First the video version. Following that, the written piece.
Toward a Solution to a Psychological Mystery
Many times here in recent years, I’ve expressed my wonderment at a psychological phenomenon I’ve witnessed in these times.
The mystery can be stated this way: How is it possible for people who seem sincerely devoted to various good values to also give their fervent allegiance to a political force that is quite clearly animated by the very opposite of those values. (Those values might be grouped as 1) the moral teachings of Christianity, 2) the founding principles of American Democracy, and 3) the qualities of good and honorable character.)
As someone who has lived in the Shenandoah Valley for decades, I have known many people who embody that contradiction between what governs them in most of the domains of their lives – in their neighborhoods, churches, and other communities – and what, in this era, governs their choices in the American political realm.
In my ongoing efforts to understand this by now quite stark contradiction, I once ventured the image of “modules”—as if there were somehow different “wiring,” or different “programs” that get “plugged in” depending on what aspect of their lives people are engaged in. While that’s how it looks, it seems strange to conceive of human psychology in such terms, as though we can have a different personality, with different feelings and values, for different arenas, as if people had interchangeable electronic modules that “switch on” to govern how they’ll conduct themselves.
But however strange it seems to imagine human psychology working in that manner, there is a body of evidence from the human world – in psychological phenomena unrelated to politics -- that something of the sort actually does happen.
It can be easily shown that people act differently in the various roles they play in their lives: e.g. their role as child of their parents, parents of their children, friend to their friends, worker in their workplace, etc.
Social psychologists have long noted this (e.g. in Irving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.) To one degree or another, most of us can recognize that we are not the same person all the time, regardless of the situation we’re in and the role we’ve learned to play within it.
Sometimes these differences are quite dramatic. E.g. people have marveled at how the Germans who operated extermination camps by day could be loving family men when they went home at night. And I had an unpleasant experience once, when people who conducted their personal relationships with kindness and integrity operated by very different rules in their roles within their organization, as they conformed to the culture of the institution.
But whatever the degree of difference in the “personalities” that people bring to their different roles, the fact that people can be observed operating as if by different “programs” in those different roles proves the basic point: it is possible for people to contain within them more than one way of being, more than one set of rules, that enables them to be -- in some way -- “different people” depending on the situation they perceive themselves to be in.
Another proof-of-concept is still more dramatic. This is the rarer phenomenon of multiple personalities.
It is a fact that some people undergo such dramatic transformation of their individual selves that they end up containing more than one distinct identity within that single human person. (A phenomenon illustrated in the film, Three Faces of Eve.) These different identities may have different names. They can have apparently different physiologies (e.g. one identity having allergies that another does not). They may or may not be aware of each other’s existence. Their relations with each other can be complex, sometimes quite hostile.
(The precipitating cause of this break-up of the one person into such distinct identities is, apparently, some history of acute trauma that made it impossible for the person to integrate all they experienced.)
What such “multiples” prove– beyond any doubt that I can conceive -- is that the psyche has the capacity to have more than one “operating system.” If a person can contain more than one identity, which act and feel differently from each other, that surely demonstrates that we humans are capable of applying different values to different domains of our lives.
How that works in terms of what happens in the brain, I have no idea. (Perhaps the development of a personality can involve developing different patterns of neurons – or some other physical basis of our personalities – to engage depending on what part of a person’s repertoire gets triggered in a given circumstance: different roles, or even the famous “fight-or-flight” duality. Which seems very much like a matter of “modules.”)
History is full of examples of “decent” people adopting a less “decent” psychological process as a result of their membership in a group-culture that’s taught them less decent ways of being. (E.g. a lynch mob.)
I’ve observed for more than thirty years the operation of a propagandistic campaign that has taught people to perceive things in the political realm in certain ways, and have certain feelings about what they have been taught to perceive. By this means, it seems that a lot of “good” people have been “trained” to operate by different rules, and be governed by different values, in the political realm.
While, in other realms, their goodness remains largely undiminished.