Out of this week’s readings, I found Bettina Muenster and David Lott’s “The Social Psychology of Humiliation and Revenge” to be the most engaging and insightful. Instead of relying on hyper-theoretical language that cannot be proved empirically, the duo focuses on the implications of humiliation using explicit links between the determining factors that relate to control, rejection and social exclusion.
Particularly, I found it reassuring that the Surgeon General singles out social rejection as a more influential cause of violence than gang membership, poverty, or drug use. Instead of placing blame on external forces, like the media, this viewpoint embraces a perceptive stance on the nature of violent acts. Through cursory research in school shootings, and based on the chapter, it seems that out of many factors, social rejection links perpetrators of school shootings more directly together than any other element, like a shared preference for first-person shooters or a tendency for animal cruelty. In light of the spate of media coverage in regards to several homosexual teens committing suicide, I believe that this dialogue is increasingly relevant. Unfortunately, discourse on bullying and exclusion is often simplified or rejected for more sensational ponderings. Ultimately, cliques and the inherently cruel social constructs of teens and preteens do far more to encourage misanthropic and violent reactions than any video game or television show, regardless of how much the Family Research Council and its reactionary ilk carelessly imply a causal connection.
David M. Terman’s approach to analyzing paranoia in “Fundamentalism and the Paranoid Gestalt” was also compelling, mostly due to his reliance on the concept’s foundation in neurobiology. I feel that his reference to human’s fear of snakes, while concise, was far more appropriate than the jumbled, pretentious jargon of Melanie Klein, and to some extent, Freud. Klein’s nonsensical meanderings about a “paranoid-schizoid position” and its link to “good” and “bad” breasts posed no conclusive statements or relevant material. I literally did not understand the link between breasts, malevolence, sadism, and how those concepts pertain to paranoia.
Acceptance of the fundamentalist mindset requires that rage and paranoia be regarded as intrinsic psychological phenomena, present across many spectrums of personality and sociological order. The group, however, is exempted from these categorizations. Though it is capable of unleashing great effect (and sometimes great harm) upon the individuals who compose it, it is devoid of all impulse and emotion. “The group does not have a psychological structure,” writes David Terman, “nor does it have some kind of individual nature.” When acts of horror are perpetrated by groups guided by a fundamentalist psychology, it is the members’ will that was acted out – and not the will of the meta-entity they all belong to. The individuals are left as both culpable perpetrators and victims of a poisoned social structure. Paranoia (whatever its prehistoric uses for survival might be) is best served by a guru to a room of like-minded followers: rather than transference of this emotional archetype from individual to collective, the collective is often able to imbue each of its members with a thoroughly paranoid gestalt. 