[Forgiven_Sinner]

"The liberal is a person with a subconscious. The more conservative is your temperament, the less a subconscious you have. Literally. So when you're a Peggy Noonan and some leftist academic asks you about rummaging around in voters' subconscious, you have no idea what she is talking about."

Thanks. You've explained something that has always puzzled me. I haven't believed in a subconscious, at least, as Freud described it, and wondered why people did believe in it. I was self aware of my decisions from my childhood and knew why I made my decisions. They weren't always good or right or well informed, but I knew why I made decisions. Making choices without knowing why was alien to me.

As I've gotten older, I realize many people make decisions like that because they don't want to know their own reasons. They want to lie to themselves because they don't like what they do and why they did. Self honesty, even if brutally critical, is essential to my personality. I'd rather deal with an unpleasant truth about myself than lie to myself and have reality smack me in the face with the lie.

I think lying to oneself is the nature of being a liberal.

[Taliesan]

Thanks. You've explained something that has always puzzled me. I haven't believed in a subconscious, at least, as Freud described it, and wondered why people did believe in it. I was self aware of my decisions from my childhood and knew why I made my decisions. They weren't always good or right or well informed, but I knew why I made decisions. Making choices without knowing why was alien to me.

We know as much about ourselves as we want to know.

I've always been amused by the whole debate prompted by Freud about motivations. Some people have argued powerfully for the Freudian picture of the soul as a stratified, murky lakebed; others have argued just as powerfully that he was all bunk. To me, the obvious answer is that souls are different and both sides of the argument are true. I've met people who I thought were a walking bag of complexes, and I've known people who were refreshingly less complex than that.

Liberals seem to like "complex" characters in fiction, "nuanced" politicians, and "sophisticated" verbal wittiness. Anybody who is not "complex" is stupid.

It has never occurred to them that the opposite of "complex" might be "healthy", and might really exist.