I look for anything I can find that explains the psychological origins of these kinds of discussions. What are the psychological laws or dynamics that create them. The following is how I see it.
Everyone wants to see themselves as good but everyone got put down as children. This means we carry feelings of shame and guilt, feeling that are profoundly painful to experience consciously and which could not have been survived if we were not able to seal them off as children by adopting whatever moral stance those who put us down for deviation believed in and which we not also pretend to believe.
But what happens if the beliefs you were forced to believe in are socially repellent to most other people? You can either become a phony pretender, hiding your real phony feelings, or mount a violent war of resistance where you try to make whatever assholery you have been bent into as a child be a new norm of decent and proper behavior. This is what is happening with the Republican racist and mainly South.
Their shit behavior was defeated in the civil war but that racism and the moral sting of being a part of it never really left. People just do not want to admit to being morally wrong.
And along comes Donald Trump, prick extraordinaire to tell those who were hiding not to be ashamed leading at last on Jan 6 to a march on Washington DC to overthrow an election that once again repelled the notion of normalcy to that very assholery.
These Republican cavemen are simply trying to avoid feelings of worthlessness that adheres to the fact that the things they call the good and believe in are abhorrent and morally repugnant earning for them the very title they need to excape, the feeling that what they believe makes them worthless, not just in the eyes of others but in the eyes of the universe. But because, as children, all the praise that they were able to earn came as via the manifestation of that terrible immorality they were taught is the good, they can't let go of it. To let go and to grow emotionally would be to feel that repressed guilt and shame and nullify everything in the way of assholery they had achieved.
But trying to make normal what is assholery, when everyone born without that particular form of conditioning will see it for what it really is, is not a winning strategy because that moral standard they uphold is a form of mental illness and that fact will seek to shine through every time a new child is born.
There is a deep moral truth built into out genes and no amount of conditioning will ever erase it. There will always be those who are driven by the question, who really am I.
This madness will all end for the individual who finds out, and for us all when our children see more of love and compassion rather than of hate.
All, I think, should be welcome on that side of the balence bar no matter how dim their understanding may be.
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