> One would have to claim that
> ALL of those people who are sexually repressed become fascists and
> NONE
> of those who are not sexually repressed become fascists, which
hardly
> seems plausible
And why would one have to claim that? Why not say that there's some link between sexual repression and authoritarian politics - that sexually repressed people are more likely than others to be drawn to authoritarianism, and that authoritarians are more likely to favor a sexually repressive agenda - and leave universals out of it? It sure seems like a lot of authoritarians have promoted sexually repressive agendas.
Doug, could I point out something to you in the friendliest way possible? You are clearly very busy, and the list itself is pretty demanding, and what I'm picking up often now is that you scan messages pretty quickly and decide what you think they are saying, based partly on your preconceptions. I once wrote a PhD thesis on text interpretation so I like to think that I know a bit about this. Nowhere in my message could I possibly have been taken to deny that there is "some link". I took pains to point out through such careful and emphatic phrases as "all in itself" to suggest that sexual repression cannot possibly be THE SOLE explanation of fascism. For one thing that would leave many aspects of the phenomenon unexplained. For another, it would be a rather naive notion of causality. A useful way to think about this is always in terms of necessary vs sufficient conditions. I'm not sure whether repression is a necessary condition for fascism to emerge, but I'm pretty sure it's not a sufficient condition. That would be so easy to refute that it's not worth arguing: one would only have to have only one individual who has never performed the sex act in his/her life, who turns out not to be a fascist, perhaps a liberation-theologian priest or some such case. I did suggest that early psychoanalysts often overreached themselves in their claims for their emerging science. Tahir
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