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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 433 Truncating his personality in order to conform to an honorific stereotype in turn damages the political discriminator's self-esteem and also his capacity for self-knowledge. Someone who is deeply personally invested in the honorific stereotype but fails fully to conform to it (as everyone must, of course) views himself as inherently defective. He is naturally beset by feelings of failure, inferiority, shame and worthlessness which poison his relations with others in familiar ways: competitiveness, dishonesty, defensiveness, envy, furtiveness, insecurity, hostility, and self-aggrandizement are just a few of the vices that figure prominently in his interpersonal interactions. But if these feelings and traits are equally antithetical to his honorific stereotype, then they, too, threaten his honorific stereotypical self-conception and so are susceptible to pseudorational denial, dissociation or rationalization. For example, a first-order political discriminator might be blindly unaware of how blatantly he advertises these feelings and traits in his behavior; or he might dissociate them as mere peccadilloes, unimportant eccentricities that detract nothing from the top-drawer person he essentially is. Or he might acknowledge them but rationalize them as natural expressions of a Nietzschean, übermenschliche ethic justified by his superior place in life. Such pseudorational habits of thought reinforce even more strongly his personal investment in the honorific stereotype that necessitated them, and in the xenophobic conception of others that complements it. This fuels a vicious downward spiral of self-hatred and hatred of anomalous others from which it is difficult for the political discriminator to escape. Thus the personal disadvantage of first-order political discrimination is not just that the discriminator devolves into an uninteresting and malevolent person. He damages himself for the sake of his honorific stereotype, and stunts his capacity for insight and personal growth as well. A sign that a person's self-aggrandizing self-conception is formed by an honorific stereotype is that revelation of the deviant, primary disvalued properties provokes shame and denial, rather than a reformulation of that self-conception in such a way as to accommodate them. For example, a family that honorifically conceives itself as white Anglo-Saxon Protestant may deny that its most recent offspring in fact has woolly hair or a broad nose. Similarly, a sign that a person's conception of another is formed by a derogatory stereotype is that revelation of the other's nondeviant, primary valued properties provokes hostility and denial, rather than the corresponding revision of that conception of the other in such a way as to accommodate them. For example, a community of men that honorifically conceives itself in terms of its intellectual ability may dismiss each manifestation of a woman's comparable intellectual ability as a fluke. These two reactions are reciprocal expressions of the same dispositions in the first- and third-person cases respectively. Shame involves the pain of feeling publicly exposed as defective, and denial is the psychological antidote © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
