Election By Emotion Part 3

ALL emotional appeals, whether in wars or elections, are appeals to instinctive impulses. There is no such thing as an emotion arising in the conscious intellect. All emotions are instinctive emotions, welling up from the subconscious mind; and in their origin they are “purposeful to instinct,” as the doctors say. In wartime, of course, the great appeal is to the emotion of patriotism and the impulses of the herd instinct, to fear and hatred of the enemy, and to the egotism that sees itself aggrandized in the glory of its country. In election campaigns a similar appeal is made by waving the flag, by stirring up party loyalty, by arousing fear and hatred of the opposing party, and by identifying the ego of the party-man with the success of the party’s candidate and the glory of the party’s victory. That also is inevitable. The man who objects to it might as well object to the descent of the water at Niagara Falls.

But, in the present campaign between Hoover and Smith, these herd loyalties have been cut across by other emotions. The question of prohibition divides both parties. So does the question of religion. And the problem of farm relief. And the politicians on both sides are seeking emotional appeals that will take advantage of such cross-currents. neutralize them in their own party and inflame them in the ranks of their opponents. Hence the hate, the venomous whisper, the call to religious intolerance, the appeal to prejudice, to factional animosity, to any emotion that may hook a vote out of the conflicting currents that have already so muddied up the pure waters of party faith.

In spite of our admixture of foreign blood, the American people are still predominantly Puritan in their traditions and their ways of thought. The Puritan sets his soul against a powerful instinct in man, the sex instinct. To him, sex is sin. His religion also requires him to frown on his ego instinct, to be meek, to be humble, charitable, forgiving. He never quite makes that grade, but he performs miracles with his taboo on sex. He marks sex as an animal appetite that is hateful in the eyes of God. And it makes him hateful to himself. He sees himself as a miserable sinner, self-convicted by the animal impulses that keep rising in him, distempered with an inner war between the Flesh and the Spirit, and abhorrent to himself because the Spirit can never defeat the Flesh. The more religious, the more Puritanical he is, the more this poisonous self-hatred inwardly accumulates.

Now the doctors have discovered a curious thing about him. Except in the meekest and most pious saints, self-hatred cannot express itself in its own form. The natural egotism of the animal will not let it. It gets itself vented only as a righteous hatred of others—particularly of those who seem to personify the impulses for which the Puritan subconsciously hates himself. Hence the witch-hunts of the early American Puritans and the vice crusades of their modern descendants. Hence also their religious intolerance; for the Puritan, by a peculiar logic of the subconscious, finding himself hateful to his God, gets an easement of his self-hate by projecting it upon all arguable enemies of his God. The original Puritans came to America in search of religious liberty, but when they found it for themselves they denied it to all other sects. They persecuted zealously. They have persecuted ever since. Any appeal to religious bigotry, to righteous moral animosity, is irresistible to them. It gives them the relief of an instinctive satisfaction. It makes them truly happy.

Source: The Outlook, 17 October 1928

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