By Stephen L. Hall
It was fully my intention that last week’s post regarding Myopia be a stand alone piece, complete and whole within itself concerning our propensity to view the world through the limited perspective of our experience and surroundings. It was about how we project upon the larger world the distortions of our personal experience.
However, the following days convinced me that the article was only half of the picture that I was trying to paint. Ergo, I would need at least another thousand words on that topic intimately connected to our perceptions, that of the human habit of succumbing to the psychological temptation of projection.
“Projection is a form of defense in which unwanted feelings are displaced onto another person, where they then appear as a threat from the external world. A common form of projection occurs when an individual, threatened by his own angry feelings, accuses another of harbouring hostile thoughts.”
The concepts are so intertwined and tangled that they are like a dysfunctional, abusive couple. Viewing the world as if what you are familiar is the universal state of reality, you see a stranger and project upon them those same negative emotions you are feeling. That, in turn, only enhances your conviction that everyone else in the world is like that.
We have witnessed this as a near constant refrain from leftists in the media, in politics, in colleges, and on the internet.
Antifa, short for anti-fascist, groups project their hatred and thirst for violence on political opponents calling anyone who disagrees with them “fascists” and accusing them of wanting to commit all kinds of violence against them. Having projected their violence upon their targets, the antifa thugs feel justified in committing violence to prevent the violence they only imagine will be used against them.
Democrats who have been caught repeatedly in numerous vote fraud scandals, including one woman who voted multiple times for Obama, along with voter registration problems.
But, when the election is lost, it is the Republicans who fixed the election, through Russian computer hacking or bad ballots and hanging chads or even the Supreme Court nefariously ruling in their favor.
Leftist complain that everyone on the right is so racist and sexist and fill-in-the-blank-ist that they speak in code words and dog-whistles so subtle that no one can even detect it but those same leftists. Those leftist having grouped everyone and everything in pigeon-holed categories of stereotyped identity politics.
This list, as many times before, could go on at some length about the plethora of projections engaged in by the left on a regular basis. But, the left are not the only ones who succumb to the allure of projecting their negative feelings and impulses upon others, so that they can blame outside forces for what they feel themselves.
Just as with the myopia of seeing the world through one’s own perspective can be somewhat countered by looking at the big picture; projection can be mitigated if one takes the effort to ascertain if their beliefs about “those” people is based upon objective evidence.
I learned a long time ago that if a person seeks to impugn another person’s motives, then that person has those very motives that they impute to another; i.e. they are projecting their motives or emotions onto the other person. I always suspect the person making the accusation rather than the accused for that very reason.
However, if a person is critical of another person’s actions, then they are being objective and they are pointing to actions or events which actually occurred. From these overt actions, a motive can be deduced. That is the proper way to assess a person’s motives.
People grow up on too many crime shows where they have decided that what is necessary to prove someone’s guilt is: means, motive, and opportunity. Hollywood leads people astray in their thinking way too frequently.
Means, motive, and opportunity are police concepts, not lawyer concepts. Having a reasons, or motive, can make one a suspect; it does not, however, convict someone of an offense. In a television show, it is easy to confuse suspicion with proof, particularly with the magical, omnipotent power of the script.
Having watched a sufficient number of courtroom television shows in my time, and yes, Night Court does too count, one thing was always rather both humorous and unsettling to me. There was no real lawyering going on in any of those shows. I know, it’s shocking, right? They were detective shows using lawyers as the detectives.
Iron Sides, Perry Mason, & Matlock did not win cases in court. They solved mysteries by finding the real killer, or thief, or other miscreant. They did not argue the lack of evidence against their client, they proved conclusively someone else actually did it. (LA Law was just a soap opera in a law office, don’t even try that.)
Thus, given that most people’s perception of law is just detective work, it is not surprising that the police concept of motive as a suspicion, rather than the lawyerly view of motive as a reasoned deduction, prevails upon the public consciousness.
That is why impugning an opponent’s motive in the court of public opinion through the media in every political issue is so effective. The people have been trained to look at motive as merely casting dispersions upon the suspect, the projection of the accuser not the deduction from objective actions.
They have also been trained to expect all of those suspicions to be conclusively proven within the hour before the last commercial break. No critical reasoning is required.
Critical reasoning is required to separate out fact from accusation, to deduce motive rather than to just assume it.
Conservatives want to throw grandma off of a cliff, throw poor people out in the street, pollute the environment, oppress women and minorities, make the rich richer an the poor poorer, and starve little children. That is what they WANT. Except, it isn’t. That is not only bad logic, it is outright stupid.
What it is, is a gross overstatement of the projection that leftists engage in that Conservatives want to favor their supporters over their opponents. Because leftist ‘want’ to help the poor, the elderly, the children, women, minorities, the environment, and fluffy bunnies, then anyone who would oppose them must be against those things.
Leftists want control, absolute control of everything. Therefore they project that unhealthy desire for control on their opponents. That is why they call their opponents “fascists” even though fascists were leftists. They fear that you are like them, that you would pass laws to undermine their political support by attacking their supporters directly.
Why does this marry so intimately with a narrow, myopic view of the world? Because, projecting their motives on their opponents reinforces the view that everyone is like that, like them. Their narrow circle and perspective is seen in everyone they meet.
In many ways, projection is for the person what myopia is for their community. The former is a reflection of themselves, the latter a reflections of the environment around them. It is why there can be good people in bad communities, and bad people in good communities. A person who can reason can see more than their own reflection and more than a mere reflection of their surroundings.
A criminal sees someone looking at them, and thinks they are looking to do something bad by projecting, and think that everyone is looking to do something bad, because everyone they look at they think is up to something. They project themselves, and then see themselves reflected everywhere back at them.
The political people do the same thing.
Good people also do the same thing. They hear of another person who needs help and see themselves in need of help. They would not lie, so they presume the other person would not lie either.
It is hard for good people to see the bad in others; it is hard for bad people to see the good in others. It is hard for the liar to think that another might tell the truth; but just as hard for an honest man to suspect a lie.
People associate getting older with getting cynical, thus presuming the bad in other people. Experience teaches that other people are not like us. We can become jaded, and a good person can start to think that bad prevails, but if one looks at the objective side of things, they will judge on facts, not speculation.
The broad picture prevents myopia; objectivity precludes projection; these are components of understanding reality when we do not get caught up in the details.
