Ambigamy

I loved this insightful article. I am guilty of ambigamy of the bipolar and ironic types. I'd like to read more about this. I want to learn to increase the irony, wisdom, and humor of the tension between opposite feelings in life, and take more of the child-ego, knee jerk emotional responses out of my behavior.

Hey!

I really enjoyed your article. I just wanted to help correct two little typos.

In paragraph 10, the word breathe has no "e" at the end.

In paragraph 11, the word you're at the end of the paragraph should be "your".

Again, great article :-)

Thank you very much for that. I fixed them just now. It's a great help and I'm especially glad you liked the article.

Jeremy

Dr. Sherman the email you sent me was lost before I could complete reading it. You sent an attachment for me to look into also. Is it possible of you to re-send the email please?

William

Is the political right really overtaken by bipolar ambiguity? Or are conservatives simply more closed at the moment, and you're judging them from your open state?

I think what you're asking is if I'm using bipolar ambigamy, a pejorative as a new way of criticizing anyone who disagrees with me. That is a potential risk, as is the risk another layer up that someone could accuse me of doing just that anytime I disagreed with them. That may begin to sound absurd, but really that kind of infinite regress is a problem that's worth addressing. To illustrate another way, we've got the Freudian term "You're projecting" which we can use against anyone who is hypocritically attacking you. But we could also say "You're psychoanalyzing" for anyone who abuses the term "You're projecting" and we can use both terms indiscriminately as cudgels to defend against anyone. I think such diagnostic terms are useful. I've coined the phrase "To name it is to tame it" to describe their utility. In other words a phrase like "Bipolar Ambigamy" can be useful to help me constrain my tendency to act in an inappropriate way. But I do recognize that "To name it is to tame it" is double edged. The risk with "taming" is that I can deploy the term indiscriminately to keep from having to face challenges. I can simply tame the challengers by calling them "bipolar ambigamists."

The only way I know by which the first kind of taming is the result and not the second is through operationalized definitions.
With bipolar ambigamy I think I've got a pretty clear definition which has to do with making a moral case when it serves you and denying that the same moral case applies when it doesn't serve you. Of course there is subtle conditionality that may confound the issue. There may be subtle reasons why a moral applies in one case and not another that are worth taking into consideration.

The short answer is no, I think the evidence is pretty clear that because leaders on the right are so confident in their mission and objectives they have come to believe that it is their moral duty to fight with all their might even if it means fighting dirty. I think it would be hard to make a case defending Palin, Limbaugh, Beck or Rove against the diagnosis of bipolar ambigamy. Indeed I think they're proud of it:

Back in 2002, journalist Ronald Suskind interviewed Bush’s chief propagandist, Karl Rove. Suskind writes:

“Rove said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people ‘who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ Rove continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality–judiciously, as you will–we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Take Chairman Steele's righteous indignation over Reid's comments. This from the chair of the party that rose to power by arguing state's rights in the Jim Crow South and is proud of it.

I'm especially interested these days in the abuse of the moral argument that an attack is unfair because it blames one side more than the other. It implies that we are all equally at fault. No doubt politics does breed a degree of bipolar ambigamy in everyone but if it's unfair to criticize one side as doing more harm than another because fairness means that blame must always be spread evenly, then think about the absurdities that result. Slave owners could say to slaves, "It's really unfair for you to attack us. Who among us is without fault." Playing the unfair card is another one of those cards that can be played indiscriminately.

One of the big insights for me from reading The Political Brain is that negative campaigning is not the same as sleazy campaigning. It's not. I wish the Democrats went negative a lot more. I wish the Republicans went sleazy a lot less.