Holy ********* Crazy

[Dill]

(06-07-2017, 08:58 AM)GMDino Wrote: This last quote falls into a discussion I was having last night:  I have rational, sane friends who cannot accept that their side can do ANY wrong.  While I have been accused here of being purely a librul and will defend my god and father Obama until my end days they make me look good.  But the connecting factor is that if they are shown to be wrong their first instinct is turn it into them be "attacked".  My redneck ex-BIL can use the N word up one side and down the other, but if you call him racist he says he only hats "N---ers" not black people.  And to accuse him of being racist is not only wrong but also an attack on him as a person.

Since WWII, there have been a number of studies of the AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY that explain the behavior you describe.  The attackers cast themselves as victims fighting back. Often people are under "attack" by something--e.g. feeling the pressure of wage or job losses which diminish their status. Because they think in black and white terms, with no emotional distance from what they are analyzing, their anger and (sometimes real) pain can be redirected away from the real cause to other objects. This does not require an eloquent leader, but that certainly helps.

In the segregated South, recessions often triggered an outbreak of lynchings; Nazi literature is rife with stories of Aryans under economic control of "the Jew"; North Korean leaders regularly blame the US for their bad policy choices, making the US directly responsible for their starvation and low standing in the world.

Note that in every one of the aforementioned examples, there is an issue of racial or cultural purity at stake as well as security.