Kelp Pickles

 The other evening over dinner, my sister was explaining to me some of the theories of the marriage counselor behind the hit show Couples Therapy. In my sister's telling, the doctor's core contention is that all friction in marriage (and other relationships) comes from encountering radical otherness. We get angry with other people when they do or say things—react to certain stimuli—in ways we cannot imagine responding ourselves. "Why are you doing that?" 

"Case in point," said my brother-in-law, picking up something from the counter. "Why do we suddenly have kelp pickles in our kitchen?" My sister commended him for reacting to this otherness more or less the way you are supposed to—that is, with curiosity. "See"—she said—"you at least asked a question about it. You didn't just respond with fear and hostility. You weren't instantly like 'how could you have wasted money on kelp pickles?'"

(No one was moved by this conversation to eat a kelp pickle.)

But why does mere difference often trigger hostility and lead to a breakdown in communication? It's a question we encounter time and again in society—why is mere nonconformity to the societal norm treated as a threat? Why, not so long ago, were many heterosexual married couples convinced that same sex marriage would somehow cheapen or endanger their own marriages? 

Why—today—is so much of MAGA persuaded that no one threatens their way of life so much as childless adults? (In the Times piece linked here, one right-wing influencer after another—following the lead of Charlie Kirk—finds new ways to denigrate anyone who chooses to live outside of a patriarchal heterosexual procreative nuclear family.)

Why do the J.D. Vances of the world need so much for other people to validate their own life style by choosing to live the same way they do? Why are they not content merely to dictate "laws for themselves and not for me"? "And if my ways are not as theirs," why can they not simply "mind their own affairs"? Why must they instead always "make me dance as they desire / With jail and gallows and hell-fire"? (To quote a great poem by A.E. Housman.)

Freud provides part of the explanation of this phenomenon. As he writes in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, human "self-love[, which] works for the preservation of the individual [...] behaves as though the occurrence of any divergence from his own particular lines of development involves a criticism of them and a demand for their alteration." (Strachey trans.) 

In other words, the J.D. Vances of the world can't "mind their own affairs," because in their view: we started it. They think the "cat ladies" criticized them long before they criticized them. Maybe they didn't criticize them with words. But they criticized them with actions. 

Any nonconformist is seen to say to those practicing the societal archetype: perhaps your archetype is not as necessary or inevitable as you think it is. Perhaps it is not the one and only path to salvation. 

They thereby thrust the conformist into a position of unwonted self-consciousness. They force them to consider whether there are in fact values to be attained through alternative ways of living. 

And they don't like this. It's very uncomfortable; so they react with hostility and rejection to the nonconformist. They must to keep their certainty accuse / All that are different of a base intent, to quote Yeats. 

And so, people who belong to a dominant group will always have to suppress a certain repugnance and rage when they see people departing from the norm. We see the nonconformist as uttering some nonverbal indictment upon our own way of life. 

Many of us, in mature life, learn to master these emotions—but not all. And so, in organized society, one still occasionally hears about such despicable phenomena as grown men pulling Muslim women's hijabs off their heads, or yelling at someone because they are wearing a Covid mask. 

If a gentile sees someone wearing a yarmulke, say—part of the repressed pre-conscious mind always thinks: "what, are you saying I ought to be doing that as well? Are you saying there's something wrong or disrespectful about me not wearing one?" 

Nothing makes the general public more angry or uncomfortable than seeing a lone person seated with their hands on their lap while the National Anthem plays. 

And much of our national fracas about mask-wearing during the pandemic really came down to the fact that everyone who didn't wear a mask saw those who did as casting an implied judgment on their own risk tolerance, and vice versa. 

It's funny that Freud would make this point about people hating each other because of their differences, though—since it is also to Freud that we owe the insight that people also hate each other for their similarities. It was Freud, after all, who pointed out the phenomenon of the "narcissism of minor differences"—that is, the fact that groups will often have the greatest conflict with one another when they are actually closely-related. 

After all, people who are quite similar to one another are more likely to perceive each other as rivals. They are competing for similar social roles. Whereas radically different people may be better able to leave each other alone—to "mind their own affairs"—because they occupy different lanes—different positions in the social order. (It is a commonplace of politics, after all, that people resent and envy billionaires or aristocrats much less than they do a middle-class person like themselves who wins the lottery.)

The two observations are not so incompatible as they may seem, however. If people compete most with people closest to themselves in the social hierarchy, and therefore resent most the people who are most similar to themselves—and, at the same time, they tend to view any departure from their own traits or behavior as an implied criticism of themselves—then you can just imagine the fury that is unleashed when we encounter someone who is almost like ourselves—but not quite. 

That is why minor differences, in particular—in Freud's theory—are suck a sticky business. 

It has been observed before that MAGA—for all their railing against the liberal elite—is a movement of people who attended the same universities and competed for the same kinds of prestige jobs as that much-resented elite. As one political commentator recently observed: MAGA is a war waged, not against the person on the other side of the country—but on the person down the dormitory hall. 

But the example of the couples therapy show suggests that this conflict of minor differences may not be as hopeless or intractable as it appears. People daily manage to overcome and suppress their aversion to kelp pickles—to remind themselves to greet the kelp pickles on the shelf with curiosity rather than outrage.

Indeed, all of liberal pluralistic society is an exercise in gradually mastering the inherent urge to yuck someone else's yum; which is why liberalism requires infinitely more discipline than any other social formation known to man.

The people who cannot tolerate pluralism—the people who want to railroad us all into an orthodoxy of creed or lifestyle—who find they cannot coexist on terms of neutrality and equality with "cat ladies," feminists, trans people, queers, heretics, religious minorities—often accuse liberalism of being undisciplined, amoral, and "permissive." Nothing could be more absurd or incompatible with the truth. 

To the contrary—as Ortega y Gasset once put it: "Liberalism [...] is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak."

It is MAGA, by contrast, that is undisciplined. It is the J.D. Vances of the world who have failed in self-mastery. It is they who have let the Id out of the cage in which the liberal superego—which is just another name for civilization—managed to tame and confine it. 

And no wonder. Liberalism asks a great deal of maturity and decency of people. "Hence, it is not to be wondered at that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it"—as Ortega y Gasset went on. "It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth."