{"id":3810,"date":"2010-01-20T07:00:44","date_gmt":"2010-01-20T12:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=3810"},"modified":"2010-01-20T14:46:19","modified_gmt":"2010-01-20T19:46:19","slug":"conspiracy-theories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2010\/01\/20\/conspiracy-theories\/","title":{"rendered":"conspiracy theories…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When I read the Rush Limbaugh diatribe I posted Monday <\/em>[hippies caused the financial crisis and TARP… <\/a><\/strong>], I didn’t exactly know what to say at the time. The notion that the financial crisis was "not an accident" implies that that it was created by someone – presumably the "hippies," "Clintons," etc. that he berates in the article. How the fact that it happened in September 2008 could link it to his hated "hippies" wasn’t specified. But then he said the same thing about TARP – Bush’s trillion dollar bailout of the Banks – again by implication, caused by the "hippies." That makes even less sense. Moving from this completely absurd notion of causation, Limbaugh moves on to motive – to enlarge government and expand the Welfare State. It’s even more, they don’t want us to recover, they want us to plunge into a Depression so they can create a Welfare State. The reason? It’s because they are "big statists," "socialists," "fascists," "radicals," "on the fringe of American thought and belief." And it goes on like this, paragraph after paragraph…<\/em><\/p>\n

My objectivity is blown when it comes to someone like Rush Limbaugh. I’ve long categorized him as a negative force in American life, not matter what he says – an obnoxious immoral bully. But this specific rant had a different impact on me than I’m used to. It reminded me of things I heard night after night during my Psychiatric Residency working in Emergency rooms from people with paranoid illnesses. It has all the characteristics:<\/div>\n
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    private logic<\/font><\/strong> — The logic of his argument does not follow the simplest rules of argument. Limbaugh claims that they<\/em> caused the financial crash at a time when they<\/em> had no power to do so; that they<\/em> pushed TARP [a program introduced by President Bush]. <\/div>\n<\/li>\n
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    pseudocommunity<\/font><\/strong> — The people he’s attacking, his they<\/em>, are not actually connected. They<\/em> include Obama<\/em>, the Clintons<\/em>, Bill Ayers<\/em>, the hippies of the late 1960’s<\/em>, black americans<\/em> [implied], "big statists," "socialists," "fascists," "radicals, etc.<\/em>. The only thing that unites this group of people  is that Limbaugh doesn’t like them. Many of the categories ["socialists<\/em>" – "fascists<\/em>"] are actually mutually exclusive. <\/div>\n<\/li>\n
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    ‘evil’ motives<\/font><\/strong> — In paranoid ideas, the motivation of the pseudocommunity<\/font><\/strong> is uniformly to cause havoc and to destroy. If you ask "why?" the paranoid person has no answer. In fact they get annoyed. The enemies do such things simply because they are bad. They are sadists who are not coming clean with their real raison d’être – destruction. They’re the "bad guys"of our action films. <\/div>\n<\/li>\n
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    delusions<\/font><\/strong> — Essentially, a delusion is a fixed, false belief – meaning it is impervious to logic or reality. A person who believes that there’s a CIA transmitter in a tooth filling is unconvinced by having the tooth extracted. "Now it’s down in my jaw," or "It’s in another tooth," or "I swallowed it." Paranoid ideas transcend proof.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
    So there’s little question that the stuff that pours out of Limbaugh’s mouth is a marvelous example of paranoid illogic driven not by the data at hand, but by the unshakable conviction that there are a large group of people working behind the scenes to secretly destroy that which is good and right and just. <\/div>\n

    But there’s a bit of paranoia in the best of us. It’s a tempting way to think. When we don’t like how things are going, it’s easy to think that they<\/em> are destroying our<\/em> way of life. I could lump Karl Rove, Fox News people, Dick Cheney, most Republicans, the Religious Right, Sarah Palin together as a pseudocommunity<\/font><\/strong>. I could say that they have ‘evil’ motives. I could sound pretty paranoid in looking for the hidden agenda in everything they do or say. Simplifying people on the other side as "all bad" is unfortunately a regular quality of political thought and political discourse. When I watch an "action flick," I can feel great joy when the "bad guys" get hauled away in the end of the movie. And there are lots of us that have relatively fixed political ideas – myself included. So how does one distinguish between the fixity of the mental contents of the paranoid person, and the political intransigence of a ‘regular person?’<\/p>\n

    In the emergency room, it’s not very hard. When a guy tells you his mother is trying to poison him and that the FBI is helping her, and that maybe you’re part of the plot, it’s not too hard to see that the person is captured in a drama of his\/her own creation. But what of a person who has concluded that the problems of the entire country are being caused by a single, evil group working behind the scenes to destroy things? That happened seventy years ago. Adolph Hitler, a deeply paranoid man, concluded that the Jews were destroying Germany and set out to exterminate them. He convinced a whole nation that he was right.<\/p>\n

    Like I said, my objectivity is blown when it comes to someone like Rush Limbaugh. Is his massive distortion of all logic the simplification of the political zealot consciously manipulating logic to make his point, or is he a dangerously paranoid man? Is he doing what all politicians seem to do – make "straw men" of their opponents and attack them? Or is he crazy? All I can say is that I tend to see all that group that I listed [my potential pseudocommunity – Karl Rove, Fox News people, Dick Cheney, most Republicans, the Religious Right, Sarah Palin] as belonging to the former category – political zealots. But when I read these things:<\/div>\n
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    This economic disaster and the slush fund to fix it, the TARP fund, these are not accidents.  These are purposeful steps, and I don’t believe that these people really do believe it’s going to revive an economy.  That’s not what they’re trying to do.  They’re trying to show their compassion, they’re trying to enlarge government.  These are big statists.  These are socialists, fascists, or whoever.  They’re radicals.  They’re on the fringe of American thought and belief…<\/font><\/strong><\/div>\n

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    They wanted a new depression to get back and expand the safety net, restore things to the status before Reagan and the Reagan Revolution.  Reagan trimmed the welfare rolls, slowed the growth of the welfare state, and they didn’t like that.  These people are all about expanding the welfare state, getting as many people as possible on the welfare state.  They need to give us a new depression, and they’re in the process of doing it. Don’t doubt me…<\/font><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
    I cringe. There’s a blinking blip on my radar screen. I heard it last week when he was talking about Haiti. The thing that got to me was something I didn’t put in the list yet:<\/div>\n
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      conspiracy theories<\/font><\/strong> — Just as paranoid people lump their enemies into pseudocommunities, they believe that they are working together with a secret, unified plan with evil intent, and that everything<\/u> that happens is part of that plot.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
      There is an illogical, completely irrational, obviously wrong conspiracy theory at the root of these ideas. I not only "doubt" Limbaugh – on this point, I doubt his sanity. This is not ‘politics as usual’…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      When I read the Rush Limbaugh diatribe I posted Monday [hippies caused the financial crisis and TARP… ], I didn’t exactly know what to say at the time. The notion that the financial crisis was "not an accident" implies that that it was created by someone – presumably the "hippies," "Clintons," etc. that he berates […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3810\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}