Conservatives and Fear
Ok, this is the last one for the day. I remember reading a news bit a while ago about a study that tried to understand where a "conservative" mentality came from. After a fair bit of googling, I finally found it: a Berkeley Study about conservative psychology.
An exercept from the press release:
Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:
• Fear and aggression
• Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
• Uncertainty avoidance
• Need for cognitive closure
• Terror management
....
The avoidance of uncertainty, for example, as well as the striving for certainty, are particularly tied to one key dimension of conservative thought - the resistance to change or hanging onto the status quo, they said.
The terror management feature of conservatism can be seen in post-Sept. 11 America, where many people appear to shun and even punish outsiders and those who threaten the status of cherished world views, they wrote.
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It looks as if you need to get your mind off politics, admittedly a hard thing to do; but at least the sun has come out after three days, although a cold wind is blowing from the west --not that it makes much difference in rural Ohio, since I am surrounded by Red State along all cardinal points. But I decided I would share a dream I had last night, since everyone is always fascinated by other people's dreams.
As always, my dreams are very short, or my memory of them is short. What was interesting for me was that there were two strangers in it. In the main part of the dream, I am traveling with a middle-aged woman, in glasses and with her dark hair up, wearing one of those dress suits that women have had to wear since the '80s when they go to business. But we are not traveling for business --we are hiking somewhere that includes snowy mountains and green fields. On waking it reminded me of some of the scenes from the Lord of the Rings and some of the scenes in the Sandman comic in which Princess Barbara and her living toys fight the Cuckoo. It's pretty clear to me in the dream that I am the leader and that I am escorting this woman to something like my home.
Who is she? I think in the dream that I knew, but now that I am awake she most reminds me of the rather unpleasant ex-stepmother of my old roommate Abe, the woman who came to our Thanksgiving from Hell (the year before we had had a wonderful Thanksgiving) when Abe couldn't make it to his girlfriend's, now his wife's, Thanksgiving and we hosted Abe's horrible father (a holy roller/ engineer who divorced this wife when she couldn't give him any children, and married a fourth wife twenty-five years his junior) pretty much on our own. I hated Abe's father but I didn't much like her either.
But I didn't dislike the woman in the dream; I think I rather identified with her. The hike was very painless for me, not strenuous at all, nor was it for her, and when I brought her into the tall oak rooms of the house I called home in the dream, she thanked me and looked at me expectantly but oddly, as if she now had no reason to be in this house and why had I brought her here? but that if I were to leave her now it was more or less what she expected from life.
Then I left the house and "rejoined" someone who was waiting for me. He was also a stranger to my waking self, but he was young and gorgeous: taller than me, thin and in good shape, and with a great Latino-ish complexion (no darker than, say, Dean Cain) and features (one of those little noses, not one of those eagle noses). I most vividly remember that he had either put gel in his hair somewhat inexpertly, to make it stick up, or he had an amusingly bad case of bed head. He was just hanging up on the cell phone when I came out and greeted him. He looked happy to see me.
It took my mind off the election for a while in the shower--
10:19 AM
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