The Borderline Personality: A Clinical Example
[A slightly different version of this, with some additional material, was originally posted in April, 2007 as Retrospective Falsification.]
In Borderline Personality Disorder: Early Development I described how the young child must integrate multiple images (self and object representations) into a coherent, unitary, relatively consistent and stable sense of himself and the important people (objects) in his life. The person who suffers from Borderline Personality disorder has a greater than usual vulnerability to a regressive (re)splitting of his objects and himself when under stress. A clinical example follows:
Ms. S was an attractive, very bright young woman who entered into an intensive Psychotherapy to deal with issues related to her chronic insecurity and unhappiness and her tendency to get involved with unsuitable and disappointing men. Early on a pattern became apparent. She tended to heavily idealize new men she met, as long as they met certain threshold criteria (particularly in terms of their looks, intelligence, and job prospects.) For the first month or two of dating, the new relationship would be all I heard about in her sessions. Nothing else mattered in her life and all efforts to engage her in reflection about the man in question (about whom she often offered very early signs that all was not as rosy as she believed) were met with an angry accusation that I didn't want her to be happy. In fact, she would continue, this man was the answer to all her problems and I didn't want it to work out because if it did, she wouldn't need my help anymore and I wouldn't get her money!
[I might add that she was paying a very low fee at the time, and she knew, from previous therapy and from friends, that she was paying a very low fee.]
She would fantasize about marriage and their future together for several sessions and then, without any apparent warning, he would disappear from her sessions. Upon my inquiry, she would mention that she had stopped seeing him because he was a loser.
Her ability to explore what had happened was very limited for quite a while but eventually we were able to understand what typically happened.
After several iterations, the pattern repeated: my patient met the "perfect man."
He was extremely talented and very good looking; he was quite well known in his field. In addition, he was as excited by her as she was by him. She blandly mentioned that, though he (and she) were both in their 30s, he still lived with his mother. Further, until he met her (so he told her) he had only dated women younger than 21.
Either of these facts, on their own, would be sufficient to at least raise questions about whether this man had the requisite emotional health and maturity for a long term relationship. Furthermore, because I was quite aware of her tendency to use important others as "self objects" (ie, as means for stabilizing a positive sense of herself; see below) I had some reason to expect he had a similar level of self-pathology. In such cases, as soon as the important other disappoints, they lose their value as an external buttress for the damaged person's self-esteem. Such people, which includes but is not limited to Narcissistic and Borderline characters, tend to "split" objects into all-good and all-bad. When an all-good object fails them, the person's rage at the disappointment and sense of shame causes the object to shift to become all-bad. Usually the relationship ends at that point. (This is one of the difficulties in conducting therapy with such people; disappointments are inevitable in every human interaction and maintaining the therapy in the face of such reactions is a difficult technical problem.)
[A self-object is an idealized object which a person uses as a "perfect" mirror. The dynamic is as follows: if a "perfect" person loves me, then by reflection off of their image, I must be perfect, too. This is one way that Narcissists and Borderlines attempt to stabilize their sense of themselves and protect themselves from feeling defective and damaged.]
For the purposes of this discussion, the salient aspect is that once the inevitable disappointment occurred, a transformation in my patient's emotional life took place that was a marvel to witness. Not only was he a terrible disappointment and a loser but he had always been a terrible disappointment and a loser. She insisted she had always known that he was inappropriate ("how could someone who still lives with his mother at 35 be much of a man") but had chosen to overlook his shortcomings, knowing it wouldn't last, because she had enjoyed dating him, and psychologically needed him to be her perfect lover.
It is important to recognize that not only did the ex-boyfriend become, in the present and the past, a different person, but she experienced herself as a different person as well. She had been deeply in love, ready to make the move into marriage and family; an entire new aspect of her life was about to unfold. Her future husband was flawless and so was she. In fact, he needed to be imagined as perfect in order for her to feel that she was perfect. When he failed her (by dating an 18 year old while they were supposedly in love) the disappointment meant that if he remained perfect, she would have to accept that she was deeply flawed; otherwise why would he reject her? Her rage would not tolerate such an outcome (which would have led to a serious depression) so she devalued him; he became worthless and she maintained her protective sense of herself as without flaws. In order to protect herself from knowing of her obviously flawed choice, she had to change her memory to "remember" that he had always been a poor choice.
It took many years of work before she was able to tolerate recognizing her own imperfections and she had to negotiate significant depression and rage to arrive at some comfort with a more accurate picture of herself, flaws and all.
In the next installment I plan on discussing some of the various treatment options at our disposal for helping people with Borderline Personality Disorder.
March 29, 2011 at 11:34 AM in Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissism | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
The Future of Sex II
In The Future of Sex I, I wondered about the impact on our relationships and our psycho-sexual development in an environment that includes the wide availability of all forms of sexual activity on the web:
We have gone from the Missionary position for most, with a full range of sexual appetitive behavior reserved for only the very wealthiest and debauched elites, to the entire sexual smörgåsbord now being available to all, starting at a very young age. I believe this has changed the way we experience and relate to our own bodies and others, but, again, do not think this has been well studied. It is certainly a part of the burgeoning Narcissism that permeates our culture, an increasingly voyeuristic culture, I hasten to add. The availability of Porn designed and directed at all different tastes and temperaments means that one does not have to develop one's sexuality in relation to another person, but can develop a fully formed (though unrelated) sexuality in isolation.
The Future of Sex is rapidly approaching. The relationship of Sex and technology will come to fruition with the advent of fully immersive virtual reality. The use of haptic suits and 3-D goggles, or some approximation, will allow the voyeur to enter into his own sexual fantasies in ways never before possible. This has the potential to shake our concept of the self and our understanding of intimacy; it is a truly disruptive technology, and this technology will arrive much sooner than most people realize.
The most obvious effects of the internet sex revolution include changing sexual mores, the pornification of mass culture, and increasing difficulties for many, many people in forming and maintaining intimate relationships. As the Future of Sex arrives, in the form of fully immersive virtual reality, these issues will worsen, and novel forms of psychopathology will arise.
Pornography has existed for as long as man has been capable of representative and symbolic expression. Its penetration (if you will pardon the pun; most pornography is designed for men, after all, though women are catching up) into popular culture was always limited by the inherent limitations of the extant media. Traditional porn, in books, playing cards, and film made porn available to more and more people though historically porn was a devalued and debased form depicting devalued and debased women and men. With the advent of the VCR in the 1970's, porn became a more lucrative enterprise and for the first time, there was a market that responded to competition. Porn increased its production values (which meant better looking men and women) and eventually the increased ease of availability not only led to the explosion of product for the mass markets, enough so that robust niche markets could be exploited for profit, but also to the idealization of the porn star. Porn has now become socially acceptable in large swaths of the culture and the idealized porn star has replaced the Hollywood actress as the idealized woman for many young men.
As our virtual reality experiences slowly become indistinguishable from non-mediated reality, we can expect two problems to worsen. First, no women will be able to measure up to the porn star. Impossibly thin waists and enormous gravity defying breasts, along with the willingness to do anything that a man desires, are hardly attributes likely to be found in most young women. Further, although most of the animus toward porn will be directed at its objectification of women, young men will find themselves failing in comparison to the hugely endowed, insatiable, and indefatigable men with whom they compare themselves. In other words, everyone will lose out in comparison to the caricature filled world of porn.
The healthier, more secure, more future oriented young people will, after dabbling with porn in adolescence, recognize that there is greater fulfillment in a relationship with a real human being rather than a cartoon character. Yet, if our experience with drugs and alcohol is any indication, the problems of substance abuse will pale in comparison to the number of young people lost in preference to the "perfect" world they can construct in virtual reality. The siren call of sexual delights with the perfect woman or man (women or men) will be impossible to resist for the marginal or insecure person who has minimal sexual possibilities in the real world. The secondary effects will mean that young men and women will react to the virtual competition by trying to make themselves into more perfect sexual objects. Adolescence is likely to become an even more parlous time than it is already. This will be one more hurdle, perhaps the most difficult hurdle, for our children to negotiate on their way to adulthood; many will fail.
Note as well that for adults, the opportunity to regress and enter into a fantasy world will also be a powerful lure away from the disappointments and failures of an ungratifying real world.
In addition, the advent of fully immersive virtual reality may very well impact our concept of self. Studies of Out of Body Experiences and more recent experiments on phantom limb pain have shown that our sense of self does not necessarily coincide with our physical limitations; in other words, we are quite capable, with the correct situation and stimuli, of inducing our self to leave our body and inhabit a virtual body. Fully immersive virtual reality may be easier than once thought.
Dissociation and depersonalization are typically anxious states. Patients who describe Out of Body Experiences often worry about finding their way back to their bodies; the sensation of being disconnected from one's body can be terrifying; you can become convinced you are dying or dead. In other cases, when the experience of reality is blurred, other people can seem to be less real; in some psychotic states, the people in one's environment are replaced by doppelgangers.
As I pointed out last week, most of Modern Medicine, indeed most of Modern Life, is a Naturalistic experience. We are adding new variables all the time. Virtual Sex has the potential to become a Great Filter if we are not able to master the temptations.
November 08, 2010 at 01:12 PM in Innovation, Narcissism, Psychoanalysis, Science, Sex | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
Beauty's Only Skin Deep
"Deep down, I'm pretty superficial."
-- Ava Gardner
Ava Gardner was a legendary beauty. She had it all, looks, sophistication, fame, money; she could have any man she wanted and she ended up marrying a succession of self-involved creeps:
Ava Gardner Reflects on Ava Gardner
Fame and money are a heady brew and before too long Gardner was drinking heavily, dancing all night, and being courted by Mickey Rooney, MGM's biggest little star. Her marriage to Rooney—he relentlessly cheated on her—lasted a year.
She did even worse by marrying crazy man, Artie Shaw, real name: Arthur Jacob Arshawsky, who was determined to educate his tobacco road wife. On their honeymoon, Shaw gave her a stack of books that included War and Peace and Das Kapital.
Ava yawned.
The egomaniacal band leader was further upset when he discovered that his movie star wife had no idea how to iron his shirts, and this seething cauldron was enraged when she didn't fill his coffee cup to the precise level he indicated. Their disastrous marriage also lasted one year.
Can a woman do worse than Artie Show?
Sadly, she could and she did. Ava Gardner destroyed her career with alcohol.
Ava Gardner, from what little I know of her, may well have been an example of the beautiful woman whose beauty allows her to remain superficial and shallow; a woman like this is an exemplar of a type of narcissistic Psychopathology in which the surface (looks, attributes) is over-valued in the service of using the environment (other people) to support self esteem. It is not at all unusual for such women to find men who value them primarily for the way that their beauty reflects well upon the man who has obtained her. In this way, the man is able to prove his worth to others; if he can get a beautiful woman, he is elevated in the eyes of his audience. In both cases, their self esteem, even when superficially high, rather fragile. At the core, the narcissist fears he is worthless and unlovable and spends most of his or her life trying to entice or force the environment to offer them tribute.
It is never a surprise to find that relationships between mutually needy Narcissists are rarely successful. For the narcissists, other people are not fully three dimensional; rather their value lies in how they affect the Narcissist. The tragedy of narcissism is that as we age and inevitably lose those superficial attributes that have attracted acclaim and celebrity, the Narcissist lacks the inner resources to maintain their self-esteem and self regard as the "flush of youth" fades. The aging actress or beauty who desperately resorts to plastic surgery to delay the inevitable decline can become almost addicted to the process in the belief that she will be able to preserve her youth and looks forever. When it fails, as it must, depression (or its evil twins of drug and alcohol abuse) is common. Likewise the professional athlete who needs the adulation of the crowd may hang on long past the time his skills have eroded; once in retirement, depression often beckons. We have seen so many tragic examples that such personal disasters, beyond their utility for schadenfreude, have become trivialized.
Other forms of narcissistic pathology are more commonly seen in our politicians, who believe that they are above the rules. The feelings of power that come with being able to control people, deliver largess to great applause and sycophancy while being elevated above the concerns of the mundane can be intoxicating. A classic case was the former Governor of New York who not only needed a beautiful prostitute to make him feel more manly but was destroyed by the very laws he championed. Hubris is often a sign of Narcissism run wild.
We all contain Narcissistic tendencies and vulnerabilities. Our current zeitgeist encourages those who do not appreciate the distinction between the surface and the depths of a person. Ava Gardner's comment would be taken as a post-modern insight of great depth were she a celebrity alive today prattling on during some day time talk show.
When young we all tend to be at our most Narcissistic; adolescents, almost by definition, suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, where their moods and self esteem depend on the state of their social life and their standing in the hierarchy at any given moment. Americans have a special proclivity to becoming trapped in extended adolescence. (And apparently we no longer even expect 26 year olds to be able to survive on their own; eg, Obamacare.)
Cassandra linked to a remarkable news story and tried to address it seriously:
Looks, Men, Women: Blah, Blah, Blah
So are women who work hard to look good insecure, or do they just understand market forces? The older I get, the more value I see in examining the adaptive value of male and female behaviors that cause conflict and misunderstanding. While I'm not a big fan of rigid stereotypes, is it really reasonable to assume that people do things we don't understand/agree with for no reason (the old, "He/she only acts that way b/c men/women are insane/irrational/overemotional/not reasonable like I am").
What's interesting to me is the area of overlap. Today women are completing school in record numbers. We have careers, in most cases, before we marry and have children. This makes pregnancy a lot less risky because for the first time we can support ourselves and any children we might bear, if need be. That reduces the value of a man's earning potential and forces him, if he wants to win the best quality female (however he defines that), to bring additional qualities to the table.
I'm often bemused when I hear men go on about how women only care about the size of a man's wallet. When I fell in love with my husband, it was tremendously important to me that he have integrity and be dependable because when a woman is pregnant or has small children, she makes herself enormously vulnerable in a way I don't think a lot of men understand. His earning power was not something I even thought of. My assumption was that if he was dependable, he'd keep a roof over our heads if I needed to stay home and care for our children. But I also thought of wage earning as a shared and negotiated responsibility neither of us could unilaterally delegate away.
Modern feminism presented women with a binary choice. Either tend to your looks and define yourself as non-serious and defendant or ignore your looks and declare your independence. Cassandra has it almost right. In fact some women work hard to look good because they are terribly insecure (ie for primarily narcissistic reasons) while others like to look their best for their own pleasure and to please their man. Likewise, men do many things to increase their appeal to women, sometimes for purely narcissistic reasons (to acquire a beautiful women for display) but more often out of a combination of reasons, including the desire for a truly intimate relationship with someone who can become their closest confidante and best friend. Those who never progress from the superficial will never be able to achieve intimacy. Those who fail to grasp this end up writing articles like this:
Why Beauties Get Cheated On Big Time!
Guess what girls -- don't be envious of the most beautiful women in the world
Look at Elin, look at Sandra Bullock, look at Halle, Britney, JLo, Reese, Julia Roberts, Jessica Simpson -- they've ALL been cheated on!
It's become irrevocably clear -- beauty is no vaccination against having your man cheat, and it's happened in every public area.
Models — gorgeous supermodel Christie Brinkley cheated on by her architect husband Peter Cook.
Politics -- stunning Silda Spitzer cheated on by her husband Eliot Spitzer.
Sports -- head turner Cynthia Rodriguez cheated on by her Yankee star A-Rod, and then when it comes to the world of celebrity, the list goes on and on with Jesse James' transgressions against his beautiful Oscar-winning wife Sandra, who thanked him in her acceptance speech, is just the latest jaw-dropper. So why doesn't beauty confer ANY protection against a cheating spouse, fiance or boyfriend?
It is not beauties who get cheated on all the time but people for whom relationships are primarily Narcissistic exercises, where the value of the other lies in how they make the Narcissist appear to the world. (NB: At any given moment, the world can be as small as a hotel room.) Since such relationships are firmly rooted in the superficial, deeper desires for connection and intimacy are rarely possible once the initial flush of physical intimacy relents. The headline might better have explored: Why Narcissists Get Cheated On Big Time!
May 28, 2010 at 11:21 AM in Narcissism | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)
The Future of Sex I
A very good argument could be made that all technological advances have been propelled by our sexual desires. For most of human history, the argument would have to be that technological advances, most the result of the efforts of men, have served primarily to increase the status of the developer and increase his access to desirable women. Young men do what they can to win the affections of desirable girls. Of course, this is both trivializing the subject and rather reductionist, though likely to evoke at least a wry smile among most. However, in a very real way, sex has been a major motivator behind our modern technology. Steven Horwitz summarizes:
Pornography as the Cutting Edge Where Technology Meets Commerce
There's a great CNN.com article today on the role that porn has played in being the "canary in the coalmine" of not just internet technology but communications technology in general. When new ways of communicating are developed, you can be sure that humans will be happy to pay a premium for their use for sexual purposes. As the article points out, this was true for movies, the telephone, the VCR (and don't forget that's a big part of why VHS beat out Beta was porn), the DVD and the internet. And now 3-D! And of course, sexting.
The CNN article to which he links has more detail:
In the tech world, porn quietly leads the way
It was just days after the release of the iPad -- Apple's slate computer heralded as a tool for gaming, book and magazine reading and Web consumption -- when the announcement arrived.
One of the world's biggest porn companies claimed it had created a way to stream its videos onto the device, skipping the Apple store and its restrictions on salacious content.
The announcement illustrates a widely acknowledged but seldom-spoken truth of the technology world: Whenever there's a new content platform, the adult-entertainment industry is one of the first to adopt it -- if they didn't help create it in the first place.
"It's not necessarily that the porn industry comes up with the ideas, but there's a huge difference in any technology between the idea and the successful application," said Jonathan Coopersmith, a professor at Texas A&M University who teaches the history of technology.
"The classic example is the VCR," said Oliver Marc Hartwich, an economist and senior fellow with Centre for Independent Studies, a conservative Australian think tank. "When it was introduced, Hollywood was nervous because the big studios feared piracy. They were even considering suing the VCR producers.
"Not so the adult industry. They saw it as a big new market and seized the opportunity."
On the internet, streaming video, credit-card verification sites, Web referral rings and video technology like Flash all can be traced back to innovations designed to share, and sell, adult content.
Experts attribute much of the success of AOL, the social networking forbearer of sites like Facebook and Twitter, to its private chat rooms -- and anyone who remembers scanning the user-created chats remembers the adults-only nature of many of them.
Websites that require memberships, encryption coding, speedier file-sharing technology -- all can trace their roots back to the adult industry.
3-D is next.
However, despite all the technological advances that Porn has midwifed, none have really been a paradigm shift. At the same time, all of the advances thus far have primed the pump for the truly paradigm shattering, inevitable next step.
What Porn has done up until now, and will continue to expand and intensify with the shift to 3-D Porn, is to democratize what were formerly known as Perversions, but now may be better understood as amoralized fantasies. In Porn, the actors are always voluntarily engaged in sexual behavior that is sanctioned by their presence.
The panoply of sexual fantasies have always been remarkable for two elements:
Sexual fantasies have always tended to be ritualistic, ie carefully choreographed, and they tended to involve sexual behavior that was not typically available to the fantasist in his or her reality.
In general, the types of sexual activity which arouse a person have traditionally been stable constructs across the life span. The widespread availability of Pornography have changed this aspect of sexual fantasizing in ways which have not been well studied. While there remain many people whose sexuality is determined and solidified in early adolescense, the availability of Porn means that just as the adolescent has traditionally tried on many different personality attributes throughout his progression to adulthood, today not only adolescents, but adults as well, have the opportunity to test their sexuality, via fantasy, through a wide range of behaviors. If voyeurism allows the watcher to participate in fantasy in the sexual acts he views, the repertoire of potential acts has expanded exponentially.
I will return to this topic in a future post.
May 05, 2010 at 12:21 PM in Innovation, Narcissism, Science, Sex | Permalink | Comments (52) | TrackBack (0)
The commenters who weighted in on Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out: Introduction all had interesting things to say. They added some important detail and depth to my introduction to the topic. However, I hope to throw them a curve ball or two, starting today. To repeat:
I suspect that during the next decade, the twenty-teens, "Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out" will acquire new meanings that would have confounded the early proselytizers of psychedelia.
Illuminating what Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out: Introduction meant in 1966 is not my goal here; what it might mean going forward is.
Timothy Leary meant for people to Tune In their inner world, to turn away from a corrupt and dehumanizing reality. For him, this would be the first step for becoming enlightened. In contemporary America, Tuning In means something very different. It means gaining increased access to the actual events and trends that underpin what used to be known as "news" but in reality was a fabrication of a small, select group of powerful men and women who had control over access to news and the narrative in which the news was embedded. Until fairly recently there was almost no way for most people to actually Tune In to what was controlling their lives. This has begun to change in a way that qualifies as that over-used term, a paradigm shift.
Americans began to Tune In in large numbers only over the last 10 years. The explosive, exponential growth of the Internet and blogosphere fed a thirst for information that is potentially transformative. It is awe inspiring to realize that it was only 12 years ago that The Drudge Report exploded into most people's consciousness with a story about a blue dress. Since that time, we have increasingly Tuned In to what is being done in our name and with our country. And what we see is disturbing. Our elites have shown themselves to be self-serving, ineffectual (beyond their extractive abilities), hypocritical, arrogant, and far more ignorant than we might once have realized (not withstanding William F. Buckley's famous comment about the Boston Phone Book.)
Porphyrogenitus, writing at Winds of Change, has it just about right: [All emphases mine: SW]
The Governments Have Learned from their Mistakes
The trouble is, as sagacious as people like Kevin Drum are when compared to simple-minded people like Jonah Goldberg, these guardians of the main currents of enlightened opinion fail to think beyond stage one: Why is it that bankers won't learn from their mistakes? What incentive structures have been put in place or, as importantly, what has been demolished, so as to discourage them from learning from their mistakes?
Demolished might be too strong a word. Decayed, dissolved, deteriorated might all be better descriptions, as in a building not well maintained, as with much of our public infrastructure (oh, but shovel-ready will fix this as well!)
Here is the question they dislike most, as it reflects a shocking lack of faith in our ability to solve public problems through collective action: Have the institutions they favor demonstrated a better capacity for learning from their mistakes than the ones they mock? If not, why not?
Are California or Michigan or New York &tc doing better learning from their mistakes than Goldman Sachs is? Are they really? We mock the idea that bankers are, but is it a fair mockery? Or the gaunt, chilling laugh of those who are practically undead themselves?
Have the PIIGS learned from their mistakes? Really now, have they? Is there at least as much at stake here as there is in even the biggest "too big to fail" bank or corporation?
Those who think the problem was embedded in a previous Administration or one side of the aisle need to free their minds as well. The reassuring myth that it is all caused by having the wrong sort of people in government, and now we've got the right sort of master-minds involved; those who believe in government and have faith in its capacity to solve all problems, is one they may want to reconsider, and take a more historical view. If they can open their mind to untainted history.
I might take issue with his characterization of Jonah Goldberg, but in essence he is expressing his frustration with our elites, public and private. There are a lot of people, on both sides of the political divide, who still believe that their side is right and the other side is wrong. For those who are paying attention, it is becoming clear that both "sides" have failed for similar reasons; they have insisted on centralization of decision making without realizing that they lack the expertise to do the jobs they imagine they have been selected to do, and even when they have some expertise, lack adequate information upon which to make informed decisions. The impossibility of incorporating adequate information is not new; markets work because they do a far better job of summing information than any small groups of elites could possibly do, even theoretically. The problem of arrogant and ignorant elites being unaware of their limitations (which I see as much worse on the Left but hardly exclusive to the Left) is becoming unmistakable to people who now see much more of what was once withheld "for their own good."
[An analogy: I work with people four times a week. A good argument can be made that I know them as well as anyone can, yet I also have the humility to recognize that I can never know enough about a person to predict with certainty what will work best for them. I do not offer advice or tell them what to do because they will have to live with the consequences and only they can take responsibility for their actions as adults and free agents. If I do not think it wise to make decisions for people who I know so well, how can I countenance unknown, distant people making decisions for all of us?]
Our markets failed in the banking crisis principally because the incestuous relationship between big business and government led to dangerous risk taking by the well connected, government intervention that distorted the market place, and ultimately a misunderstanding and miscalculation of the dangers inherent in their activity; all was well until the party ended. We might excuse some of the aforementioned were we convinced that our governing and business classes were now taking our concerns into account.
Because Politicians Didn't Take The Crisis Seriously
Is our government really paying any attention? It seems to me that the DC crowd is diving ever deeper into denial.
What interests me is that common citizens in the US are paying attention, but our politicians are not. A further quote:
What at the time looked like scaremongering has now become bitter reality -- because politicians didn't take the warning signs seriously.
Below in the comments, Who Struck John writes that he thinks getting politicians to take the US government debt seriously will take a few election cycles.
We don't have a few election cycles. As of April 30th, US debt held by the public had risen to almost 8.4 trillion. Bookmark this Treasury Direct page. You can enter a date range at the bottom to see how debt has risen. At the beginning of 2010, the public debt was 7.81 trillion. Q1 nominal US GDP (see Table 3) was 14.6 trillion. The danger ratio is 80% of nominal; at this rate we'll be there by 2012 or 2013. It takes time to correct. We only have a few years to start that correction, which must include both tax increases and hefty cuts in government spending.
[NB: Read the whole thing including the comments to her post.]
I have no particular facility with economics, which is why I rely on people whose credibility has been earned over the years. I find the front page reporters at the MSM to be without credibility anymore when it comes to almost anything. They are so busy propelling an agenda that the actual news is a minimal part of their reports. Yet, as M_O_M points out, the information is available. Its import is seeping in as more and more people Tune In to what is happening to our country.
America was founded and populated by people who just wanted to be left alone by their government. As long as the government left us alone, (relatively speaking) we were willing to pay our taxes and leave well enough alone. Since the Reagan revolution the government has been consistently reasserting its desire to not leave us alone. At first slowly, then suddenly, the government has grown so large and become so demanding to be fed, that it now endangers our ability to be left alone.
Once people Tune In, the next step, the Turn On, becomes inevitable.
May 04, 2010 at 10:55 AM in Narcissism, Resilient Communities | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)
Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out: Introduction
According to Wikipedia, the phrase, popularized by Timothy Leary,
came to him in the shower one day after Marshall McLuhan suggested to Leary that he come up with "something snappy" to promote the benefits of LSD. It is an excerpt from a prepared speech he delivered at the opening of a press conference in New York City on September 19, 1966. This phrase urged people to embrace cultural changes through the use of psychedelics and by detaching themselves from the existing conventions and hierarchies in society.
Here is an excerpt from the speech:
'Turn on' meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. 'Tune in' meant interact harmoniously with the world around you - externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. 'Drop out' suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. 'Drop Out' meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean 'Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity'.
The subtext that does not show up in this excerpt is that Timothy Leary, et al, believed that America was a corrupt country, engaged in a War of Colonialism (Vietnam) and that capitalism was inherently evil. These ideas grew in fertile soil.
The 60s were an interesting time in which, for the first time in human history, an entire generation grew up and came of age with the expectation that they would never be so poor that they would face starvation and that the diseases which had traditionally taken the lives of half of all human beings before they reached age 5 were a thing of their past. Because of such remarkable changes, each baby boomer child was invested on average with far more parental narcissism than previous generations. To add to their Narcissistic investment in their own pleasures, the baby boomers came of age when sex had made the transition from a pleasurable activity fraught with consequences to one where its recreational aspects could be imagined to be primary. Penicillin, the Birth Control Pill, and finally, elective abortion, completely changed the calculations involved in sex; there was, for a time, no apparent risk to casual sex, and the free love movement of the late 60s, the apotheosis of Narcissism, collided with the reality of War.
As a result of that collision, the 1960s went from this:
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.
My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
Inaugural Address by John F. Kennedy - January 20th 1961
to thsi:
Steven won't give his arm
to no gold star mother's farm;
War's good business so give your son
and I'd rather have my country die for me.
"Rejoyce" from After Bathing at Baxters Jefferson Airplane, 1967
It took all of 6 years for the baby boomer cohort to assert their individual desires as the law of the land. Of course, there were always those reactionary hicks and rednecks, not to mention military fascists, who still believed in honor, duty, and love of country trumping love of self, but among the liberal elite college students, the Vietnam War was a horror precisely because it asserted that their country might have some demands on their abilities that deserved primacy. (Please note, I am not re-fighting the Vietnam War; it was poorly managed in many ways and we fought to not lose and thereby lost.)
[For more discussion of the Narcissistic transition of the 60s, see Demographics & Narcissism.]
In the next few posts in this series I plan on exploring how Americans are in the process of Tuning In, and Turning On, and what a future of Americans Dropping Out might look like.
May 03, 2010 at 01:08 PM in Narcissism, Resilient Communities | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBack (0)
The SovietizIng of American Therapy
On Friday, Dr. Helen Smith wrote a troubling post at Pajama's Media, Narcissism, Power, Fear of Death, and Liberalism, in which she discussed Jeffrey Kottler's On Being a Therapist. I have not read the book in question and cannot comment on some of the details, but Dr. Helen offers enough to alarm:
I often get books on psychology sent to me by publishers, and the other day I received Jeffrey Kottler's On Being a Therapist. The book is now in its fourth edition, and this latest edition "puts the spotlight on the therapist's role and responsibility to promote issues of diversity, social justice, human rights, and systemic changes within the community and the world at large."
Whoa: I thought the therapist's role was to increase the client's well-being and treat mental illness.
Kottler touches often on the narcissism of therapists in the book and has a section on the topic. He talks about his own struggle with self-worth and measures his own success by looking at all the good he has done, the people he has helped. He discusses how therapists often feel they are frauds. The author talks about his deep need to influence others, and he mentions a treatise on narcissism that describes it as such:
A lack of feeling, the need to project an image, the desire to help others in order to exercise power, and arrogance are all familiar symptoms.
He then states that he has long felt he holds super powers:
After all, it seems at times (to others, if not to myself) that I can read minds, predict the future, and hear, see, feel, and sense things beyond the powers of mere mortal beings.
In the author's defense, he does struggle with this and acknowledge it can be a problem. I have talked to therapists who feel they are superhuman yet see it as an asset.
An arrogant psychology PhD student at an APA convention told me that all psychologists go into the field because they want to be omnipotent, himself included. Really? Because when I got my training in New York City, I was taught that therapists were to be humble and work hard to achieve self-knowledge so that they can help their clients make the right decisions for themselves, not for the therapist. The client is not an extension of the therapist, but rather an independent, autonomous person with his or her own thoughts, feelings, and life.
Part of any successful analysis, especially a training analysis undertaken for the express purpose of developing oneself into a better therapist, is the necessity of analyzing one's own omnipotent and grandiose fantasies, which typically derive from our unconscious narcissism. Even well analyzed therapists have been known to commit egregious boundary violations with their patients. It is all too easy for a well meaning therapist to be not only unaware of his own blind spots but to unconsciously assume that his needs and desires and the patient's needs and desires are the same.
[I have written many times about the tendency of the Narcissist to assume that the mind of the other is a mirror reflection of his own mind. The true Narcissist does not see the "other" as an independent person, complete with agency and desire of his own.]
Dr. Helen wonders whether the Liberal's desire to control others may stem from a similar font as Dr. Kottler's:
I've noticed that psychology programs around the country have shifted from an emphasis on individual mental health to an emphasis on "promoting social justice." In practice, this always means liberal politics.
And maybe there's a connection there. Could it be that for liberals and certain therapists endowed with self-importance but without religion, influencing others is all they have? Forcing others to do as they wish fends off their fear of insignificance, which is why it is so urgent that others go along. It keeps their legacy alive. Notice how many times people bring up "Ted Kennedy's legacy" of health care. Is this more about keeping Kennedy's name immortal and his image alive than about real solutions to real-world problems?
The need to control others can stem from various unconscious psychological determinants. Many Liberals, and even more so for many on the far Left, are motivated by selfless idealism, in which they surrender part of their autonomy to a greater, usually Utopian, dream, and need to force others to follow along with them out of a conscious desire to save _____ (fill in the blank with the planet, the people, the volk, white racial purity, the poor, minorities, etc.) The motivation is often based on an idealization of their tenaciously held and narcissistically invested ideas.
[It has gone out of fashion to discuss the psychosexual component of control but it remains true that controlling people often derive a great deal of the powerful emotional investment in their need to control from their unconscious sadism, usually related to the anal phase. Orally derived sadism, in which the object must be controlled in order to prevent it from abandoning the infantile character, also adds its own imperative to the mix. The Narcissist's control over the object is characterized by less passion and an almost complete negation of the significance of the object except in so far as it serves the unconscious needs of the Narcissist.]
In March 2007, I noted the danger in pathologizing one's political opponents:
"Diagnosing" President Bush
There is a more serious potential danger in this as well. Once political differences have become pathologized, we have entered a slippery slope that can lead to very dangerous outcomes. Those of us who are familiar with the mis-use of Psychiatry by totalitarian regimes like the USSR, which created a special diagnosis for dissidents are very sensitive to this kind of shifting of the frame of the debate.
["Slow Schizophrenia" was one of the diagnoses they used against dissidents. Obviously, anyone who publicly complained about the Worker's Paradise was clearly psychiatrically disturbed and needed to be locked up and treated with powerful anti-psychotic medications.]
Recently the Chinese have taken a page out of the Soviet's book on how to handle dissidents and has been locking up such psychiatrically disordered individuals at an accelerating pace. (See this and this.) The value, to the totalitarian, of diagnosing an opponent as Psychiatrically ill is that it obviates the need to actually address their arguments and avoids the messiness of a public debate on the merits of a particular policy.
[Apparently, according to Human Rights Watch, the Chinese have coined "evil-cult-induced-mental-disorder" for use against Falun Gong members. I suppose the diagnosis sounds more professional in Chinese.]
See also PsychBlogging and the Goldwater Rule which includes some historical perspective on the mis-use of Psychiatry in politics.
With the best of intentions, Therapists like Jeffrey Kottler and those who believe that their job description includes "promoting social justice" are leading American Psychotherapy in the direction of the Sovietization of Mental Health.
Psychiatry has struggled to define the proper limits of our discipline. Where once we were arbiters of normality, and pathologized a great deal of personal variation (Homosexuality used to be considered a diagnosable, deviant sexual orientation) we have long since abandoned the notion that we could define "normal." The current DSM defines most pathology in terms of its cost to the individual and his effect upon those who interact with him. We are now risking making the same mistake but simply with a different valance. Labeling someone who believes Homosexuality is a sin with "hate speech" is on a continuum with Homosexuality as disorder.
(I am using Homosexuality as an example because it exemplified how our blind spots led us to become agents of social engineering; this was as problematic on the Conservative end of the spectrum as it is now on the Liberal side of the ledger. The advantage of taking a more Libertarian approach in one's Therapy as it doesn't require any particular imperative to impose one's own weltanschauung on one's patients.)
The reason Psychoanalysis (the discipline from which all current Psychotherapies derive) has been considered dangerous to society by totalitarians from the Soviets to the Nazis to the current Chinese, is that the goal of Psychoanalysis is to enlarge and enhance the autonomous functions of the patient's ego. In other words, our goal is to minimize the resources that our patients must devote to their unconscious conflicts (which includes the resources the Narcissist must devote to maintaining his unconscious grandiosity) so that they have more psychic energy to devote to those choices they deem more positive and satisfying in their lives. Autonomous agents are always a threat to totalitarians.
When Psychotherapists adopt a political stance as part of their therapeutic weltanschauung, they have left the field of enhancing autonomy and entered the field, albeit with the very best of intentions, of social engineering; they are allowing themselves to become agents for enhancing soft totalitarianism. It would behoove any such therapist to undergo some self-analysis and determine from whence his need to control arises.
April 19, 2010 at 12:28 PM in Liberalism, Narcissism | Permalink | Comments (17) | TrackBack (0)
Western (White) Guilt and Suicidal Moral Masochism
We are all familiar with the person who "has it all" yet manages to ruin their life. Not all such individuals have unconscious guilt which causes them to seek ways to punish themselves, but unconscious guilt as a motivator for masochistic, ie self damaging, behavior is an extremely common occurrence.
The predominantly white European world from which our Civilization emerged was, like any civilization past, present, and future, comprised of many different elements. Much that was evil was committed in the name of Western Civilization yet there are more people alive today, living in relative comfort and security, with more personal freedom, than any Civilization has ever managed before. Our technological civilization would never have come into being if not for the acts, often excessive, of those who came before. Yet our very success in the midst of overwhelming evil, penury, and sorrow, engenders feelings of guilt in those who do not feel that they have earned or deserve their privileges. There are a great many among us who, once having jettisoned God, are left struggling to understand why luck has granted them such ease while so many others struggle and die in abject despair and poverty. The liberal impulse, to help others, is a healthy response to such guilt but it can become so intensified as to tip over from a well meaning desire to help others into a less conscious desire to harm oneself (or those like oneself) in order to diminish the disparities that are so intolerable.
When the unconscious guilt is leveraged by a Narcissistic investment in the desire to "heal the world" and erase disparities, a toxic societal Moral Masochism can result.
Part of the rot at the center of many of our elite institutions is the result of just such over-valued Utopianism, an outgrowth of unconscious guilt, and the corresponding compensatory Moral Masochism. The academic who declares that "Amerikkka" is uniquely evil or the Cleric who preaches that "white folks' greed runs a world in need" are emerging from a weltanschauung that embodies an unconscious need for punishment for our successes. (The fact that these people are richly rewarded for their attacks on our legitimacy is a measure of the degree of Moral Masochism that our culture has accepted.)
The desire for equality (ie, to erase disparities) can be a rational and reasonable response to inequality, but in recent years it has become a dangerous source of instability in multi-ethnic and multicultural societies. Thomas Sowell writes in Race and Politics:
Few combinations are more poisonous than race and politics. That combination has torn whole nations apart and led to the slaughters of millions in countries around the world.
You might think we would have learned a lesson from that and stay away from injecting race into political issues. Yet playing the race card has become an increasingly common response to growing public anger at the policies of the Obama administration and the way those policies have been imposed.
Obama has promoted to the Supreme Court a circuit judge who dismissed a discrimination lawsuit by white firefighters, whose case the Supreme Court later accepted and ruled in their favor.
He preceded this appointment by talking about needing people on the court with "empathy." That is a pretty word but the ugly reality is that it is just another euphemism for bias. For generations, white Southern judges had all kinds of empathy for other white Southerners, which is to say, bias against blacks.
The question is whether you want equal treatment or you want payback. [Emphasis mine- SW] Cycles of revenge and counter-revenge have been at the heart of racial and ethnic strife throughout history, in countries around the world. It is a history written in blood. It is history we don't need to repeat in the United States of America.
Political demagoguery and political favoritism have turned groups violently against each other, even in countries where they have lived peacefully side by side for generations. Ceylon was one of those countries in the first half of the 20th century, before the politics of group favoritism so polarized the country-- now called Sri Lanka-- that it produced a decades-long civil war with mass slaughters and unspeakable atrocities.
We know-- or should know-- what lies at the end of the road of racial polarization. A "race card" is not something to play, because race is a very dangerous political plaything.
When society regresses under duress, once unified societies undergo pathological splitting. Where once was e pluribus unum, there ensues a descent into civil strife. Yesterday Richard Landes linked to a very troubling article describing the descent of South Africa into racial conflict; he drew some conclusions for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the experience of South Africa. In fact, his conclusions have much broader implications:
South Africa's Second Coming: the Nongqawuse syndrome
The reason I have written so little art this blog (and not participated in the excelllent discussions) recently is because I'm preparing the manuscript of my book, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience for Oxford U. Press. One of my chapter deals with the Xhosa Cattle-Slaying of 1856-7. In trying to keep up with the recent literature on the subject, I ran across an article by Achille Mbebe, a Cameroonian post-colonialist writer who has penned a blistering indictment of the post-Apartheid government of South Africa which i thought would interest the readers of this blog. Here it is, below, with comments.
Among other things, it underlines two major points: 1) the difficulty of establishing a working democracy; and 2) the almost certainty that any Palestinian state - a fortiori a "one state solution" to the Arab-Israeli problem would produce a failed "democracy."
Achille Mbembe, 14 June 2006
A dozen years after apartheid ended, a dangerous mix of populism, nativism and millenarian thinking is inviting South Africans to commit political suicide, writes Achille Mbembe.
The deputy chair of the South African Institute of International Relations, Moeletsi Mbeki speaking recently at Witwatersrand University, made an arresting comparison between the current political situation in South Africa and the one prevailing in the period leading to the Xhosa cattle-killing in 1856-57.
As is his wont, Richard's post is long, but it is very valuable; read the whole thing.
Nelson Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize because when South Africa gave up apartheid he led the way to a peaceful transition and eschewed revenge in favor of enabling the emergence of a functional multi-ethnic democracy. This is now failing in South Africa. Governance in South Africa has been poor and the economy is failing its people. It is now a nation descending into magical thinking, splitting, and paranoid delusion.
In his comments, Richard Landes makes an important point that is never considered or even recognized by so many who so easily criticize the West:
One of the sad and difficult things for liberals to learn is that before the advent of modern civil polities (with some rare exceptions like the Jews), elites have never treated their own people well. The idea that the black elite would treat blacks better than whites did was a liberal fantasy. (And in this case, the whites hardly treated the blacks well.) In the case of Israel, the observation that just does not compute with liberals and progressives who blame Israel, is that they treat Arabs better than Arab regimes treat Arabs. And all those Palestinians who want to be in Israel rather than in Palestine makes it clear that they understand.
By surrendering to our unconscious guilt and our need for self punishment, we no longer support fundamental elements of Western Civilization, especially the dignity and autonomy of the individual, that have led to more people being treated better than at any time in human history. Our Moral Masochism damages our ability to speak up for those who are less fortunate. It is no coincidence that a President who emerged from the elite Academic left and received spiritual sustenance from Reverend Wright would be disinclined to support the Iranian people in their efforts to escape the tyranny of their masters or is blind to the tyranny of the Palestinian "freedom fighters" with whom he is so sympathetic.
Notice that Black Power groups, La Raza, Islamist groups, and a myriad of separatist and supremacist ethnic groups who in reality represent majorities in various parts of the world are now accepted as simply part of the fabric of America. Yet the mention of White Power or White Pride instantly (and correctly) conjures up images of neo-Nazis and Christian supremacists. What our guilt blinds us to is that the separatists and supremacists of non-"White" ethnic groups are as evil and dangerous as any White Supremacist group could hope to be. The difference is that Western Civilization, whether in its American, European, Australian, Canadian, or Israeli iterations, (and overwhelmingly White), have repudiated, as a society, notions of ethnic or religious supremacy. This is a healthy response to past excess. The corresponding refusal to condemn non-White Supremacists, who often have mirror image goals to the White Supremacists we all condemn, is a measure of our Moral Masochism.* It is suicidally self indulgent and it represents an ongoing threat to the coherence of our society.
[* This is one part of an answer to Noah Pollack's question, Why Does the New York Times Only Cover Some Kinds of Anti-Semitism?]
This morning, Bookworm notes two classic examples of the expression by predominantly white Western elites of their unconscious racism, which is fueled by and fuels their guilty Moral Masochism:
Getting a closer look at why liberals continue to feel that blacks should be held to a different standard
A few days ago, in the wake of a concerted (and almost certainly fraudulent) attack against the Tea Party by claiming its members are racist, I wrote a post in which I said that, if I'm going to be called a racist, I get to define the term to accord with my understanding of race.
I was wordy (so, sue me; so was Charles Dickens), but it boiled down to my firm belief that, while blacks needed a helping hand in the immediate aftermath of first wave of Civil Rights (the mid-1960s), the system has become perverted, encouraging blacks to become dependent on rich white liberals. I contrasted the black experience with the Asian immigrant experience (or you could contrast it with the Irish immigration experience, or the Jewish, or the Italian…), all of which show groups that had the same handicaps as post-Jim Crow blacks — illiterate, poverty stricken, and ghettoized — but that nevertheless managed to mainstream within a generation.
The problem, I said, does not lie with blacks; it lies, instead, with liberal policies that persist in treating blacks as if they are helpless, intellectually incapable, non-rational beings. If I'm racist, it's because I look at blacks and think that, without the smothering influence of white liberal guilt, they are, as a group, every bit as competent, capable and rational as any other group.
Even self-styled victims have lines their fellow-travelers aren't supposed to cross
We all know that Palestinians are victims, right? That's why they get a free pass for eating up billions of dollars in foreign aid without establishing viable communities, for launching tens of thousands of missiles aimed at Israeli civilians, and for periodically boarding Israeli buses or entering Israeli restaurants to get an up-close-and-personal approach to massacring Jews. Still, even self-styled victims have their limits. In Israel, Palestinian women in Israeli prisons drew the line at being portrayed in Turkish television shows as the victims of sexual assault. Their gripe is that it makes them look so . . . so . . . victimish:
For the White left, racism is the worst possible thought-crime. They remain unaware of their own unconscious racism and project it into their enemies. (All Republicans, Conservatives, even liberals who slip from the assigned ideological line, are incipient racists until proven otherwise by adopting the Left's ideology.) Their intolerant Morality, an expression of Moral Masochism, finds fault with all that emanates from Western Civilization and excuses all evil done by non-Westerners, ie, non-Whites, which expresses their racism in a hidden manner. It is ugly and very destructive of Civilization. When groups are excused from adhering to the basic lowest common denominator of civilized behavior, merely by virtue of their ethnicity, while those who struggle to uphold civilization's norms are constantly under assault, the greatest danger is that, in the immortal words of the poet:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
April 07, 2010 at 10:06 AM in Faltering Elites, Liberalism, Narcissism, Societal Regression | Permalink | Comments (22) | TrackBack (0)
From Holden Caulfield to Jihad Jane
Holden Caulfield was the literary embodiment of adolescent existential angst. He was familiar to all of us who grew up privileged in America. We were blessed with freedom and amazing wealth compared to every prior generation, but suffered from a paucity of meaning. The baby boomers grew up in an era where God and country were slowly becoming less important and central than the aggrandizement of the Self. The 1960s were a time where John F. Kennedy's stirring Inaugural speech on January 20th, 1961:
"Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."
Morphed into Grace Slick singing, in 1967's After Bathing at Baxter's:
Rejoyce
and I'd rather have my country die for me. [Emphasis mine-SW]
The processes that fed the anomie that led to the large scale "rebellion" of youth in the 1960s have not gone away. As the Western elites have become more and more secular and entitlements and the entitlement mentality have grown (with Europe far in advance of America in their dissolution) hedonism has replaced selfless devotion as a major core dynamic. "Just do it" is far easier to follow as a commandment than the original Ten Commandments. Yet, the turn away form traditional religion means that for a significant cohort there is no replacement for the meaning derived form religion. This is not to suggest that it is impossible to live a life imbued with meaning without believing in God or organized religion; it is to imply that living a life filled with meaning is more difficult without a Deity; the Existentialists have done us no favors by devaluing a structure that has worked for several thousand years. As a result, once the joys of the hedonistic life have paled, there is often a turn toward spirituality to fill the void.
"Jihobbyists" No More: English-Speaking Western Jihadists Coming of Age
Perhaps the most ironic aspect of all the media attention in the latest criminal allegations against "Jihad Jane" is that Colleen LaRose of Pennsylvania is only the latest example of this odd emerging trend in homegrown terrorism. Indeed, LaRose is hardly alone in this category, whether we speak of London resident Samina Malik, an active user on jihadi social networking forums who busied herself with transcribing Al-Qaida training manuals into English during spare time at her job working in secure areas of Heathrow Airport--or Canadian citizen Beverly Giesbrecht (a.k.a. Khadija Abdul Qahhar), who was taken hostage by the Taliban during rather suspicious travels through North Waziristan. Both men and women who were once written off as hapless wannabes and mere "jihobbyists" are unexpectedly rising to the occasion, in often quite desperate bids to prove their total commitment to the cause.
These individuals are, more frequently than not, English-speaking with only a cursory knowledge of Arabic or the Middle East. Their pedigree is less than elite, and they lack the traditional connections back to Al-Qaida's central leadership. Yet, even Al-Qaida's senior echelon now openly recognizes the critical value of these potential "lone wolf" operatives. In several prominent publications--including both the latest video from American Al-Qaida spokesman Adam Gadahn and the most recent official magazine from Al-Qaida in Yemen--the terror group has openly broadcast its pleasure and interest in the actions of such independent actors as Ft. Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan and Jordanian webmaster and CIA bomber Humam al-Balawi (a.k.a. Abu Dujanah al-Khorasani).
Without meaning in one's life, without the sense that there is a purpose to our existence that transcends our petty appetites, one can develop a terribly skewed view of the world. If the world is merely a result of chance and we are only born into comfort or deprivation because of random luck, guilt and rage are to be expected. Instead of appreciating the bounty with which we are blessed, the anxious and uncertain young person views the unfairness around him and, in the absence of an overarching schema, invents one or adopts one. At that point, since there is no Satan to supply the evil, it can only be a derivative of man's behavior. From there, it is a short step to externalizing all one's discontents. Scapegoating depends upon such Psychological processes. If you see successful people and a vibrant society, where you do not feel you fit in anywhere, resentment and an exaggerated sense of grievance flow naturally from one's personal psychology to a(n imagined) societal induced anomie.
Toady our young people, and those who have become fixated or regressed to more infantile positions, can find meaning in such attractive alternatives as the struggle for social justice or for the environment (both offspring of Communism/Socialism, ie collectivism) while others may find meaning in a return to traditional religion or to a new iteration of traditional religion; still others may seek out less restrictive religions (how many Catholics reject Catholicism because of its attitudes toward sex and procreation?) or find solace in a religion which is self confident (at least superficially, though it hides a deep seated sense of insecurity under its violet and aggressive bravado) and growing in strength while filled with an absolute certainty, ie Islam. By submitting to Islam, all the difficult questions and problems in life are resolved.
Islamism offers a framework, an external structure, that supports the externalization of one's problems, and supplies a ready response to difficulties in one's internal and external life.
John Robb reports on testimony before Congress that supports this as one of the predisposing factors in home grown terrorism:
Scott Atran, Terrorists, and Global Guerrillas
Last year, open source warfare received some exciting validation in the form of a scientific study that reached the cover of Nature Magazine (although the theory reached the pinnacle of scientific validation, nobody in the DoD noticed -- wow, seriously, is there anybody with a working brain still working there?). Now Scott Atran, a sharp anthropologist that has been studying terrorism scientifically (although from his narrow area of specialization), has noticed some shifts in terrorist behavior that align more closely to Global Guerrillas using open source warfare than traditional Jihadis. Here's a summary from some Congressional testimony he recently gave.
Entry into the jihadi brotherhood is from the bottom up: from alienated and marginalized youth seeking out companionship, esteem, and meaning, but also the thrill of action, sense of empowerment, and glory in fighting the world's most powerful nation and army.
Although lack of economic opportunity often reliably leads to criminality, it turns out that some criminal youth really don't want to be criminals after all. Given half a chance to take up a moral cause, they can be even more altruistically prone than others to give up their lives for their comrades and cause.
Read the whole thing; this relates to the alienated foreign born terrorists as well as the Western born. While you are at it, check out Jim Hoft's posts on an American born al Qaeda who has not been conspicuous in the MSM:
Stunner. Al-Qaeda Killer Who Shot His Way Out of Hospital Is Former Dem Operative
Breaking: Al-Qaeda Killer & Dem Operative Worked at New Jersey Nuclear Plant
All societies have their marginalized individuals. Such people have traditionally borne their failures and their inner despair by themselves. By offering a way out of a life of failure and/or meaninglessness (since even materially successful people can suffer from inner emptiness) radical Islam solves their internal and external, Psychological and social, problems. Once invested in Islamism, one's life is suffused with meaning and nobility; such a Siren call has a powerful allure.
March 12, 2010 at 11:59 AM in Baby Boomers, Clash of Civilizations, Narcissism, Radical Islam, Religion | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
The Modern Left: A Marriage of Post-Modernism and Narcissism, Part III
[The Modern Left: A Marriage of Post-Modernism and Narcissism, Part II
The Modern Left: A Marriage of Post-Modernism and Narcissism, Part I]
In Part I of this series I discussed an interview with Stephen Hicks to illustrate how the Post-Modernist Left has mis-used and aggrandized Post-Modernism as an assault upon Reason. Post-Modernism is a useful, though ultimately minor, philosophical idea (it falls far short of being a theory) that helps offer an understanding of subjectivity and the problem of objectivity; when the Post-Modern idea was abrogated by the Left for their ideological purposes it abandoned reality and reason and became merely a tool of intimidation and power.
In Part II I considered Richard Landes's discussion of PoMo as a tool used for its utility in disguising the failures of Leftist ideology, akin to (failed) Millenialists' denials. In Richard's words:
In millennial studies jargon that's cogntive dissonance at recognizing (and denying) the failure of one's outrageously hopeful expectations, at the horror of witnessing the God that failed.
Here, rather than acknowledge that the failure of expectations was due to a misreading of human nature, we have people throwing out the very effort to accurately read the world of humans.
The third leg of the stool supporting the PoMo narrative is the Psychological. Post-Modernism, an idea that facilitates intellectualization, is the perfect defensive structure for the Narcissist, fulfilling many unconscious needs. The core of the Narcissist's relationship to his own outputs was eloquently captured in a quote that Stephen Hicks offered in his interview with David Thompson (and that Richard used in his post, PoMo Unpeeled: David Thompson talks with Stephen Hicks, as well):
SH: Pomo is rhetoric-heavy, yes. But rhetoric is a tool, so one can ask how it's being used and why it's being used that way. The postmodernists have rejected reason, and along with it concern for evidence and consistency. What then is the purpose of rhetoric? In pomo practice, there are a couple of possibilities.
One is that rhetoric becomes a kind of subjectivist expressionism - you play around with language and hope that something interesting pops out. Derrida is often like this - I think of him as a performance artist of postmodernism. In its darker moods, this approach recalls a line from Kate Ellis, a sympathetic-to-postmodernism commentator, who noted "the characteristically apolitical pessimism of most postmodernism, by which creation is simply a form of defecation." [Emphasis mine-SW] Whatever's been processing and churning up inside you - you just let 'er rip.
Leonard Shengold, in his essential book on child abuse, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation, described Defensive Anality, in which all distinctions are reduced to an homogenized inchoate mass, feces. The abused child does this (unconsciously) in order to make sense of the impossible, to allow himself to believe that the parent who hurts him also loves him, to square the circle of bringing his perceptions into accord with his abuser's prescriptions. It is an impossible psychological task and the abused child's mind surrenders by turning it all into shit. Love, sex, hate are all then made equivalents. This defensive style is common to Narcissistic defenses and to Leftist Post-Modernism. Why and how does the Narcissist resort to such a primitive defense?
For the Narcissist, any failure is a narcissistic injury, threatening to cause intolerable shame and a catastrophic collapse of his self-esteem.
[One response to this conflict is commonly seen in the college student who has difficulty studying for a test: to not study and do less well than hoped is a minor disaster; what else could you expect? (while secretly hoping to do well and show your brilliance.) Alternatively, to study and then fall short is a catastrophe; your feared stupidity is confirmed! The defense was poorly adaptive at one time, when grades actually reflected accomplishments. In our PC college culture, one has to put in great effort to do poorly in terms of grades and the defense works tolerably well for our increasingly narcissistically damaged youngsters.]
If failure can never be tolerated or admitted ways must be found to hide evidence of failure and deny failure. Post-Modernism is the perfect tool for the job and has shown itself to be up to the task. Since there can be no objective standards for anything, no one can ever conclude that a liberal theory or policy has failed. The Emperor may be stark naked but in the world of the Post-Modernist, imagined clothing can be as beautiful as the finest couture; in fact, since to the Post-Modernist it is the language that describes the clothing that lends it beauty, the naked Emperor is actually considered to be better clothed than the conventional Emperor of dead white male infamy! This is the power of Post-Modernism; all nonsense is accorded the same, or higher, degree of authority than the most painstakingly, experimentally confirmed scientific theory.
Only Post-Modernists could fail to understand the brilliance of Alan Sokal's Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. The Post-Modernists can mouth the words of science but understand nothing of the concepts and think they have received wisdom. Because Sokal can use their language, which they idealize above the reality that language at its best approximates, they elevate feces to an ideal.
Narcissism stems from an early age and receives a tremendous surge of psychic investment during the anal period when the child is becoming civilized and learning to control its bodily urges. When a child is first being toilet trained it is common for the parents to treat its outputs, the feces, as a treasure. As the child develops they soon learn that feces is not a treasure but if offered in the wrong place and time a source of shame. The Narcissist defensively regresses to a state in which undifferentiated, meaningless verbiage (feces) are no longer considered to be distinct from more sophisticated verbal outputs. To the Narcissist any theory they adopt or invest in is important because it comes from within them. Proof or evidence is unnecessary because its provenance supplies all the justification it needs. Since it is their "crap", it must be important! The Narcissist is like the little child, desperate to please its mother, struggling to push out a treasure for her. The fact that their undifferentiated mass has no intrinsic value is of no consequence.
Post-Modernism, Left wing ideology, and Narcissism are thus a menage a trois of mutual dependency. The Narcissist who needs to see himself as more caring, smarter, and more moral than the crypto-fascists on the right, can never admit that a liberal policy has failed because the failure of an idea he holds is an injury to his self-esteem. An attack on his belief is thus an attack on him; the two cannot be separated. This is also why so much discussion from the Left contains so much invective and so few attempts at reason or marshaling of evidence; since they are so emotionally invested in their beliefs, they must defend them as if they are defending themselves. It is no wonder that our political discourse has been so coarse.
May 26, 2009 at 11:26 AM in Narcissism, Post-Modernism | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)