Saturday, March 5, 2005

It's All about Domination.

I'm excerpting some interesting comments from an interview with Stephen Ducat that I think complement what I've been saying about Powerlust over the last several weeks. When I read people like Charles Krauthammer and some other right-wing commentators, I've been astonished that anybody so intelligent and psychologically sophisticated could not be aware of how his ideas are a justification for the crudest kind of animal aggression. Here's Ducat:

In a culture based on male domination and in which most things feminine tend to be devalued, even if they are secretly envied, the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman. This powerful adult male imperative to be unlike females and to repudiate anything that smacks of maternal caretaking is played out just as powerfully in politics as it is in personal life. In fact, political contests among men are in many ways the ultimate battles for masculine supremacy. This makes disavowing the feminine in oneself and projecting it onto one’s opponent especially important. This femiphobia--this male fear of being feminine--operates unconsciously in many men as a very powerful determinant of their political behavior. It also constitutes a very significant motive for fundamentalist terrorism.

Femininity, for male fundamentalists, is seen as a contaminant, and there is an attempt to repudiate those aspects of one’s self that seem feminine. This is something that fundamentalists around the world share. As I argue in the last chapter of my book, there is a surprising affinity between Christian fundamentalists in this country and the extreme Islamic fundamentalists elsewhere, when it comes to this kind of devaluation, repudiation and fear of the feminine.

In fact, the kind of hyper-masculine strutting that we see on display by right wing males is a defense. It’s a defense against this anxious masculinity, against their fear of the feminine. In a culture in which it’s so important to deny the feminine in men, masculinity becomes a really brittle achievement. It’s quite Sisyphean--you know, you can never quite get there. You’re always having to prove it.

Part of the reason is that this type of masculinity is defined largely in terms of domination. The problem is that domination--either in a personal or a global context--can never be a permanent condition. It’s a relational state. It’s dependent on having somebody in a subordinate position. That means you could be manly today, but you’re not going to be manly tomorrow unless you’ve got somebody to push around and control, whether that is an abused wife or another country. So this kind of masculinity is really brittle.

I also saw the Republican National Convention as essentially a hyper-masculine strut-fest. The real point of the convention was to make John Kerry their woman. That’s what they wanted to do. They had already done that with John Edwards by dubbing him the “Breck girl.” And Arnold Schwarzenegger went on to proclaim that any men who were anxious about the loss of jobs under the reign of George W. Bush were, as he put it, “economic girlie-men.” The inference was that Democratic candidates who were always whining about pink slips may as well be wearing pink slips. Real men, you know, don’t worry about the losers in the new global Darwinian economy.

This theme was echoed by a number of people, including Zell Miller, who said that not only was Kerry suspiciously French [code for effeminate], but he would even let Paris decide when America needs defending. There was the implication that, if Kerry were ever to run the White House, he would imperil the masculinity of all men by turning the U.S. into a kind of submissive bottom in the global contest for supremacy, the deferential housewife in the family of nations.

Cheney basically echoed the same themes, referring to Kerry as sensitive, faint-hearted, weak, wobbly, soft. Since the reign of Bush, even the notion of negotiation or diplomacy, or international cooperation became very suspect. For many Republicans, collaboration raises enormous femiphobic anxieties, even if they’re collaborating--and perhaps especially if they’re collaborating--with Democrats. GOP strategist Grover Norquist once said that bipartisanship is another name for date rape. So that tells you about his anxiety, I think.
In the world they live in, you’re either a top or a bottom. Mutuality, democracy, equality--that makes no sense to them.

Bulls in the animal world bash one another in domination battles to establish themselves as the leader of the pack or herd. Humans are no better than animals when they do the same thing. Healthy, well-developed human beings find a way to work things out and use violence only in self-defense and only as an absolute last resort. For people like Krauthammer, though, working things out is for girls.

I've been saying all along that what drives political violence are issues that relate to identity. It's most obvious in situations like Northern Ireland or between the Israelis and Palestinians. But I've been thinking about it primarily in terms of the way consumer capitalism homogenizes culture and annihilates the traditional communities that supported healthy identity formation.

The republican ideal was to have independent-minded, self-reliant, well-informed citizens--men and women who know who they were and who were suspicious of concentrations of power in governments or in centers of finance. But we have witnessed over the last century a society that has made the development of such human beings more the exception than the rule.

Our society is creating more people who have a weak sense of self, and such people feel powerless, and one effective way to seek to redress the feeling of powerlessness is by bullying. Bullies are people who feel weak and frightened and so attack others as a way to prove to themselves and others that they are not weak and cowardly. They live in a state of constant anxiety about being shamed--for being perceived as losers, as nobodies.

That explains to a significant extent the psychology that drove Timothy McVeigh to do what he did in Oklahoma City, what Harris and Klebold did in Littleton, CO, what Osama did on 9/11. It all starts with a feeling of powerlessness and resentment at those who have humiliated them by their strutting and condescension. There are few emotions that have greater potential to drive men to rageful acts of violence than those that are excited by being humiliated in this way. The U.S has done just about everything it could possibly do to enrage the entire middle east with its humiliation of Muslims. And I'm not just talking about Abu Ghraib.

People who have a healthy sense of self feel no need to prove that they are strong. They know that they are, or at least as strong as they need to be. The reason that people possessed by powerlust can never have enough is because for them there is never the feeling of strength that comes from being genuinely strong. These are all hollow men who have filled their emptiness with a lust for domination. They are a bottomless pit of anxiety, so they have to keep doing things which seek to fill the emptiness. As such they are dangerous, and they need to be grounded and sent to their rooms. Instead last November we gave them the keys to the car.