There is a split in the commentary on the Fort Hood killer. Many of the Mainstream Media reports, as well as statements from official sources, emphasize how troubled the shooter was by his upcoming deployment. Rather fanciful theories promulgated by non-Mental Health Professionals as well as by non-clinical Media Psychologists suggest he suffered from Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder; this is a nonsensical formulation but the kind of thing we have come to expect from media purveyors of psycho-babble. It has a certain resonance for non professionals and (mis)uses words associated with Psychoanalysis to gain a pseudo-authenticity. The goal of such obfuscatory commentary is to minimize the risk that the killers actions will in any way be associated with his religious beliefs.
On the other side of the divide are a host of Commentators who are outraged at the official response (more of a non-response) to the obvious. Since few such commentators are in positions of influence on the MSM or the government, their outrage is relatively impotent. And that may be a window into the psychology of the Politically Correct approach.
Under the PC administration, all utterances must be filtered by the thought police. It is at such times that humorists and satirists often get closest to the reality:
This is what hacks me off about liberals. It's not their romanticizing socialism; though that's problem enough. But worse is their assumption that everyone outside their tribe is an idiot. Right now Obama and the tingle-leg media are spinning that a man who yelled 'Allahu akbar' before shooting was a victim of pre-traumatic stress disorder. Why? Well because they expect us Neanderthals to start killing brown people in retaliation.
Bill Bennett approaches the same point from a slightly different angle:
Why are chiefs of staff of the army saying things like: “I think we have to be very careful....Our diversity not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse,”?
You connect those dots and you will have your answer. I’m used to this kind of talk in a university—perhaps a university that outlaws ROTC. I’m surprised to find this kind of talk and attitude from on high at institutions ROTC trains under and for, namely one of the last “hard places” in America.
I well recall the 2006 Nickle Mines Amish School massacre of 6 children. And I recall Jay Nordlinger saying: “This is what we would have thought would have been one of the last safe places in America.” He was wrong—we would have thought a place like Ft. Hood a safe place in America, safe from our own U.S. military hosting an officer-terrorist (that’s what we shall call him, an officer-terrorist). I also would have thought the Army would have been one of the last, or one of the first, hard places in America as defined by Michael Barone (“the part of American life subject to competition and accountability where the military trains under live fire—as opposed to a soft America that seeks to instill self-esteem. Hard America plays for keeps.”).
Well if we want to be safe, if we want to defeat the jihadist threat, we’d better reinforce hard America—and, sad to say, starting with our military leadership.
I have written in the past [PC & Defects in Reality Testing] that PC-thinking is a thought disorder which impairs the ability to recognize and effectively deal with reality. The major purveyors of PC-thought, Academia, the MSM, liberal and Compassionate Conservatives, cowardly politicians of all stripes, adopt PC-thought as a way to diminish rational, protective aggression.
[This is a complicated construct. Clearly the far left, from which PC arose, does not eschew aggression. They consciously use the demonization of aggression to disarm traditional liberal democracies, who they correctly identify as their greatest enemies. The soft left/liberals who have adopted PC-thought out of a desire to do and be "good" are unaware of how they facilitate violence. It is this group that may be eventually amenable to enlightenment.]
PC-thought disarms those who are forced to adhere to its tenets. In PC & Defects in Reality Testing: Part I I reviewed the process by which a child develops their sense of reality and explained how the ability to accurately assess reality is impaired by child abuse: [Emphasis added-SW]
In the typical case of parental child abuse, the abuse is traumatic in and of itself, but is given a spacial resonance by virtue of the perpetrator being one of the people the child most loves, trusts, and depends on. For an abused child, they are handed an impossible developmental task: The person they need so much has caused them terrible pain and distress. In the case of overt sexual abuse, it is even worse because of the violation of the child's bodily integrity. (It is common to see in survivors of childhood sexual abuse, ongoing fantasies of horrible internal objects/introjects, which are constantly threatening to emerge and attack them and people they love; sometimes this is "normalized" into fear of illness, genetic disorders, cancer lurking within.) Further, the abuser is often contrite (and often was intoxicated at the time of the transgression); the abuser will bind the child to maintaining their "special" secret, tell the child it was all the child's fault or the outgrowth of the abuser's great love for the child, or act as if the abuse never happened. In all these situations, the child can not, no matter how intelligent and how hard he struggles, make sense out of a reality which calls love hate and hate love. The only way to understand how the loved one could hurt them so much is to imagine that they did something wrong (often a minor transgression or an imagined transgression) and deserve or provoked the punishment or abuse. The adult who survives such abuse will tend to have difficulties in recognizing danger signs in new relationships. Many abused adult women will minimize their abuse by saying that their boyfriend or husband hit them because they love them so much. Furthermore, during the inter-abuse interval, the abuse is excused and/or seen as an aberration, most often caused by some mistake that the victim has done. "He really loves me but when he drinks he gets angry." or "He really loves me and works hard and I should have had dinner on the table the way he likes." Notice how the structure of these reactions is parallel to the child who can only explain the abuse by imagining he provoked it or "daddy didn't really mean it."
The abused child grows up to be an adult who in specific circumstances has a defect in their sense of reality. They are literally unable to see that the person they are becoming involved with has serious flaws which threaten to repeat the abuse they lived through as a child. They may know on an intellectual basis that a man with a bad temper who yells at them during the early stages of their courtship is a poor choice for a mate, but emotionally, they are blind to the danger they face and use defenses such as rationalization and denial to avoid knowing. This is not done consciously but has the effect of preventing them from protecting themselves from an abuser.
The survivor of abuse is left with the choice of accepting the reality of their own perceptions (Mommy/Daddy was an evil abusive monstrous person) or denying their own perceptions in order to preserve the image of the "loving" parent. In a similar vein, PC-thought offers us the choice of believing the evidence of our own eyes, which risks our careers, social ostracism, and public shame or denying our own senses in order to remain a member in good standing of our community. From PC & Defects in Reality Testing: Part II: [Emphasis added-SW]
Yesterday I described how childhood abuse creates an impossible contradiction for a child. He is faced with the choice of believing what an authority, who they love and depend on, tells him is reality ("I am doing this because I love you and its for your own good") versus his own immature perceptions of reality (this feels abusive and is hateful.) The resolution often requires the child to split his awareness of parts of reality and this "vertical splitting of the ego" becomes a stable structure throughout his life. Political Correctness creates the same kind of discontinuity in our conscious appreciation of reality.
Political Correctness has its roots in Post-Modernism and Deconstruction. I am hardly an expert in this area but it seems that the Deconstructionists took a small piece of reality, that all of us construct our sense of reality through our own subjectivity, and made it the primary determinant of reality, ie since we are all subjective, there can be no such thing as objective reality. In other words, the world of consensus reality is a construct and if we change how we view the world, we will change the construct.[Among the other evil offspring of this philosophy, we would have to include moral relativism and other (rationalized) excuses for inaction in the face of evil.]
The Child Abuser forces a splitting in the consciousness of the child as a way to protect himself from the danger of aggressive retaliation. The child is forced into a passive, helpless, hopeless position from which there is no escape and no way to protect herself. (The healthier/safer child, in response to the assault, mobilizes enough aggression to report the attack to an adult, through whose agency the child is able to retaliate and subsequently protect herself from the abuser in the future.) The PC-thought police force a split in the consciousness of society for a similar purpose. Any aggressive response to the assault is treated as if it is inappropriate and shameful. The aggressive responders are labeled as racist, one of the definitive ways in which PC destroys those who resist, and all focus is placed on the various victims of the assault, which consciously includes the perpetrator, making him (relatively) immune to opprobrium. Since this is on a societal basis, those protected include the radical Muslim Imams and spokesmen whose vile utterances are simply ignored by society's perceptual apparatus, the MSM(if we don't see it or hear it, it doesn't exist); those identified as victims include not just the direct victims of the shootings, but all soldiers. Becoming a victim is a way to emphasize passivity and derail aggression. Note the conclusion from Bill Bennett's post this morning:
President Obama is going to Ft. Hood today for a memorial service there. We will all be sorrowful and our hearts and minds and souls will be with everyone at Ft. Hood. My worry about these services now is that they are a) not angry enough and b) that they are the end and not the beginning. Ever since the week after 9/11/2001, anger has eluded memorial services (with the exception of Paul Wellstone’s memorial—that, somehow, was a moment of anger for the left). It is an American thing to pray, to be sorrowful, and then to be angry and fight. [Emphasis mien-SW] I hope we still have the stuff for the last two parts.
Passivity in mourning is a regressive state. Recall the 9th "major symptom of large group regression" from Terror and Societal Regression:
9) Reactivation of a "chosen trauma" whereby a large group unconsciously "chooses" to make a shared mental representation of an event that caused it terrible losses, helplessness, humiliation, and victimization....Slobodan Milosevic exemplified this phenomenon in his reactivation of the shared memory of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, in which the Serbian hero, Prince Lazar, was killed.
Since 9/11 American group mourning has become a stylized choreography in which anger at the perpetrators of our trauma is minimized and our loss, our passivity, our helplessness, and our hopelessness in the face of murderous enemies are emphasized. Rather than join in the public (faux) mourning that President Obama will preside over, let us allow the families their private mourning and rather dedicate ourselves to fighting the twin axis of Islamist terror and PC-thought.
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