The "Othering" of Ted Cruz

Andrew Stiles writes of the practice of "Othering" -- which is really just a primitive impulse to say that anyone who is Not Like Us is almost certainly a savage monster capable of undreamed horrors -- and how Progressives have embraced it as a political Standard Operating Procedure.

The biological purpose of "Othering" -- dehumanizing, actually -- is to shut down all empathy towards the target so that a maximalist war can be fought against that target without any human fellow-feeling weakening the killer instinct.

It makes sense to dehumanize one's enemy in some contexts -- War, of course, most famously. And for the two to three hours of a sporting match. Football players, for example, fill their heads with notions of how their opponents have demeaned them and so on to get some good warrior game faces on. (Of course, football players also tend to shut down all that nonsense after the game is over; they don't move on to the next game still thinking about how awful and arrogant their last opponents were.)

But Progressives have decided, collectively, to just treat their fellow Americans as the dehumanized Other 24/7. Not just before an election, mind you, but every single day of every single year.

And they do so while chanting "No H8," their limited intellects, conditioned by those who manipulate them into hatred, not capable of seeing the irony.

posted by Ace at 01:22 PM

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