[MD] Drug User or Genius?

[david buchanan]

Arlo said:
Interestingly, the 10 states with the highest divorce rates are all 
conservative states. More interestingly, 8 of the 10 states with the lowest 
divorce rates are liberal states.

Craig replied:
Shame on you.  This is sophomoric statistical manipulation.  Nothing of 
significance can be concluded by examining so-called "conservative" (like 
the Nevada of gambling & prostitution?) or "liberal" states.  If instead, 
you look at counties instead of states, you see that either category of 
state consists of a mixture of so-called "conservative" or "liberal" 
counties, generally tracking rural, suburban & urban areas. The only 
interesting conclusion that can be derived is by comparing divorce rate for 
PEOPLE who are conservative or liberal.

dmb says:
I think its safe to assume that the stats are based on the divorce rates of 
people in those states. I mean, the same pattern appears no matter how you 
break it down. In the case of counties, you'd see the same difference pop 
up. And I think there is an intelligible psychological reason for this 
trend. There's probably a more specific name for this phenomenon, but its 
basically a form of projection. As we've all seen in news stories, moral 
crusaders often turn out to be engaged in a huge battle with their own 
demons. Mark Foley was involved in various projects to protect children from 
sexual preditors and then turned out to be exactly that. There was a guy at 
the FBI who was in charge of the anti-child porn unit. Turns out he was 
quite the pervert too. Then there was the anti-drug, anti-homosexual 
preacher who was discovered to be having sex with a gay prositute, one who 
did double duty as his drug dealer. Newt Gingrich was having an affair with 
one of his young aides even while he was busy impeaching Clinton for exactly 
that. See, this goes way beyond hypocrisy. Its pretty clear that people tend 
to deny their own faults and project them onto others, as if they could 
eradicate their own problems by attacking people who remind them of those 
problems. I think people would be shocked if they knew how many anti-gay gay 
people there were among conservatives. Or how about the anti-abortion 
protestors. I bet the majority of them have had abortions and their 
participation in that movement, more than anything else, serves to relieve 
their guilt and to distance themselves from a very regretable decision. 
Basically, people are concerned with the issues that they themselves are 
most concerned with, especially when they don't quite realize what they're 
doing.

Anyway, the stats bear this out. The social pathologies that most concern 
the "family values" crowd are precisely the pathologies they suffer from 
most. They project it onto "Hollywood Liberals", leftist intellectuals and 
other groups they don't identify with, but basically we're talking about 
people who hate these qualities in themselves. Its a kind of unexamined 
self-loathing. And it makes people really, really mean and judgemental. Its 
a very common form of mental illness and self-deception from which none of 
us are immune. And yes, it shows up in red states, red counties and red 
families more than blue. Ideology tends to reflect a person's psychology. I 
mean, people like to think that their political beliefs are based on 
rational decisions but that's not really how it works. We can see this 
tendency to project evil onto others throughout the conservative ideology in 
this country. The reds tend to have negative attitudes about minorities and 
foreigners of all kinds insofar as they serve as a field of projection, as 
"the other" to be scapegoated. That's why, if you're a bigot, a misogynist, 
a homo-phobe, a xenophobe or anything like that, you're gonna find yourself 
more at home in the Republican Party.

And here we are talking about anti-intellectual, social level 
neo-Victorians. The so-called family values conservatives are actually a lot 
less moral than they'd like to think and represent a slide backward in terms 
of the evolution of morals. In their hands, as we have seen, principles such 
as democracy and human rights too often take a back seat to lesser kinds of 
moral codes such as the one's against vice.

I think all this has quite a lot to do with the way people reacted to Bush's 
anti-UN, "axis of evil" based foreign policy. The conservatives say, "damn 
straight, those guys are evil and God is on our side". The liberals hear the 
same speeches and say, "You've got to be kidding!"

dmb

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