Tara Reade may exist

Is there anything really intelligent to be said about the Tara Reade situation? Once again, psychology is the pathway.

Observable phenomena in the scientific (“objective”) realm should be necessarily considered true. But facts in the human realm are subjective at their core.* Example: A chemist’s son commits a murder, a crime of passion, a one-time descent to visceral white-hot rage and the absolute sense that his identity will implode when his wife leaves him for his best friend. That chemist accepted that salt is NaCl before the crime, and he accepts that salt is NaCl after the crime. Prior to it, he knew that his own wife’s murderer deserves either death or life imprisonment. Following his son’s act, he is certain that all evidence militates against harsh punishment: His son should be spared.

Another example: A Trump loyalist and a Trump hater look at the same photograph of the president’s Inaugural crowd. The hater takes it at face value: There was a paltry turnout. The loyalist knows that one photo doesn’t necessarily reflect full reality. It was taken at the wrong time. People came and went: Trump admirers are plain folk, hard workers, not into spectacle. They needed to get back to their jobs. Numbers of audience members at a given moment, the admirer realizes, say absolutely nothing about the incredible ardor, or at least fascination, people feel about the new president. “Bigger” or “biggest” should only refer to what’s in countless people’s hearts. The president’s crowd was the biggest. The photograph is completely meaningless, just as the Shroud of Turin is to an atheist.

We can reduce these understandings to an absurd truth: What matters to people is all that matters. To liberals, Brett Kavanaugh is doubtless a very bad person. His politics are antisocial and corrosive of any conceivable decent value, and he couldn’t even muster the character to refrain from adolescent rage at the Senate Judiciary hearing. There is no doubt that he sexually abused that woman. That is who he is. Nor could it matter how long ago that terrible act was committed.

Joe Biden, to liberals and Democrats, an unknown number of Independents, and some Republicans, is so necessary to our country at this precarious moment as to practically be a new law of nature. His ideas are prosocial; his history has been visibly more whitish than blackish. It is therefore both impossible and of no meaningful significance (please note the pure paradox) that he might have committed the sexual behavior he has been accused of.

That will be the unspoken position taken by a possible majority of the electorate heading into November. I take that position, speak it, and for this post’s purposes, run with it.

I don’t want Ms. Reade to have been hurt by Joe Biden years ago, but my chosen super­ficial glance at the situation indicates that she survived intact. That is a corrupt position for a psychotherapist such as myself to take, but a necessary one in these times. Most important factor is that I don’t want her to ruin the future of our country by fatally harming the candidate’s reputation. Her injury – if true – is less important than our future. Therefore, she needs to be banished to oblivion or to discred­itation. If Biden now or later proves to be a hypocrite, a misogynist in virtue’s clothing, I will still see him as essentially good because he may, and hopefully will, destroy the much worse. I have defined “good” as a fact based in its deepest source: my self.**

And so have you.

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* This idea was explored earlier at – https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2018/07/our-delusional-selves-draft-for-carmen.html.

** The issue of selective delusion is more complex than what I’ve described. I honestly and clinically believe there is, on balance, a greater capacity for truth-seeking and -accepting in the liberal or Democratic psyche. But I can only use myself as a test case. Countless Republicans know of the president’s heinous acts and words, but continue to define good in accordance with their agenda. On the other hand, if film, photograph or other incontestable evidence of rape by Biden were to be unearthed, I would accept that reality and its meaning, would immediately reject him and would turn to another Democratic candidate.