A few thoughts recently occurred to me that I wanted to follow through. I’m highly concerned at the state of our nation, and the clinician in me keeps trying to conceptualize diagnosis and treatment of the destructive ideologies that have served to empower such disturbing levels of hate and ignorance in our country. In analyzing the unique perspective of American political conservatism, I’d like to focus on the theme of “corruptive knowledge.” In this post I’ll be talking about the American conservative mindset at length. When I use the term “conservative,” I am referring primarily to those that espouse socially conservative opinions but I’m aware that social and economic conservatism in this country have merged into a single ideology and cannot be easily separated.
The following argument rests on what may perhaps sound like a radical proposition: that the conservative mindset is akin to a kind of willful ignorance. This does not mean that conservatives are unintelligent or lack capacity for insight, but that they are engaging in an at least semi-conscious attitude of denial toward realities that may make them uncomfortable. I understand that many will see this as a biased or partisan position; however, I believe that America needs to come to a reckoning concerning certain uncomfortable truths about its ideologies and I can support this position rationally. The plain, objective, verifiable and scientific truth is that we know that the “War on Drugs” was a failure (gauging by the rise of drug use and addiction) that COVID-19 is a real and deadly threat, that conscious life does not begin at conception, that climate change is a very real danger to the entire human race, and that Donald Trump lost the most recent election. The above are facts, not opinions, and it behooves us as responsible citizens to stop treating them like ideological preferences. And while these are only a handful of political stances, they are heavily represented in The Republican Party and may constitute tenants of belief for conservatives. As disinformation and authoritarianism threaten the existence of an American democracy, it is becoming clearer and clearer that we cannot afford to mince words about political truths that threaten the livelihood and safety of all American citizens.
The conservative mindset prioritizes feelings of comfort and ethical superiority above facts or logic. Politics in this country have ceased to be addressed on a rational basis; emotions and beliefs are now much more central now. At this point, we have all witnessed firsthand that rational arguments and scientifically verified facts do not make a dent in delusional political beliefs. When a conservative person is presented with evidence that contradicts their beliefs, their immediate and unconscious reaction is to resist it as an attack on their very person. Considering evidence in an unbiased manner is not part of how they interact with the world so a reasoned and rational approach based on presenting evidence is fruitless. In their book Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest, professors of political science Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins come to the conclusion that “Consumers of conservative news media and think-tank reports are exposed to a steady flow of content that further promotes that perspective.” Recently, this process is ramping up even further in the exodus of faithful viewers of Fox News to fringe outlets such as One America News Network and Newsmax due to Fox’s failure to support the baseless accusation that the recent presidential election was rigged in favor of Joe Biden.
As what I am proposing falls under the category of what Jung would call a mass projection of The Shadow, I’d like to focus on how conservatives view liberals; their perceived enemies or “opposites.” The conservative view of the individual liberal or progressive is marked by conflicting concepts; that they have access to much more education and knowledge than the average conservative but that they live in a bubble and are out of touch with the realities of modern America. I believe this to be a case of projection based on insecurity and fear. If an individual grows up with a conservative mindset, they are by definition viewing the world in much simpler terms and have blinded themselves to much of the complexity and subjectivity of political realities. I propose that conservatives are not conscious of this, but that their unconscious minds (perhaps even a “conservative collective unconscious”) are very threatened by the reality that other people know more than they do in the political sphere. The fear and anxiety generated by this unconscious process leads to the stigmatization of knowledge itself. What might be conceived of as a “loss” or case for inferiority becomes something like a Pyrrhic victory, a deep validation of not only lack of knowledge, but anti-intellectualism. Whereas lower-income, less privileged, or more sheltered conservatives may not have access to or may outright reject access to higher education, more financially successful and even highly educated conservatives have chosen to enter into a belief system often at odds with the world around them; one that selectively filters the realities they are exposed to. This filtration system (what one Vox reporter cleverly refers to as “tribal epistemology”) manifests itself at lower and higher levels of wealth and privilege, where people may build entire communities that revolve around promotion of a more comfortable worldview over the messier and dirtier reality. The small town conservative with limited access to diverse ideas and stories is just as stunted as the wealthy suburbanite who only associates with people of their socio-economic status. I want to stress here that while I’m speaking of conservatism, this kind of ideological filtering is not limited to political affiliation. Indeed, one can argue that at least some of the criticism of liberals or progressives as sheltered and out of touch is valid and in need of addressing. However, much of it is also a process of conservative individuals unconsciously attributing their retreat from reality to their perceived enemies.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, an elected member of Congress who has repeatedly voiced support for Q Anon.
I write about this process of projection because I believe it’s becoming a larger and larger problem in our society. As our nation faces more stressors and tragedies, this projection becomes more and more amplified, resulting in a higher frequency of violent behavior. The more mild “liberals are overly educated and out of touch” message has now become in many instances “The Democratic Party is part of a Satanic cabal of pedophiles that secretly controls the world” as the Q Anon movement alleges. And as a reminder to the reader of the measure of Q Anon’s very substantial political influence, a third of Republicans rate its claims as “mostly true,” its online groups now endorse millions of members worldwide, and multiple elected members of congress have promoted its belief system. Despite how tragic this set of delusions is, we can see in its amplification a more transparent process of fear and insecurity among American conservatives. What are in reality uncomfortable but ultimately acceptance truths about race, immigration, science, legislation, fascism, democracy and The American Dream become more and more sensationalized as dark, destructive, and inherently corruptive knowledge. The semi-conscious perception is that if a conservative were to authentically approach these concepts without the ideological shield of their biases, they themselves would be fully corrupted or destroyed. It sounds dramatic, but this explanation accounts for the far-flung nature of right-wing conspiracy theory and its growing power as well as the highly troubling covert and overt themes of “White replacement” in conservative and right-wing circles. Such a dramatization is also a familiar process for any mental health practitioner; a marker of an irrationally distorted belief system that over-emphasizes potential threat and causes higher than necessary levels of distress. When further “threatened” by reality, conservatives are demonstrating that they will only cling tighter to their ideals to the extent of merging their personality and very identity with them. So let’s address this theme of dark, destructive, or corruptive knowledge through exploration of the images that it projects on the face of our cultural consciousness.
H.P. Lovecraft was a horror fiction writer in the 1920s who, although not widely recognized in his day, has since become one of the most influential fiction writers of the modern world. Not only through his secondary influence on highly regarded authors such as Stephen King, Alan Moore, and Clive Barker, but now more directly through overt pop-culture nods and several loose TV and film adaptations. The crux of Lovecraft’s stories is that there exists a parallel reality to ours in which “Great Old Ones” dwell; beings described as horrific, alien, and god-like, but not essentially evil. The philosophy of Lovecraft’s fiction is that human beings live in a kind of blessed ignorance of this shadow-reality, and that exposure to it, even simply viewing one of the Great Old Ones or their progeny, will drive a human being insane. His protagonists almost categorically end up driven mad or dead by the end of his stories. Now lets contrast Lovecraft’s fictional world with his real-life worldview. Lovecraft was a self-described “antiquarian,” which entailed not only a love of older things but a high degree of racism, xenophobia, nationalism, and ethnocentrism. Even by the standards of 1920s America, Lovecraft was right-wing. He often used themes of racial “miscegenation” in his stories by highlighting the horror of humanity interbreeding with monstrous or alien races, and he overtly denigrated African-Americans and Jews. Lovecraft even endorsed an admiration for Hitler as he rose to power, although he didn’t live to see the outbreak of The Second World War. Lovecraft’s complicated legacy is now being addressed in HBO’s Lovecraft Country, in which cosmic horror is battled from the perspective of pre-Civil Rights Era African-American characters.
A creative depiction of The Necronomicon - artist unknown
One of Lovecraft’s literary inventions was that of The Necronomicon, a fictional book that contains occult knowledge of such bizarre and world-shaking import as to drive any human reader insane. In a sense, The Necronomicon encapsulates the most pervasive theme of his work, that of corruptive knowledge as a threat to sanity and even human existence. Although The Necronomicon is maybe the most blatant example of this, it harkens back to a tradition of deep distrust toward new knowledge, a book being the ultimate symbol of knowledge and education. In a sense this theme can even be traced back to the story of Pandora’s Box or Eve offering Adam the forbidden fruit, although for the purposes of this article I’m going to focus on the symbol of the book and its significance in myth or cultural consciousness. And honestly I can’t recall ever having read a story that included a book filled with good magic, yet the trope of a grimoire or book of spells that threatens to corrupt the reader suffuses both fiction and folklore.
Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel states that fiction allows us to “try on different mental states” and “pushes to its tentative limits our mind-reading capacity.” Lovecraft obviously shows a phobia of this, and despite his self-identifying as a “bibliophile” (a term he coined) one suspects that he may have also struggled with bibliophobia. I’d argue that we can attribute mind-expanding qualities to any form of literature, fiction or non-, as education by definition seeks to expand one’s perspective. I imagine that, being a reader, Lovecraft must have continuously brushed up against the possibility of trying on the perspectives of people very different than he was, and that he may have needed to semi-consciously “guard” himself from losing his very elitist worldview. He was living on the edge, in a sense, of what he considered acceptable, and the vitriol of his prejudices may have been the energy that kept him from going over to “the dark side.” In Lovecraft’s fiction and especially in the symbol of The Necronomicon, I believe the conservative mindset is showing its hand in an imaginative and potent process of psychological projection. Lovecraft’s attribution to his Great Old Ones of a highly threatening strangeness that is not necessarily evil shows his unconscious grasp of the situation. I believe that on an unconscious level he knew that he was intentionally engaging in a process of willful ignorance to avoid discomfort or loss of ego-strength. Despite the conscious threat he saw in it, on some level he knew that contact with “strange” knowledge gained from cultures and backgrounds foreign to him would drastically expand his worldview. This is essentially the psychological reaction of the conservative mind. This is why conservatives tend to look on universities, intellectuals, and bookish types with suspicion, condescension and derision. They are afraid of leaving the intellectual nests and caves to which they’ve become accustomed, only sensing the true “power” of outside knowledge as a manifestation of something destructive. Another profoundly influential writer and staunch social conservative C.S. Lewis expresses this in his quote that “the love of knowledge is a kind of madness.”
Thus, I believe that modern conspiracy theories share in the same process of stigmatizing and avoiding “corruptive knowledge” that is so visible in Lovecraft’s fiction. In an odd sense it seeks to inoculate the mind against more complex truths in its process of “red-pilling.” This term refers to the film The Matrix and is indicative of the experience of “waking up” to a higher reality proposed by a conspiracy theory after having been deluded or sedated for most of one’s life. It’s extremely telling that belief in a world controlled by an evil cabal of Satanic pedophiles is more acceptable to adherents of this belief system than a world where no single group, good or evil, is really “in charge” (although of course some individuals and groups exercise a disproportionate level of political influence). I see “red-pilling” as a process that apes and supplants the necessity of true and unbiased reckoning with reality. It pretends to confront corruptive knowledge while ultimately hiding from it, more akin to hiding a pill in one’s cheek than swallowing it. True acceptance of reality is hidden in this message in the form of the corruption that has proportedly taken hold of our system of government; something so unspeakably evil that one recoils to even consider the perspective of a child-eating devil-worshipper. This adds a further layer of threat to the Q Anon belief system in its dehumanizing its perceived enemies, which paves the way for justifications of violence against them. As soon as one accepts a worldview that includes corruptive knowledge, one is firmly and innately on the side of Good against the forces of Evil. This process may be conceptualized as a form of Shadow-projection in Jungian terms and can be characterized as both defensive and offensive in nature.
I understand that the message I’m crafting here is very stark, but I believe that the extreme nature of our political environment calls for us to be blunt about political realities. This is by nature not a message crafted to provide comfort to anyone, but to more accurately diagnose a mass dysfunction in the American psyche. I believe that a psychological approach to such societal issues can yield new perspectives and ways of understanding it in the public consciousness, which gives us a leg up when it comes to treating the problem.
So what does treatment for this problem look like? It’s difficult not to be reductive when speaking about it, but in order to de-stigmatize knowledge the foreign has to be made more familiar. Or, in other words, the unconscious has to be made conscious. Rigid ideas of black and white or good and evil have to be dropped and the “evil” has to be transformed into “good.” This is a process that Jung would call “individuation,” the highest work that a human mind can strive to and the goal of Jungian approaches to psychotherapy. Ironically enough, I believe the symptom is again aping the cure in Q Anon culture’s thematic refrain of “dark to light.” Instead of representing a true transformation, this phrase is obviously interpreted to mean a complete erasure of the “dark” in order to be replaced with “light.” The belief that unconscious and disturbing psychic contents (representative of our own human flaws) can be somehow purged, destroyed, or done away with is a fallacy, and a human being can waste mental energy on this quest ad infinitum. The point is that until America embraces rather than seeks to eliminate its problems, it will be chasing its own tail. Or worse, it will be engaging in an unwitting process of self-harm. And I believe that self-aware citizens are responsible for watching and understanding this process and helping where we can to address and counter beliefs of “corruptive knowledge.”Because if we don’t, this set of delusions poses a threat to not only our existence, but the existence of a functioning American society.