If you don't like LARPs, there's always the AKBL

[go4tli]

Barbecuing kittens is wrong. It is cruel; it is illegal; it is, quite
plainly, evil. No one should ever barbecue kittens.

I am, unambiguously and without qualification, opposed to barbecuing
kittens. I am also confident that you are opposed to this, too. And
that latter point is why I *cannot* join the (fictional, but there's a
point here, so stick with me) Anti Kitten-Barbecuing League.

It's not that I think they're wrong in their stance. It's a stance
against something that *ought* to be stood against. But that's not
what drives the AKBL. What keeps them going is not opposing what
everyone in his right mind opposes -- it's thinking that their stance
is brave, controversial, exceptional, in the minority, and under
constant attack. It's thinking that this stance separates and
elevates them as a special class of people, that it grants them a
moral high ground that few others attain.

The AKBL is not interested in protecting kittens. Not really.
They're more interested in accusing other people -- people whom they
perversely understand to be *in favor of* kitten-barbecuing.

It doesn't matter that pro kitten-barbecuers cannot be found. It
doesn't matter that people trying to barbecue kittens with their votes
don't exist. These facts do nothing to dampen their enthusiasm or
their volume; they must stand against monstrous cruelty, kept at bay
only through their brave efforts! It's delusional, but the members of
the AKBL really, *really* enjoy the delusion. It gives them meaning
and purpose; it grants excitement to their otherwise dull lives; it
allows them to think that they are fighting for righteousness and
goodness, or at least that they're fighting more than other people,
and they're *certainly* more righteous than people who would want to
barbecue kittens.

Believe it or not, the mentality of the AKBL has come to define
American politics. We'd rather focus on imaginary monsters than jobs,
taxes, infrastructure, science, or protecting the environment. Fear
of imaginary monsters like the kitten-barbecuers mobilizes millions of
voters and gains millions of votes.

Need examples? Here's Republican Presidential candidate (and former
Senator for Pennsylvania) Rick Santorum, describing an inhuman
nightmare that he imagines is taking place in the Netherlands *right
now*:

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"In the Netherlands, people wear different bracelets if they are
elderly," Santorum said. "And the bracelet is: 'Do not euthanize
me.' Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands but
half of the people who are euthanized -- 10 percent of all deaths in
the Netherlands -- half of those people are euthanized involuntarily
at hospitals because they are older and sick. And so elderly people
in the Netherlands don't go to the hospital. They go to another
country, because they are afraid, because of budget purposes, they
will not come out of that hospital if they go in there with sickness."
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http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/24/10497644-santorums-dutch-death-panels

You ought to be relieved to find that this is utter nonsense. Nothing
even remotely like this is actually happening, least of all in the
Netherlands. The bracelets don't even exist. The whole thing was
apparently made up by the Louisiana Right to Life Federation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/euthanasia-in-the-netherlands-rick-santorums-bogus-statistics/2012/02/21/gIQAJaRbSR_blog.html

That assumes that you *are* relieved, of course. Most people --
assuming they were suckered into worrying such a thing might be true
in the first place -- would be pleased to know that this isn't
happening, because we'd prefer to live in a world where this isn't
happening.

There's a different mentality, though, that, when confronted with
evidence that it's not happening, gets all defensive and angry.
They'd prefer to deny the facts and the evidence; they'd prefer the
horrible fantasy.

The obvious question is Why?. Why would *any* human being *want* this
to be true? Why invent monsters and then desperately cling to the
need for their existence? Aren't there enough real problems in the
world that demand our attention as it is?

I've been studying the Anti Kitten-Barbecuing League in its various
incarnations for a long time now, especially as they pertain to
Evangelicalism, and I have a few theories in answer to those
questions.

1. It's exciting to believe in imaginary monsters.

Santorum fights imaginary death panels. As a teenager, I used to
fight imaginary kobolds, goblins, and orcs. There's something deep
inside us that longs to struggle bravely against evil(1). It's fine
when you know it's just a game with character sheets and unusual
dice. But it's a problem when you lose the ability to distinguish
between the fantasy and real life, when you start to try to convince
other people that your fantasy is real so that they can join you in
the fight. There are real evils to confront in the world, and these
distractions do no one any good.

2. It allows us to defend our own self-righteousness.

Being good is *hard*. If I compare myself to Jesus or Daniel or
Francis of Asisi or Harriet Tubman, then I can only see room for vast
improvement in my life. But if, instead, I compare myself to Hannibal
Lechter, then I look pretty good. Compared to Hannibal Lechter, I
tell myself, I am a saint and a hero and not just someone largely
indistinct from everyone else, stumbling along in a self-absorbed
routine of quiet desperation. Sure, Lechter is a fictional character,
but he's so terribly useful as a foil to my own righteousness! Am I
really a righteous saint and hero? Compared to Hannibal Lechter, to
the kitten-barbecuers and the Satanic baby-killers, yes. Yes, I am.

Interestingly, a lot of the people who insist that their faith renders
such comparison invalid are among the quickest to compare -- if
nothing else, making themselves feel better as Children Of Light
because they're not as evil as those Children Of Darkness. (I'm
thinking of the popularity of the Satanism scare several decades ago.)

3. If the monsters don't exist, the societal theory collapses.

The Big Theory presents an if-then equation to explain how society
works. The theory demands that something fragile be defended --
"traditional morality," sectarian privilege, patriarchy, ethnic
superiority, cultural exceptionalism, nationalism, and so on -- and
claims that if it is *not* defended, then consequences too terrible to
contemplate will ensue. The absence of these terrible consequences
undermine the theory, potentially also rendering whatever the theorist
is defending irrelevant.

So monsters must be invented. And anyone who denies the reality of
these unreal monsters must be condemned as an enemy of traditional
morality, or of the sect, the ethnic group, the culture, the nation,
etc., lest people listen.

4. Imaginary monsters give our fears a name and a face.

We're afraid, all the time. We're afraid of things and people that
are different; financial insecurity; forces beyond our control; death;
and so on. These fears are unsettling, overwhelming, and impossible
to define adequately or fully. So we give them a name and a face, and
we pretend we're up against something we can fight. Instead of the
amorphous fear of something in the undefinable dark, we can pretend
that it's a werewolf in the woods. A werewolf is scary, too, but
*now* we have something we can do. Okay, yes, technically there's
still no such thing as werewolves, but if we pretend there are, then
we can take decisive action. We can start making silver bullets. We
can start locking up neighbors we suspect might secretly be
werewolves. The monsters may be imaginary, but at least they're
*specific*.

This refusal to think abstractly develops into a real problem over
time. Soon, people start to think that the only truths are obvious or
straightforward ones, and that if you're trying to describe something
subtle and multi-faceted, you must have something to hide. Which is a
shame, because things like freedom and prosperity are more a result of
keeping many different things in balance than they are a matter of
keeping simple, easily-identified villains at bay; and the only way to
appreciate scientific beauty seems to be to understand some of its
complexity.

5. It lets you do what you want in government, should you be elected.

What if you happen to be elected during a time when unemployment is
high, but you don't really want to focus on job creation? Or when the
infrastructure is collapsing, but you have no interest in building
roads and bridges? What if people trying to protect the environment
threaten to nullify your investments? Distract people with "death
panels"! Or convince them that the scientists are in some kind of
grand conspiracy! It doesn't matter that no "death panels" can be
found, or that no evidence of conspiracy exists; what matters is that
people feel like they're fighting something just by electing you. And
if a bunch of corporations happen to be enriched in the process of
protecting us from those nasty "death panels" or those evil
scientists, well, that's just the glorious free market at work.

6. No need to work at actually trying to *understand* the real world.

This is strongly related to Point Four, above. The monster's
existence is just consistent with your worldview, so why question it?
Why put in any effort to try to understand? That's just too much
*work*. And the work only increases, since it's much easier to think
in terms of simple blocks than to acknowledge the complexity of
reality. Admission that real understanding requires effort might open
my ideas up to fallibility, and we can't have *that*.

I'm sure there are many more reasons besides these.

But at the end of the day, the irony is that if we let these guys
actually have what they want, this *is* what would happen. Does
anyone remember the TEA Partiers actually *cheering* the "let 'em die"
approach to dealing with the uninsured? Why is just allowing death to
happen so much better than euthanasia, anyway? (Let those Kitten
Barbecuers die. It's what Jesus would do.)

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(1) And that, I suspect, is why some walk away from Omelas -- far
better to fight evil than to simply allow and tolerate its existence
in the name of how much good everything *else* represents.