Turns out it’s not so complicated after all. With relatively minor qualifications, aggressive behavior is driven by fear, especially in males. We can to some extent learn to react more constructively (less abusively) to fear, but chaotic, threatening, unpredictable, unsafe environments will always elicit what we call “fear” and its associated adaptive responses, like aggression and controlling behaviors, because it is what allowed our ancestral survival and why we are here.

Are we anxious, fearful? Read the news, look around. The signs are everywhere – from obesity rates to gun ownership to alcohol use to “stress management” to growth in pharmacological fixes. Anxiety Nation.

Not that we have so much to be anxious about really, just things like getting really sick and not having enough insurance, or getting downsized and wondering how to provide for the kids and pay the bills without losing your home and your dignity, not having the resources needed for survival, or your kid getting sick and . . . . all conditions we seem to stoically accept as part of capitalist, free-market . . . . .

Wait. I’m so sorry. I didn’t really mean that, didn’t really mean to go there. In any case that’s not allowed. So sorry.

I find it disturbing that H., albeit clearly in distress over the loss of heroine Starbuck, would so reflexively and unselfconsciously (just like a human) displace her anger to Baltar, one who has suffered greatly. Has he betrayed humankind? Or uneasily accepted the reality of a dialectic of which Cylons are an element? More traitor than the pathetically weak Adama, who would recklessly risk humankind for a single individual, if that individual happened to be his own son or “daughter”?

No laughing matter.

Mr. Greenwald is astute to note the underlying psychological processes driving these attacks, yet might go farther to deconstruct their role in what is generously taken more generally as “our political dialogue”. What may seem “psychologically warped” and “depraved” is completely understandable and predictable as the need by males in our culture to split off and disown what we are trained to fear and disallow – any feminine traits which would surely result in humiliation and loss of status and security if owned.

It’s easy and tempting to react to and pathologize the likes of Ms. Coulter, Mr. Taranto Dr. Paglia and others, but their fears and defensive projections are themselves products of much larger and deeper forces. As distasteful as it may feel to contextualize their behavior, the only way out, ultimately, has less to do with what passes for political discourse, and more to do with fundamental social reconstruction that would normalize and support the healthy integration of maleness and femaleness in all individuals, something Mr. Greenwald appears to courageously model.

The cost of not challenging an orthodox constructed social reality that punishes such integration is, as many are noting, the real consequences of low intellectual functioning that comes with impulsivity, and aggressive and defensive reactions, all masquerading as discourse and ideology.

Followed a bit farther, Mr. Kamiya’s analysis may lead to a view of the phenomenon “conservatism” not as ideology or ideas at all but, as hinted at, a means to gain power and control by preying on fear.

There is (barring serious psychopathology) a nagging anxiety that accompanies the uncertainty stemming from arrested moral development and associated antisociality, or unexamined and unprincipled behavior – something like Am I good? Am I OK?

Conservatism sells a false sense of escape from this anxiety using a lie, a classic psychological defense mechanism (reaction formation) in which an undesired part of self (venal, antisocial, untrustworthy) is protected against, denied, by adopting the façade and role of its opposite: moral, upstanding, righteous. We allow this process, this dog-and-pony show, to be constructed as ideology or political discourse.

The protectors, perpetuators and beneficiaries of inherently unjust and oppressive systems (capitalism, patriarchy, classism) insistently construct themselves as moral for good reason. Like church attendance, it can be deconstructed as See? I am good. which deconstructs as I cannot tolerate the anxiety stemming from the nagging awareness of my antisociality.

Tough choice: work through the discomfort of guilt and the fear of needed changes in behavior, or avoid all that and get instant relief by simply labeling yourself the “moral majority” and then continue to reap the fruits of your antisocial behavior.

It’s a hell of a product. And a bargain, as Mr. Kamiya noted.

as everyone is to some degree, you are vulnerable to anxiety. You medicated the symptoms for 13 years with nicotine, but all meds have their side effects, and you wisely gave up smoking, but didn’t deal with the anxiety. You instinctively substituted another substance (food) to manage the anxiety, but it has side effects as well (get it – “side” effects? damn!). Unmanaged worry (hyperarousal) set you up to do battle with (that is, overreact symptomatically to) every antigen that came along. Yoga helped because relaxing somatically calms the mind.

Anxiety is very effectively helped by cognitive-behavioral therapy. It’s no big deal, and it’s not about “mental illness”. It’s about re-working how things are evaluated and interpreted, like, whether the vicious ranting of petulant letter writers is really about you or about them; or oh, say, the importance of a mother’s approval to a 31-year-old.

Rebecca? At 31 years of age, you had to lie to your mother about the yoga injury, or else . . . . . . . . . ?

Autonomy and anxiety tend to be inversely related.