New research supports the notion that we fixate on enemies, and inflate their power, as a defense mechanism against generalized anxiety.
The longer article is here. This is another way of putting the point:
According to one school of thought, this tendency to exaggerate the strength of our adversaries serves a specific psychological function. It is less scary to place all our fears on a single, strong enemy than to accept the fact our well-being is largely based on factors beyond our control. An enemy, after all, can be defined, analyzed and perhaps even defeated.
This must create a lot of anxiety for writers of blogs we fixate on. We pass our anxiety on to them by treating them as an enemy. Then they need a defense mechanism too. It’s never ending.
A good example of this are climate change supporters who believe that some supernaturally well funded enemy has infiltrated the blogosphere and is defeating their cause. In fact the weakness of their case and their ownhyperbolic and paranoic behavior is defeating their cause.
I would not conflate genuine fear of a physical or mortal enemy with mere political or ideological opposition.
A physical threat to your survival, and a political threat to your power base are not nearly the same thing, nor are the behavioral and psychological response mechanisms identical.
Seems like there is some “projecting” going on here.
I think it is kinda stated backwards. We don’t necessarily “use” an enemy to lessen our fears of things we can’t control, I believe that humans just naturally process fears this way. Fears are a function of how we see the world; it would probably have been evolutionarily suicidal if we didn’t take all our fears seriously and thrust them onto agencies to counteract them. If we recognized that what we fear was uncontrollable humans would be open to critical misjudgment. It becomes more efficient to take just about every fear seriously than risk being wrong.
On a side note this would help explain why some people need to foist agency onto the unexplainable by creating religion, god, spirits, and other paranormal actors.
I don’t buy the psychological explanation given.
First of all, there are constraints. What we can worry about is limited by the fact that we can generally only worry about one thing at a time which is then further constrained by time.
Second, of what evolutionary advantage is the ‘psychological explanation’? Speculating, perhaps exaggerating a common enemy helps us bond into groups which would have been important in our tribal days.
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