What I find really fascinating is observing people struggle with feelings they find unacceptable. One often experiences emotions one knows are wrong and shameful yet these feelings refuse to go away. In order to make them more tolerable, people attribute these unacceptable beliefs to others and argue with them passionately.
“So are you saying XXX?” they bellow in the face of an unsuspecting bystander who has no idea what they are on about. “You are a vicious animal! How can you be so cruel!”
The vituperation is not really meant for the bystander. It is the dark hateful part of themselves they are trying to repudiate in this way.
See the fascinating discussion we’ve been having in the most recent post in the How We’ll Do You Know series. Several people have erupted in passionate rants against those who want the minimum wage to be abolished. Their need to distance themselves from those who exploit the poorest members of our society was so intense that they projected the discomfort they feel around the barely surviving minimum wage workers onto me. As an immigrant, I’m always the most convenient target of blame for the poverty of the most dispossessed people in society.
The powerful urge to find a scapegoat for the disturbing images of US poverty makes people search for the extraneous, foreign body within their society that can be blamed for all of the existing ills.
“We cannot possibly be the ones who messed this up so badly,” they tell themselves. “We are good and virtuous and we don’t even believe in social classes. There must be an alien presence here that is causing all this.” Once this facile explanation is found, one can rest comfortably in the knowledge that one has fulfilled one’s duty by revealing who the real enemy is.
This is a neat mental trick American Liberals love and practice in a way no Conservative ever does. If we had more militant Liberals who are unapologetic about their beliefs, this wouldn’t happen. But instead Liberalism often gets reduced to the blabby privilege- scratching exploration of vague feelings of guilt.
I’m so used to this that this isn’t even annoying any more. It is simply funny. I’ve seen people stretch their imagination to the limits to convince themselves that the spoiled entitled brats they so hate can be found in the mirror a lot easier than on my blog.
Clarissa's Blog 
“As an immigrant, I’m always the most convenient target of blame for the poverty of the most dispossessed people in society.”
Story of my life. Everybody’s so moral and on a self-improvement drive, but nearly all of their self-improvement efforts are vacuous steam or attained through extreme modes of projection.
As for me, my level of being scapegoated is so extreme that people just ignore me when I point this out.
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The funniest thing is that there is never even a gleam of realization that all this rage is completely misplaced. Isn’t it obvious that I couldn’t have caused any of these problems?
It must be hard to live with such poor insight into one’s own emotional states.
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Once you see through all their strange projections (which might have been easier for you to do than I), you realize that these are very inept people who are angry at how little they control in life. They go in for projections to compensate them for a lack of power, even in the form of a basic understanding of life’s principles.
There are people who want to live without being harmed and also, (because harming others does harm to one’s self image), without harming others. Don’t be deceived that they really want to live for others or to help them. They have to do what it takes to protect their self-image as harmless and good people, but that it not the same as having wisdom, courage, or the capacity to do good.
I think that so long as such people can get away with projecting their worst attributes into others, they create a psychological buffer (at the expense of innocent others) and do not need to have any insight into themselves.
When we remove ourselves — that is, our psychological buffer field — from the situation, we return them to themselves as they actually are.
Live and let die, I say.
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Anti-immigrants liberals? I’m surprised.
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This is quite an interesting post. I think you’ll find this article I wrote in my blog quite interesting: http://disaffectedamerican.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/how-the-democrats-and-republicans-dupe-their-bases/
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