Attached is a key segment of larger article that explains the curious attachment of conservatives to folks like Palin and Bush and how their screw ups and personal failings just endear them more to their followers. The article explains how they give up their personal freedom readily to authoritiarian leaders or the types of Christianity they are attracted to. I think possibley that this desire to flee the freedom of agency might explain why they want to just subject everyone to the impersonal whims of the markets and poo poo just about any government or planned human progress. Of course at a higher pay grade you have the corporate leaders manipulating markets actively to their personal advantage. ******* You've applied some of Erich Fromm’s theories to the religious right in this new book. Did you find that the leadership of the religious right were driven ideologically by their personal crises to gain followers by tugging on the vulnerable emotions of similarly scarred Americans? Max Blumenthal: Well, I don’t say that the leadership took advantage of the personal crises. A lot of the leaders had these crises themselves. There are exploiters as well. [Focus on the Family founder] James Dobson, who is a central figure in my book, is just someone who I think understands this culture and understands how to mobilize people who come from a background animated by private trauma. I covered this movement for six years, and in covering it I met just dozens and dozens of followers, leaders and activists who told me that they had had some terrible thing happen to them in the past that they blamed themselves for. Junk -- you know, alcoholism, some family crisis, sexual abuse, sex addiction, p*rnography addiction, drug addiction -- you name it. And they confessed this to me unprompted, without me even asking about it. And I wanted to understand what it was that connected all these people together -- why there seemed to be a common thread throughout the movement. I came across Erich Fromm’s book, Escape From Freedom -- which he wrote in 1931 as a warning to Americans after fleeing from Nazi Germany and watching the rise of an authoritarian movement in a democratic society. And what he said was the peril stems from people who can’t handle the pressures of freedom, who can’t handle the anxiety and pressure of exercising their free will in an open society. Often they will succumb to that pressure. They will become self-destructive, and they will seek what he calls the neurotic solutions, which is flocking to an authoritarian structure or an authoritarian leader to basically control them and help them reorder their lives. And that’s what so many people on the Christian right told me. And if they did what they wanted to do, they would basically go crazy and do anything up to man-on-dog sex. But when they did what God wanted them to do -- you know, God as translated to them through James Dobson -- they could put their lives back together. Fromm helped me articulate what I was seeing on the Christian right, which was a culture of personal crisis that animates the politics of resentment. BuzzFlash: How does an individual, personal crisis animate the politics of resentment? What’s the tie between the two? Max Blumenthal: When you believe that when you do what you want to do, you can’t moderate your own behavior, and you’re destroying your life -- you’re self-destructive -- for whatever reason, you seek to dissolve the self, what you think is the source of your problems. For example, if you’re ashamed of the fact that you’re gay, and you live in a community where homosexuality is looked down upon, you blame yourself. And you seek to dissolve the self in a glorious holy cause that’s bigger than you. And in giving away the self, you give yourself over to a strong authoritarian leader like James Dobson. .... That’s the goal of so many of the men of the Christian right. It’s why Mark Sanford, for example, when he confessed his affair with his Latina lover in a nationally televised press conference, said the reason why he followed God’s law is to restrain himself from the self. It’s like John Ensign, the only Pentecostal senator in the Senate, a far right-wing legislator from Nevada -- well, what happened in Vegas didn’t stay in Vegas. His affair was revealed with a staffer he’d been paying hush money to. He wrote her a letter and he said, "The reason why I did this with you is I walked away from God." In other words, "I did what I wanted to do." Sarah Palin, in her autobiography, Going Rogue, says you have to give your life over to God and let God take over. In other words, give away yourself and let God take over control over your own life. This is a movement populated by people who believe that they have to give away their own individual will. They give away the self to a higher leader, which is the essential mentality of an authoritarian follower. And the reason why they think that way, the reason why they want to give the self away, is they loathe what their individual will has made them do, and they feel that it will lead them to do, which is a sin. http://blog.buzzflash.com/interviews/164
Giving away your own individual will is a poor way to describe it....it's more that your will changes from being concerned primarily with self to being more concerned about others and the things God cares about. I think it is self-denial in small measures...but it doesn't take long before you find it's far more rewarding to live a life turned inside out/upside down. All jjust my opinion, of course....formed from experiences. The concept of "dying to yourself" is not exclusive to the religious right. It's not entirely exclusive to Christianity, even. Buddhists talk about overcoming desire...that desire is the heart of suffering.
I try to stay away from the Religious Right because of how I personally understand them, and it is not easy in Texas to do that. I find it a challenge to dialogue with many friends I have who align themselves with RR. Especially when I tell them I didn't support Pres. Bush, I am against the invasion of Iraq etc, I do not support their view of Israel, I will not engage in public crusades or political crusades on moral issues. And I don't preach out of popular Christian books, I don't even read them. I don't have time. I rarely watch Christian TV channels, but I do love the people in the RR (I didn't say like them, I said love them )
From what little I know about the bible, Jesus was a more of a communist. It's just laughable to me that the people who call themselves Christians are pro free markets, anti social programs and hawkish. Are they reading the Bizzaro Bible?
1. He doesn't comment any, as far as I can tell, on economic structures. He does point out continually that greed and the love of money are things that lead to awful places. 2. The early church was very anti-war....there are all sorts of letters circulated amongst them about how difficult, if not impossible, it would be to be a soldier and a Christian. "Christ, in disarming Peter, disarmed every soldier" -- Tertullian; "Christians, instead of arming themselves with swords, extend their hands in prayer" -- St. Athanasisu; "I am a soldier of Christ and it is not permissible for me to fight." -- St. Martin of Tours "We ourselves were well conversant with war, murder and everything evil, but all of us throughout the whole wide earth have traded in our weapons of war. We have exchanged our swords for plowshares, our spears for farm tools...now we cultivate the fear of God, justice, kindness, faith, and the expectation of the future given us through the crucified one...the more we are persectued and martyred, the more do others in ever increasing numbers become believers. -- Justin "I do not wish to be a ruler. I do not strive for wealth. I refuse offices connected with military command. I despise death." -- Tatian "Emperors could only believe in Christ if they were not emperors - as if Christians could ever be emperors." -- Tertullian 3. I'm favor of many social programs. I think Jesus, though, was hoping that perhaps our hearts would be changed enough that we wouldn't need to have charity compelled by government. He certainly wouldn't have had a context to understand or contemplate charity from the Empire he lived under.
Its an interesting argument but couldn't the same argument be applied to the modern Liberal movement in terms of economic freedom? The article is saying that the Right is mistrustful of moral freedom as they believe that humans cannot be moral and completely free. At the same time the Left often argues that humans cannot be moral and completely economically free since that will lead to econmic exploitation. Therefore limits are needed in regard to economic freedom so that individuals cannot make financial decisions that may harm society.
The Buddhist concept is that the pursuit pleasure leads to suffering because you will be constantly caught up in a cycle of that pursuit. In other words it is like an addiction where you are constantly looking for the next high. There isn't anything inherently moral about that or exactly tied to compassion, the idea of being more concerned about the welfare of others than just yourself, but it is a statement of the nature of existence.
We had a recent thread about them creating a "conservative" Bible. I think generally they just take selected passages out of the Bible to justify their politics.
Not really - the argument is not really about individuals, it is actually that as a whole, due to lack of information, among other things, unregulated markets are often less efficient than regulated markets in many circumstances. You can't simply count on "the magic of the marketplace" or the "invisible hand" to erase collective action problems, market externalities, commons problems, etc...in fact it tends to exacerbate the inherent problems even worse.
Except as we've seen with the most recent economic crisis that even those who are the most informed still did a lot of damage to the system even though they might be very well aware of the potential negative consequences. Consider for example that most people know that spending on credit more than you earn is going to be bad in the long run still doesn't stop people from doing so and in fact if most people did would have negative repercussions on our economy. Going back to the moral argument though we don't always count ignorance as an excuse for immoral behavior and we also consider externalities such as how a cheating husband's acctions can negatively affect more than just his immediate family, in regard to moral restrictions. So its not as though limits on economic freedom are different since they address ignorance and externalities while limits on moral freedom do not. Both are restrictions on what an individual can do.
i think one's beliefs, no matter from whence they come, influence the kind of policy they pursue. is anti-gay bigotry less offensive if it takes place outside the church? i don't think so. moreover, there are plenty of religious leftists who use their own vision of what god teaches as the basis for their beliefs. i find that unremarkable, so i'm not sure why glynch is so offended. does he, or anyone else in this thread, think the people he objects to would hold different views if they didn't go to church?
That was my reaction. I think he's making too much of it, as if this were some cultish phenomenon specific to the Religious Right. It might be cultish, but not that specific. It does remind me of a cultish self-delusion I see in the conservative church though. They have this idea that everybody sins, including themselves, and they like to claim (like Paul) that they are chief among sinners. It's an honor to proclaim what a sinner you are, so you can give credit to Jesus for loving and saving you anyway. That's fine. But, they also have this idea of sanctification -- that Jesus is working in their individual lives to make them better people (though still sinners) so that they will occasionally try to love others, be like Jesus, and so on. The implication being that the godless don't have the capacity to be loving or selfless or otherwise good in any way ("dead in sin" in my church's parlance). Fellow christians will sometimes tell my wife how surprised they are that her husband will do altruistic things, some even going to the extreme of saying that I must be a christian and just don't know it yet. This is absurd and a delusion. Whatever the Bible meant about being dead in sin and about sanctification, it did not mean that no one can ever do anything good without the Holy Spirit. And, getting around to Blumenthal's point, this is the mindset he's talking about. These christians think that, if it weren't for Jesus, there'd be no reason why they would constrain themselves by any moral code. They'd do whatever is fun -- which is probably stuff like clubbing baby seals (that's fun, right?). They remember the days they were chief among sinners right before they found Jesus. And, they forget that they were still victim to things like self-preservation, human compassion, and other base instincts. This all sounds too critical. I think many people have improved themselves in Christ. But, they don't give us baby-seal-clubbers enough credit. Does this then mean that, since they are already willing to give themselves over to an authoritarian regime of Christ, they would be happy to also serve other authoritarian figures? No, that's dumb. Wanting to follow a strong leader isn't specific to the religious. It's human nature.
Uh, are you trying to use the crash of 2008 as some sort of example in favor of unregulated markets leading to more efficient outcomes? Cause I really couldn't think of a worse way to do it or a better way to illustrate my point. Basically, the crisis puts the few final nails in the coffin of the efficient markets hypothesis, which is the underpinning of a lot of conservative economic thinking. So what? since it is bad in the long run, an efficient, self-regulating market wouldn't allow people to get cheap credit. Or allow for a massive global credit bubble to inflate right? Right?
No I think that the right is afraid of exercising their free will or they will go wild in their personal lives and therefore they want an authoritarian religion or government to structure their lives. I would argue similarly that the Right is afraid of people organizing a society and an economy through rational political action. They wish to submit to whatever the unregulated market leads to. Again they despair of human free will to organize something better and wish to submit to God or the market.
