Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [65]
Or . . . you may deny the opposing belief that it’s wrong to judge someone by the color of his skin. That is the approach that Herrnstein and Murray took in The Bell Curve. They embraced racial generalizations and rejected the idea that racial generalizations are wrong. Judging by the book’s popularity, their strategy for dealing with the cognitive dissonance of racial prejudice is a common one.
But rejecting what Murray called the “Inequality Taboo”8 wasn’t easy, for aversion to negative racial generalizations is now deeply ingrained in the American conscience. To avert the psychological stress of championing such generalizations, you might need to find some way to rationalize your conclusions. You might, for example, try to prove that your prejudicial ideas are actually good for ethnic minorities by inventing a bizarre dystopia involving reservations for dull-witted black and brown people. You might further imagine yourself to be a courageous defender of freedom of thought who stands tall against the roar of the “white elite’s” dangerous dogma. And if Festinger’s theory was right, then you might also seek out social affirmation for your rationalizations. You might, for example, publish a book that goes well beyond statistical analysis to make a passionate case for and win converts to your bold racial generalizations.
The Intolerance Taboo
Now let’s suppose that your prejudice goes beyond purse hugging in the presence of a strange black man. Let’s suppose that deep down, you really hate those black people . . . or those brown people or those homosexuals or those Jews or those women or whomever it is that you’ve been taught that it’s wrong to hate. You’ve got some serious cognitive dissonance on your hands. You might be able to shrug off the Inequality Taboo that Murray mentioned, but there’s another weightier taboo that’s tougher to repudiate: the Intolerance Taboo. The Inequality Taboo is just a foothill in the Intolerance Taboo Mountains. In twenty-first-century America, no one wants to be a bigot. Bigots are mean and angry. They scream epithets and abuse minorities. They lynch black people and slaughter Jews. Bigots are bad.
So how does your conflicted mind untie the knot of contradiction? How do you admit your hate without admitting your bigotry?
One tactic is to reverse the equation. You project your hateful feelings onto the people you hate and those who aid them. You convince yourself that they hate you. Now you have justification for your hatred. You don’t hate them because they’re black or homosexual or Jewish, you hate them because they and their liberal allies hated you first. You hate them because they persecute you and your kind. You are not the bigot; you are the victim of bigotry. As Sigmund Freud wrote of Daniel Schreber, “He hates (persecutes) me, which will entitle me to hate him.”
This hypothesis presents an answer to the question we asked at the end of chapter 5: “Why would anyone want to be paranoid?” Developing a fear of persecution by minorities, and also by liberals on behalf of minorities, is a way of expunging the sin of bigotry. Paranoia allows people to hate with a clear conscience—it lets them convince themselves that their enemy deserves to be hated. And by providing a reason to hate, paranoia reduces the painful cognitive dissonance between feeling intolerant and believing intolerance is wrong. Reducing the pressure of cognitive dissonance feels good. It feels so good that people selectively expose themselves to right-wing fearmongers; they watch and read and listen to the men and women who make them feel so pleasantly afraid. Moreover, like the UFO cultists, they don’t challenge the ideas that make them feel good. Their confirmation biases lead them to embrace absurd theories without question. And the more severe the cognitive dissonance