Or, why a sustained, national commitment to mental health will do wonders for our constitution. As prompted by this post on Metafilter.

Richard Hofstader writing in 1954 with my changes in brackets:

The restlessness, suspicion and fear manifested in various phases of the [Tea Party] revolt give evidence of the real suffering which the [Tea Party member] experiences in his capacity as a citizen. He believes himself to be living in a world in which he is spied upon, plotted against, betrayed, and very likely destined for total ruin. He feels that his liberties have been arbitrarily and outrageously invaded. He is opposed to almost everything that has happened in American politics for the past twenty years. He hates the very thought of [Bill Clinton]. He is disturbed deeply by American participation in the United Nations, which he can see only as a sinister organization. He sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world — for instance, in the [Middle East] — cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed. He is the most bitter of all our citizens about our involvement in the wars of the past, but seems the least concerned about avoiding the next one. While he naturally does not like [Islamic fundamentalism], what distinguishes him from the rest of us who also dislike it is that he shows little interest in, is often indeed bitterly hostile to such realistic measures as might actually strengthen the United States vis-à-vis [Islamic fundamentalists]. He would much rather concern himself with the domestic scene, where [Islamic fundamentalism] is weak, than with those areas of the world where it is really strong and threatening. He wants to have nothing to do with the democratic nations of Western Europe, which seem to draw more of his ire than the [Middle East], and he is opposed to all “give-away programs” designed to aid and strengthen these nations. Indeed, he is likely to be antagonistic to most of the operations of our federal government except Congressional investigations, and to almost all of its expenditures. Not always, however, does he go so far as the speaker at the [Tea Party convention] who attributed the greater part of our national difficulties to “this nasty, stinking 16th {income tax} Amendment.”

Nothing of consequence has changed between now and then, between their revolt and ours.

What role has this political movement played over the last half-century? Is it even a political movement, at all, Hofstader channeling Adorno wonders, or rather a way of avoiding politics; a nihilism disguised even from its own adherents as conservatism.

Is it a way of thinking or simply a way of feeling? A feeling which expresses itself in rhetoric that does not wish to change the status quo – which provokes it – but instead wishes only to amplify its own feelingness? Is this process a way of prolonging a pain (and/or anger) that has become meaningful and helpful?

Toxic feelings are intoxicating. As anyone who has ever escaped from the vicious cycle of a domestic dispute can attest, strong feelings can become pleasurable, however perverse this may seem from the outside or after the fact.

We “nurse” grudges. Strong feelings protect themselves by steering their subjects away from resolution. They are a flame that does not want to be extinguished, that would rather burn down its entire world than be put out.

People participate in politics out of a sense of shared responsibility as well as self interest. But self-interest need not be strictly rational. The process of politics can also satisfy emotional needs. A political movement which satisfies primarily emotional needs is not concerned with real change. In fact, it’s not strictly speaking a political movement but rather a social one. It is motivated not by ideas but by feelings.

From a political standpoint, it might thus be counterproductive to engage an an emotionally-driven, social movement as if it were primarily an ideologically-driven political one.

This does not mean ignoring its political import as that would mean abandoning the political process. Rather, it requires that the political response be complemented with a cultural strategy. In addition to addressing the political claims made by such movements – precisely because they are incoherent and/or inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution (created as it was to “establish Justice”) – we must also address the “real suffering” these positions mask.

Even if these are self-inflicted wounds (e.g., the cognitive dissonance and thus real discomfort a racist feels upon having to accept a mixed-race President), they are wounds, nonetheless. In fact, I hazard that these are often proxy wounds.

I believe that such movements provide a socially acceptable cover for expressing deep personal pain: “I hurt.” They are additionally appealing because they allow such expressions without requiring of the injured party that she or he examine their own role in their discomfort.

They provide a public alibi for private distress. By immersing themselves in a broader social narrative – thin and convoluted as it may be – the participants avoid reckoning with their own personal narrative.

The incoherence of the Tea Party is thus not a bug, it’s a feature. Its members are not looking for integration, they are avoiding it. Such movements have more in common with the romanticism of religious revivals than with the realism of political organizations.

In the essay cited above, Hofstader goes on to ask if this isn’t a distinctly American condition, “a product of the rootlessness and heterogeneity of American life, and above all, of its peculiar scramble for status and its peculiar search for secure identity.” But I suggest this is a universal condition, a response to the insecurity of identity. The less noble face of the religious impulse.

I was surprised to find yet another conversation about the Rodarte makeup line for MAC on MetaFilter this morning, some two weeks after the controversy began.

This discussion on MetaFilter is mostly more of the same: the policing of art with a variety of interchangeable though not always compatible standards. For example, commercial art must be X, art for women must be Y, art about cities in developing countries must be Z, etc.

Which prompted me to wonder: if one common standard for “politically conscious” critiques of art is whether the work introduces a difficult topic to mass media, hasn’t the Rodarte makeup line, facile and shallow as it was intended to be, been more “successful” than the Lourdes Portillo documentary, deep and thought-provoking as it is and was intended to be?

According to Google, there are currently 32,600 results for “lourdes portillo juarez” versus 281,000 results for “rodarte juarez.”

Personally, I don’t believe art should be judged by its political consequences. Political acts should be judged by their impact. Likewise, art that is, in essence, a political gesture should be judged by its political impact. As for the Rodarte makeup line, here’s an excerpt of my comment on MetaFilter:

I don’t care for the Rodarte fashion. It’s purposely dark and creepy. That’s what they do. Should I be outraged by their aesthetic in general or only when it invokes a reference that is mainstream?

…What are appropriate topics for fashion? Are they different than topics appropriate for art? Why?

…Or, simply: fashion is a superficial art form. On purpose. If your critique of fashion is that fashion is superficial, it may be your observation that is shallow and lazy.

People who are in the business of selling things have always tried to make the leap from observation, “People who like X also like Y”, to prediction, “People who like X will also like Y.”

Can supercomputers and massive amounts of data help businesses make that leap more consistently – with less risk of falling flat? For a few years now, Netflix has been trying to answer that question. No doubt Google and Amazon are also engaged in the same experiment as are hundreds if not thousands of other groups.

It’s noteworthy that the building block of these prediction engines is the human mind on a mass scale; or, more precisely, what logic we can infer from human behavior as expressed via simple human-computer interfaces – liking, recommending, a one-to-five star rating system, purchasing, gifting, etc. It’s a curious “gold rush” to tap the collective conscious.

We spend a great deal of time thinking, talking and acting upon this collective conscious, a complex system of actions and reactions that define our society, from politics to marketing, from trend-setting acts like Lady Gaga to the recent controversy around vaccines and autism.

Yet we seldom talk about the collective unconscious, a concept which to me is as essential as other simple machines like the pulley or inclined plane. Invoking the collective unconscious, if only as a tool, allows us to take a interesting perspective on how thinking happens.

To me, the tool works by laying out a few rules based on observable phenomena: that we are not exactly who we think we are; that an idea may contain another, very different idea; that we can never see the ground upon which we are standing – that for there to be a known there must also always be an unknowable unknown; that we communicate with one another in ways we are not aware of; that we think in ways we cannot be fully aware of lest that awareness impede the very process of our thinking.

Let’s say our predictive engines get very good at catering to consumer wants; that 9.999 times out of 10, the engine I use to help me choose the next movie I watch results in a highly pleasurable movie viewing experience. Much of the data being used to make these predictions is coming from the aggregated choices of other people (in the future, it’s not just Soylent Green that is made out of people!) To the extent that these people are engaged in conscious choices, let’s assume they are also being guided by unconscious choices.

In the same way that these social filtering mechanisms create feedback loops whereby a popular item can become a super-popular item, don’t they also become feedback loops for unconscious trends?

Thus, instead of one person committing a “Freudian slip,” we can imagine an entire society committing a Freudian slip? In essence, an entire society playing a massive trick on itself.

I’d love to see that. But, then, by the very rules of the unconscious, I can’t.

In a well run society, there should be no difference between doing work that benefits yourself in the future and doing work that benefits others immediately.