You probably saw the movie “Inside Out,” an animated masterpiece that imagines each of us controlled by five emotions: anger, fear, joy, sadness, and disgust.
Had you been asked by Pixar to choose these emotions, would you have come up with that last one, disgust? Me neither. (For the record it took Pixar some time to decide on the five and they consulted psychologists in the process.) How prescient does that inclusion look now, though, given the manner in which disgust drives politics and culture? The right’s bottomless disgust of homosexuality and other people's genitals in particular.
Yesterday I wondered how we might begin to get beyond this disgust.
Psyche 101 tells us homophobes are projecting their own desires and I’d also suggest a deep envy among maga-ites and theocrats of the freedom they see in gay people and drag queens. (Note the wild costumes of those at a Trump rally, the dress your typical priest wears.) Look through this envy/disgust lens and you might see how those who came up from slavery or survived an exodus from Mexico earn a freedom and demonstrate a commitment that humiliates any escalator rider. Currently, Pride Month is under attack by those who are most vocal about the books they don’t read, the guns they own, and the vanilla sex they pretend to have. Could it be they fear not having anything to wave a flag about?
Needless to say, such psychological projections apply to the left too, though disgust is a less motivating feature, I surmise, than the fear which makes one envy safety.
How terrifying it must be not to be sure who you are at the essential level of biology (or to be told over and over that your certainty about your gender or sexual preference has no place). A trans kid the right makes a target is a kind of poster child for the dysphoric left, where doubt and relativism are valued over authority and dogma.
Activism has its place (and then some) and it is better to be on the right side of history and justice, whatever one’s inner struggles. However a-tonal and unthinking what Sam Harris calls “wokeistan” can be, the worst of the left pales next to the dangers of the theocrats on the right. The disgust of the right is more disgusting than the anger on the left.
Still, activists of all stripes suffer a desperate need to be right lest they face the possibility they are something far worse than wrong, gay for instance, or not.
Which means we need to do something old-fashioned and hard. We need to try and feel what we are feeling and learn from that.
Why do you disgust me? And what can I learn from that about myself?
Why do you terrify me? And what can I learn from that about myself?
I won’t hold my breath for a country-wide sit down and feel-in, but it would be a start.
I certainly feel like giddiness, embarrassment, satisfaction, confusion, and boredom all play roles in my life equally if not more than the ones in the movie (which I have not yet seen).