Political Psychology

March 26, 2013

Weak Principles

By Don Kirk in Optimists and Pessimists, Philosophy of Mind, Political Psychology, Political Theory

The School of Life in London runs a philosophy blog where a Mr. Stevenson has seven ‘Principles of Optimism.’ His principles of optimism include being busy, have ambition for the future, devote your life to something more important than the self, expose yourself to new ideas, be an empiricist, and suffer criticism gladly. Hmm.

The first five could describe Hitler or Stalin as optimists. Nothing provokes more head-shaking than listening to a philosopher describe how much of an optimist Karl Marx was. Optimism is a psychology, not a set of principles.

It is possible to inject optimism into a pessimistic life, and the mental health improvements are well-studied and documented. But it is how we form our pessimism originally that is just as important as employing ‘principles’ to become more optimistic.

The perceptions of the partially-full/empty glass of water are grounded in how we perceive human nature. If we find humans to be inherently bad, we develop a pessimistic psychology. If we find humans to be inherently good, we develop an optimistic psychology.

The easy test of the divide is to notice how we vote: if we approve of statism, we are pessimists wanting the state to assert control over inherently bad human beings. If we approve of less-regulated humans, we are optimists. ‘Principles’ do not have much to do with it, because the two psychologies are deeply imbeded in everyone. And note, such ‘principles’ can easily be used to describe people who are definitely not optimists.

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December 16, 2012

Chop Hands Instead of Chopping Heads

By Don Kirk in Human Identity Formation, Philosophy of Freedom, Rationality vs. Irrationality

Courtesy of economist Brian Knight at Brown University, this is a graph measuring the relative strictness of gun control laws in the 48 contiguous States. With the recent tragedy in the Connecticut elementary school, calls for greater gun controls dominate the national media, and California’s senior Senator has just promised to introduce tougher controls in the new Congress.

Note that although Connecticut already had a strict gun control regime, the strict controls did not prevent the tragedy. In China, where no one can own a gun, that absolute ban on gun ownership did not prevent a lone man from slashing a room of elementary school children with a long knife. The problem is not with guns; the problem is with humans.

The ultimate logic of gun control is to amputate the hands every human being on the planet. Only then will there be no more tragic deaths from guns, knives, swords, spears, or a rock.

Everyone one of us is capable of committing unspeakable brutality, as psychological research on normal human beings has demonstrated for more than half a century. Gun control no better solves the problem of human violence than banning nuclear weapons solves the problem of wars. The cry for gun control is understandable and appealing, but all it will accomplish is surrendering more individual freedom while doing nothing about the true problem.

Either chop off everyone’s hands, or do something about finding and solving the problem of human self-destruction. That’s right. The homicidal impulse against innocent strangers is rooted in the human impulse for suicide. Guns and knives and spears and rocks have no such self-hatred, banning them is futile and only less freedom will be the result.

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November 30, 2012

Pitt in the Pit

By Don Kirk in Film Review, Life-Flourishing vs Life-Extinguishing, Political Psychology, Social Regress & Social Progress

Lot’s of gore. Plenty of splashing blood. Ray Liotta as a weepy wise guy, James Gondolini as a contract killer now become a whining weakling, an obese alcoholic pining for the whores who never loved him as much as he loved them. And there’s Pitt. Quiet tough. A stone cold killer with an ascetic philosopher’s focus on logic and rationality. He kills for business but won’t kill if it’s personal, an ethic that is the film’s theme, threatened aloud by Pitt at the film’s close: “America is business; now pay me my fuckin’ money.”

The location is New Orleans, in the ghost neighborhoods abandoned after Hurricane Katrina. Crime is the only business, criminals are the only citizenry. There are no families; the only women in the film are prostitutes. A broad daylight street murder doesn’t even get Pitt’s character to turn his head. The public murder is routine, nothing extraordinary about it.

The collapse of civilization is the constant theme as news stories of America’s Great Recession and the just-concluded 2012 national elections provide the back-drop to the movie’s action. Presidents Bush and Obama drone on and on during the movie’s bar scenes, plying the voting public with political banalities and ideological futility in televised speeches. They are two priest-politicians acquiring power in the name of “Change” and ‘saving America,’ but it’s clear to an observer that the civilization is gone and both politicians known for their ‘caring’ are actually socio-narcissists, the mirror lovers. Duopoly politics during the collapse of civilization acts like a bitch-slap for the movie audience; the hypocrisy of both presidents will assault the loyalties of nearly everyone who sees the film.

Definitely a movie to go see, especially to watch a mature Pitt play the only adult in a sea of late-middle-aged losers. He’s both smarter and more rational than the lawyer, tougher than the other contract killers, and far more subtle in his deceptions than everyone else he meets. No woman tempts him. He’s thorough, hard working, conscientious about his task, the Protestant work-ethic personified: killing as an efficient business. One can’t help thinking of how Calvin would have admired Pitt’s killer, evoking the founding Protestant’s burning of devout Christians alive at the stake, rationality gone amuck.

This is not a film for the meek or weak. It’s a dark film of pessimism about human nature and the human propensity for self-destruction. The protagonist is an anti-hero without any conscience. It’ s a film noire that celebrates the sociopath, telling us that this is the pathological sub-culture we have devolved into and this is also the psychologies of all the men we now vote for on Election Day. The politics of psychopathy matches the collapse of civilization into the sub-culture of killing. In the film Killing Them Softly, the only honest man in our American psychopathological culture is the hired killer.

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November 29, 2012

Ouija Board Economics

By Don Kirk in Economics, Optimists and Pessimists, Political Psychology

One of the more accurate forecasters of recessions is the Producer’s Manufacturing Index, the much-watched PMI. As in all human studies, prediction is a fallible art, not a reliable science.

With that caveat of potential error, note in the chart above, from the Calculated Risk blog, that the red line tracking the Institute of Supply Management’s PMI is currently bouncing off of zero. That’s the good news. But notice also, in the past twelve years which include two recessions, in two out of three drops below zero and then a bounce upward result in a later plunge downward. Hitting zero marks a slowdown, and the recovery from zero usually but not always appears to be only temporary.

So, does this mean we are headed for another recession, or are we now in the lucky one of three lasting bounces off of zero? If you believe in reading tea leaves or rolled bird bones or spilled cat guts, you are a Pessimist and we are headed for a ‘double-dip’ recession. If you believe government can rescue an economy, you are an Optimist and we will not fall back into a recession during 2013. However, if you believe governments unintentionally are the true cause of recessions, you are a pluralist and we are just as likely to be on the verge of another recession as not, a thoroughly ambiguous forecast that demands humility whenever dealing with human studies.

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November 4, 2012

Purity & Polarization

By Don Kirk in Ethics, Political Psychology, Political Theory, Politics

The 2012 national election is now nearly over, with the ultimate decision determined by the results in the above nine ‘swing’ States. The chart is from Politico; they expect three southern States to go to Mr. Romney and six States to go to Mr. Obama. Once again, as it has in the past three elections, how Ohio votes will likely decide who is the next President of the United States.

What this map does not show is how much polarized our national politics is over the past forty years. Largely hidden beneath the normal electoral contest between two opposing points of view is the increasing rigidity in each view. Dr. Seth Masket of the University of Denver has research on California politics showing that political polarization between the two parties has increased steadily for forty years and shows no sign of abating.

Professor Masket’s book, No Middle Ground, argues that both major parties succeeded in switching from bipartisan moderation to partisan loyalty in 1953. I argue that the “switch” to partisan purity winning their party’s nomination, and then using the gerrymander to protect their incumbent true-believers with ‘safe seats,’ accounts for the inexorable rise of polarization in our politics for the past four decades. Politics has always been a rough-and-tumble business of character assassination and entire cemeteries voting on Election Day, but when bipartisanship was the reward for incumbency, government worked better.

The moderate middle in American politics has no organized effective voice. There are very few American political parties extolling the centrist values of the bourgeoisie. The two major parties—the duopoly—operate under a “big tent” concept which effectively divides and subsumes the moderate voters to control by the ideo-extremists. The duopoly’s mutual control over 50 State legislatures and hence the entire elections process makes the rise of a centrist third party nearly impossible.

So long as the few moderate third parties are politically impotent, and so long as ideological purity is the reward for winning re-election in both major parties, our nasty and extremist polarization will continue. Either the moderate middle in America organizes itself as a citizens’ reform movement, or our politics will continue in its long forty-year decline into hate filled extremes.

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November 2, 2012

Filtered Facts

By Don Kirk in Ethics, Political Psychology, Social Regress & Social Progress

The Washington Post published a news article yesterday about Syrian Kurds fighting Syrian rebels who had opened fire on a Kurdish demonstration in northern Syria, on the border with Turkey. The Post news article gave a sketch of the actors in the expanding conflict in Syria, mentioning the involvement of the PKK, a revolutionary Kurdish group wanting Kurdish independence.

What the Wapo news article never mentioned is that the PKK is a Marxist revolutionary group, long recognized by Turkey as a murderous terrorist organization. How does such a salient, well-known fact escape Wapo’s reporting?

And why does The New York Times and The Washington Post never give the full name of the brutalizing political party that governs Syria? The mainstream media always calls the Syrian government, the Ba’ath Party, but actually, the correct name is the Ba’ath Socialist Party.

The same filtering of facts was a twenty-year fixture of reporting on Saddam Hussein. His ruling political party in Iraq was also the Ba’ath Socialist Party, but the American mainstream media forever called it simply, the “Ba’ath Party.”

We can easily see the same kind of filtering of facts in reporting on Zimbabwe. The governing political party is the brutal Zanu-PF, but American media never mention that the Zanu-PF is Marxist, complete with mass murder of the N’Debele people, expropriation of private property, communist hammer and sickle flags, and calling each other “comrade.” Never once does a reader of American mainstream media learn that this vicious government in Zimbabwe is Marxist.

The phenomenon is so frequent it cannot be merely coincidence. Whenever a brutalizing government in the world is socialist, the mainstream media in America filters out that fact in its reporting, perhaps because they want to protect the reputation of their own democratic-socialist ideology. Clearly, the media does not have the philosophy of freedom or the philosophy of human rights as an ethic.

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September 26, 2012

Left/Right Apocalyptics

By Don Kirk in Ideo/theologies, Philosophy of Freedom, Political Psychology

Here’s the cover of a book I’m certain to avoid. Has a great, colorful, eye-catching use of color, but then, the colors appear to be so sharp they become lurid. There is an old saw, a metaphor, about human psychology which is; that you cannot tell a book by its cover, so in this case the lurid colors are perhaps a warning sign.

The book appears from its author-supplied summary to be an attack upon socialist thinking, written by someone who was born and grew up in a soviet nation. The premise of the book is that the U.S. is on the same path toward socialist totalitarianism because Leftist minority groups in the U.S. are able to coalesce into a political majority. The play on words is obvious: “Bolshevik” means ‘majority’ in Russian, and it is the name of the very small group that took over the socialist Russian Revolution of 1917 and made it a Bolshevik Communist Revolution in 1919.

Apocalyptic books sell well. There is something very human about our fascination, our love-hate with the theological or ideological end-of-times. Too often, however, in addition to selling a lot of books the eschatological world-view wins votes and political power. In the political apocalyptic, the philosophy of freedom is reduced to a mere ideology used to preach, dominate, and manipulate the congregation of true-believers and unwitting voters.

How to tell whether a politician is an apocalyptic? S/he might preach a hyperbolic exaggeration of how they “saved” an entire industry (Mr. Obama bailed out only two of three unionized auto companies out of sixteen different companies in the industry), or an entire economic system (Mr. Bush’s claim that he ‘saved’ the free-market, in order to justify TARP), or an entire people (Lenin and Hitler). Especially the apocalyptic, in addition to being the ‘saviour,’ will argue that if he is not re-elected to power then the republic will suddenly end as if struck down by the hand of a vengeful, righteous god.

Sounds like the presidential election of 2012, doesn’t it?

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July 24, 2012

Is Voting Moral?

By Don Kirk in Ethics, Philosophy of Freedom, Political Psychology

Bahavioral economist Dan Ariely, famous as the author of Predictably Irrational, had an article in the Wall Street Journal four days ago answering a question about voting. Dr. Ariely differentiated between incentives to vote and motivation to vote.

An incentive would be to receive a double-scoop ice cream cone for voting, while a motivation would be to effect a change in policy or government. We neither reward nor punish for voting in American politics, relying solely on motivation to get citizens to vote.

Some argue, voting is a responsibility of citizenship, and as soon as ‘responsibility’ is introduced then a moral argument is being made. Under this argument, not voting is irresponsible, implying immorality.

However, doesn’t not-voting represent a kind of voting, where the negative feelings about the politics motivates citizens to avoid voting? If more than 50% of potential voters refuse to vote (as frequently occurs during off-year election cycles), then isn’t that a message that those who are elected represent only a minority of the voters, and are therefore less legitimate than those elected with greater than 50% turnout? If all choices are unacceptable, doesn’t not-voting send a clear message that there is no over-riding motivating influence to vote, such as good governance?

The responsible-argument has a trump card, however. By not voting, the undesirable politics is perpetuated. So, the moral conclusion is: Voting is a responsibility of citizenship, and is arguably even more of a responsibility for those who dislike their politics. ‘Dislike’ is a motivation; passivity–lack of motivation–is not moral. Deliberate forebearance from causing harm could be moral, but it always ethical.

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April 30, 2012

Left/Right Authoritarianism

By Don Kirk in Conservatism, Political Psychology

Today’s blog of the AFSCME–the Left-liberal labor union of government employees–reports that a federal district judge in Miami this morning declared that Florida’s conservative Governor’s executive order of random drug testing for all state employees is unconstitutional.

No kidding. Thank God, again, for the nation’s Founders making the judiciary a check on the power of the other two branches of government.

A Frederick Taylor ‘scientific management’ argument could be made that it is the idiocy of management that sends workers to form a union. Random testing of every employee? This is the third time that random drug testing has been turned down by the courts in Florida; when will the conservative governor get a clue?

A voluminous amount of academic research declares that authoritarianism is solely a phenomenon of the conservative Right. That’s blatant “confirmation bias” by Left-liberal academics–the extreme Left is every bit as authoritarian as the extreme Right–but this clueless Florida governor appears to be determined to prove that authoritarianism has a home on the conservative Right. Clearly, this manager is no freedomist…but then, neither is the labor union.

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