The Psychology Behind the Birther Movement and its Corollaries

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Wed Aug-19-09 08:40 PM
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The Psychology Behind the Birther Movement and its Corollaries

The election of Barack Obama to the U.S. Presidency proves that racial prejudice among the American people has dissipated a tremendous amount since the days of slavery � much more so than many believed possible at the beginning of 2008. But at the same time, the desperate hysterical reaction against the Obama presidency among a sizable minority of Americans shows that rabid racism is still a formidable force to be reckoned with in our country.

President Obama receives about 30 death threats a day, a large proportion of them overtly racially tinged, representing a 400% increase over death threats received by his predecessor, and a higher rate than for any previous U.S. president. Worse yet, there is evidence of increasing racially motivated violence against African-Americans in our country.

THE BIRTHER MOVEMENT

The Birther Movement, which claims that Obama was not born in the United States � and therefore is not eligible for and not legitimately elected to the presidency � has come to symbolize this racial reaction against President Obama. A recent nation-wide poll shows that 11% of adult Americans believe that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, 12% are not sure, and 77% believe that he was born in the United States. But these opinions are greatly skewed demographically and by political party:

Percent of adult Americans who believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States:

Democrats: 93%
Independents: 83%
Republicans: 42%

Northeasterners: 93%
Midwesterners: 90%
Westerners: 87%
Southerners: 47%

Blacks: 97%
Latinos: 87%
Whites: 71%

Undoubtedly, the legacy of slavery in the United States has tremendous influence on these statistics. Slavery existed for a much longer period of time in the southern states than elsewhere in the United States. Humans have a need to justify their actions. In order to justify using other human beings as slaves, as well as the brutally violent treatment perpetrated by slave masters upon their slaves, the southern slave masters had to argue � to themselves and others � that their slaves were sub-human. That attitude became deeply ingrained in southern culture and was transmitted down through the generations.

The results of this attitude are shown in exit polls from the 2008 Presidential election, which showed Barack Obama losing the white vote to John McCain in all eleven states of the old Confederacy (by 14 to 78 percentage points in the individual states), while winning the white vote (19 states) or the white plus Hispanic vote (4 or 5 additional states) in most of the non-Southern states in the country.

Absence of evidence that Obama was born outside of the United States

As someone who is acutely aware that world history is permeated by dark conspiracies perpetrated by the powerful against the masses of ordinary people, that these powerful elites routinely make every effort to cover their tracks, and that that my own country is not immune to this phenomenon, I hate to reference mainstream sources on this issue. And I have to admit that I have virtually no expertise in judging the validity of birth certificates.

But the fact of the matter is that there has been NO credible evidence whatsoever to substantiate the claims of the birthers that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Hawaiian health officials have authenticated Obama�s Hawaiian birth certificate. None have refuted it. The birth certificate has been examined by experts. A birth announcement of August 13, 1962, announces Barack H. Obama�s birth in Hawaii:

THE PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND THE BIRTHER MOVEMENT

In his book, �The Sane Society� (which H2O Man recently recommended to me), the humanist psychologist Erich Fromm discusses among other things the five human psychological needs that differentiate us from animals. In this post I�ll discuss three of them � the three that seem to me to have relevance to the Birther Movement:

Rootedness

Human beings throughout history and over the course of their lives are faced with the choice of clinging to what is familiar versus going out on their own to develop their own individual personalities. Another way of looking at this choice is security vs. independence. Fromm singles out nationalism and racism as the two most common strategies that Americans (and others as well) use to cling to the familiar to an extent that is very unhealthy:

Man � freed from the traditional bonds� afraid of the new freedom which transformed him into an isolated atom � escaped into (a state) of which nationalism and racism are the two most evident expressions� Along with the progressive development� went the development of the negative aspects of both principles: the worship of the state, blended with the idolatry of the race or nation. Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism are the most drastic manifestations of this blend of state and clan worship, both principles embodied in the figure of a �Fuehrer� (Fromm wrote this in 1955)�

The average man today obtains his sense of identity from his belonging to a nation� His objectivity, that is, his reason, is warped by this fixation. He judges the �stranger� with different criteria than the members of his own clan. His feelings toward the stranger are equally warped. Those who are not �familiar� by bonds of blood� are looked upon with suspicion, and paranoid delusions about them can spring up at the slightest provocation. This� not only poisons the relationship of the individual to the stranger, but to the members of his own clan and to himself� his capacity for love and reason are crippled; he does not experience himself nor his fellow man in their � and his own � human reality.

Nationalism is our � idolatry, our insanity. �Patriotism� is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by �patriotism� I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one�s own nation�

Thus it is that Dr. Fromm equates excessive nationalism and racism with insanity. He emphasizes this point by noting the extreme outrage manifested in excessively nationalistic people when they witness disrespect to the symbols of their country, such as their country�s flag.

Sense of identity

Fromm�s discussion of the human need to develop a sense of identity sounds to me very similar to his discussion of man�s need for rootedness. He says:

In the development of the human race the degree to which man is aware of himself as a separate self depends on the extent to which he has emerged from the clan and the extent to which the process of individuation has developed. The member of a primitive clan might express his sense of identity in the formula �I am we�; he cannot yet conceive of himself as an individual, existing apart from his group� When the feudal system broke down, this sense of identity was shaken and the acute question �Who am I?� arose�

Many substitutes for a truly individual sense of identity were sought for, and found. Nation, religion, class and occupation serve to furnish a sense of identity� In the United States� the sense of identity is shifted more and more to the experience of conformity.

Inasmuch as I am not different, inasmuch as I am like the others, and recognized by them as �a regular fellow,� I can sense myself� Instead of the clan identity, a new herd identity develops, in which the sense of identity rests on the sense of an unquestionable belonging to the crowd. That this uniformity and conformity are often not recognized as such, and are covered by the illusion of individuality, does not alter the facts.

In the last paragraph of this section, Fromm sums up the problem with present day sheeple:

(Humans) are driven to do almost anything to acquire this sense (of identity). Behind the intense passion for status and conformity is this very need, and it is sometimes even stronger than the need for physical survival. What could be more obvious than the fact that people are willing to risk their lives, to give up their love, to surrender their freedom, to sacrifice their own thoughts, for the sake of being one of the herd� and thus of acquiring a sense of identity, even though it is an illusory one.

Relatedness

The need for relatedness to other human beings is as great as the two needs discussed above. Fromm discusses two unhealthy means by which humans seek to establish relatedness and one healthy one. The two sick means of establishing relatedness are domination and submission. The one healthy one is love � not necessarily in the sexual sense, but rather:

Love in this sense is never restricted to one person. If I can love only one person, and nobody else, if my love for one person makes me more alienated and distant from my fellow man�I do not love�.

Some form of relatedness is the condition for any kind of sane living. But among the various forms of relatedness, only the productive one, love, fulfills the condition of allowing one to retain one�s freedom and integrity while being, at the same time, united with one�s fellow man.

CONCLUSION � THE EXPLANATION FOR THE BIRHTER MOVEMENT

There is a certain segment of the American population that tends to put security above all else. These are the people who are willing to hand over to government the power to spy on American citizens; they are the people who are willing to allow their government to spend any amount of money to build up an impregnable military machine and go to war against any country that their (white) president claims poses a danger to them, no matter how flimsy the evidence.

These are the ultra-nationalists and the racists. They feel safe only when they have a �strong� leader to lead them. They are always willing to believe that it is necessary for their �strong� leader to protect them against the hordes of humanity living in distant lands who have different color skin, speak strange languages, and practice religions other than their own � or no religion at all. They consider such people expendable. They don�t care how many of them have to die or be bombed into submission in order that their own security is assured. Jurgen Todenhofer, in his book, �Why Do you Kill?�, describes what this has meant in terms of how the Western powers have treated Muslims over the past two centuries:

Over the past 200 years no Muslim state has ever attacked the West. European powers and the United States have always been the aggressors� Since the beginning of the colonial era, millions of Muslim civilians have been killed. When it comes to killing, the West is leading by a ratio of more than ten to one.

The legacy of slavery in the United States has not ended. Not by a long shot. The racist and the ultranationalist � who are usually one and the same person � are very much alive and kicking in our country. Their whole identity is tied up in their country and in their race because they have never developed an individual identity. Without those crutches they feel insecure and lack a sense of identity to the point of insanity.

So what are they to do when the President of their country is a member of a race whom their ancestors brutally abused with the rationalization that that race is sub-human? They can�t reject their country. That would be �unpatriotic� and a sacrilege and deprive them of their security blanket. And yet, it would be unthinkable to accept a non-white person as the leader of their country. They are left with only a single alternative � to find a way to delegitimize their non-white leader as a fraud. And since they couldn�t think of an honest way to do that, they had to make up something. Add to that toxic brew the tendency to submit to authority and follow the herd, and you get the Birther Movement.

In the last paragraph of his section on humanity�s need for rootedness, Dr. Fromm summarizes the cure for the problem that gives rise to the kind of desperate hatred that characterizes the Birther Movement and its corollaries:

Nationalism and state worship became the symptoms of a regression� Only when man succeeds in developing his reason and love further than he has done so far, only when he can build a world based on human solidarity and justice, only when he can feel rooted in the experience of universal brotherliness, will he have found a new, human form of rootedness, will he have transformed his world into a truly human home.