There is a very interesting article by psychologist Renana Brooks I posted about a couple of years ago. It's worth another look. Some key grafs:
Bush's handlers project the President as a man of character. His team has carefully crafted an image of him as a man who is strong and moral, someone who sticks to his principles and is capable of making tough decisions. This phenomenon was foretold by media philosopher Marshall McLuhan, who warned: "Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be."
Theory soon became reality. Ronald Reagan was the first American politician to demonstrate the power of what I call the character myth, a project launched by his speechwriter Peggy Noonan, whose biography of him was titled When Character Was King. The character myth relies on the psychological phenomenon that a person who speaks frequently and passionately about morals is generally regarded as a moral person.
According to the character myth, a person who demonstrates that he has "character" need not present any evidence in support of his policies or decisions. They are simply assumed to be correct, since they come from a person with the ineffable quality known as "character." Even though Reagan was divorced and many of his Hollywood friends hardly saw him as a paragon of morality, he managed to present himself in politics as an exemplar of "family values." Reagan was seen as having character for sticking to his principles. He was widely viewed as someone who cut taxes, even after actually raising them. Americans simply ignored all data that did not fit the myth.
Similarly, Bush's handlers use the rhetoric of morality to bypass people's resistance to his ideas and to convince them that they should not go beyond their core belief that "Bush is doing the right thing." This imagery of strength and morality is inspired by the ideas of conservative philosopher Leo Strauss, who has strongly influenced many within the inner circle of the Bush Administration. . . .Strauss feared the mediocrity that he believed was inherent in democratic societies. He argued that when a strong political leader explains his policies he should develop a mythology for the consumption of the general public that hides his true motivations, because the people will not accept the boldness of the leader's initiatives if they are presented in an unvarnished fashion. This mythology should use the language of morality to mask the candidate's real interests, which are his own survival in power and his ability to continue to exert dominance over the populace.
Psychologists have long understood that people who hold views that are mutually inconsistent, or who perform actions that depart from their values or that threaten their positive self-image, will experience discomfort. This is known as cognitive dissonance. People naturally choose to remove the discomfort through rationalization, thus repairing their self-image as people who are reasonable and moral and act in ways consistent with their values. Bush's leadership style and use of language essentially have created cognitive dissonance in the electorate. The more that Americans observe the Bush presidency pushing policies they do not support, and would normally question, the more they confront the choice of whether to oppose him actively or rationalize away their discomfort.
Many Americans have chosen the latter because the President has convinced them that the situation is desperate and that only he can handle the continuing crisis. The more they depend upon Bush, the more they rationalize away any objections they may have to his specific ideas and policies. In this manner, Bush has forged an emotional, visceral relationship with the nation, successfully bypassing conscious resistance and stripping away any sense that he needs to answer to a higher legal or constitutional authority beyond his personal moral force.
Myth is not a negative term for me; I wish the Democrats understood better how mythopoesis works rather than just using the word only in its pejorative sense. The GOP understands the power of mythic narratives, and the Dems, rationalists that they are, don't. They are into laundry lists of sensible programs to solve problems in sensible ways. BO-ring. Uninspiring. That's why they're going to continue to lose. I'm not suggesting that the Dems abuse the power of mythic narratives the way the GOP does, but I just wish they understood better how important mythos is in helping people to imagine who they are, where they came from, and where they are going.
People want to feel as though they're a part of some bigger, some larger, more meaningful movement in history.That's why mythic narratives are seductive and a tool that demagogues know how to use effectively. And that was at the heart of the demagoguery selling the Iraq war. NY Times reporter Chris Hedges understands this dynamic and explores it in his book War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. He writes from his experience covering the war in the Balkans, but his insights are easily extended to our motivations for going into Iraq. War is one of those bogus things that gives us a mythic sense of national greatness, and it's delusional and almost always leads to no good end because no one can control the dogs of war once they are unleashed. They should never, ever be unleashed except under the most extreme provocation no matter how idealistic and pure we think our motivations.
So many Americans supported the war buying into the administration's mythos–but now that the mythic fog has dissipated, they are beginning to see the war for the ugly thing it was from the beginning–a brutal horror show which provides a cure worse than the original ailment–all the idealism and good intentions notwithstanding. Every war, no matter how savage, had an idealistic cover story.
This business of mythos is something that I struggle with because while I think that there is a legitimate human longing for a mythopoetic dimension in our human experience, it's a longing that more often than not leads people into behavior akin to looking for love in all the wrong places. Because so many people continually fail to find love and settle for cheap thrills does not mean that love does not exist. It just means that they haven't found it yet. And that's our situation with regard to a culture-wide, grounding, health-producing mythos or metanarrative. We don't have one; we haven't found it yet.
A lot of people would argue it's better that we don't. And it's understandable because at this point our only way of imagining it is in ideological terms–as if totalizing Islamist or Christianist, Socialist, or Fascist models were the only possibilities. And it's true–lots of people would love it if they could force Americans into one or another of these ideological molds. So, some would argue, it's better that things stay fragmented and pluralistic so that there is no center and periphery, no dominant in and disenfranchised out. I get that.
And it's a moot point, because fragmentation is our future, at least in the forseeable one. Because even if the Christianist Right has some success in imposing its bizarre mythos on the rest of us in the short run, it cannot possibly last in the long run. It's too alienating, repressive, and out of synch with what it means to be a normal human being. It has no poetry, no beauty, no eros. It's just a tight-assed form of control freakism. Tyrrants are always eventually overthrown, but that doesn't mean tyranny does not lie in our future.
A healthy alternative to either fragmentation or totalizing ideologies is impossible to imagine now. And I think that it will remain impossible as long as we're in this in-between stage. I suspect that moving beyond "in-between" will require our suffering through a political or environmental catastrophe of some sort in the future. We seem to be built in such a way that we need them from time to time to shake us out of our comfortable narcosis of the moment. It's only when we are shaken awake, usually against or will, by some unpleasantness that we become alert to a deeper apprehension of the mysteries that abound all around us and to which we are all mostly otherwise insensate.
For no mythos that has genuine life-giving potential is possible unless there is a widespread apprehension of the mysteries behind the appearances. Those kinds of experiences give rise to mythopoetic articulation, and such an articulation will have legitimacy not because it is verifiable by the rationality and the scientific method, but because the heart knows its truth. For the time being, it would seem, the culture in this in-between times thinks it's better not to try to apprehend the mystery that exists outside the cave of the senses–better to just keep buying the cheap myths that keep us anesthetized.
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