Self Deception is a political issue that underlies all other political issues, from year to year and decade to decade. I would consider it the one that marks every one of us and defines all the other issues. Where do you stand on this?
This diary comes from struggling to come to grips with whatever wisdom I might have gained over the years since I first immersed myself in public contact, back in the early seventies, and to apply it to the present circumstance.
I went to school at Baylor University. Becoming dissafected from the Psychology department, I found a job working more than full time on the campus independent daily newspaper. I graduated "betwixt and between," going out into the world with only a few courses to substantiate my writing skill - a career handicap. I have been seeking various alternative pathways to writing ever since, which has led to many adventures and to seeing things from a variety of different perspectives.
Self Deception began to be identified as an issue in a context where enthusiastic young evangelicals were the dominant culture on campus. Many truly passionate people were going to Bible studies virtually every night. Cultural frustration with an environment in the outside world full of 1960s era progressivism led to a sense of crisis urgency to move America back from error, to save its collective soul.
The kernel at the heart of the nascent New Right, Campus Christian/Republican movement was an ethic you wouldn't be exposed to in Philosophy 101 where basic concepts of logic get surveyed.
The syllogism went like this: Christians had to admit that the majority of the population, "seduced by the siren song of Hollywood and Liberalism" were not going to vote for Christian candidates if they talked directly about what they were about. They needed to lie, to say what people wanted to hear, instead. Because this goes against the essential honesty that the Bible would seem to promote, there had to be an out. For those who are truly among the Righteous, there is a different set of rules. The ends justify the means - for the Righteous. This is a concept of The Elect of God.
At the time one was tempted to dismiss this as Sophomore thinking driven by hormones and too much coffee. After all, locker room scuttlebutt was that you could get the best sex out of praying with some girl who could get really excited religiously. When you think about that kind of seduction, then think about the same people 10...20...30 years later, what is going on politically in the right wing makes a lot of sense.
It wasn't long before it proved serious. Less than ten years later, one of the "stars" of the Baylor campus New Right ran for Congress in a Houston district, matching Christian born again hubris with big time Oil and Chemical Interest money. That Faustian bargain has been with us ever since. Karl Rove's East Texas Strategy came into its own then. He had been a Campus Republican organizer out of Washington, DC during the early seventies when this Christian fervor was brewing on college campuses across the US. Ralph Reed was also in this college cohort. It isn't clear to me who originated this line of thinking and put this together. Probably there were prominent evangelical preachers of the time, or figures like Richard Viguerie, a founder of the Moral Majority, who actually came up with the strategy behind this. More probably it was sort of organic.
The practical nexus began to be clear to me on the doorsteps of Appalachian Pennsylvania. I did a gig during the summer in which I sold books door to door for a company, which hires college kids to go to an opposite end of the US - at least 1500 miles from friends - to work in a high energy door to door sales program. I sold an educational aid book set. I did this because I wanted to get to know America, to see who lived in all those houses and what their lives were like.
On the doorstep you encounter a huge issue that also underlies all other issues and is a basic life ethic.
In coal country, where people are uneducated and poor, a college kid gets immediate respect. People will listen and they may be influenced to spend money they shouldn't because of this. What do you do with this? Do you take maximum advantage so you can make another 20 bucks, or do you take a larger view of the situation, take their vulnerability into account and attempt to be sensitive to it?
Some of my colleagues were flush with victory at their ability to manipulate people for their own advantage and couldn't get enough of it. In truth, these people tended to make a lot of money. Some of them went back to campus in the fall with new clothes, a new car and star power.
This dynamic applies to mature life and politics as well. Do you take advantage of the public's trust and manipulate for purposes which aren't on the table, perhaps making yourself wealthy in the process? Or do you operate out of a sensitive respect for the trust that people have in order not to abuse it, and to be a real public servant?
The way people decide, divides the crowd.
It happens that I moved into local political organizing a few years after these experiences. It seemed to me that by 1980, these profound issues were already shaping the times. To me, progressive political campaigns and candidates were best situated to succeed, and keep on succeeding, if there was a brutally honest appraisal of the true conditions without self-deceiving, wishful thinking based on emotion and if there was less interest in manipulating people and more on figuring out a path to intelligent public policy.
Conservative candidates already had adopted the self-deceiving concept that lying was necessary to have a case and that manipulation was the way to succeed. Elections get won this way, mainly because it always seems to be associated with lots of money. Probably because the sort of people I had worked with, who were given to manipulating people for money, had no problem with this. Christian conservatives were blind to all else except how they could get in with anyone who might gain them some kind of a foothold anywhere.
This die was cast in Texas a long time ago. In reading up on the career and life of Lyndon Johnson, it seems basic to understanding politics in the first half of the twentieth century, building up to the latter half. Back in Johnson's time, a radio preacher who made a fortune selling prayer water on the air became Governor.
I think that young people coming of political age are always surprised by this state of affairs. It isn't after all, logical and may be pretty well hidden from anyone not exposed to evangelical culture. But it is real. The choices people make in their everyday lives aren't separate from the choices made politically. It is about defining what is meant by pragmatism.
At a taxi cab company, there was a scam going on that I ran across. Drivers owe their soul to the company store. They are encouraged to get into a lease-to-own sort of deal and they have to work extremely hard to try and get ahead of the debt. Then something happens and the only shop in town they can take their car to is the company shop. They charge more than other mechanics would. Not only that, but drivers were suspicious that the mechanics in this shop might find some way to sabotage the car to make future repairs necessary. One driver I knew claimed that a line feeding transmission fluid into the transmission was ice-picked, to cause the transmission to need replacement as the fluid leaked under pressure. One shop manager was actually fired over this sort of thing.
What is the difference between this kind of low rent manipulation and Bernie Madoff or for that matter, billion dollar spurious deals at the top of the food chain that necessitate breaking the national treasury to fix?
Thus does self-deception play into real consequences. This is how the Reagan and Bush Administrations got us into trouble in various parts of the world including Latin and South America, the Middle East in general and Iraq and Afghanistan in particular. We are still dealing with that - into a third decade.
This is how America had the wool pulled over its eyes - Again, since Reagan/Bush - and allowed the oil interests to run the country in their favor while we ignore the need for a big picture overhaul of the way America plans for future energy use.
Global Climate Change is an issue that is in the process of laying this core issue bare.
This is how we get a media system in this country that is breaking down. When I first went around looking to get into newspapers, mostly the story I got was that they were about to announce bankruptcy. To have this happen over and over was very disconcerting. What was going on was that the financiers behind the mostly maverick, independent small newspapers that there used to be lots of were pulling the rug out from under them. Partly this was because they just weren't seen as producing sufficient profit. Partly this was because they were too independent and not sufficiently impressed that there were sacred cows that conservatives considered taboo.
Another aspect of the Christian campus movement that I was exposed to was that some of these kids came from the most wealthy and massively influential families. They became determined to use the clout that they were about to inherit to promote the conservative Christian agenda and as soon as they got a chance to apply this new found knowledge. As college graduates, they did.
On the other hand, I hitch-hiked around the country a bit and had adventures in counterculture intellectualism as did a lot of other people I have known. I still think someone who is young and healthy should go out and explore the world and get exposed to realities that were not experienced in childhood. I think this greatly broadens ones outlook and helps one become wiser faster. Education alone doesn't aid in maturity or wisdom. Some coursework, if not a degree, from the School of Hard Knox is good.
After attempting to be a writer, deal with the media from several different approaches, and being a critic of media for something over three decades now, I think we should conclude that our present media system is as obsolete as the steam engine.
I think the circumstance we find ourselves in coming into 2010, is vastly oversimplified and underestimated. Since the entire basis of any commercial media operation is to make money from advertising and since advertising tends to support self deception and to make realism taboo, this system cannot help us beyond a certain point. Just can't.
The Fourth Estate - is us. Right here. This is where it is at. We might as well accept the challenge.
We are in a time of tremendous, paradigmatic, and global change on many levels. It may be that the entire human population faces a bottleneck episode in evolutionary terms. That means we may see a large portion of the human race not make it through into the 22nd century, along with a large number of animal and plant species as well. That's a prospect. It may be that winning an election isn't the issue. Ultimately, it may be about the best way to achieve survival on the best terms for the human future.
Some may balk at that, but I think that is because we all are tempted to think that our trying to read a lot and pay attention will ipso facto bring us into awareness of all that is real. It may not. One also has to think deeply and long, and penetratingly. We have to dare to throw off the prohibition to think above our pay grade.
The alternative we have control over is for each of us to take responsibility to work our way out of self-deception, towards a more honest appraisal of the big picture situation we live in and to see that which is largely hidden from us. I believe that, as we practice this discipline, we see the truth for ourselves more clearly and must rely less on others to interpret reality for us. Those others may be manipulating us for their own ends, whoever they are.
I think that is the essence of how we will assure that the future is addressed in the best possible way. As engaged and strongly participating citizens and voters, we will demand that the system not be blind to realities that some would prefer to not see. We will help assure that our leaders are not the sort of people who are willing to say anything people want to hear, but instead are also people who reject self deception.
If we don't do that, I think the prospect exists that more self-deceivers like Sarah Palin will get elected over the coming years as things continue to be unsettled. We aren't going back to the 1950s and 1960s. But, the more unscrupulous will promise large scale self-deception on the basis that we can.
Thus, to me, progressivism's basic ethical foundation is to develop the ability to see clearly, honestly and not be tempted into self-deception and emotionally driven illusion. We could adopt an evangelical principle however - and work to help others throw off blinders and open their eyes.