Letters to the Editor
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Not to oversimplify or overgeneralize
An individual's self-identity is the base reference model for all social references and relations. Although our inclination is to use categories such as religion, politics and ethnicity to describe both individual and group identity traits, it is only our own ethnocentrism that makes them seem sufficient to the task.
If a person is taught to look outside themselves for their identity, they will find themselves forever subjected to the vagaries of the marketplace. They will live in a constant state of cognitive dissonance. Today's "untermenschen" is tomorrow's "ubermenschen." "Eurasia is the enemy. Eurasia has always been the enemy." External identity is custom-made for hierarchy and control. It doesn't matter if you are liberal or conservative. The result is the same. Today's revolutionary is tomorrow's counter-revolutionary.
If a person is taught to look to themselves for their identity, none of the categories of external identity will dominate. By definition they cannot. Internal identity tends to strip away everything until the only thing left is the unity of being, a philosophical term for empathy. That individual will not identity with a movement or group that is not inclusive and collaborative.
A good example of external versus internal identity reference, and one that is relevant to this discussion, are the growing calls by the Right for genocide against our enemies in the Mideast and calls for protection (or accelerated genocide in the case of Ann Coulter) of the innocents against whom our enemies are committing genocide in Africa. This US and THEM, continually foregrounded in the MSM, is very much intended to pit Christianity against Islam, to portray our involvement in the Mideast as a war of cultures, a battle for the preservation of democracy. The only reason this propaganda has succeeded to the extent that it has is because in the US, religion is publicly identified through the MSM with a specific form of a specific religion, fundamentalist Christianity. Although Christianity constitutes one-third of the world's population (approximately 2.1 billion) and is the religious preference of approximately 85% of the US population, fundamentalist Christianity only represents 25% of the US population. That Christianity is so easily placed in the service of US geo-politics says less about Christianity than it does about the failure of US society to see and decry the machinations of those people who use external identity references to religion, politics and capitalism as a collective, ersatz definition of "freedom."
It should come as no surprise that the increasing cognitive dissonance is overwhelming the abilities of many people on the Right to cope. And it should not be a surprise to anyone that the THEM in the Right's worldview has grown to include almost everyone in the world as a result. When you are in a spot like that, genocide begins to make more and more sense. Nuclear war makes more and more sense. And totalitarian control of your own country by a single person (if that person is on your side) makes the most sense of all.