@snood,
Quote:Yes... despite all their poisonous mischief, it's still very important for [conservatives] to see themselves as not only right and good, but somehow pure.
That's
such an interesting aspect to the psychology and to the dynamics of how groups function.
Psychologically, simplicity can be very appealing and convenient. If you can manage to clasp onto a certainty that you have the core truth of things in hand, the puzzles and confusions and complexities are no longer (or at least much less) a bother. And we see this all the time in religious or political extremists. The common use of cliches by these sorts of people is one obvious manifestion - the simplistic cliche avoids the need to keep on thinking and is effectively a
substitute for thinking. The person offering up, "God works in mysterious ways" thinks he is thinking but it marks the spot where he has actually stopped thinking.
In terms of group dynamics or operations, the most fundamental element in that is agreement. Where there is no agreement, there's no group. And the solidity of the agreement(s) among members is what determines strong (or weak) group cohesion. "Wishy-washy" = bad.
Then, where we see that personality/psychological type described in the first graph with the dynamics described in the second, that's where we get the really ugly human social behaviors - the al qaeda crowd or Spanish Inquisition thing. They are highly aggressive in the us/them framing, in demands for "purity" and they are always highly punitive. The conservative response to, for a contemporary example, transgender people, emerges from this stuff.
