a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

I am in rural southeastern Pennsylvania, having traveled down from Toronto to celebrate my mother’s 88th birthday. She and my step-father –also 88—and I went out to dinner last night at our favorite local place, Miss Oxford’s Diner, in Oxford, a town near their retirement community. Without any retro effort, Miss Oxford’s, like the town around it, is “lost in the 50s tonight,” so it feels like my childhood. At the Formica soda fountain you can get shakes and floats—homemade rootbeers a speciality. The heaping plates of food brought to the booths are without nutrition consciousness –lots of canned gravy over ‘mashed, lots of butter on the toast, fruit in syrup. So obesity is the norm among the waitresses and most of the customers –and this is certainly not a feature of my childhood memories; it is part of the new dumbed-down America. Some of the juke boxes are out of order, but others will give you for your quarter a blast from the past.

As usual, my step-father Ernie and I discussed “current events.” He reads a lot of magazines –The Economist, Science, Time, and The New Yorker are his weekly fare—and follows the economy on his computer, using his research to write a monthly “Market Outlook” for his investment club at the retirement community, his friends, and our family. (I’ve taken to calling this his blog, although he sends it out by email.) Certain sectors of the economy are of special interest. Because he was a chemical engineer, he knows a great deal about that field, and innovative medical technology is his son’s area. With my older brother Gibby, he discusses real estate, as my brother is a real estate salesman and developer –following in our father’s footsteps. Recently, his conversations with Gibby have been bleak. The bank where my brother has done his banking for forty years called in a series of his paid-on-time mortgages when a single property he could not sell went into foreclosure. Perfectly legal for the bank to call in the well-maintained mortgages and wipe out the better part of my brother’s lifetime of work. His single remaining property will keep him afloat, but Ernie and I did wonder about a bank that would attack a loyal and conscientious customer, and how the men who run that bank can sleep at night.

I told Ernie my ideas about “finance capitalism,” and explained how these ideas differ from modern Marxist theories of modified monopoly capitalism. Ernie sighed, and launched into his chief complaint about our country now. When he entered the workforce after the Second World War, with his UPENN engineering degree in his hand, America’s education system was the best in the world in sciences and math, he said, and now, although some universities –“for which you have to have a fortune or go into debt for a fortune”—are as strong as ever, the public schools do not prepare “everybody’s kids” for a complicated “knowledge industry” world. The undereducated are all set to be victims of finance capitalism, while the badly educated are the captains of industry and banking. “You and I both know, Elisabeth, that I am a Republican because my father was a Republican, and in my family you do not change course unless there is a much better alternative, but I have not been able to vote for more than one or two Republicans in the last forty years. The GOP does not have people of the sort I could support –fiscal conservatives, believers in taking responsibility for the community as a whole. Liberal Republicans. The present Republicans are all about rampant individualism and everyone entitled to do whatever they want and total intolerance of any way of doing things that is not ‘just like me.’ And they are badly educated! I cannot believe this Republican Party has happened to the country. When the Republican fund-raisers call me up and ask me for money, I tell them I will only give money to a real Republican if they can find one. I am completely embarrassed by Sarah Palin –but, then, I am completely embarrassed by John McCain, too, if he thought she was mentally qualified to be Vice-President!”

Ernie’s belief is that the root of our national malaise now is the lack of education amongst our citizenry, and amongst our leaders. “That we could elect someone smart like Obama is a miracle, but then the dead weight of the uneducated drags him down.” At the breakfast table this morning, he read outloud from the newspaper selected “examples of stupidity.” “Listen to this bigoted idiot objecting to that mosque near Ground Zero…” Later in the day, we discussed Jane Mayer’s article in the August 30th issue of the New Yorker, which Ernie thought presented “an example of the stupidity that is behind what you called “finance capitalism.”” “See, billionaire libertarians buying Republicans and Tea Party types, and buying educators and think tanks so that more and more people can be made stupid…”

As a scientist, Ernie is particularly distressed that the state of science education is such that huge numbers of citizens can be harangued into believing that global warming and climate change are not happening. Last year, when he was 87, he pushed back by creating a very thorough and compellingly illustrated Power Point program that he premiered in the retirement center’s lecture series. “Most of the old people here are quite well educated, and if you give them the facts, they do not deny them. You’re the psychoanalyst, you should tell me why people would deny an assessment twenty years in the making by scientists world-wide, particularly when the consequences of denial will be so catastrophic.” We did not have time this visit for me to sketch my thoughts for him, so I will do that here –as a sequel to a book I published some years ago entitled The Anatomy of Prejudices.

Denial is a defense mechanism that has for many years been reasonably well studied as a key feature of prejudice. A prejudiced person denies members of the group or groups he is prejudiced against –at the level of denying particular truths about them and their experience, or at the level of denying their humanity tout court. The denial serves the purpose of the prejudice. So a racist denies particular traits of different-looking people, like intelligence, or denies their common human ancestry, in order to be better able to exploit or enslave them for their labor, including sexual labor. A Holocaust denier denies the experience of European Jews under totalitarian domination in order to be better able to persecute Jews currently. A person who needs to have a target-people that can be eliminated after being accused of burrowing into and undermining institutions (particularly financial ones) will focus on a people, like the Jews, who are associated with finance and who are thought to be wily and cunning infiltrators. Anti-semites are conspiracy theorists who fear the people they hate have gotten positions inside their society. They can, in present conditions, just as well focus on wily and cunning Muslims, as Pastor Jones of Gainesville, Florida does. A sexist denies women the ability or the power to control reproduction in order to be better able to control it himself –so “pro-life,” anti-abortion people are the quintessential sexists of our time. In my psychoanalytic view, these exploiter, eliminator and identity erasing types of prejudiced people are associated with three character types taken to extremes –hysterical (racists), obsessional (Anti-semites), narcissistic (sexists)—although the types are usually mixed and seldom appear purely.

Denial is functional in all three of the basic prejudice types. It is also functional in the service of specific interests, which involve prejudice in favor of the invested group and against a group said to be undermining that interest. Energy producers and sellers who want energy industries to be unrestricted –for the energy market to be a “free market”—use climate change denial to argue against restrictions. Thus the “billionaire libertarians” described in the New Yorker article (the Koch brothers of New York City) protect their investments in energy by plowing funds into institutions that will market climate change denial and sponsor deregulation or repeal of regulations. The “inconvenient truth” of global warming must be knocked out of the path of profit, just as government regulation and all manifestations of wily, cunning Big Government or invidious Socialism must be knocked out of the path of “individual freedom.” The libertarian Koch brothers also insist that Obama and his administration are a socialist conspiracy out to undermine America; their entire mentality is anti-Semitic (never mind that Obama is not a Jew, but –so the craziness goes—a Muslim).

When established scientific theories and proofs are denied in the service of a prejudice or of an interest that reflects a prejudice, it seems to me that there is a key mechanism at work in addition to the one all the prejudices employ, which is called projection. Let me describe the projection mechanism first. Since the end of the Second World War, social scientists –led by psychoanalysts—have understood that prejudiced people project onto others facets of themselves that they despise or are guilty about or ashamed of. So there is a kind of “intergenerational transmission of trauma” going on. The harm a prejudiced person feels has been done unto him, which has made him “bad” or damaged, he does unto another to relieve himself, to detoxify. The same dynamic operates with a harmed group that harms in the way it has been harmed. A group that has been obsessionally eliminated from the place where it lived has a proclivity to eliminate another, weaker group in the same obsessional way: round them all up and send them to ghettos and refugee camps or killing camps or into exile. The eliminated group is now the blameworthy “bad” group, while the one which was once eliminated but has become able to eliminate is “good,” superior. (For extremist fundamentalist Christians, guiltily awaiting the Apocalypse, “the Muslims” are projectively the bad people, so it is a good idea to make a Reichstag Fire of their sacred books and fantasize about rounding them up and destroying them. )

But being prejudiced against a scientific truth also involves regression, not just a projective cycle of being-harmed-and-harming-in-turn (a repetition compulsion, to use the psychoanalytic terms). Science denial involves an “I don’t want to know,” a feature of “I won’t grow up,” and a feature of magical thinking and superstition. A person who needs and wants to believe in the theory of intelligent design and the Biblical creation story, for example, will be prejudiced against the theory of evolution. Human narcissism is much more directly supported by the idea that we are a species completely different than any other, the special darlings of God, created in a magical stroke on a single day, than it is supported by the idea that we evolved over thousands of years from “the apes” and their ancestors. Human obsessionality is much more supported by the idea that we can do whatever we want with earth’s resources –gobble them up–and eliminate the waste of our digestive processes wherever we want to than it is by the idea that we have to toilet train ourselves and get on with the process of growing up and being responsible.

Finance capitalism can be analyzed economically and politically in terms of the balance of human activities; from the point of view of psychoanalytic theory of prejudice, it looks like adult people projecting their guilty acquisitiveness and regressing into messy terrible twos tantrums during which they deny what the mess they are making means.

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