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In reply to the discussion: What I've learned about conservatives in the last few months [View all]calimary
(80,700 posts)My mom even had a bit of this. She'd been terribly wronged when she was very young. And some things about her young adulthood weren't exactly peachy, either. She always seemed to lead with an unspoken compulsion to punish. Someone had to be punished for what she suffered through. Someone had to pay.
The punishing thing, the desire or the compulsion to punish, to rule by tyranny and not just to defeat but to draw blood from an opponent. That goes to the drive to dehumanize, demean, and diminish all those people and ideas and policies in ol' newty's nasty little book of black magic that taught the terminology and verbiage - framing and other psy-ops - for describing your side versus your opponent's side. That's how "liberal" became a dirty word. That's how taxes became so bad. That's how government was suddenly some ridiculous Mother Goose and Brothers Grimm monster to be avoided, defied, wiped out, and the ground salted underneath. I read an essay in and around here whose premise was how the Dems and GOP look at politics and the whole concept of bipartisanship completely differently. Our side values reason, compromise, give-and-take, various kinds of power-sharing in the service of solving problems and dealing with issues for the common good. Their side views compromise as a dirty word, and whose longterm mission is not to find ways to work together but to keep Democrats out of power permanently.
There's also something else that, it seems to me, also feeds into that intrinsic, seemingly instinctive urge to cause pain that I learned about in great depth while I was pregnant. If you just start reading and exploring and learning, you eventually stumble into the little cul-de-sac of the history of pain relief or lack thereof during labor and childbirth. Those utterly merciful epidurals and other professional-grade pain medications are a relatively new thing, only becoming standard operating procedure in the last century or so. How come? Because the prevailing opinion in the (mostly male) medical establishment and, of course, the Church, was that women should not be given or offered any relief from pain during labor and childbirth because women were SUPPOSED TO suffer. It was their birthright stemming from the Sin of Eve. The "Original Sin"! Seriously. Therefore, to compel women to struggle and suffer in labor and childbirth was somehow a God-sanctioned position because that was womankind's lot in life, because of Adam and Eve and the snake and all that, and how women simply were expected to pay for Eve's disobedience as her surrogates, by enduring the full hurricane blasts of agony like you get a LOT of during labor and childbirth.
And when that whole Dark Ages mentality began to evolve and that barbaric philosophy started to change, church officials, meddling moralists, and establishment conservative opposed it and fought it vigorously. I swear to you I saw this stuff while I was learning about my pregnancies! And it was stunning as all-get-out. I just could not fathom it, especially as a pregnant woman myself, back then.
Maybe it's where we get that "authoritarian father," or the "domineering father," or the "tough love" approach, while the mother is purportedly the softer, more malleable, more accomodating nurturer. It just seems to be this general Puritan, Inquisitional, narrow, imperious, authoritarian, punishing ethic that much of the world struggled with during the Dark Ages. Like an overall smog that settles over us that we have to keep breathing for awhile until we can finally get all the air cleared. Seems to me this whole sick, stunted, Troglodyte mindset stems from the "Original Sin" curse and the vigorously insisted-upon penance foisted upon you as an heir of Adam and Eve. It's a whole "you were born into sin until you're rescued in baptism" thing - in which you start out a loser and a sinner the instant you're down out of the chute and breathing on your own, in religious and socio-religious terms.
VERY odd and twisted way to explain and justify extremist shit. It's sociopath and psychopath stuff, seems to me. And it's all the sadder that it may have its roots in religion.