The consensus on various areas of long-determined science is the canary in the coal mine here, but it makes crystal clear what the reactionary mind is reacting to. Climate science, vaccines, gender and sexuality science, even the refusal to engage with basic health information and sex ed in schools show what is essentially a fundamentalist avoidant behavior pattern.
While these can be branded as “anti-science” as an intellectual position, a skepticism of the scientific establishment, or a rejection of modern institutional systems in education or capitalism – ivory towers and Big Pharma, for example – the truth seems to be folded into a larger gestalt of overall avoidance of emotionally challenging ideas across the board, and a set of deflecting and avoiding maladaptive behaviors that inform and validate their political and personal identity.
As we look across the global Right in general, we see patterns of avoidance that begins with individuals, develop into cultures, and express as politics. As these movements grow, the easy path of avoidance gathers adherents and becomes reflex. Merging the ego boost of deflection with the facile ideology of “power words no”, it becomes clear that the attractiveness of this pathology transcends the individual and becomes a self-replicating response, just as individual avoidance is.
When we talk about avoidance it this sense, we are referring to a maladaptive response to two major triggers – fear and shame. This is not simply procrastination, or an unwillingness to engage on certain topics. This is a far deeper response set that is built to protect the individual from perceived harm. We are all avoidant to some degree, of course, it’s a basic safety system. It is when those systems are both cranked up to protect the sense of self itself, and expanded to include anything new or challenging that it becomes this extreme, problematic force that demands active repression and retaliation against a world seen fundamentally as hostile.
The emotional trauma of fear and shame is transfigured through action into the emotional utility of power fantasies and performative cruelty. Because at its core, what they are avoiding are their feelings of shame and fear, not just the trigger itself. So just staying out of politics isn’t going to work. They need to convert those feeling of shame and fear into feelings of power and punishment. This creates that gestalt of “punitive aggrievement” that we talk about so often with regards to the Right.
This is why they can’t just let Christopher Nolan do whatever he wants with The Odyssey, or just not watch The Acolyte, or SHe-Hulk, or any number of tantrum-inducing media. They have to do whatever they can to punish it out of the world forever. As long as it exists, their feelings of shame and fear will persist. We see this play out in decades of internet bullying from GamerGate to the “go woke, go broke” nonsense. These are the expression of a reactionary avoidant strategy that seeks to make the world safe for the mind that needs the comfort of a world with strict hierarchies and static values.
In talking to veterans, even peacetime non-combatants, we hear quite often that the hardest thing about adjusting to civilian life is the lack of social hierarchy – some form of “on base, I know instantly who to salute and who needs to salute me” is surprisingly common. This creates a safe social framework in which cues and nebulous rules don’t exist. It’s all laid out on the shoulder stripes.
We can extrapolate the affect of similar social structures in various civilian cultures in which strict and rigid social systems provide similar comfort – through race, through class, through in-group participation, etc. When you grow up knowing exactly where you stand, entering a larger culture in which those rules no longer apply can be scary and disorienting, whether this is in meatspace, such as moving to a new town or entering college, or online, where each space has its own hierarchical systems that need to be navigated.
This is increasingly damaging when those original systems privilege or prioritize the individual as the top of the social pyramid. Along with the fear of not knowing the rules comes the shame and rage at perceived loss of power and privilege. From the high school star quarterback to third string clipboard holder in college, or the prettiest girl in school to a mid, out of fashion woman in an office, these changes can be devastating to those who fail to navigate and adapt to new environments.
These are twee examples, but they’re also apt. And they stand in for larger systems of hierarchical power like white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism, all hierarchical systems that privilege the identities found on the Right. The perceived loss of social esteem going from an almost all white environment in which men are the dominant social force to a diverse, unhierachical urban environment means dealing with those privileges. When they are baked into your identity, that can prove to be extraordinarily difficult.
When that identity is largely external, idealized, and somewhat delusional – see our articles on narcissism and politics for more – without a robust internal sense of self that doesn’t depend on in-group participation to generate self and social esteem, this can be traumatic, and instead of reconciling the self from the external to the internal, one becomes incentivized to respond with hostility, anger, and avoidance to protect that external self from these “dangerous” gestalts that are challenging the fundamental way one sees oneself.
What you have then is a rootless identity ripped from its validating environment to one that challenges it at every turn. The instinct in this case is a kind of fight or flight, both well within the avoidant behavior playbook. You can either flee to a safe space, or destroy the things making the environment challenging. Or a bit of both.
The Right’s challenge to education leaps into stark focus here. Removing information that challenges white supremacy both protects their racial identity and punishes those who are challenging that identity in the first place. The Right’s assault on trans folks, specifically trans women, seeks to remove the challenge to their hierarchical gender social structure and punish those doing the challenging. Pete Hegseth’s absolutely insane testosterone program isn’t about reality, it’s about defending his own warped patriarchal ideal that he performs for social cachet. He performs a hypermale ideal that is absolutely an external, idealized, delusional identity – again, narcissism 101 – and anything that challenges that violent vision of masculinity must be both avoided and destroyed.
The utter destruction of reality itself by the Republican Party in the US, and globally by myriad Right Wing power centers, plays directly into this. “I reject your reality and substitute my own” was a Mythbusters catch phrase, but also perfectly describes what tools are used to protect these fragile, external, constructed hierarchical identities on both an individual level and as these avoidant identities form groups.
The appeal of groups and safe spaces for avoidant identities folds in perfectly. The constant creating of validating spaces, spaces where these folks can get new deflective tools and thought terminating cliches with which to “pwn the libs”, is a key component in the spread and reinforcement of these avoidant behaviors. Fox News and Conservosphere media spaces are not merely media power and propaganda, they’re validating spaces where these identities are reinforced and nourished, where deflective arguments and gotcha memes are doled out to provide these adherents the trifecta of validation, deflection, and punishment towards the offending gestalts.
“Pwning the libs” isn’t just an asinine type of sport politics, it’s the vital mechanism for these reactionary avoidants, protecting these various sociocultural and politicocultural identities. Add in religious institutions that provide the divine authority that works so well to dismantle argument, and the clear picture emerges. Every structure within Right Wing politics in designed to present an unbreakable wall between the fear and shame of responsibility for extraordinarily evil acts, beliefs, and politics, and the safe, warm hug of certainty and supremacy in a static system that privileges unearned in-group markers and imagined superiority.
When we wonder why so many people support politics that act directly against their own interests, this is the explanation that fits every version of this. Poor people supporting unhinged billionaires? Sure, that validates their class identity, and deflects fear of the unknown systems that would come with more class-supportive and collectivist policy. Women supporting religious tradwifery? Sure, it validates the comfort of the cage they have wrapped their identity around. They know the rules, and as they perform them, they are validated in their overall sense of self – even if all they are doing is performing on TikTok. It’s the externality that matters. They can believe they deserve power and liberation as an individual while still supporting the oppressive system because it’s the performance that gives the emotional utility, and that deflects the fear and shame of having to face and develop a real sense of self.
And this is the heartbreaking part – it all starts with the avoidance of doing the hard work to discover, define, and develop ones’ real sense of self. Internal, consistent, and intentional, while taking responsibility for ones’ behavior and impact. This is the fundamental rain that falls on all f us. And it’s just fucking easier to slap on an external costume that makes it easier to navigate your environment, especially if that costume also makes you feel good about yourself because it’s valued and validated by that environment.
Environments relying on the emotional utility of white supremacy, patriarchy, class status, religious participation, all these in-group markers and performances, to provide basic self esteem and punish any deviance from the dominant culture are always going to block the real growth of individual selves. The stronger these in-group ties are, and the more rigid and strictly they are enforced, the more likely that individuals will adopt avoidant strategies when confronted with challenging ideas, environments, or gestalts.
It is this fundamental refusal of responsibility that defines the Right, their framing of being “pro-responsibility” itself being a deflective device designed to avoid responsibility for repeated crashing of the economy, a long history of racism and sexism, the relentless pursuit of capital for no reason other than personal aggrandizement and the purchasing of power structures. Their policies have been repeatedly and resoundingly found to be failures, if not outright disastrous. Any sane person acting rationally would have abandoned them long ago.
But as they spiral into fascism, the avoidance itself fuels further cruelty and punitive aggrievement, as the impact of their literal evil becomes harder and harder to take responsibility for. The people who refuse to acknowledge 250 years of vaccine science because they refuse to see the true dangers of a global pandemic aren’t going to suddenly un-toxic themselves when children are dying in concentrations camps, put there by gestapo lunatics trying to ethically cleanse the country.
This is the real danger. No matter how bad it gets, they will refuse to acknowledge anything that challenges their identity, including the idea that they’re the good guys, that they can just refuse reality itself and get everything they need from memes and gotchas performed online. When Stephen Miller trots out the gas chambers, they will cheer and cheer and cheer, because that is the maladaptive structure of delusional avoidance in which they are locked.
Avoidance is a shockingly powerful strategy, and the emotional utility in every time one avoids something, especially if you can also punish it, destroy it, and then retreat to a crowd cheering you as a hero cannot be overstated. And this is what lies at the heart of this fascist firestorm that threatens to consume humanity as a whole.
We have real problems, and they require a stark look at our impact and our options. Republicans are never going to be partners in this. They will continue to elect idiot performing clowns that do nothing but deflect, avoid, and punish, just like their constituents. Same with the global Right. They are incapable of leadership or problem solving because they are pathologically incapable of taking responsibility for reality.
Kelsoland.Institute 