Extremist "Religiofication" of Politics #2: The High Cost of Instructed Belief vs. Using Our Eyes, Ears & Senses in General

The "Religiofication" of Politics and Economics posted on Reddit several months ago looked into Ernest Renan's late 19th century notion that left-wing socialism was the coming religion of the Asian land mass "and that being a secular religion it would lead to a religiofication of politics and economics" worldwide. Renan proved to be correct, of course, as an extreme version of socialism -- communism -- came to dominate politics from the middle of Germany east all the way to the shores of the Pacific by 1950.

But over the last 35 -- and especially the last 12 -- years, we've seen an obvious swing in the opposite direction from the same starting point west all the way to California's coastal valleys. The authors of new research at Chicago's Northwestern University may well have explained why. In "Why Are U.S. Parties So Polarized? A 'Satisficing' Dynamical Model," in SIAM Review, Vol. 62, No. 3, September 2020, Vicky Chuqiao Yang, Daniel M. Abrams, Georgia Kernell and Adilson E. Motter assert that "U.S. political parties are becoming increasingly polarized due to their quest for voters -- not because voters themselves are becoming more extremist."

(See the media article in today's Science Daily and the abstract of the research paper.)

Nevertheless, it's probably evident to 90% of the people who populate this sub on a regular basis that evangelical, fundamentalist Xtianity has PRE-conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, socialized, habituated and normalized the minds of millions to the very ideological extremism that makes it so easy for them to buy into the pretty obvious manipulations of one major US political party that is now far more radicalized than it was before 1990.

What a far smaller number here may see is the rapidly increasing reciprocal reactivity between the two major parties that has radicalized the other party... even though the vast majority of its registered members assert they are "NOT Xtians," and many claim to be agnostics, atheists or affiliated with other non-Abrahamic religions like Hinduism and Buddhism.

IMO, this is because those of so-called "conservative" sway are not the only ones who have been conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, socialized, habituated and normalized to belief and following the pronouncements of others in perceived "authority."

I've seen plenty of research that demonstrates that those of the so-called "liberal" sway are only marginally less inclined to be "believers" in what they have been told vs. "lookers, listeners, feelers and sensors" determining what IS -- vs. what is NOT -- with their eyes, ears and senses in general.

Resources

Arterburn, S.; Felton, J.: Toxic Faith: Understanding and Overcoming Religious Addiction, Nashville: Oliver-Nelson, 1991.

Bellah, R. N.: Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-traditional World; New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

Berger, P.: The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion; New York: Doubleday, 1967.

Bottero, J.; et al.: Ancestor of the West : Writing, Reasoning, and Religion in Mesopotamia, Elam, and Greece; Chicago: U. Chicago Press, 2000.

Carpenter, J.: Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism; New York: Oxford U. Press, 1997.

Debray, R.: God: An Itinerary; London: Verso, 2004.

Durkhem, E.: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life; London: Allen & Unwin, 1915.

Ehrman, B.: The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World; New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

Hallman, J.: The Devil is a Gentleman: Exploring America's Religious Fringe; New York: Random House, 2006.

Heyrman, C.: Southern Cross; New York: Knopf, 1997.

Hoffer, E.: The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements; New York: Harper and Row, 1951, 1966.

Krishnamurti, J.: On God, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.

Krishnamurti, J. The Collected Works..., Vol. VI, 1948-1952, The Origin of Conflict, Ojai, CA: Krishnamurti Foundation of America, 2012.

McDougall, W.: Promised Land, Crusader State; New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1997.

Miller, D.: Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium; Berkeley: U. California Press, 1997.

Miller, D.; Yamamori, T.: Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement, Berkeley CA: U. California Press, 2007.

Miller, R.; Stout, H.; Wilson, C.: Religion and the American Civil War; New York: Oxford U. Press, 1998.

Noll, M.: The Old Religion in a New World; Grand Rapids MI: Erdmans, 2002.

Phillips, K.: The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America; New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Phillips, K.: American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religions, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century; New York: Viking, 2006.

Quigley, C.: Tragedy and Hope: A History of The World in Our Time, New York: Macmillan & Co., 1966, (Chapter III: The Russian Empire to 1917).

Smith, A.: Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity; New York: Oxford U. Press, 2002.

Stewart, K.: The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism; London: Bloomsbury, 2020.

Strozier, C.; Terman, D.; et al: The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence, and History; London: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Sutton, M.: Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America; Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 2009.

Yang, V. C.; et al: Why Are U.S. Parties So Polarized? A 'Satisficing' Dynamical Model," in SIAM Review, Vol. 62, No. 3, September 2020.

A Free online BOOK on How Cults Work

The following "chapters" are the result of a decade of formal, academic study and several decades of direct investigation, including participation in several cults before I understood what I was getting into. (Substantially enhanced 04-03-2021.)

What Are Cults and How Do They Work?

The Five Progressive Qualities of the Committed Cult Member

The Typical Path of Cult Involvement

Cult Membership as an Addiction Process... and a Process Addiction

Groupthink, Social Proof & Unquestioning Acceptance of Authority

Authoritarianism, Affective Polarization, and Economic Ideology (with commentary)

The Cynical Use of the Crowbar of Stipulated Belief in not-moses’s reply to the OP on that Reddit thread

Understanding Codependency as "Soft-Core" Cult Dynamics... and Cult Dynamics as "Hard-Core" Codependency

Cognitive Dissonance & Double-Binding: The Sure Paths to Cultic Crazy-Making

Coercive Persuasion in Cults

Constant Conflict: Conditioned Belief for Collective Survival vs. Using One's Senses for Individual Survival

Damned if you Do and Damned if you Don't "Double Binding" & the Treatment Thereof

Doctrine and Certitude

How Cults use Benign Portals to Recruit New Blood in not-moses’s reply to the OP on that Reddit thread

How Cults use Duplicity, Contradiction, Conflict, Cognitive Dissonance, & Dissociation to Take Over & Control the Mind

Ego Decompensation & Emotional Blackmail in Thought Reform

Fantasy Operational Processing in The True Believer

Abusive Xtianity, Emotional Blackmail & How to Recover from the Lingering Effects of F.O.G.

The Cultic Road to Learned Helplessness  and the After Effects of Being Groomed into Learned Helplessness

Article by Cult Expert Janja Lalich (2017)

How & Why do People Leave One Cult and End up in Another?

Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement among Upper Level Cult Authorities and not-moses’s reply to the OP in Do cult leaders know they are cult leaders?

The Typical Path of Cult Involvement

Do cult leaders really Believe what they are Preaching? in not-moses’s reply to the OP on that Reddit thread

The Psychology of the Cult Experience (1982)

Psychopaths as Gurus, and Vice-Versa

Religious / Cultic Trauma Syndrome

Social Proof and the Teflon True Believer

Abgrall's Soul Snatchers: The Mechanics of Cults

The True Believer, Spencer’s Model, the Addiction Model & the Paradox of Openmindedness

The Unquestioned Power of the Priest or Guru...

Can People truly Recover from Cult Indoctrination and Manipulation?

Do I need Exit Counseling or Deprogramming?

A Basic Cult Library 

International Cultic Studies Association affiliate exit counselors include those listed right here. I cannot vouch for any of these people, but ICSA is pretty up to speed on how cults work and how to treat those who get to the second and third of the five stages of therapeutic recovery.

The Popular Notion of "Victim Mentality" vs. Borderline Organized "Righteous" <------> "Discouraged" Victimhood

I went to Wikipedia to look into the "victim mentality" at this link. While I certainly understand why, I was dismayed to find a one-sided and rather "pop-psych" view of the topic Otto Kernberg, William Meissner, Theodore Millon, Christine Courtois, Marsha Linehan, Bessel van der Kolk, Pete Walker, et al, would find at least "insufficient" if not, well, worse. So I decided to correct that for use here with those who suffer from Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the pseudo-empowering -- but disquieting and even self-destructive -- compensations of the Cluster B personality disorders. The original text appears in black. My addictions thereto appear in dark red.

Victim mentality is an acquired personality trait in which a person tends to recognize or consider themselves as a victim of the negative actions of others, and to behave as if this were the case in the face of contrary evidence of such circumstances. Victim mentality depends on clear thought processes and attribution. In some cases, those with a victim mentality have in fact been the victim of wrongdoing by others or have otherwise suffered misfortune through no fault of their own. However, such misfortune does not necessarily imply that one will respond by developing a pervasive and universal victim mentality where one frequently or constantly perceives oneself to be a victim.^[1]

The term is also used in reference to the tendency for blaming one's misfortunes on somebody else's misdeeds, which is also referred to as victimism.^[2][3]

Victim mentality is primarily developed, for example, from family members and situations during childhood. Similarly, criminals often engage in victim thinking, believing themselves to be moral and engaging in crime only as a reaction to an immoral world and furthermore feeling that authorities are unfairly singling them out for persecution.^[4]

Foundations

In the most general sense, a victim is anyone who experiences injury, loss, or misfortune as a result of some event or series of events.^[5] This negative experience, however, is insufficient for the emergence of a sense of victimhood. Individuals may identify as a victim^[1] if they believe that:

·         they were harmed;

·         they were not the cause of the occurrence of the harmful act [OR the were conditioned to believe that they were the sole cause of harm done to them; e.g.: “I sinned against God, so I should be punished”];

·         they were under no obligation to prevent the harm [OR they were powerless to prevent the harm and perhaps even deserved it];

·         the harm constituted an injustice in that it violated their rights (if inflicted by a person), or they possessed qualities (e.g., strength or goodness of character) making them persons whom that harm did not befit [or the opposite; see above];

·         they deserve [or do NOT deserve; see above] sympathy.^[6]

The desire for empathy [which is decidedly different from sympathy: sympathy comes from a “rescuing” identification on a Karpman Drama Triangle; empathy is observation-derived understanding] is crucial in that the mere experience of a harmful event is not enough for the emergence of the sense of being a victim. In order to have this sense, there is the need to perceive the harm as undeserved, unjust and immoral, an act that could not be prevented by the victim. The need to obtain empathy and understanding can then emerge.^[7]

Individuals harbouring a victim mentality would believe that:^[1]

·         their lives are a series of challenges directly aimed at them;

·         most aspects of life are negative and beyond their control;

·         because of the challenges in their lives, they deserve sympathy [possibly leading to the use of emotional blackmail];

·         as they have little power to change things, little action should be taken to improve their problems.

Victim mentality is often the product of violence. [And, as such is widely seen in the polarized, typical borderline organization of the disempowered in the welfare and lower working classes who are Millon’s “petulant”and “impulsive” compensatory narcissists, histrionics, antisocials and/or sadists here… and “self-destructive” and “discouraged” depressives and dependents there.] Those who have it usually had an experiences of crisis or trauma at its roots.^[8] In essence, it is a method of avoiding responsibility and criticism, receiving attention and compassion, and evading feelings of genuine anger.

Features

A victim mentality may manifest itself in a range of different behaviours or ways of thinking and talking:

·         Identifying others as the cause for an undesired situation and denying a personal responsibility for one's own life or circumstances.^[9]

·         Exhibiting [Complex PTSD-driven] heightened attention levels (hypervigilance) when in the presence of others.

·         [Complex PTSD-driven, obsessive and often paranoid hyper-] Awareness of negative intentions of other people.

·         Believing that other people are generally more fortunate.

·         Gaining relief from feeling pity for oneself or receiving sympathy from others.

It has been typically characterized by attitudes of pessimism, self-pity, and repressed anger.^[10] 

People with victim mentality may develop convincing and sophisticated explanations in support of such ideas, which they then use to explain to themselves and others of their situation.

People with victim mentality may also be generally:

·         realist, with a general tendency to realistically perceive a situation; yet may lack an awareness or curiosity about the root of actual powerlessness in a situation^[11]

·         introspective

·         likely to display [compensatory narcissistic] entitlement and selfishness.^[12]

·         defensive: In conversation, reading a negative intention into a neutral question and reacting with a corresponding accusation, hindering the collective solution of problems by recognizing the inherent conflict.

·         [dichotomizing, polarizing, and] categorizing: tending to divide people into "good" and "bad" with no gray zone between them.^[9]

·         unadventurous: generally unwilling to take even small and calculated risks; exaggerating the importance or likelihood of possible negative outcomes […or over-adventurous, stimulation-seeking and even risk addicted in polarized, borderline organized fashion]

·         exhibiting learned helplessness: underestimating one's ability or influence in a given situation; feeling powerless [as well as compensatory narcissistic over-estimation of one's ability or influence in a given situation]

·         self-abasing: Putting oneself down even further than others are doing [as well as its compensatory narcissistic opposite, grandiose pseudo-competence]

A victim mentality may be reflected by linguistic markers or habits, such as pretending

·         not to be able to do something ("I can't..."),

·         not to have choices ("I must...", "I have no choice..."), or

·         epistemological humility ("I don't know")

·         [as well as the compensatory narcissistic opposites thereof].

Other features of a victim mentality include:^[13]

·         [An histrionic / narcissistic] Need for recognition – the desire for individuals to have their victimhood recognised and affirmed by others. This recognition helps reaffirm positive basic assumptions held by the individual about themselves, others and the world in general. This also implies that [in polarized, borderline organization,] offenders recognise their wrongdoing [here, but not there]. At a collective level this can encourage people to have a positive well-being with regards to traumatic events and to encourage conciliatory attitudes in group conflicts.

·         Moral elitism – the perception of the moral superiority of the self and the immorality of the other side, at both individual and group levels. At an individual level this tends to involve a [polarized, dichotomistic] "black and white" view of morality and the actions of individuals. The individual denies their own aggressiveness and sees themself as weak and persecuted by morally pure, while the other person is seen as threatening, persecuting and immoral, preserving the image of a morally pure self. At a collective level, moral elitism means that groups emphasis the harm inflicted on them, while also seeing themselves as morally superior. This also means that individuals [who develop the complex ego defense of antisocial personality disorder or even outright sadism] see their own violence as justified and moral, while the outgroup's violence is unjustified and morally wrong.

·         Lack of empathy – because [ultra-narcissistic, antisocial / sociopathic] individuals are concerned with their own suffering, they tend to be unwilling to divert interest to the suffering of others. They will either ignore the suffering others or act more selfishly. At the collective level, groups preoccupied with their own victimhood are unwilling to see the outgroup's perspective and show less empathy to their adversaries, while being less likely to responsibility for harms they commit. This results in the group being collectively egoistic.

·         Rumination – victims tend to focus attention on their distress and its causes and consequences rather than solutions. This causes aggression in response to insults or threats and decreases a desire for forgiveness by including a desire for revenge against the perpetrator. Similar dynamics play out at the collective level.

Victims of abuse and manipulation

Victims of abuse and manipulation often get trapped into a self-image of victimisation. The psychological profile of victimisation includes a pervasive sense of helplessness, passivity, loss of control, pessimism, negative thinking, strong feelings of guilt, shame, self-blame and depression. This way of thinking can lead to hopelessness and despair.^[14] It may take a long period of time for therapists to build a trusting relationship with a victim. There frequently exists a distrust of authority figures, and the expectation of being hurt or exploited.^[15]

The Wikipedia authors' (because it's evident there are at least two) references can be seen at this link. My own references and resources can bee seen in A CPTSD Library. 

Managing Addictive, Codependent, Reciprocal Reactivity with Borderlines

I believe I am reasonably qualified to express myself on the topic. I am a recovering codependent who went to my first Codependents Anonymous meeting in 1990. And a recovering, principally impulsive-type borderline since 1997. As well as the adult child of a severely petulant-type borderline... and a former chaser of them into bumpy-road romance for decades.

I'd had no idea whatsoever about the reciprocal reactivity "fur ball" until I stumbled onto Harry Stack Sullivan's notion of "parataxic integration" while I was (again) in school in 2004 reading Sullivan student Lorna Smith Benjamin's Interpersonal Diagnosis and Treatment of Personality Disorders.

Though I would love to say I connected all the dots together in seconds, it would be thoroughly erroneous to do so. But I was playing emotional dodge ball with yet another borderline on the other side of my computer screen a year or so ago when I began to at least get the dots closer together.

Now. Here's where we need to take a sudden left turn, insist upon a "prerequisite," and get explanatory. So please see this article so you understand at least some of what I have come to understand after having dealt with well over a hundred borderlines since 1987.

Got all that? Okay, good. Because we -- as borderlines -- are a) reciprocal reactors, as well as b) hyper-codependent and attachment-seeking here and hyper-counter-dependent and attachment-rejecting there. Why? because we grew up conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, socialized, habituated, normalized and neurally “hard-wired” to be desperate for connection here and desperate for protection there.

(See Why do we get so Desperate for Connection? An Answer from the Purview of Attachment, Early Life Research & Codependency as well as the "protector" in the Internal Family Systems Model.)

Which makes us suckers for seduction -- as well as seducers ourselves -- and addiction-prone, hair-trigger reactors to even the slightest hint that the seducers we reciprocally react to by seducing them have turned ("suddenly") into the same sort of vile abusers we were raised by. Which was all too often a mother who baited and then bit, showing us (however subconsciously) how to seduce and abuse. (I assert the "bad mother" along with many of the early experts on BPD like Winnicott, Sullivan, Mahler and Klein because the "dark diagnosis" is so often the result of some combination of having been neglected, ignored, abandoned, discounted, disclaimed, and rejected, as well as invalidated, confused, betrayed, insulted, criticized, judged, blamed, shamed, ridiculed, embarrassed, humiliated, denigrated, derogated, set up to screw up, victimized, demonized, persecuted, picked on, vilified, dumped on, bullied, gaslighted, scapegoated, emotionally blackmailed and/or otherwise abused by others upon whom they depended for survival in the first few years of life. Producing a nasty and lingering case of sometimes utterly intolerable Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

(Can a "bad dad" cause CPTSD > BPD? Of course, but the character of BPD seen in adolescence and adulthood tends to look different: It's more compensatory narcissistic and less like Learned Helplessness & the Victim Identity. In my opinion, that is because "bad dad" BPD usually takes place at a later stage of development on Piaget's, Kohlberg's and Erikson's developmental paths when a child has somewhat more evolved cognitive capacities, understanding of morality and autonomy, initiative and competence, respectively.)

Most of the self-proclaimed "codependents" I have encountered over the past 30 years exhibit mild to moderate BPD traits though those traits will look a lot different "up front" and "at first" if the person is a petulant or impulsive vs. self-destructive or discouraged type of borderline. (Ultimately, all four "types" will show up, but usually not for a while.)

Moreover, codependents who have moderate to florid BPD traits find it extremely difficult to see, hear, feel or sense themselves because of their Dissociation into various Internal Family Systems Model "alters." (Some readers will jump up and down here about supposedly absolute demarcations between BPD and DID, and they're welcome to do so. But I've studied Kluft, Putman, Herman, Courtois, Lynn & Rhue, van der Kolk and van der Hart in depth; and I have known a LOT of people with DID and BPD. The demarcation is anything but absolute or rigid, is actually quite plastic and varies considerably over time.)

Some alters can "self-see." Most cannot. And many get very hostile when they think they are being "forced" to do so out of understandable and unprocessed shame, guilt, worry, remorse, regret and anxiety, as well as overwhelming terror and reactive rage. And when in those states of gross autonomic agitation, they will act out according to being in any one (or more) of the Fight, Flight, Freeze, Faint, Feign (or Fawn), Freak and/or Fry responses.

Fortunately, this rarely occurs in CoDA meetings, but on occasion, it does. Especially when the borderline flips (as they do and they will) from an acquiescent, submissive, attachment-seeking identity to one that dimly recalls what that gawd-awful abuser did to them and sees a new version of that abuser in the meeting. (I never did that. Hah!)

NOW. Please disabuse yourself of any notions that you can use any of this information to edify or “manage” a troubled codependent borderline in extremis, let alone in the heat of the moment. The information here is supplied simply for recognition, acknowledgment, appreciation and understanding of what's going on in the long term... and management of one's reaction to a borderline's sudden rage.

Resources: See the section on Borderline Personality Disorder in A CPTSD Library.