re: #272 Dr Lizardo

Here’s the money shot from “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”;

The paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon. Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering—a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies…systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”

Yes, that sounds like a fairly accurate description of what I see when I lurk at FR or read Breitbart or RedState and other RWNJ sites. Pam Gellar’s site springs to mind immediately.

I don’t know how anyone could believe this is “confined to our own country and time.” In fact it used to be something most Americans defined themselves AGAINST—“We in America believe in reason, compromise, common sense, moderation, finding solutions that work for all, vs. the extremism and radicalism we see elsewhere.” There have been times that attitude has been tested—the Civil War, the Great Depression, the Red Scare—but we always pulled back before falling off the cliff (even the Civil War and its aftermath could have been far worse). All my life I’ve never worried that the U.S. could succumb to extremism but I’m no longer so sure. Why? Because so many people are untutored in logical thinking, because so many people are untutored in history, because so many people want fast, easy solutions, because so many people childishly want it “my way, now” instead of having a sober adult outlook that embraces tolerance and compromise and accepts that you can’t always get exactly what you want.

We also have churches that are deeply invested in keeping their members from thinking critically, for fear of losing them. They encourage dishonest, illogical, fallacious thinking and arguments against Biblical scholarship, evolution, etc. It’s not surprising that this carefully inculcated contempt for facts and reason in favor of blind faith spills over into politics.