self-sufficient individuals living lives of freedom and abundance.
Right. Excellent point about the individualism. It was why when Trump started to rise I kept saying (jokingly but also thinking there’s something to it) that Terror Management Theory explained his popularity. It’s a very simple theory, mostly to explain religious adherence, I think—mainly the idea that people simply cannot face death and their own insignificance. So they seek a certain image of projected power to alleviate that terror of annihilation. This is such a fascinating observation about the anxiety over plots by ill intentioned individuals to promote ‘collectivism’. It means then you must rely on others, and there’s a lot of contingency involved in one’s own existence.
Now I am making so much more sense of libertarianism of this kind! Thank you! Everyone is focused on the arrogance but of course it’s also about the vulnerability of interdependence, and, as you say, “the limits of one’s individual agency.” I know there isn’t a unified account but that’s all extremely plausible. It is fundamentally a desire to live a kind of fantasy that assuages certain uncomfortable realizations but for these people it becomes a full-time job to maintain the ramparts of their mental fortress.
And it’s fascinating how this links up to authoritarianism. You would think libertarianism is the desire not to have authority over oneself, combined with the desire to avoid demands for cooperation and the recognition of the cooperation that makes one’s life possible (so the arrogance). However, it devolves so quickly into authoritarianism as we see.
So that ‘freedom as license’ is not the impulse (for most). Rather, both this fantasy of independence and the friendliness to a certain kind of rightwing authoritarianism provide that feeling of safety some people crave. I had never thought to make this connection!
I grew up around to these kind of people (albeit less consumed) so what you write is endlessly fascinating to me and even a bit of a nostalgia-fest. I was observing them with deep curiosity even as a child and even came up with a theory maybe in 6th grade or so that they were ‘afraid of change.’ That was my first attempt at political psychology. I really tried to get into their heads, had tremendous sympathy for them, and they also tried to convert me to their way of thinking but even in early childhood I would just put a pin in what they said and think ‘I’m not going to believe this right now, I will just wait and find out the truth later, when I am an adult…’ (Google is a help to children in a similar situation these days but it stopped being truth-productive a few years back unfortunately.) Sometimes I see things you uncover and think “oh yeah, I remember that one!”
Another solid report from Fascism-ville. Thanks for venturing down these rabbitholes and offering sober analysis.
What strikes me is how impossible it would be to find a way IN to these minds. It’s like a fevered swamp surrounded by brambles. What if you tried to talk to Mrs. Jo Hinman or her ilk and say ‘what are the facts? Why do cities need planning? Why would someone support such a plan? What if people democratically decided they wanted fluoride, or a walkable city, etc. etc. because they preferred not to get cavities or they dislike auto pollution and car accidents and walking is more healthful...?’ (I actually forgot the details of the 1313 plan so I don’t know what her terror was caused by.) You can’t do it. But how does someone get like this? How does a whole group of people get like this? I think it’s racism maybe? I don’t know what causes the primal fear that wrecks the minds of people but I do wonder about it. My gut says it IS caused by a profound distrust of other people, and that racism and antisemitism is one of the first seeds of causing such a profound distrust. Once you create the divisions and solidify them enough, then you get profound distrust on many sides because people subject to the racism also have a profound distrust (reasonably so but it can make people unreasonable in insular communities I suspect). I can’t prove it--it just makes sense to me.
The strangeness of this mindset is what keeps me fascinated by the subject, and I'm not sure I'll ever unravel it (if there is even is one unified answer to be found). I think the radical individualism espoused by most of these folks goes some way toward explaining their hysteria around issues that force them to acknowledge their inescapable embeddedness in social structures that they can't control. Once one takes on board the complexity of the industrial food system or climate change or public water supplies, let alone the possibility of global nuclear war, one can either learn to live within that vulnerability and the limits of one's individual agency, or one can run screaming into an imaginary world where anything you can't control and which you don't like gets transmuted into an intentional plot hatched by an identifiable set of ill-intentioned individuals. Once that imaginary plot is revealed and squashed (which of course never happens because it's unreal), then one can return to that imagined nostalgic world (which never existed) of self-sufficient individuals living lives of freedom and abundance.
Right. Excellent point about the individualism. It was why when Trump started to rise I kept saying (jokingly but also thinking there’s something to it) that Terror Management Theory explained his popularity. It’s a very simple theory, mostly to explain religious adherence, I think—mainly the idea that people simply cannot face death and their own insignificance. So they seek a certain image of projected power to alleviate that terror of annihilation. This is such a fascinating observation about the anxiety over plots by ill intentioned individuals to promote ‘collectivism’. It means then you must rely on others, and there’s a lot of contingency involved in one’s own existence.
Now I am making so much more sense of libertarianism of this kind! Thank you! Everyone is focused on the arrogance but of course it’s also about the vulnerability of interdependence, and, as you say, “the limits of one’s individual agency.” I know there isn’t a unified account but that’s all extremely plausible. It is fundamentally a desire to live a kind of fantasy that assuages certain uncomfortable realizations but for these people it becomes a full-time job to maintain the ramparts of their mental fortress.
And it’s fascinating how this links up to authoritarianism. You would think libertarianism is the desire not to have authority over oneself, combined with the desire to avoid demands for cooperation and the recognition of the cooperation that makes one’s life possible (so the arrogance). However, it devolves so quickly into authoritarianism as we see.
So that ‘freedom as license’ is not the impulse (for most). Rather, both this fantasy of independence and the friendliness to a certain kind of rightwing authoritarianism provide that feeling of safety some people crave. I had never thought to make this connection!
I grew up around to these kind of people (albeit less consumed) so what you write is endlessly fascinating to me and even a bit of a nostalgia-fest. I was observing them with deep curiosity even as a child and even came up with a theory maybe in 6th grade or so that they were ‘afraid of change.’ That was my first attempt at political psychology. I really tried to get into their heads, had tremendous sympathy for them, and they also tried to convert me to their way of thinking but even in early childhood I would just put a pin in what they said and think ‘I’m not going to believe this right now, I will just wait and find out the truth later, when I am an adult…’ (Google is a help to children in a similar situation these days but it stopped being truth-productive a few years back unfortunately.) Sometimes I see things you uncover and think “oh yeah, I remember that one!”