Simplicity Denied

I was just reading an article in Rolling Stone about the teabaggers. It had some interesting insights into the ideology (idiot-ology?) of that particular group of angry white people, and I think it spelled out something that is kind of consistent between the tea party nuttiness and most right-wing Christian conservative thought--an overwhelming desire for simplicity. There is present a cry or a longing for easy answers, a need for the world's problems to be spelled out in few words and the solutions in even less. This whole movement is formed by a group of people who yearn to see the world in the lowest possible resolution.

The seduction of easy answers to the tangled problems of an increasingly complicated world is kind of easy to understand, I guess. Hell, just me sitting here saying that the tea party movement and hardcore christian conservatism is motivated largely by the need for simplicity and easy answers is itself an easy answer, and the satisfaction I'm getting from thinking I've 'figured it out' is pretty blatant.

I don't know if it's the answer, but I think it definitely forms a big part of what motivates most of these people. It's an interesting thought exercise in a way because it predicts some of the weirdness that has resulted from the largely incoherent ideology of the tea party on the one hand and the largely retarded ideology of christian conservatives on the other. The idea is this: because the world isn't simple, trying to picture it in simple terms forces you to believe some weird things in order to keep your initial premise intact. As you go on and you experience or discover or are forced to acknowledge more facts or situations that utterly contradict your worldview, you have to keep twisting the minutae of your ideology in order to compensate. Eventually what you're left with is a worldview that no longer retains any of its original simplicity and is now also totally divorced from reality. You end up becoming a kook.

The Creation Museum might be a great example of this, with its human-riding-vegetarian-dinosaur displays. The basic premise - the world is only 6,000 years old - is pretty simple, but trying to force that notion to accomodate the enormous mountain of scientific fact which contradicts it puts you in a position where your rationalizations get weirder and weirder. Even if you judiciously ignore one or more piles of facts, a lot of twisted intellectual compensations still have to be grafted in there. To the point where maybe you build a whole 'museum' as a way to try and solidify your massive pile of patently stupid rationalizations. Just the one little belief in a simple 'literal biblical creation' becomes contingent on believing so many other completely ridiculous things that the mental contortions completely tear your brain out of its moorings.

The problem is, lots of people are having no problem doing this.