My mordant musings have given birth to the following proposition: at the core of ideological intensity is an attempted transfer of angst by an unhappy individual to the rest of us. Regardless of whether the in-your-face fanaticism comes at you from The Left or The Right, the insistence that you embrace the same apocalyptic perspective (Obama is Stalin, Dubya is Hitler, global warming is destroying us all, we must ban the Victoria Secrets' Catalog to preserve the virtue of the youts, etc.) is really a function of an individual's personal angst, cloaked in the guise of a public cause and ostensible idealism. More simply expressed, ideological intensity is a form of emotional aggression against the rest of us, an effort to Jedi-mind trick a largely contented majority to become as agitated about an issue as the angst-ridden individual. George Will once tartly observed that, "some people only feel half alive if they aren't consistently indignant about an issue." I would put it less eloquently: you're extremely unhappy about something in your own life, so you latch onto an issue and get in my face to convince me that this issue is a crisis in my life that necessitates me doing exactly what you say...otherwise, I'm a morally deformed person. Political conversation becomes an attempted emotional mugging, replete with tiresome guilt trips and threadbare, but shrill End-of-Days rhetoric. The conservative stance in such a situation is to politely fend off the emotional aggression and recognize the kernel of personal derangement that fuels the onslaught of angst.
Unless you're like me, and you're tired of being humoring the deranged bullying boor. Then you just get curt. An arsenal of possible responses in such a situation...
"Um no, studies DON'T show that."
"I don't believe that."
"Not true."
Or you can just back away slowly...
Joe Ercoli on January 11, 2010 at 12:08 AM
This sounds all too familiar, no?
Anonymous on January 9, 2013 at 3:34 PM
Was it ever thus... There are those who are only fully alive when there is an emergency to be handled RIGHT NOW. There are those who are happy being unhappy. There are those who always know what's best for EVERYBODY. These folks are often fervid, myopic, and tunnel visioned. Their outward focus helps to temporarily dilute the fear that they might not matter in the grandest scheme of things.