Projecting badness onto others protects the self from internal contradiction.

Evidence

With the split of both the self and the world into “good” and “bad” objects, the “bad” self is distanced and identified with the mental representation of the “bad” object. This act of projection saves the self from any confrontation with the contradictions present in the necessary integration of “bad” and “good” aspects of the self. The deep structure of our own sense of self and the world is built upon the illusionary [sic] image of the world divided into two camps, “us” and “them.” “They” are either “good” or “bad.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 646

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Projection as a psychic mechanism that constitutes both selfhood and the world’s binary order — the self is built through externalizing its own bad objects. This gives the psychological motor for othering that later Islamophobia arguments depend on but rarely make explicit.
• XREF: This psychic projection mechanism is the colonial-psychology building block the reader is explicitly mining; it links to later framings of racialized selfhood and to how the colonized become the receptacle for the colonizer’s disavowed traits. — connects to: Psychological guilt stems from evading one’s absolute freedom through bad faith — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 71; Civilized subjects project their own repressed mimetic impulses onto others as repellent remnants. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1426; Privileged innocence is purchased at the cost of others’ suffering — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 167 (+4 more)
• SEED: The claim that ‘splitting’ saves the subject from confronting internal contradictions could be essay-material on why contemporary anti-Muslim discourse resurges so stubbornly: it is psychic economy, not just policy conflict.