Psychoanalyzing a bigoted narcissist

I've got a lot of stuff to do here, from basic household chores to some minor work stuff to website repairs to eBay listings to leisure stuff like sketches, novels, comics, etc., and yet instead I'm allowing myself to go down a rabbit hole based on reading something in the news. Because I'm just that broken, I guess.

Not as broken as President Ralph Wiggum Palpatine, though. I mean, no one is as broken as that guy, which the world was reminded of this week when he made his latest bat-guano-crazy speech in Davos (my favorite moment of which was when he asserted that his Swiss hosts should be worshipping the United States because "without us, you'd all be speaking German"). 

But it's actually something from the big interview he gave to the New York Times a couple of weeks ago—you know, the one in which he said he was restricted in his actions by nothing other than his own morality—that grabbed me today. And it isn't anything new.

It's Felon47’s remarks about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its subsequent support measures that got me spinning out.

Everyone knows Felon47 is a racist. That's been clear for decades. Most of us also know that at the root of every grievance that broken human cesspool utters is fear and insecurity. Put those together and you get remarks like he gave the Times, such as "white people were very badly treated" by civil rights laws, and that the Civil Rights Act "hurt a lot of people." He couched this by saying what he no doubt thought was a mitigating context around affirmative action policies without actually mentioning affirmative action policies: "People that deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job were unable to get a job. So it was, it was a reverse discrimination."

Part of this is, of course, him pandering to his base of wannabe Klansmen. He knows his strongest support comes from people who need to scapegoat their problems on an "other" and the easiest "other" to invoke is the one he's personally held in contempt for his whole pathetic life. But a lot of it is real, borne of a combo package of personality traits and disorders that make him devoid of empathy and have him believing that everyone in the world thinks like he does. Since he cannot conceive of anyone looking at the world any differently—everything is zero-sum, everyone is self-obsessed, anyone that has power abuses power—his view of civil rights laws is not that they are protections for the common good, but rather that they're weapons in a conflict.

"White people were very badly treated." This means, before the law, people with power and privilege—boiled down here as "white people"—were allowed to oppress people with less power and privilege—women, African-Americans and other minorities—with impunity, but after enactment they weren't. Disallowing oppressive behavior equals "very bad treatment" because everything is zero-sum, everything is about exerting power. If I can't exert a power over you, then that means you can exert that power over me.

The concept of equal treatment or the good of the whole doesn't compute, to him that's like trying to divide by zero. "People were unable to go to college or get a job" in his terminology means that before the law, white folks only had to compete with other white folks and thus the pool of college or job applicants was smaller, while after the law that pool was enlarged to include minorities, reducing the likelihood of the less-abled white applicant to get in/get hired. (Affirmative action hasn't been quota-based for decades, it's all about making sure women and minorities are recruited/considered with a goal toward proper representation, i.e. enlarging the pool.) He's probably not exactly sure why odds and ratios work that way (because math is so hard), he just knows that "his side" lost power, which by definition means the "other side" now has that power over him and "his side." 

Bigotry isn't the problem issue in his mind; to him, bigotry is a given and a neutral tool. The issue is who gets to wield the bigotry and to what degree.

That shows up in his use of "reverse discrimination." There's no such thing as "reverse" discrimination, you either discriminate, in whatever context, or you don't; A holds more value than B, B holds more value than A, or A and B are equally valuable. I discriminate between this piece of paper, which is a bulletin from the state telling me I have to now charge sales tax on services (a whole 'nother problem in my world), and that piece of paper, which is a receipt from the Post Office for mailing my latest eBay sale. Discrimination reveals that the former is important, while the latter holds no value to me. I don't "reverse discriminate" against the receipt. Felon47 doesn't get that. If a comparison doesn't fall in his favor, then it's "reversed." If no discriminating is done at all, then it's got to be unfair because his value should always be superior, and if it's not superior, that means someone else is superior, and them's fighting words.

If I can't oppress you, then it follows that you are oppressing me.

Because remember, not only is everything zero-sum, but everyone thinks about using power just like he does.

If African-Americans were given power, then, his thinking is, they would enslave white people as revenge, because that's what he would do. If immigrants were allowed to thrive, then they would subjugate the native-born, because that's what he would do (is doing, actually). If trans folks are given respect, that means less respect for non-trans folks and thus the trans community can better impose "their agenda" (which in his mind means turning more people trans, because his goal is to prevent people from being trans).

Every single thing Felon47 does follows this paradigm. "If I don't abuse my power, someone else will abuse me with their power." If the U.S. doesn't take Greenland from the Danes, then China will and thus diminish U.S. power. If tax policy doesn't benefit the super wealthy, then the super wealthy will be the oppressed class. If the president doesn't usurp power from Congress, then Congress will usurp power from the presidency.

Even tariffs—he genuinely does not understand what a tariff is, so he thinks that imposing a tariff on a country (a tariff isn't imposed on a country, but he thinks it is) is a means of directly taking money from that country for the United States. Zero-sum, exert (abusive) power to diminish their power over (and ability to abuse) you. In this case, because he is so stupid as to be uneducable about what a tariff is, it's a spectacular backfire, but the psychology is the same.

Anyway. None of this is news or really at all helpful in getting through these nightmare years, it's just something I needed to process to get it out of my head so I can focus on something else.

Like soup. I think I'll now try making a big pot of a winter soup since it's so bloody cold out.