"Why We Need to Have Empathy for Tea Party Lunatics": must Teabagger reading

"We have to get inside their heads, figure out how their choices are reasonable from their point of view. It would help if we found ways to get into relationship with them, to demonstrate a genuine curiosity not about their paranoid theories but about the underlying pain and fear that is the source of them."

-- from "Why We Need to Have Empathy for Tea Party 
Lunatics" by Michael Bader, on AlterNet today

by Ken

I know, I know, the last thing you want to read is some smart aleck telling you how we have to "understand" the Teabaggers. But trust me, San Francisco psychologist-psychoanalyst Michael Bader knows how we feel. That's why he threw that "lunatics" in his title.""This hodgepodge of people and groups spout frankly paranoid beliefs as received wisdom," and he follows up with a pungent sampling of some of the nuttier ones. He also notes of the movement:

Self-defense and armed resistance are frequently called for. Racist stereotypes, innuendo and hostility run rampant. The Constitution is its sacred text and Glenn Beck its most beloved prophet. They don't usually wear aluminum hats but perhaps they should.

"I hate these folks," he writes, "but I also understand them." And, he adds, he empathizes with them. "They share the same psychology as the paranoid patients I treat every day," except that the Teabaggers' paranoid beliefs are political.

The causes and dynamics, however, are the same. And so just as I have empathy for my patients, I have come to have empathy for the Tea Partiers, even as I despise their influence and work hard to defeat their ideology. It's crucial that the Left does likewise, because if we don't understand the ways that decent, god-fearing, and victimized people can come to espouse such a dangerous ideology, we won't be able to fight them effectively.

There's mild paranoia, Bader tells us, and more severe forms. "A patient I saw spun tale after tale of slights, interpreted innocuous events as malignant, saw conspiracies everywhere, and always imputed malevolence to others' motives." Does that ring a bell? Then so, I think, will this description of how paranoia works (once again, the boldfacing is simply my own crude highlighting, and should be ignored by anyone who possesses basic reading skills:

There isn't one cause of paranoia. Tomes have been written about it. Individual variations and exceptions abound. A few generalizations, however, can be made. Paranoid people are trying their best to make sense of and mitigate feelings of helplessness and worthlessness. Their beliefs are attempts to solve a profound problem, albeit in ways that distort reality.

People can't tolerate feeling helpless and self-hating for very long. It's too painful, too demoralizing and too frightening. They have to find an antidote. They have to make sense of it all in a way that restores their sense of meaning, their feeling of agency, their self-esteem, and their belief in the possibility of redemption. They have to. They have no choice. That's just the way the mind works.

The paranoid strategy is to generate a narrative that finally "explains it all." A narrative -- a set of beliefs about the way the world is and is supposed to be -- helps make sense of chaos. It reduces guilt and self-blame by projecting it onto someone else. And it restores a sense of agency by offering up an enemy to fight. Finally, it offers hope that if "they" -- the enemy, the conspirators -- can be avoided or destroyed, the paranoid person's core feelings of helplessness and devaluation will go away.

Bader provides striking cases of severely paranoid patients whose invented terrors he was able to trace back traumas they were unable to deal with. Terrifying as the invented terrors were, they were somehow more manageable than the underlying ones, which had at least some basis in reality. "The core truth about paranoia," he writes, is that "it is an attempt to lessen unbearable feelings of self-blame and powerlessness."

From Frank Rich's Sunday NYT column, The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged," he cites the finding that the Teabaggers, far from being experienced right-wing political types --

are frequently political neophytes who prize independence and tell strikingly similar stories of having been awakened by the recession. Their families upended by lost jobs, foreclosed homes and depleted retirement funds, they said they wanted to know why it happened and whom to blame.

They turned to Glenn Beck, the Federalist Papers, books by Ayn Rand and George Orwell, and radical right-wing websites. Quoting this "crucial observation" of Rich's, "Many describe emerging from their research as if reborn to a new reality," Bader goes on:

[L]ike my patients, the Tea Party folks find in their paranoid views about politics a narrative that "explains it all," that reduces their sense of helpless confusion, and that channels their feelings of victimization into one of self-righteous militancy. They go from passive victim to active agent, from guilty to innocent, but all at the price of distorting reality into one full of malevolent conspiracies.

The payoff is that they are no longer confused. They are reborn and now, thankfully, have the "answer." And that answer is that big forces are hurting and enslaving them. While these forces include the banks and large corporations, the main culprit is, of course, the government. People don't have a direct and immediate experience of Goldman Sachs; they do, however, experience government every day, not only on television news shows, but via laws, taxes, public services (or the lack thereof), law enforcement, etc.

Of course lots of people experience those feelngs of guilt and helplessness, but only some turn to paranoia for relief.

Some become simply depressed or resigned, others turn to strategies of distraction or addictive self-medication. Others might face their feelings more directly, tolerate them, and find alternative solutions, e.g. turn to friends, therapists or various communities of support. Still others may find relief for painful feelings by projecting all meaning and agency onto God. And some simply fight back against "reality," despite long odds.

Nobody really knows, Bader tells us, why different people make their different choices.

For new Tea Party members, however, the drift toward paranoia is facilitated by the right-wing media machine that offers several ready-made narratives perfectly designed to help its consumers clear up their confusion, understand their helplessness, absolve them of any blame and offer a way out. The conspiratorial alliance of business and government, a growing tyranny intended to disenfranchise, disarm and exploit ordinary citizens, secret pacts to overthrow the Constitution, etc. all currently led by an un-American, godless, colored, elitist, contemptuous foreigner: Barack Hussein Obama. A grim and frightening picture of the world to be sure. Psychologically speaking, however, it offers relief from helplessness and a sense that things are falling apart. It offers a sense of cohesion and identity based on certainty, a commonality of interests, innocence, and even martyrdom. While the world of the Tea Partiers is filled with danger, it is a danger mitigated by moral certainty, clarity of purpose and a definable external enemy.

It may be that you're nodding agreement but impatient. Sure, you say, but haven't we sort of instinctively understood all of this? And where has understanding it gotten us?

There's just no reasoning with these people. And that's the point.

The first thing Bader insists we understand is that "the anxiety, helplessness, and pain that generate" the paranoid "storyline" "is not irrational or crazy."

It's real. We all feel it. Most of us do feel helpless in relation to the most important aspects of our lives, from the nature of our work to its security, from our politicians who are on the corporate dole to those perpetuating gridlock through their narrow ideology, from the quality of our health care to its availability, and from the isolation and loneliness of everyday social life. The pain of self-blaming is also ubiquitous in the cultural assumption that our lot in life is determined primarily by individual ability, not by getting help from others. Confusion, anxiety, disconnectedness and a sense that "things are falling apart" are not crazy feelings. They are accurate and valid responses to a highly alienated and often abusive social world.

"The 'problem,'" says Bader, "is that Tea Party activists move from legitimate feelings and normal longings to paranoid political positions that are dangerous and cruel." But because the paranoid delusions have been put in place for powerful psychological and emotional reasons,

they can't be changed by rational argument. I have never been able to help a paranoid patient even a little bit by arguing with his or her view of reality. Not one bit. The only way I have been able to make any headway is using our relationship to provide real experiences that have a shot at providing an alternative and more satisfying "solution" to their underlying fears. Only then can I begin to offer a counter-narrative, one that acknowledges their pain and innocence, but enables them to more accurately identify its sources and, therefore, its antidote.

The hardened cases may indeed be beyond our reach. But, Bader argues,

to the extent we want to reach people who are drawn to Tea Party, patriot, libertarian, and other right-wing movements but are not yet hard-line ideologues, or prevent others from becoming so, we have to begin with empathy. We have to get inside their heads, figure out how their choices are reasonable from their point of view. It would help if we found ways to get into relationship with them, to demonstrate a genuine curiosity not about their paranoid theories but about the underlying pain and fear that is the source of them.

In this way, perhaps we can figure out how to speak to that pain and fear in ways that are both authentic and comforting. Perhaps we can figure out what experiences they might need to have in order to feel safe enough to at least listen to another narrative: ours.

Easier said than done, you say? For sure. And as I'm sure Bader as a trained psychologist understands better than any of us, it's pretty hard to help people who don't want to be helped, who don't see any need for help. But he has a nice line about the Teabaggers serving "as a spur to get our own house -- and movement -- in order." And his framing of the issue at least opens the possibility of creating some sort of path toward providing more reality-based solutions to people who surely do want help for the very real pain they're in.

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