Change, High Stakes, and Extreme Behavior

The source for this post in is Frank Rich's editorial, The Rage Is Not About Health Care New York Times, March 28, 2010

Following the passage of the health reform bill, the Tea Party has expressed its rage against Congressmen who voted for it. Frank Rich, points out that those who came most under attack, were a Jew and three blacks:

"It's not a happenstance that [Barney] Frank, [John] Lewis and [Emanuel] Cleaver-- none of them a major Democratic players in the healthcare push-- received a major share of last weekend's abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan "take our country back," these are the people they want to take the country back from."

Rich links the angry outbursts to the rage in the past against Social Security under FDR, Medicare under LBJ, and after the passage of the Civil Rights Bill in the sixties. Frank Rich's point is that the rage is not against the health bill, but is about “an inexorable and immutable change in the very identity of America, not just its governance.”

The rage Rich is singling out is what Structural Dynamics calls a ‘high stakes behavior’. Recently introduced changes in our governing body—Obama, a black President, Pelosi, a female speaker of the house, Sotomayor, a minority female on the Supreme Court, as well as changing demographics--through which, all too soon, whites will become a minority, represent threats on identity, a high stakes matter for all involved.

In high stakes situations, behavior changes, often in the extreme. One phenomenon that raises the stakes is the “Power of ‘Other’”. At these times, ‘other’—the stranger, the outsider, the foreigner, any group or individual perceived as radically different from ‘us’ and from ‘self’--is accorded great symbolic power, which incites anxiety. At such high stakes times, dark, shadowy, and extreme behaviors are stirred up and acted out. Our model’s understanding of high stakes behavior, only partially represented here, perfectly describes the extreme rage we are seeing from the Tea Party movement.