This is mostly a question to Justin, or whoever else who is interested. The implicit question is who is crazy?
I am about half way through Allen Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, and have finished three essays and a book review by Leo Strauss. I am trying to figure out the elite rightwing. I realize this is not a stunning conclusion, but I think these people are completely crazy.
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Everyone is crazy, some are less crazy than others. The less crazy can be moved by 'facts', even those that are uncomfortable to consider and accept. The more crazy cannot be budged from stubborn belief.
That, at least, is how I see it.
The Rashomon reference is precisely right.
I cannot speak about the rightwing elite though I suspect their motivations are a mixture of simple self-interest (after all, their points of view and the policies that flow from them, are mostly beneficial to the architects and hangers on) and ideological bent.
But at the level of ordinary people who happen to be rightwing - the folks who get up and go to work everyday (or not), the complex of belief is propped up by less tangible supports.
I have many friends and acquaintances. Among them, you'll find a wide variety of political views. Most are run-of-the-mill Democrats with perfectly respectable (by conventional standards) beliefs. These are the sorts of people who call the Vietnam war, along with every other American act of aggression, a "mistake".
A few are what I would call friendly right-wing reactionaries. "Friendly", because they're willing to participate in civilized debate, to exercise their minds with dialogue.
The civility makes it possible to maintain friendships despite our wildly differing perspectives.
Anyway, the Iraq war and occupation has, unsurprisingly, been a lightening rod for discussion with my right-wing friends. One fellow believes, with all his heart it seems, that Bush's invasion is, as the White House frames it, the "frontline in the war against terror."
He sends mass emails to his friends periodically with attached jpegs of American soldiers helping children and administering medicine, along with a few sentences urging us to remember the men and women who are "protecting our freedoms."
It's easy to dismiss this as patriotic foolishness, as blindness to the harsh reality unfolding before the world's eyes in Iraq, to the Bush Administration's criminality.
And so it is.
But I think it's also a means of protecting a cherished worldview. For reasons we don't fully understand, it's fairly common for people to cling to ideas like lovers, even when there are strong counter-indications of the ideas' truth or usefulness.
So, the Rashomon phenomena is caused not simply by divergent perspectives, but by the need we have to cling to those elements of the truth that support and reinforce our already formed beliefs.
My friend looks at Iraq and sees friendly GIs, fighting a good and difficult battle against the shadowy forces of evil. Since there are in fact American soldiers of good will who, as far as they can, seek to provide aid and comfort to Iraqis he can find examples to support his view.
Of course, I see things very differently, and can also find countless examples to support my view.
Because the 'truth' is large and we are, at the conscious level at least, rather small, I think this fracturing of perspective and belief is inevitable.
DRM
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