Repeal All Gun Laws, Part IV: Motivation Influences Perception
By John Longenecker (07/04/06)
Happy Independence Day, everyone. As always, Good For the Country is written for the apolitical, those citizens searching for new information they'd appreciate knowing in running their households.
Some psychiatrists have described gun control as a betrayal of an underlying neurosis; there's even a name for it: Hoplophobia. But I see gun control as a much larger dynamic with broader implications for the nation beyond any single issue.
Can liberalism and conservatism be compared psychologically so easily?
Yes, it can. When one examines any political or even personal issue, one must come to the examination with a good faith willingness to understand and cooperate. On the other hand, Marie Parente said that when you sit down to negotiate what you already have, you lose.
We’ve sat down and lost a lot. And in good faith.
In short, poor values and personal anxiety will play a large part in cooperation or non-cooperation. Or in takings.
Can an anxious person set aside his anxiety for the good of the country? Or does the person come to the table with an anger that makes him believe that crushing people is necessary for the country?
Karl Marx was such an impaired person who believed that crushing peoples’ rights was good for them -- inthe end, an end to be generations away. He actually believed that desire, ambition, want and motivation – which he portrayed as greed and other spin – could be eliminated after a few generations of deprivation. And with force, when the people didn’t agree with his mad plan. [Which involved confiscation of weapons so they'd hold still for the treatment.] Only an angry neurotic can believe this. Liberals believe that guns have to be taken for our own good, everybody’s own good – yet only the officials will need them?
One-sided force is not good when only officials have all the force.
Liberty enthusiasts are courageous, and anti-gun people are not. It’s easy to claim courage when you attack the Right because you know it’s safe. It’s hard to attack criminals because you know you’re quite unsafe. They’ll retaliate. Attacking the Right is not courage, yet liberals are relentless, openly hostile and will say anything.
Anti-gun people are anti-liberty people. There is no such thing as a righteous, good faith anti-gun position. Good people cannot endorse gun control.
This is where it gets sticky: where motivation influences perception – even in conservatives who advocate gun control – it’s a reflection of another motivation at work, something deeper than liberty interests. It is something which displaces values good for the nation, something more personally meaningful than the country is for them.
You will excuse the Freudian analysis, but it’s actually first year stuff, the idea that motivation influences how you see the issue to begin with. Salesman, professionals, attorneys, artists and more know all about it.
My analysis is first that politics is a reflection of world view, or Weltanschauung, Freud’s name for how we frame what we see in terms of our past experiences and how it concerns us. A person who hates being spanked or punished will predictably become sensitive – perhaps even driven to activism – on the subject of child rearing; this person would masquerade as a child advocate, perhaps even spend years in study, but in reality is trying to soothe their own original pain.
Others who had been spanked may view it with less significance, in its proper perspective. These people tend to support parenting without interference or an exaggerated feeling of their own past spankings, for instance.
The angry who continue to dwell on their traumas have been and are called today, injustice collectors. The name is as it implies.
This is how America gets turned upside down. We have cooperated needlessly with neurotics – the side whom we suspect are out of touch with reality.
They are out of touch with reality, motivated to see things differently by their older, long-standing anxieties which come first in their lives. Defense mechanisms, Anna Freud described in such detail.
People fool themselves, and the major difference between liberals and conservatives – in my humble opinion – is a matter of degree on these inner conflicts we all have. Angry people who feel cheated and who can’t resolve it all and get over it tend to gravitate to the Left, the party of compassion for others.
Compassion, my butt: the liberals are the party of interference, abuse and revenge, all in a sick attempt to get rid of that unending anxiety they hold, which is why they attack the symbols in our society we hold dear: family, good faith, honor, patriotism . . .
People who can and do get over their anxieties tend to be self-reliant and work without a net. They gravitate to the party of independence, respect and liberty, because they live it every day. Liberals live a life every day too, but one of misapprehension, anxiety and distrust. World view. This is why liberals cannot tolerate any pain in general, and they understand that for others it is an injustice, not a fact of life. For them, injustice is a convenient term, but a bad faith, misleading one. For each of us: falling off your bicycle, being cut from the team, being wrongly accused or even being spanked is simply a fact of life. Simple. For liberals, it is a crime, and the rest of us have to pay, and how.
An example of how motivation influences perception on a much larger, political scale is in the left’s view that self-reliance – including marriage, adulthood and other self-reliance – is a sham value. Perhaps for them, it was, but the reality is that self-reliance – liberty, including marriage, adulthood and more – is not a sham, the United States being the grander example of this.
Hence, the United States is the target for liberals. There is no plan to improve her in the name of social justice - only their plan to stop her from reminding them of past pain.
Thus, in every endeavor – gun control, interference with parenting, inserting foul education content into curricula, erasing our heritage under silly, straw arguments (that it will offend or exclude) — are all anti-liberty measures. For the angry, anxious leftist, these symbols are a constant source of irritation and must be eliminated.
Translation: Hate.
We pay a terrible price to accommodate the anxiety of others. As such, the United States is under attack by neurotics. Unhappy, hurt kids who never grew up to become self-sufficient adults.
Imagine the more effective solution: when the nation operates in liberty, the rest will take care of itself. All things in America are anchored to our way of life in Liberty and Independence.
Imposition – especially pre-emptive interference by officials – serves one purpose: to crush independence on this same motivation. Because independence would do two things: it would prove that liberals are not even needed – and neither are their hostile programs – and it would out the neurotic motives of the left, namely to take control of things purely to soothe their own anxiety which other Americans probably find hard to understand, though they do correctly sense that liberals are out of touch with reality.
How such anger could be cured is to either spend time on the couch to work through their anger or to hell with them. I have no compassion for such willing, stubborn anger.
My political suggestion is, of course, to meet the political activism with a political solution: to see the anti-crime policies and other stupid, go-nowhere social programs as frauds, created out of the impaired motivation to either soothe personal pain or simply to control others – is there a difference? – all at horrible cost to America, not only in dollars, but in personal sovereignty, self-governance and self-respect.
The Bradys, the Feinsteins, the Schumers – all of them – are tragically misguided, angry people with one mission: to destroy independence which can live life without them. The evidence is that the values they spit on are not right wing, but mainstream American values, and the very existence of those values threatens the game of the left to control as a means of soothing their own anxiety. Things such as independence bug them because they cut them off from their pipeline to their addiction fix: control.
Liberals want power because it brings them balm to their irrational pain.
Yet it never resolves it, does it? So they want more and more, and like addicts, they go crazy and out of control when they don’t get it. There is no good faith in any of that. Meanwhile, we all – all of us – pay more and more in terms of our sovereignty.
The self-reliance they want to destroy is a purely American value. The values they characterize as judgmental right wing are mainstream American. There is no argument that values such as family, safety, dealing in good faith and fair play, personal integrity, sovereignty and others are not only discouraged and punished by liberal policies, but those values are also mainstream so that even liberal homes, too, are hurt by such activism.
That’s irrational. It’s self-destructive. There is a general belief in psychology that impaired persons know precisely what they are doing, and that only the gravely impaired do not. Defense mechanisms are not a pathology, but thet theystill serve as reality distortion devices, and when they interfere with our way of life, they are destructive purely because they operate in misinformation input.
When you damage both conservative and liberal homes in the process – everyone’s homes – you damage the country.
Liberalism is no longer compatible with liberty.
So, why repeal all gun laws, again? How would that help, John?
Because we are the authority in this country, and we want to keep it that way.
Because our sovereignty in America is backed by our force, and it is threatened.
We have seen the utter mistake – the utter tragedy – of allowing neurotics to have their way to play America for her compassion and cooperation. It’s time to reverse it. We start with revoking all go-nowhere anti-crime policies, and we repeal all gun laws, immediately.
Why?
Chiefly, because our cooperation with such nationwide and local anti-crime policies has cost us dearly in terms of privacy (Read ID Cards coming) sovereignty (Self-defense laws and misplaced reliance on agencies) and our independence (immoral and excessive punishment for everything from family law to fathers rights to smoking.)
Secondly, because individuals can handle violent crime better - better - than anti-crime policies ever will, one of the best kept secrets in politics. Don’t worry, there won’t be anarchy, chaos or vigilanteism. None of the dire predictions from the left has come true, and they won’t, either, because the honest have a character better than what officials give you credit for.
Revoke all gun laws – for their mistake, their heavy-handedness, their unjust values system of the presumption of criminal intent, the idea of criminalizing honest behavior and most of all, the presumption of law enforcement that average Americans are suspects and might commit a violent crime. Gun laws forget that crimimals don’t obey laws, and for every crime, perhaps several state and federal laws were broken and did positively no good in protecting a community.
The real reason for 22,000 guns laws and the real reason guns are taken pre-emptively is because liberty will impeach liberal philosophy and will handle our society just fine, in that the rest will take care of itself. That would humiliate the liberals, and they don't want to give anyone the chance to do that. They’re scared to death they won’t be needed anymore. They're scared to live without their crutch.
Let the heavens fall.
Repealing all gun laws would allow independence to shine beyond question, proving the beauty and personal integrity of the average American. Ever notice liberals don’t respect average folks? Ever notice that laws based on battling exclusion wind up excluding even more people?
Repealing all gun laws would allow independence American style to shine, with no need for oversight by persons concerned only with soothing their anxiety from long ago. (People intuitively call this feel good legislation and for a very good reason: average people sense the true motivation of liberals; to soothe an inner anxiety of long ago.)
Independence would mean that liberals would no longer have any power over America.
Repealing all gun laws would allow independence to shine, period.
And that, my fellow Americans, would be good for the country.
(Printer friendly version) Email: John Longenecker
