Reply #15: Insecurity...is it the cognative mother of social motivation and [View All]

actualization, and politics?

It is a part of the human condition, and we need to understand it.

When presented with something that you and I percieves as risky we try to bring that thing "under control" constrain it, or somehow reduce insecurity about it by providing a sense of management of the risk.

Everyone including the left has this aspect to their personality. Conservative personalities really do seem not only to be very sensitive to very different anxieties, but they also seem to rely on very different solutions for managing insecurity.

On a qualitative level we are different mostly in what we view as creating insecurity and the way we view the management techniques impact on insecurity.

The left sees pollution and global warming as a threat, we seek government and international protection from the polluting ways of industries, communities, and individuals.

The current flock of republicans fear people who don't believe as they do, look like them, people who think in complex and abstract rather than simple terms like them, or respect the same authorities as them. They construct things like the Patriot Act to manage their insecurity. They fear weakness and insist on global hegemony in military and economic domains as the means to be secure.

We fear the invocation of a police state, the loss of civil rights, we fear the Patriot Act, we want to manage that risk by having 16 provisions of the Act struck. We fear the role of empire and the inevitable conflicts maintaining hegemony must bring. They fear bad outcomes and use them to justify the bad means which we fear. They fear paying taxes for public institutions thus reducing their profits, we fear their profits stripping support from institutions we see as necessary.

What sort of difference does understanding politics as the management of insecurity mean to progressives?

We do not need to be _strong on the military_,we do not to be bullyingly tough on the world. What we need to do is to understand and apply solutions that reduce insecurity. As much as we reduce insecurity we gain support for the methods we propose for managing it.