Expectations Collide

14Dec09
This blog has been in something of a holding pattern in December. I've done a great deal of thinking about the direction I'd like to take the blog in, and my organizing/activist efforts as a whole.


I think I know now where I need to be.

I've also been thinking about some of the relationships in my life. I have some family members who are liberals. Hell, I have a friend who'd probably be a full communist if it didn't require such a substantial time commitment. As I've become more politically active and less able to hold my tongue when one of these people plays fast and loose with the truth, my relationships with these people have become increasingly strained. They have poor respect for my opinions or boundaries and at times I've been subject to their disrespect, resentment, passive aggression, and even outright spite without fully knowing why.

I've been thinking about when I was reading Brett's blog a while back, and came across a link to an editorial about wishful thinking and the political left. You should read it for yourself, so I won't recount the entire thing here. But basically the author points out two kinds of people in this world; those who observe how the world functions and build their world view based off of what they observe (materialists), and those who think there's a greater purpose to things and discard what they observe in favor of how things "should" be (teleologists).

It is a powerful contrast.

Once I read that it got me to thinking about a thing Brett mentioned in a previous entry. It was phrased differently than what I'd previously heard. But it's something that I recognized from, of all places, my post traumatic stress group:

"Anger is what happens when one's outcomes differ from one's expectations."

Which is why there's so much friction with some of the people in my life, I've realized that they're Teleologists. They're stuck in the way they think things "SHOULD" be rather than how they are. While I as a Materialist look at the history of Liberalism and Conservatism in the 20th century and can see their various failures for what they are, none of that matters to them. How the world really works doesn't matter to them. What matters is that they "know" their ideas are how things should be, and that whoever doesn't share their ideas is the bad guy. The person who must be at fault for the failure of those ideas. Black and White, Cowboys and Indians.

They see themselves as intelligent people, with a right world view, and everything would be just hunky dory if the right wingers weren't always foiling their plans. They struggle with the idea that anyone else could be intelligent and yet not share their view. I will also say without malice that these liberals I know all have another thing in common, that they're all in some level of financial crisis. Not because of the economy or bad luck, but because of their own poor decisions and flawed view of what the world "owes" them.

So because I'm the bad guy, any success that I may have is an affront, not in keeping with their world view. They're experiencing cognitive dissonance from so wholeheartedly believing that their idea of how the world "should" work is reality, then observing things as they really are and noting the contradiction. Liberal angst, a feeling of victimization and anger, are a result of their highly charged emotional state.

Their Liberalism is like a hypochondriac's mental illness.

That illness has made these people a toxic presence in my life that does not add value to my days, it only detracts. Like a toxic chemical I know the only way to avoid sickness is by minimizing contact with the offending substance. To allow them to bother me is giving them claim upon my life and my time. That they do not have.