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🇦🇹 Austria /Culture & Society

Right-wing agitators and the human psyche

From Der Standard · () German

Translated from German and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

Opinion Named sources Context piece
  • Robert Misik examines how propaganda and repeated lies can cultivate resentment, anger and paranoid personalities.
  • He argues that right-wing agitation reproduces the emotional conditions that sustain bitterness rather than seeking its resolution.
  • The commentary links this propaganda to a cult of toughness, cruelty and destructive impulses.

The resentful person, Robert Misik argues, can become attached to bitterness itself. The aim is not healing, but the constant reproduction of the conditions that allow resentment to deepen.

Misik writes that hateful individuals do not simply appear. They pass through what he calls an education in inhumanity, subjected to relentless propaganda and lies. Fabricated horrors are piled onto real grievances, he says, creating anger and feelings of bitterness while pushing people toward increasingly paranoid identities.

The process works not only through adopted language and slogans. Emotions adapt as well. Propaganda and what Misik calls brainwashing draw strength from a cult of toughness, a pleasure in cruelty and fantasies about the harm that could be inflicted on others.

Citing social scientist Leo Löwenthal, Misik says this agitation intensifies “murderous, aggressive and destructive impulses.” His argument focuses on the emotional machinery of right-wing mobilization and its ability to make bitterness self-sustaining.

murderous, aggressive and destructive impulses

· Leo LöwenthalMisik cites the social scientist to describe the impulses intensified by propaganda and agitation.
About this summary

Originally published by Der Standard in German. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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