If we don’t understand how decent, god-fearing,
victimized people can come to espouse such dangerous ideologies,
we won’t be able to fight them effectively.

These Tea Party folks seem to most liberals — well, to most of us who live in the “reality community,” or, as I like to call it, “reality” — like crazy f*ckers.

As a recent New York Times article reports, this hodgepodge of people and groups spout frankly paranoid beliefs as received wisdom, e.g. the Federal Reserve is our enemy and should be abolished; citizens should stock up on ammo, gold; and survival food in anticipation of an impending Civil War; states should “nullify” federal laws and even secede; medical records are being shipped to federal bureaucrats; the army is seeking “Internment/Resettlement” specialists; and Obama is trying to create crises in order to destroy the economy, convert Interpol into his personal police force and create a New World Order.

Conspiracy theories involving shadowy elites like the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations have resurfaced. 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 [[I don't: Paul Evans]] but I also understand them. And, well, uh, I also empathize with them. They share the same psychology as the paranoid patients I treat every day. The only difference is that the paranoid beliefs of the Tea Party movement are political while those in my consulting room are of a more personal nature. 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.

I treat people who are paranoid all the time. Sometimes they’re only mildly paranoid. For example, someone I treat can’t tolerate blame of any kind, can’t take any responsibility for failures, and can’t really be optimistic about the potential goodness in others. It’s always someone else’s fault. Other times, they’re more severely paranoid. 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. The most extreme cases can be found in the delusions of schizophrenics.

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.

Take an extreme case. Someone I saw years ago had a paranoid delusion that orbiting satellites were trying to control his mind. He went to great lengths to insulate his apartment so as to repel these psychic assaults. When I got to know him better, I discovered he developed this delusion as a way to make sense of an ongoing but terrifying experience, the genesis of which lay in his childhood: that he wasn’t a separate person and didn’t have the right to his own thoughts. This terrifying feeling of helpless vulnerability was rendered comprehensible to him by his delusion about orbiting satellites. In a paradoxical way, his delusion reduced his terror even as it generated its own fears and dangers.

Continue reading this article, here.

See The Moral Problem of Neocons like Bunning Who Love to Cut Off Poor Peoples’ Living, OpEdNews, March 2, 2010, by John Lorenz.

See Hatch Forgets About The Bush Years, Claims Reconciliation Is Meant To ‘Balance The Budget’, Think Progress, March 2, 2010, by Zaid Jilani.

COMMENT by Evans Politics owner Paul Evans: While I mostly agree that the tea party people are as a whole “crazy as hell” in terms of their political ideology, I do NOT de-value them as individuals or as thinking people. We just went through the second worst financial collapse in history and twenty percent of Americans are unemployed or underemployed. This is not the time to take ten or twenty percent of the political population and demonize them, NOR is it the time to start casting them as crazy people. I’ve wondered about the possible validity of SOME of the tea party people’s views, myself.

MOREOVER, as one who has himself suffered rather severely from mental illness, I resent this smug psychiatrist coming onto AlterNet and casting everybody as crazy! These psychologists/psychiatrists: I don’t know. In the nineteenth century, the Sioux Indians had a much more sublime way of dealing with mental illness than locking the afflicted ones in secure wards…. They simply let the offbeat “citizens” wander around the encampment and surroundings until the ill one came to his/her senses. Sounds humane to me. Let’s hope and pray the tea party types come to their senses, as well. I’ll tell you, they AREN’T crazy about some of their complaints, just some of their major conclusions about the complaints they have. Bader IS right about ONE thing, though. In this economy, in this society, many of us who aren’t doing so well, at least economically, certainly do feel helpless and pretty upset about it. And that ain’t crazy at all. (I, myself, no longer feel helpless about life at all, but empowered and ready for the future, come what may.)