Posted By: Thad McKraken JAN 18, 2017
Admittedly, that’s more than a bit of a click bait headline, but underneath it lies a legitimate inquiry about the nature of human psychology. God, nearly 16 years ago now I completed my oh so profitable degree in psychology, and one thing I learned during that period of my life was: wow does mainstream psychology like to spend its time “proving” obvious shit. I’ll never forget looking over countless studies which demonstrated that sunny weather does in fact have a positive benefit on people’s moods. Someone got paid to spend their time “proving” this, even though it’s blatantly apparent to pretty much anyone who’s ever experienced nice weather. I was more creeped out at how we were encouraged to blindly follow this route to academic achievement than anything else. What you want to do is find something fundamental about the human psyche that everyone knows is true, but that hasn’t technically been “proven” by research yet. Then “prove” that thing. I have no idea what doing this actually accomplishes outside of academic promotions, but it was sort of my cue to bail on the whole scene due to my interests (books out about precognitive dreaming, buy them).
With that in mind, here’s something we should know about human psychology at this point: people who align themselves with conservative politics? Not so good at the arts. This has never been more over the top obvious than with Donald Trump’s inauguration. I mean, it’s been in your face forever, but this embarrassing fiasco is yet another boiling point moment. Zero hip hop artists, and out of the entire world of rock music, pretty much the only band they could find to play this thing is 3 Doors Down. Nickelback catches a lot of grief for sucking quite spectacularly, but let’s face it, 3 Doors Down are a third rate Nickelback clone. We only trash Nickelback because in reality, they’re far more successful than the watered down grunge lite shit show that is 3DD. They’re who you get if you try to get Nickelback, but Nickelback’s like “We’re Canadian and we hate you!”, so you go down the list and are like, well, Candlebox is booked. Seven Mary Three turned us down. Matchbox 20 have a conscience apparently after making that album with that Santana guy who keeps stealing American jobs. How about Creed? Fuck, even they can’t stand Scott Staap. Okay, what other shitty 4th rate commercial radio yarl band from 15 years ago can we find? Ooooh, how about 3 Doors Down? They said they’re in, but they want more cash than they’ve been paid to play in the last decade. Done.
Now, I’m not implying that all creative types are repulsed by conservative politics, I’m just saying that I’m guessing roughly 90% are. I couldn’t find the definitive research “proving” this, so what I’m suggesting is that some ladder climbing psychology student gets off their ass and conducts it. And no, I don’t think this deficiency in conservative creative thinkers has much to do with the “culture of Hollywood” or whatever other bullshit reich wing propagandists like to blame it on, but moreover, that there’s something fairly fundamental about human psychology going down that’s rarely discussed. And before you get to calling me a libtard piece of cuck shit or whatever, do yourself a favor. Go scan through the gajillion or so pieces I’ve written for this site over the last 4 years and find the part where I say nice things about the Democrats (other than Bernie Sanders). I’ll wait. The Democratic party’s creepy pro Wall Street agenda sketches me out to no end, and yet, I can sum up the entire Republican modus operandi in 3 words: fuck the poor.
They’re so over the top about it. With the white trash Jerry Springer shit show that was the last year of American politics, all these “I’m not sure who’d be a worse president” lefty anarchists seemed to be neglecting something important. Donald Trump’s proposed economic policies are now, and were always as follows: Huge tax cuts for rich people. Huge tax cuts for corporations. More, incredibly extreme corporate deregulation. Super expensive healthcare for poor people. And my personal favorite: cutting social services in favor of increased military spending which doesn’t go to the troops, but rather to the people making the weapons. It’s the precise opposite of what Bernie Sanders wanted to do, but more importantly, it’s the precise opposite of what Jesus would fucking do. Yet somehow people got duped into thinking this guy was an outsider despite the fact that those are in fact the exact same policies of George W. Bush and the Republican party in general, ever since I’ve been a person. It’s just even more extreme now than it was back then. These people were downright tame when Bill Hicks, Hunter S. Thompson, and Robert Anton Wilson were trashing them.
And it’s not like these trickle down policies won’t work. They will absolutely make rich people even richer in the short term before the economy eventually tanks which will also make rich people even richer. This is precisely what they’re designed to do. The trickle down part? They don’t believe that. The people that voted for them in rural America believe that, the politicians don’t. Same deal with climate change, as we now know. The most vocal opponents of climate change don’t believe it’s junk science.They’re getting paid by the oil industry to tell people it’s junk science, but they don’t believe that. Same shit with trickle-down economics. It’s a con game. You spend a bunch of money on “we’re the Jesus party who’ll protect you from terrorists” propaganda to get people to vote against their own economic self interests. Works like a charm on the evangelical set.
So why is it that people of the more artistic persuasion are less likely to fall for this con? Well, it’s the liberal culture of Hollywood that….no, stop right there. Most musicians don’t live in L.A. and most have very little to do with Hollywood whatsoever. These are the people blacklisting the inauguration. Also, and here’s a more important point, only like .01 percent of artists actually make a living from their art. Yet, they almost universally revile conservative politics. Remember that tiny band Nirvana from 20 odd years ago? I’ve never really been a huge fan myself, but in watching that utterly horrible Montage of Heck documentary last year (God, do NOT watch that heroin snuff film bullshit), something fairly profound did in fact occur to me. That “rage of a generation” angst that Kurt Cobain got so famous peddling? Where’d it stem from exactly? Well, as it turns out, it stemmed from growing up in the coastal elite logging town of Aberdeen, Washington and being an artsy kid. In small town America, being different doesn’t go over super well in a lot of cases. You’re probs going to get your ass kicked on the regs. Seeing as our country is far more politically divided between the cities and small towns than anything else at this point, it might be time to start having these conversations.
Shortly after the Trumpocalypse, I had a fun discussion on FB (like my writer page for psi intel). One of my fans from rural America was pointing out to me that people in small towns are actually way nicer than us big city “elites” make them out to be. It was with this that I had to interject…ummm, really? The thing is, when I was younger, I dressed a tad weirder than I do now. It was the 90’s in Ohio and I wore what were rather over the top thrift store collage outfits at the time. I had the old school Mike Patton from Faith No More long-but-shaved-on-the-sides do. While still living in a smaller town, I at one point had a hardcore Christian manager who waged an unsuccessful campaign to try and get me fired when he realized I had long hair under the hat I was required to wear at work. Not to mention the time I was pulled over for no reason, illegally searched for drugs, and thrown in jail while driving through nowheresville. Why? As far as I can tell, because my friend had a Bad Religion sticker on his car.
Fact is, half the time I went outside a city and into a smaller town, I got fucked with. Random dudes would come up and try to pick fights with me, for no other reason than I didn’t look like what “normal” was supposed to look like in their world. You know what’s uber creepy about all this? I’m a white guy. Not only am I a white guy, I’m quite a bit more muscular than average. Despite all that, I was still the target for random harassment. I got pretty good a diffusing fights, especially in situations where dudes quite a bit smaller than me wanted to go at it. There are some incidents in my past where I still go, what on earth was going on with that tiny dude randomly trying to pick a fight with me and my 3 friends who dwarfed him? Maybe he had a gun? That’s sort of why I always diffused these things with my mouth rather than my fists.
By why the hell did I have to diffuse things in the first place? I looked like the same goddamn bands they were watching on TV (god I’m old). It got to the point where I knew this was going to happen in advance. I’ll never forget moving to Seattle and dating a girl who had a friend way out in the sticks. We’re were partying at her place well outside the city one night and they decided they wanted to go out to a bar. I had to point out to them that if we did, I was going to get fucked with. They didn’t even believe the words coming out of my mouth and thought I was being crazy paranoid. Sure enough, we’re at the bar for barely 5 minutes before the bartender himself starts berating me, openly trying to hit on my girlfriend right in front of me, and calling me “college boy”. Sometimes everything just comes together and as we were leaving he attempted to get in one final jab. “What are you going to do with that fancy degree college boy?” “Her” I said, motioning to my scorching hot young lady friend. “I’m going to do her.” I kept that promise, but the utter strangeness of the entire endeavor stuck with me. Even though I can blend in and look like about as normal a normal looking white dude as humanly possible these days (pending I’m not showing my tattoos), you think I’m itching to go out for a drink in Trump country anytime soon? Riiiiiight. Again, I’m not even a minority. Imagine how they feel. People in small towns are in fact super nice, but typically only to other totally normal looking Christian white people. At least that’s been my experience.
As mentioned, we’re currently more politically divided between the cities and small towns than ever before, which also means we’re more politically divided between the artsy types and the norms. If you’re of the more artistic persuasion, you almost have to move to whatever big city you can, not just because that’s the only place you’ll find other artists or any semblance of an art scene, but also because it’s probably the only place you won’t get regularly fucked with. This meme pretty much sums it up (although I’m not much of a punk guy myself):
Editors note: I could not locate this meme so apologies.
But that’s only one aspect of it. I’m sure another factor is that artists (especially musicians) are typically poor and often don’t have fun things like health insurance. I personally love watching alt wrong dorks get worked up about the “Hollywood elite” while failing to recognize, you know those stars who you’re convinced are in the Illuminati actually work for non-creative types who are far richer than them right? Of course you don’t, you’d couldn’t even come up with something as basic as Pepe on your own. You had to steal it from a now terrified lefty dude. In general, for every dollar most artists make on their art, some boring suit makes 4. Now we’re in a situation where for every dime we make, some tech bro makes a dollar. Go look at a list of the richest people in the world? How many artists of any variety are on that list? Even those super successful “elite artists” are technically getting fucked over by shitty businessmen when you look at the fine print most of the time. Same deal with athletes. It’s easy to forget that say LeBron James technically works for a guy who’s way richer than him, who made a fortune off the subprime mortgage crisis and threw pro-Trump parties in secret. Which would be another point, since most athletes in the NFL and NBA are minorities, those people hate the new regime for the most part too. So basically, nearly everyone that large numbers of people give a fuck about because they make our lives less boring hate the new administration.
But those are social and socio-economic factors. There’s obviously a psychological explanation for why creative types tend to loathe regressive politics as well. If I were to guess, I’d say this most likely has to do with the creative part of the mind giving artists a greater sense of empathy toward others. It’s why I encourage everyone to explore this part of themselves, whether they excel at it or not. Same reason everyone should exercise. There’s an enormous tie between spirituality and art and great artists are typically more of the divergent thinking variety. They’re trying to come up with new things, with new means of expression. Conservativism in a nutshell is the exact opposite. It’s trying to keep things the same and even more bizarrely, trying to recapture some sort of imagined fictional glory of the past. Make America Great Again? Like fucking when exactly? When rich people paid way more in taxes? Chaos and Order I suppose. I’m not going to pretend religion doesn’t have a lot to do with this. Why is it that people of the more artistic or creative persuasions just don’t buy into shit like religious fundamentalism as easily as well? Why are there like 4 well respected Christian bands total in the entire history of rock music? Why indeed.
If I were a clever psychology student, this is certainly something I’d be working on if I wanted to get published. It’s one thing to notice something obvious about our collective psychology. It’s another thing to officially “prove” it with research, as I learned. Regardless of whether or not this “proof” comes about in the near future, the obviousness of an entire creative class collectively rejecting the dominant politics of their era is going to be a tad unprecedented in the coming years. Get your popcorn ready.
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