House of Eratosthenes

Okay, so what’s going on in the heads of the big-government people? That’s what I’d really like to know. Do they see some evidence in the shutdown that maybe, just maybe, the Tea Party is right, and the “have government take care of everything (until the day comes it isn’t taking care of jack squat)” might not be the right way to go?

Or…are they just blaming “extremist GOP members of Congress holding the country hostage” for it all. Because if they’re doing that, all the way from the frontal lobes to the brain stem and every synapse in between…the rest of us would then be forced to conclude…

Big government advocacy == big ego. And, big ego == advocacy for big government. Synonymous relationship.

I’m having more thoughts about this, which is a sign that this thought is a journey and not a destination. That, in turn, would mean that it belongs here at the blog, and not over there.

The ancillary thought I’m having about this is about the irony. It’s rather obvious, isn’t it? “Ego” is Latin for “I.” As in…I’ve been wondering about this for a very long time. Love of government, I’ve learned over the years, is not really love of anything at all. It is loathing. It is fear. It is an instinctive revulsion against the idea of anyone identifiable doing anything significant.

I say “identifiable.” Barack Obama, and a few others, can go ahead and do amazing big things and get & “deserve” credit for getting those things done. To these Nervous Nellies, Obama is not identifiable. He is a shining face in a shrine…or on a fake American flag. They won’t meet Him, ever, and if they ever do, they won’t feel the burden of being compared with Him. Mortals aren’t supposed to do the things the deities do. So what they really seek to do, is place all definable achievement outside the realm of the expected — for them, and by extension, for any of their true peers. They live in a world in which “real” people aren’t supposed to do things.

Let’s expound on that a bit, to be fair, since some of them are indeed hard workers. The distinction upon which we cogitate here has to do with milestones. “Real” people do work, the way a slug crawls upon the ground…or would, if the slug didn’t have to eat anything. Every hour of work done is like a gallon tin of vegetable oil, strictly non-exceptional, identical to the hour/gallon that came before, and will come afterward.

So the irony is: I would expect someone with a huge, fragile ego to have the opposite problem. Large ego should mean: Living, to excess, in a world of “I will do this because I can’t rely on anyone else to do it.” These sad sacks seem to live in a world color-photo-negative reversed from that: I can’t get it done, and since you’re like me (or should be like me) you can’t be counted on to do it either. So let’s have government do it. To those of us who can point to many examples of the government screwing something up, dropping the ball, twisting the mission around into one of just being a general pain-in-the-ass — they cannot offer a substantive rebuttal. They just snark and distract. It’s truly surreal. You can’t help wonder if they ever had to wait in line at the DMV. The most they do by way of response is make some kind of remark about “right wing echo chambers.” Look for excuses to reject the information. So they’re not really placing faith in government, they’re just restraining their faith from being placed in anything else. “Government should do it” really means “I don’t want anyone else doing it.” Either way, government should have exclusive permission to do it. All of it.

Until, as I wrote in the parentheses, government grinds to a halt like it just has. Then what? Going by their rhetoric, the answer is to just blame Republicans for everything not going their way. How far does that go?

If I presume it isn’t an act, and the thought stretches downward and inward, toward the very core of their brains, we’re left with less of an actual “narrative” or conclusion, and more of a string of silly nonsense that simply can’t exist in my universe. I can’t grok with it. I mean, give it a try: We have these bad, bad Republicans in Congress who are all at fault for monkey-wrenching to a halt this good-government machinery that I need to be chugging away and attending to my…everything. Those darn Republicans are such idiots. The machinery upon which my life depends, upon which I want all facets of my existence to depend, has been stopped by these idiots.

Do I want to have every facet of my existence depend on running machinery that can be stopped by idiots? Do you? Do they? I think it safe to say most of us wouldn’t want that.

Tentative conclusion: Ego is the problem, but the issue is not the ego’s size, rather its delicacy. Like a balloon inflated beyond reasonable limits, their ego has become fragile.

They say they’re all about “hope.” That ship has sailed; it is fear that motivates them.

I think it’s ego in the Freudian sense. Quoting wiki quoting Freud:

“[The ego] serves three severe masters … the external world, the super-ego and the id… Thus the ego, driven by the id, confined by the super-ego, repulsed by reality, struggles … [in] bringing about harmony among the forces and influences working in and upon it, [and readily] breaks out in anxiety — realistic anxiety regarding the external world, moral anxiety regarding the super-ego, and neurotic anxiety regarding the strength of the passions in the id.

They know their mental picture of the world isn’t congruent with reality, so they can either change their mental picture, or avoid reality. The various ways of avoiding reality are Freud’s neuroses.

I’m not a shrink and I don’t play one on teevee, but I’ve noticed that most if not all liberal behaviors make sense if you replace “government” with “ideal Daddy” and “Republicans” with “actual Daddy.” They don’t want the nanny state (and we’re doing the conservative cause a disservice by using this term); they want the Daddy State.
- Severian | 10/16/2013 @ 08:01
Yeah…I remember someone on a short-lived sitcom back in the seventies, sparked a laugh-track moment when he whined to excess about “everyone telling me what to do all the time, I’m so sick of people telling me what to do…” (pregnant pause) “…what should I do?”

It’s always nice to have a better understanding of what human foibles are costing us 17 trillion dollars…
- mkfreeberg | 10/16/2013 @ 08:10
I know I sound like a broken record on this point, but this is why I really do fear (and expect) some kind of quasi-fascism here in the next few decades. We’ve raised at least two entire generations who not only don’t want freedom, but actually fear it. Thanks to self-esteem, they believe bending the knee is empowering. Thanks to liberal pseudo-intellectualism, they think knuckling under is what smart people do.

Erich Fromm and Theodore Adorno got it basically right. They thought they were describing conservatives, of course, but if the last few decades have taught us anything, it’s that you can’t spell “liberal” without P-R-O-J-E-C-T-I-O-N.
- Severian | 10/16/2013 @ 08:20

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Five Ton Flatbed Truck of Ego IronyWednesday, October 16th, 2013

Five Ton Flatbed Truck of Ego Irony
Wednesday, October 16th, 2013