Welcome friends!
You may recall a few weeks ago I suggested the source of the still seemingly enormous rhetorical power of the normative elements of neoclassical welfare economics may derive not from anything explicitly stated within or even supported by that theory, which I nevertheless debunked again last time out, but from the usefulness of that theory in insulating and sustaining a rather poorly defined and diaphanous dream world or fantasy many conservative Americans appear to find attractive in which we have no or anyway very limited use for government, no one pays taxes or if they do then very little, and everyone ends up getting precisely the amount of economic power he or she deserves. Well, a little while ago I read an article that made this same general sort of argument in the context of a different public discussion showing remarkably similar signs of pathology: gun policy. This struck me as quite plausible because here in the USA people who tend to be attracted to the happy dream of economic conservatism tend also to be quite attracted to guns or perhaps I should say to the dream world of gun symbolism. It would certainly explain some of the angry, irrational, hysterical, and just plain not quite right in the head quality one associates with right wing conservative contributions to our public discussion of the issue. If you really need an example of the sort of thing we’re talking about you may recall a few weeks ago a Midwestern conservative pundit associated with the sinister octopus-like Sinclair media empire, Jamie Allman, resigned after joking about preparing to employ a hot poker to torture a young man who had been in the news recently agitating for gun reform after losing some of his friends and classmates to one of those mass shootings at his high school. At least one hopes Mr. Allman was joking. One is never entirely sure these days. Good luck trying to find the exact quote by the way. The Washington Post declined to provide the full text claiming it was “too vulgar to reprint in full.” Doesn’t really sound like the sort of thing one expects to hear from people interested in taking up an issue calmly and rationally does it? But not really so unusual in the context of the sort of thing one hears from conservatives in this country whenever anyone mentions the word “gun.” So what’s really going on in that dark, dank, murky, fetid, swamp we call the conservative mind? Well, let’s see if we can make some progress shall we?
The article that caught my eye this week was a small piece in Scientific American that delved into the recent increase in the number of guns in this country. Apparently since the 2008 election of President Obama we’ve tripled the number of guns we manufacture here in the USA and doubled the number of guns we import. We just didn’t have enough. Needed a lot more. Interestingly the number of households owning guns has held fairly steady for some decades now at around forty percent so it’s not like a great number of additional people have suddenly become enamored of guns. No, what’s been happening is that a certain segment of the gun owning population has become increasingly interested in stockpiling weapons. Who and why? Well, that’s an interesting question. Apparently, gun hoarders are generally males of the less educated and paler complexioned sort. Sociologist Angela Stroud, who has studied the phenomenon, argues the likely psychological motivations are fear, feelings of vulnerability, and racial anxiety. Another study found the people most “emotionally and morally attached” to their guns were again males (sixty-five percent) and “white” (seventy-eight percent). The authors of that article suggested likely causes were economic anxiety and a perceived need to buttress their masculine credentials by imagining a narrative in which despite clearly struggling along some dimensions these people are heroic figures not just in terms of taking out rampaging hordes of bad buys along the lines of every lowbrow Hollywood blockbuster for the past several years but also in a quasi-patriotic proto-fascist sense of defending The Nation (as opposed to the actual democratically elected US government, which they tend to view quite negatively) against the depredations of The Other variously and fluidly conceived but generally involving a racial component. Unfortunately as any reasonable person might expect the actual result of owning guns tends toward the decidedly non-heroic end of the spectrum. For example, one study found there are seventy-eight suicides for every justified homicide. Basically in terms of the body count we’re talking much more about gun owners shooting themselves than about them shooting anyone else. As far as race goes turns out most shootings and murders involve people who know one another and for that reason generally involve people of the same race. Along the same lines guns in the home are far more likely to be used against those who live there than against burglars or crazed killers. For example, women living in a house with guns are five times more likely to be killed by their husbands than women living in homes without guns. Need more? It seems every week in the USA a rather astonishing average of one hundred thirty-six kids and teens are shot more often than not by siblings, friends, parents, or relatives.
Interesting stuff right? And doubly interesting to me in that the basic scenario appears quite similar to what I speculated might be happening in the case of the economic dream. I argued previously that although it seems quite likely the economic happy dream of the conservatives conveys some psychic benefits to those who succumb to its mind-numbing charms it’s ultimately self-destructive because it’s not real, it crowds out more sensible discussions of how to address serious economic issues, and it provides unscrupulous people a rhetorical tool they can use to take advantage of people. The end result of this unfortunate addiction is not only increased economic weakness and vulnerability but the voluntary relinquishment of the one source of power available to the economically disposed in our society: the hard-won revolutionary political power granted to citizens of democracies under the egalitarian one person one vote principle. Seems something quite similar may be happening with the opium of the gun. Gun ownership clearly conveys some sort of psychic benefit to those who fall under its spell but objectively it makes their world much more violent and chaotic.
So what are we to make of this? I suggested before it wasn’t necessarily obvious we should try to wean people from the narcotic effect of the economic dream of the conservatives. Although ultimately destructive it does appear to carry short-term psychic benefits. And it seems quite likely some people may simply be too weak minded or ignorant to represent themselves in the hurly burly of serious public debate that forms the true basis of the democratic way of life. It may well be the illusory and ultimately self-destructive short-term psychic benefit of the economic dream is worth more to them than doing the hard work of understanding the true causes of their economic problems and taking steps to address them. I suggested we might do well to keep in mind these people harm mostly themselves with their addiction to conservative fairy tales and no matter how annoying it may be to see them led around by their noses by the greedy manipulative jerks who sit at the apex of the conservative political machine one must consider they might subjectively feel better off in that role than in any plausible alternative. However, I may have given inadequate attention to the opposing argument, which is that ultimately their addled thinking and addiction to conservative claptrap could very well have repercussions for the rest of us. As their happy dream fails to be expressed in reality time and time again these people are much more likely to arrive at some boneheaded conclusion such as the scapegoats du jour must be working behind the scenes to make it so than to do what any reasonable person would do and reassess the dream itself. This sort of dynamic has played out before and we all know where it leads: fascism, national insanity, and quite frequently death. One hopes the wealthy conservative elite who busy themselves taking advantage of these people in pursuit of the almighty dollar have read a bit of history and know what happened to the economic elite of Germany during the Nazi era when they tried to play that game. They did fine for a while but it didn’t end well. Could happen here as well. It’s not like we can just pack up the lot of them and send them on a rocket ship to Planet Stupid. We’re stuck with them here on planet Earth. Their deranged thinking may ultimately affect all of us.
Seems we’re in the same general sort of situation in the context of guns. If hoarding and playing with guns is the only way these people can maintain some sense of self-respect given their repudiation of their political power and their relative lack of economic power does one really want to charge in with a pair of garden shears to make off with the family jewels? Again one might be tempted to say they themselves bear most of the cost of their devotion to their dreams and neglect of reality but of course it does tend to bleed over to the rest of us from time to time and I do mean bleed. The more guns there are in circulation the more likely a nut or a criminal or a terrorist or someone along those lines will lay their hands upon one and the next thing one knows one goes to a movie or a nightclub and it’s the last thing one ever does in this world. Again packing them all off to Planet Stupid and allowing them to parade about with their guns is simply not technically feasible. We’re stuck with them. We have to find a way to allow them to act the fool while minimizing as much as possible the risks they pose to everyone else.
I thought for a moment I might make the same argument about the conservative attachment to the dream world of religion but I’m getting a bit tired of writing just now and anyway that may be like shooting fish in a barrel. It’s a nice spring day and I’m sitting here lamenting the state of the world. I make myself sad sometimes; I really do. Let me just end with a few words about the Big Picture. Here in the USA liberals tend to be better educated and more intellectual than conservatives and they tend to want to talk to other people in the language liberals themselves understand, which is to say reasonably, calmly, carefully, with implicit and explicit appeals to both human reason and our shared values. That’s a great handicap in a democratic system like that of the USA because many conservatives live in an entirely different realm of human consciousness. They operate more on the level of inchoate fears, symbols, fantasies. It’s not so much they’re unwilling to talk openly and honestly about their values as they simply don’t have the patience or intellectual wherewithal to formulate or express their values in any coherent way. They say things that appear inconsistent or illogical. They dabble in alternative facts and pseudo-science. Even many conservatives will readily admit what they say often doesn’t really make sense. A great theme during Mr. Trump’s successful campaign for the presidency was conservatives’ insistence we not take the man’s utterances literally or even seriously. Indeed it was a feature that made him sympathetic to his conservative base. They want and expect to hear bulls__t. It’s the sort of thing many liberals simply couldn’t comprehend. How can one vote for a man if one has no idea what he really stands for? How does one know what he intends to actually do? However, that’s neither here nor there. If we liberals are going to ever close the vast chasm that has opened up between us and our fellows we will have to learn the Language of Stupid. We can and should of course continue to talk seriously among ourselves. But when we’re building bridges we have to try a little harder to enter the mysterious miasma of the conservative mind and meet them in their own world: the world of dreams and symbols and impressions and feelings where words are just funny sounds people make. We need to fight conservatism tooth and nail of course but we need to fight it through understanding and with compassion. Don’t get too hung up on what conservatives actually say. That way leads to madness. Instead think more about the psychological needs and unstated fears and half-conscious dreams and desires that lead them to say it.
References
Why Are White Men Stockpiling Guns? Jeremy Adam Smith. March 14, 2018. Scientific American. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-are-white-men-stockpiling-guns/
Sinclair show cancelled after commentator’s vulgar tweet about Parkland survivor David Hogg. Eli Ronsenberg. April 10, 2018. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2018/04/09/sinclair-commentator-resigns-after-threatening-to-sexually-assault-parkland-survivor-david-hogg/?utm_term=.e9fa209b3dd1
