Monday, October 02, 2006

Why Voters Like Values

"...values sell because they’re an antidote to the endemic mental health problem of our time: depression.

Humans demand that there be a clear right and wrong. You’ve got to believe that the track you’ve taken is the right track. You get depressed if you’re not certain as to what it is you’re supposed to be doing or what’s right and wrong in the world.

People need to divide the world into good and evil, us and them. To do otherwise – to entertain the possibility that life is not black and white, but variously shaded in gray – is perhaps more honest, rational and decent. But it’s also, psychically, a recipe for disaster, as are the psychic pressures of life in our multicultural, tolerant, globalist, egalitarian, post-1960’s era. It all leads to great uncertainty as to what is right and what is wrong. That is very conducive to depression.

The Republican Party wins elections because the Democrats – with their perceived agenda of tolerance, multiculturalism and equality – are inherently depressing." Jerome Kagan via a column by Judith Warner