ShrinkWrapped

Narcissism, Malignant Narcissism, and Paranoia: Part I

Narcissism, as defined at Dictionary.com:

1.Excessive love or admiration of oneself. See Synonyms at conceit.
2.A psychological condition characterized by self-preoccupation, lack of empathy, and unconscious deficits in self-esteem.
3.Erotic pleasure derived from contemplation or admiration of one's own body or self, especially as a fixation on or a regression to an infantile stage of development.
4.The attribute of the human psyche characterized by admiration of oneself but within normal limits.

Narcissism, a greatly overused word,  is typically understood to include excessive self-regard, inflated self esteem, and lack of empathy for others.  The first there definitions all refer to pathological narcissism.  The last definition is vague and fairly banal; in reality, healthy narcissism is a prerequisite for healthy relationships and functioning in the world.   I would like to more carefully craft a description of narcissism, and show how pathological narcissism can merge into sociopathy and paranoia.  This has significant importance in our politics because, as I have pointed out elsewhere in slightly different language, Democratic systems are the best ways we have found to manage conflicting narcissistic needs. 

Closely related to narcissism is self esteem, another concept which is often invoked and even more often, poorly understood.  In general when one has a healthy narcissistic investment in one's self, one also usually has decent self esteem, and the ability to weather various injuries to one's image of oneself.  When you read the following, you should try to keep in mind that only part of what I am describing is conscious to the person; much of what makes us who we are is out of our awareness most of the time (and some of it can never be accessed.)

To better understand narcissism, you need to better understand  the development of self esteem and a related concept of the "ego ideal."  Early in life we take the various images we have developed of ourselves (our self representations, in Psychoanalytic terms) and merge them to form a relatively stable, and usually only moderately distorted, sense of who we are and how we fit into the world around us.  If we had the good fortune to be raised by a "good enough" mother (D.W. Winnicott, again) part of our core self representation will be of the adored child, the "apple of the mother's eye" as Kohut once so elegantly put it.  Many other self representations are added through the years, some positive, some negative, until we form a  relatively stable, relatively realistic, core sense of who we are and what kind of person we want to be.  One of Kohut's contributions was to show how the child's nascent sense of himself developed primarily in relation to the mother's sense of the child and how failures of attunement by the mother left the child at high risk for narcissistic disorders.  In other words, how a mother looks at her child, especially her unconscious wishes and fears, are the most important influences on the child's developing self concept.  A mother who experiences her two year old as demanding or defiant or a brat, rather than appreciating (not without some difficulty; 2 year olds have their reputation for a reason) her child's need for and push for independence, will one day discover they have a poorly behaved, impulse ridden, needy child on her hands.

[Please note, I am fully aware that I am generalizing here.  Many fathers, grandparents, siblings, and others, can have a salutary effect on the child's developing self esteem.  Many children, despite what we might think of as poor parenting, find a teacher, or an older sibling, or relative, who values something within them, and allows the child to flourish.  You might think of my use of "mother" as a shorthand to include other nurturing  objects, as well as the primary care taker.]

Clearly, there are a great many influences on the developing self representations, but for a start we are considering the impact of the mother.  From the various self representations the child develops his ego ideal.  The ego ideal is the collection of abilities, traits, strengths and weaknesses, that make up the person who the child wishes he could be.  This will include identifications with various important people in the child's world (including fantasies of people, but that takes us farther afield) and can include famous people as well.  Many adolescents and pre-adolescents long to be like their favorite athlete or movie star (though what they want to be like is their fantasy of the person based on he celebrity's carefully crafted persona.  Despite the celebrity culture in this country, most people give up their longing to be someone else well before they reach adulthood.) 

An example of an "ego ideal" and its vicissitudes would be someone who, as a child, wishes to be a heroic "White Knight." This "ego ideal" might include images of oneself being kind and loving, brave and steadfast, honest and chivalrous, a hero who fights injustice,  protects the meek, and rescues fair maidens.  A healthy outcome of such wishes and fantasies about oneself might be to become a fireman, or join the military, or become a Psychiatrist who helps people overcome their own difficulties (sorry about that; a little irony is useful at times).  A less healthy outcome could be a man who can only become involved with a woman who has a drug problem, because the he can save her and gratify his rescue fantasies.    When our hypothesized "White Knight" succeeds in ways which allow him to feel he is close to his "ego ideal", he feels that he has returned to his position as "the apple of his mother's eye", he is on top of the world.  When he finds himself distant form his "ego ideal", he loses the glow of his mother's love and approval (now internalized) and his self esteem plummets.

In the healthy person, by adulthood, the ego ideal has been tempered by reality and includes a realistic assessment of one's abilities and attributes.  (Many a "great" third grade athlete recognizes, by high school, that his two left feet render him a better bet for college than for pro sports, and is able to negotiate the metamorphosis, without too much emotional pain, of his ego ideal to more closely approximate reality.)  The healthy person sees himself as lovable, likable, able to like and love others, able to do good and useful work, and adding some benefit to the community.

I will return to this topic and continue discussing what happens when normal development is skewed and pathological and malignant narcissism eventuates.

Political Deification

I have spent some time looking at three questions pertaining to religion and politics.  I have addressed (here) what happens to a society that "loses its religion" (ie, they stop reproducing, among other things) and whether one can understand the liberal and left political philosophy as being akin to religious faith (in that they intensely resist testing the propositions they rest on.)  While I focused on  the "feminist myth of equality of the sexes" (courtesy of Horsefeathers) as one particular foundation stone of liberalism, much of modern liberal thought rests on assumptions that have either never been tested or are untestable.  Furthermore, the philosophical foundation of modern feminism asserts an argument that is in complete contradiction to other, equally firmly held memes.  For example, consider the contrasting ideas that male/female differences are all socially constructed yet homosexuality (choice of sexual object) is completely genetic.  It seems to me that there is no way to include both of these ideas in a single philosophy, yet neither idea can be approached or addressed in the MSM or Academia without dire consequences for the apostate.  Another powerful meme is that military power never is justified and can never have a positive outcome.  Since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, there have been relatively free elections in those two countries and in the Palestinian territories.  Libya has given up their WMD, the AQ Khan "Nukes R Us" mart has been closed down, there was a popular uprising in the Ukraine, people have been out in the streets in Lebanon, and the beat goes on.  The only response I have heard from friends and relatives who opposed the war in Iraq is silence, or in one case, the untestable meme that we are only producing more terrorists.  What is it about our unconscious mind that almost requires us to have and hold religious ideas?

Freud wrote about primary process versus secondary process, descriptions of the way our minds process data.  Primary process is the only form of thought that occurs in the young child, from birth up to 6 to 8 years old generally.  Much  of what occurs before age 8 is subject to "infantile amnesia" which means that our memories prior to that age are fragmentary and generally take the form of pictures rather than words.  Memories formed after 8 are much more available to language and recall.  Coincidentally, much of the process of myelinization of the brain is finished by age 8; this age also coincides with the onset of higher level abstract conceptualization as described by developmental Psychologists, like Piaget.  From many points of view, our thinking processes change and become more realistic and rational starting at age 8 and continuing into adulthood.  As I pointed out in an  earlier post (The defensive denial of terror)the irrational primary process exists at all times, lurking just below the surface of our minds.  We see it in our (irrational) dreams, in our irrational thoughts and feelings, and in our politics.  I wrote:

Since the case for the danger of al Qaeda, more appropriately the danger of Islamic fascism, has been argued, and convincingly argued, for the last several years, I can only repeat that if al Qaeda got their hands on a nuke, or a weaponized Smallpox virus, or could make large quantities of poison gas, they have said they would use them on us.  Furthermore, if nothing had been done, their success would have become more and more likely with each passing day, until the inevitable would occur.  In circumstances where the risk of doing nothing is hundreds of thousands of dead Americans, or American friends, to ignore this danger would be criminally irresponsible.  So, how can we understand how so many Americans, and even more Europeans, can deny and ignore this danger?

The beginning of an answer lies in recognizing that the ability to rationally interpret information is quite limited and easily disrupted.  If you have ever attempted to argue when you are angry, only to apologize later, then you can see how strong emotions can disrupt higher order thinking.  Terror can also cause rational thought to break down.  Worse yet, we rarely are able to recognize when this is happening.  Psychologically, trauma refers to any event that overwhelms the psyche's ability to metabolize the insult; that is, a trauma temporarily interferes with the psychological functioning of the victim.  The hallmark of the traumatic event is the actual experience of helplessness, or the feelings of helplessness evoked by the event. Terrorists know this intuitively.  The whole point of terror is to perpetrate an act so horrific that the audience literally cannot think; they are paralyzed with fear and left speechless, with the threat of more gruesome attacks to come.   What words do we have to describe the spectacle of terrorists beheading a helpless man, or flying airplanes into office towers?  Our media decided that certain images are too horrific (traumatic) for our eyes; (less horrific images, like the abuses at Abu Graib are shown repeatedly because "only the images can emphasize the true horror of the event".) How much more horrible is a beheading or the mass murder of children? Civilized, rational beings have no way to understand how such frightening things are allowed to exist in the modern world.  The viewer is left feeling helpless and without language to describe the outrage.

There is another important implication of the fact that the primitive, primary process thinking co-exists and often threatens the secondary process we all would like to believe is our default state of mind.  In the absence of the parent, a powerful protector, the child's native state is terror.  Last week we visited a friend with an eight month old infant.  When the child saw us, he began to howl inconsolably and with a look of panic on his young face.  We were strangers to him, and eight months is the time of "stranger anxiety".  The infant is frightened because we are not his familiar caretakers.  While no one can know exactly what goes on in the mind of an infant, current research suggests that it is the unfamiliarity of the stranger, the "not-motherness" that evokes terror, which is worsened if the stranger picks up the child.  In evolutionary terms, it makes perfect sense; the world is a hostile, dangerous place to an infant.  Infants who scream when in the presence of strangers would be more likely to survive (by gaining their parent's attention) than those who were quiet.  Children are dependent and surrounded by dangers for many years. Our first 8 years of life are spent in potentially dangerous places; we are completely dependent on the powerful "other" to protect us.  In modern societies, we are unable to take care of ourselves and become independent until well into adolescence.  The American Psychoanalytic Association considers adolescence to extend until 22 (college graduation); until then, our children need to be cared for.  The only way for the child to feel safe is to be with a protective adult.  A lost child is a terrified child. 

It should be clear where I am going with this:  If the primary process underlies the secondary (adult) thinking, what keeps us from feeling terrified?  If God does not exist, we would need to invent him, if only to maintain our fragile ability to make sense out of an often irrational world.  When much of the third world trades fantasies of the United States and Israel causing the recent Tsunami, they are deifying America and Israel.  Our soldiers talked about the Iraqi's anger that we did not walk in and like superhuman demi-Gods, instantly give them electricity and riches beyond their dreams.  In my post Magic and Rationality, I wrote:

The idea that sophisticated 21st century, technologically adept people could be equally seen as surrounded by magic would, to many, be a non-starter.  However, I believe it is the necessary starting point in trying to make sense of the world. 

When we say something is magic, it can have various meanings.  It could mean that the event in question is impossible in our experience (a sophisticated and more nuanced comment would be that it violates the laws of physics); an alternative meaning is that we do not understand what is causing the event in question to occur.  For example, how many people do you know who can explain why light appears out of darkness when you flip the switch.  And don't bother telling me about electrons flowing through wires and heating up when the wire/filament forces them through a narrow space with higher resistance.  In a very fundamental way, this is not a meaningful explanation.  All of our science and technology have simply removed the locus of the magical activity.  To our aforementioned cave ancestor, a flashlight is a magical instrument of the gods.  We, of course, take lights for granted and yet, I would suggest that for all intents and purposes, most of what surrounds us is the equivalent of magic.  If we can not directly experience an action's cause and effect, we can ultimately only hope to infer its source.  No one has ever seen, or will ever see, an electron.  We can build complex machines and apparatuses which allow us to connect a long chain of experimental observations to deduce the existence of electrons.  We then hold forth that their existence has been conclusively proved and no longer is in question.  There is no doubt that this works for us (the computer I am typing this on is sufficient proof of that) but in reality it is a constructed world view; it has great predictive power and is therefore said to be an accurate representation of reality, but it is fundamentally a construct.  (This is, in part, where the deconstructionists have a point, which they then take to such ridiculous extremes as to render their philosophy meaningless, which I suppose is pretty consistent, when you stop to think about it; but I digress.)   The fact is that the construct can only be a reflection of some deeper level of reality, not the reality itself.  Furthermore, the failures of the construct are pretty obvious, even a little embarrassing: just try to wrap your mind around the concept that an electron is both a particle and a wave (and what is a particle, or a wave, anyway?), and let's not even start with Quantum Mechanics!

We are better equipped than our distant cave dwelling ancestors to understand the world, but on an individual level, we remain surrounded by monsters and magic.  Fate can separate us from our loved ones in an instant and we have no mommy or daddy who will hug us and tell us everything will be all right (which our children  might believe; even if someone tries to reassure us, we can not even comfort ourselves with the reassurance because we know better.)  The only way we can keep our irrational (and sometimes rational) fears from destabilizing our minds is to find something more powerful than ourselves to believe in; we need God, and in the absence of God, we will invent the equivalent to protect us. 

Being a leftist and/or a liberal in the modern world means we are smarter, more ethical, more caring (holier than thou, even); more importantly, if we can only share our innate goodness with other rational people, and try to help them solve the root causes of their distress, (send them money because they are poor, give up our rights so they won't feel offended) they will see we are friends and will no longer try to harm us.  The fact that none of this works is irrelevant; it is not meant to work in reality, but to make us feel more comfort and security.

Thus, in the absense of God, we create him out of our ideas.

Political Religion

In my last post, I began to explore the place and need for religion and faith in our society and in our unconscious minds. I define religious faith as a shared belief system which is not supported by any available facts. The belief in Intelligent Design, for example, does not have to be rooted in any particular religion, but is clearly a religious belief; ie, there is no way currently to test the hypothesis.  In contrast, the Theory of Evolution does lend itself to making and testing various hypotheses and has been supported by a large volume of evidence over the years.  Again, whether one believes in Evolution or not, the salient point is that Evolution allows for the generation of testable hypotheses.  If it did not allow for such, it would be faith, not science.  Of course, all of the observations of Evolutionary theory can be explained by Intelligent Design, but there would be no way to test their hypotheses.

I have come under some attack in the last year or two when I have talked about Liberalism and the left as overlapping and inhabiting the core of the Democratic Party.  I recognize that I have not clearly defined what I mean by "liberal" or "left" and one should be reticent about relying on "conventional wisdom" for one's definitions, however, I do think the terms are adequate short hand for a certain political stance.  [A future post might profitably look at what exactly are the core philosophical tenets of modern American and European Liberalism and Leftism.  I welcome any suggestions in this area, especially from my liberal friends.]  Without going into a long exposition of Liberalism, I would like to look more closely at the clash between two of the foundation stones of the American left and determine whether these ideas are based on rationality or faith.

I would suggest that most on the left consider themselves to be Secular Humanists.  They firmly believe in Evolution, strict separation of church and state, Affirmative Action, Government aid to level the playing field and lift up those who are unable to succeed in the Capitalist System (aka "victims"), and freedom of Speech when it doesn't clash with the Rights of minorities who might be injured by such speech, and that War is almost never justified and can only be conducted under the auspices of an International Coalition (the UN).  There is of course more to this, it is not meant to be an exhaustive list, and quite obviously, not every Democrat, Liberal, or Leftist agrees with all of the above.  I would further submit that the ultimate arbiter of the Liberal position is the paper of record, the New York Times.  This is instructive.

On Sunday, the Times chimed in on the Lawrence Summers kerfuffle.  I rarely read the Times anymore, finding them all too predictable and unable to simply report the news without introducing their particular bias to the reports, however, I was at a friend's home and there was the Sunday Times and I took a look at the Op-Ed page.  Here is an excerpt:

All of which, of course, takes us to Lawrence Summers and his china-smashing remarks on gender and academia. Back in January, the president of Harvard shared his thoughts on why so few women get tenure at the best schools at a conference on "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce." His conclusion - couched in many assurances that the jury was still out - was that female scientists are distracted by the demands of family, and that "there are issues of intrinsic aptitude."

Dr. Summers told his audience that he wanted to be controversial, and if that's so he must be extremely gratified by the results. Several apologies and clarifications later, Harvard now has two brand-new task forces on recruitment of women and a restive faculty that seems to be teetering on the verge of revolt. Last week's release of the long-sought transcript of his remarks is not likely to improve things much. Dr. Summers compared the shortage of female scientists at the highest ranks of academia to, among other things, the shortage of Jewish farmers, and white men in the National Basketball Association. (Coming soon: Female Biologists Can't Jump.)

As always, it is best to take  a look and read the while thing here. (It does require registration).  Since the full transcript of his remarks are available in many places, including from Harvard here it is worthwhile wondering how the Editors of the Times arrived at their rather dismissive and supercilious conclusions.  If they read the entire transcript, they would have understood that the point of the talk was to raise uncomfortable questions about whether or not inherent attributes of men and women were involved in the relative paucity of women in the sciences.  This is not a terribly controversial point of view outside of Academia and such bastions of liberal thinking as the New York Times.  Only people as bright and talented as Professors and Newspaper editors could convince themselves there are no innate differences between men and women.  Since there is a growing body of data supporting the fact that men and women's brains are wired differently in some fundamental areas, it is hard to see how the question Summers raised could be so distressing.  Yale at Horsefeathers offers a brief description of some of the factors that influence personality and development (italics mine):

Anyone familiar with the relevant scientific data having to do with personality formation, which includes choice of profession and the complex behavioral phenomena associated with it, will understand that such processes entail a large array of influences from genetic, developmental, experiential, and later, educational, and social spheres. No one set of influences is determinative and it is clear that they impact differentially on males and females from conception on. There is, of course, much overlapping in function between males and females, and between one person and another, since the species shares the same genome, more or less. But there are unique and individual differences between human beings and between males and females. There can be no such thing as biological equality or indentical-ness between people, not even in the case of identical twins. Unfortunately, the feminist myth of equality of the sexes is a hopeless fantasy and one of the major follies of post-modern life.

Notice the reference to the "feminist myth of equality of the sexes."   Arnold Kling, in a post at  Tech Central Station writes on "Ego, Testosterone, and the Academy: Why the Controversy Over Larry Summers is Important." He points out that for much of Academia, the idea that the lack of women in the sciences may have some biological determinants is a forbidden idea.  It is such a threatening thought that even to raise the question is dangerous.  He relates a story from his daughter's college experience:

At the University of Maryland, my oldest daughter, Rachel, took a class in which one test included a question in which she was asked to respond to the statement "Gender is socially determined." This was given, not as an essay question, but as a machine-graded true-false choice. Having read the textbook for the class, Rachel knew that the machine would treat "true" as the correct answer. She herself believes that the answer is something other than "true." Perhaps, if given an opportunity, she could have written a thoughtful, balanced essay on the topic. Evidently, however, her professor does not have a sufficiently open mind to be willing to face such an essay.

The question facing Lawrence Summers as he gave his talk was, "True or false: the explanation for the high ratio of males to females in physics, math, and engineering at universities like Harvard is cumulative sex discrimination." Evidently, the textbook answer is "true." Instead, Summers gave a thoughtful, balanced essay answer that was something other than "true." For that, many modern academics, including some smug critics at MIT and other prestigious institutions, believe he deserves a bad grade. Shame on the critics. Praise to his defenders.

When people refuse to even allow a question to be asked, they are no longer in the realm of reason but have entered the halls of religion. 

In effect, the meme suggests that there are no inherent differences (Nature) between men and women and all differences in outcome can be attributed to social influences (Nurture).  If you have any doubts that this is a religious belief rather than a fact based opinion, do the following thought experiment.  Imagine yourself in a room full of Homosexual activists.  Imagine yourself giving a talk in which you suggest that Homosexuality is the outcome of a complex interaction between a child's inherent constitutional make up (Nature), including the structure of his brain, and his emotional development in relation to his early childhood and parenting experiences (Nurture).  The idea that Homosexuality is genetic (any time you read that something is "genetic" take it with  a large grain of salt; as I once read, genes encode for proteins, not behavior) is a "given", scarcely more open to discussion than the idea that women and men are not equal.

I would suggest that a great many of the core beliefs of the Liberals and the Left are no longer supported by the data available to us in laboratories or in nature (history).  Liberalism has become a religious philosophy.

Feb. 19, 2005: W(h)ither Religion

One of the reasons European sophisticates (and American elites) look down on the American barbarians (Texas cowboys, fundamentalist yahoos) is that the Europeans have become post-modern peoples who no longer have any belief or need for religion. 

(For the purposes of this blog, I am taking an agnostic position on religion.  I try to use the scientific method to help me clarify what I see around me and at the moment, arguments for and against the existence of God essentially rest on faith, not on  facts.  The Cosmologists, Astro-physicists, Bio-chemists, Cell Biologists, Evolutionary Biologists, and others have shown that our current reality could have developed without any intervention by a greater power or intelligence.  Again, religion is about faith, not science.)

I am interested in a number of points based on the belief or non-belief in a deity. 

First, does it matter that a society evolves beyond a belief in God?

Second, is there an inherent need, psychologically and unconsciously, for God to exist in one form or another?

Third, is there any way to tell when one's beliefs have taken on the character of religious belief as opposed to reality based belief systems?

Today I will briefly address the first question, with perhaps some hints about the second and third.  The empirical evidence suggests that "losing one's religion" (to paraphrase REM) leads to a societal dead end.  The post modern states of Europe are demographically doomed.  This is now starting to slowly seep into the West's consciousness but they have no way to address it without challenging some of their fundamental tenets.  The lack of replacement birth rates in Old Europe (France, Italy, Germany, especially) is now old news.  It is certainly over determined with multiple contributing factors but  I would suggest that among the more important issues on an individual level for not having children are a lack of faith in the future and an over emphasis on one's own gratifications. 

During my personal analysis, I wondered how I would know when I was ready to have children.  My analyst answered that when I was prepared to put the infantile needs of my child ahead of my own (infantile) gratifications, that would be when I was ready to be a parent.  I have seen this again and again in my work.  People who are unable to put their own infantile needs second to their children can not become "good enough" parents (D.W. Winnicott).  The two jobs are mutually exclusive.  For clarification, when I refer to infantile needs, I am talking about such things as the need for nurturance overlapping with various hedonic gratifications; in adults, these needs are usually fairly well disguised and hidden from the self, but they are typically not that well hidden from an astute, outside observer. 

One classic example of the difficulty posed to adult functioning (of which parenting is just one facet) from the recent news would be our last President.  Bill Clinton was an exceptionally able politician, the best I have seen in my observing lifetime.  He was bright, charming, with amazing charisma and acumen.  He could have been one of our best Presidents, though the times he lead in precluded greatness (that requires great challenges that bring out the greatness in a President.)  Unfortunately, his childish needs for approval and gratification along with the infantile grandiosity (and frequently, unconscious guilt and masochism, as well) at the core of the Narcissistic character lead to his well known Monica Lewinsky problem.  I am not addressing here the "vast, right wing conspiracy" that targeted him, but his own unconscious needs which lead him to offer his enemies the rope they could use to hang him.  He was ultimately the source of his own failure as a President and it arose out of his character.

When one grows up in a culture which aggrandizes the self and the needs of the self over the needs of others, it is very difficult to put aside one's own desires in favor of the difficulties of gratifying the desires of a small, dependent human who for the next 20 plus years will be a net drain on one's emotional resources (ie, children need their parents' emotional support much more than the parents need their children's support; parents are also more able to offer the support.) 

Everyone must struggle with the balance between personal gratification and submission to the gratification of another.  Religion has always been a force which supports the difficult task of having and raising children, perhaps more so today than in the past when having children was an unavoidable outcome of personal gratification instead of the choice it is today.   Giving up religion and faith is one factor impairing Europe's ability to reproduce itself.  Once a society can no longer "be fruitful and multiply" that society is doomed.

In another way the loss of religion is damaging.  Even in the worst of times, religion offers the hope that someday in the future things will be better.  A caring God must allow evil to exist for a reason and someday righteous people will be rewarded.  Even if the reward must wait until the afterlife, it is there in the future.  Someday the Messiah will come (or return, depending on one's view) and we will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.  This is an incredibly powerful idea that enables one to imagine a better future for oneself and one's children.  If there is no hope for a better future, one only has despair in difficult times.

Enough! is a European blogger who uses different language to discuss this issue.  His post Europe is lost is gloomy but necessary.  He writes:

Firstly, we need to regain consciousness about our values. The european politicians should meet to establish a common set of rules or values that we feel characterize Europe. From there, we can create an european engine of action. (see below). And finally we must connect the values to actual ”rules” – how to act towards which countries in which situations. This is the only way we can secure a quick, and appropriate,  response in world events that cause human diaster. Having the moral foundation for united action, having the engine for united action and having the specific rules on hand for a specific siatuation in a specific foreign country or region.

Read the whole article; it is an interesting exposition from a European point of view.  While reading consider the congruence between his notion of "our values" and religious values.

Politics and Faith

A psychoanalyst, as part of his training, learns how to continually monitor and question his own prejudices, preconceptions, and biases (which is much of what happens during analysis but is post-analysis carried on without the assistance of the analyst.)  The need to do this is related to the ongoing work of analysis with pone’s patients.  When, for example, I make a particularly trenchant and incisive interpretation and my patient reacts with disbelief or worse, doesn't have any reaction at all, it is up to me to discover the source of my possibly incorrect interpretation.  Did my own prejudice cause me to miss something the patient was working on?  Was I so invested in my own brilliance that I forgot to attend to the working of my patient’s mind?  There are, of course, innumerable ways in which the Psychoanalyst can miss something important, and it is crucial to learn whether the “miss” had its source within the mind of the analyst as opposed to arising in some resistance of the patient.  All of this is preamble to a question that has been troubling me for some time: Why is it that some people have so much trouble questioning themselves?           

I have been often accused of various transgressions since beginning to change my political views.  My favorite was being told I am stubborn and won’t ever change my mind, when in fact that is exactly what I have done which is so troubling to people.  My least favorite pejorative was being called a fascist by family and friends who were outraged that I might have the temerity to not only support our efforts in Iraq but actually planned to vote for Bush!

My political odyssey somewhat parallels that described by New Sisyphus in his post on “The End of the Cold War: Testing the Left's Central Thesis”.  He reviews the history of the cold war and suggests that the left (and usually liberal, as well) reading of history does not hold up as well as the right (conservative) view.  He writes:

The post-Cold War world allowed people to judge the analysis of the We don't think these two phenomena are unrelated. On the contrary, people are mostly rational and, with the facts being what they are on the ground, most people have begun to give credence to a philosophy that simply has done a better job of explaining the world around us.

We see this all the time. We may laugh when the New York Times runs one its famous "Crime Rate Continues to Fall Even as Jail Population Booms" we-can't-buy-a-clue story, but the fact is--from things small to grand--liberalism as a theory simply fails to either explain past behavior or successfully predict future. People notice this.

The Right isn't convincing people--its arguments simply don't have the same exposure--so much as the Left is convincing people that the Left isn't right.  In this vein, United States by liberals and conservatives and, more and more, people began to come to the conclusion that the conservative narrative simply made more sense. At the same time, a rising conservative movement has come to dominate the U.S. political scene, even if the cultural and educational heights are still controlled by old-school liberalism.

Iraq's recent elections are merely more of the same. One side said that it was a useless puppet exercise resented by the Iraqi people. The other said the people of Iraq wanted freedom and their voice as much as any other people would. Which side better anticipated what occurred on January 30?

The entire article is a terrific read.  It seems to me that to maintain the left point of view, for example that the Soviet Union failed because of its own inherent weakness, rather than the right’s view that it required Reagan’s resolute efforts to win the cold war in addition to the inherent structural weaknesses of communism, causes one to construct more and more elaborate structures of causality that begin to resemble the cycles and epicycles of Ptolemy’s universe rather than a coherent historical narrative.  I know others who had an experience more like Cicero at Winds of Change.  He describes how powerfully 9/11 woke him out of an "end of history" slumber:

During the remaining 1990s, while the country partied and worked overtime in search of digital gold I took a breather from the world, to recline as a political zero. I was utterly amazed and distressed at the excesses of those post-historical dotcom days. We were becoming too soft as a culture, I believed -- surrounded by too much wealth, convenience and distractive media to actually defend ourselves as free people. I felt that the West's hard-won liberal principles were melting into irony in the face of blinding overabundance and frivolous politics. But the confetti of those heady times draped over my concerns, and like many other people, I was too busy shuffling pixels to put much energy into discerning the gathering storm. But I sensed that history was near. For me, the 1990s were like a glorious sunset at the end of a long, resplendent day.

And then came nightfall.

I admit that it took 9/11 to slap me awake from complacency. It wasn't merely a shock to see the twin towers implode; I had the sick realization that the abstraction of history that so eluded me had suddenly made it's triumphant return. I felt irrelevant -- that I knew nothing when those buildings fell. Nothing. I knew that the free world had to be rewired, if only to survive the incipient era of terror that was hurtling towards us.

In the case of Cicero, it was the violent intrusion of new information that was transformative.  The events of 9/11 forced him to look more closely at his world and he was frightened, as all of us were.  Too many have let the intervening years dull the memory and they have returned to the comfort of their assumptions.

The liberal world view, usually coterminous with the secular humanist world view, is based on assumptions and tenets that fail basic tests of consistency and reliability.  I plan to investigate this phenomena in various ways over the next few days to weeks.

My initial point of departure is that the political philosophy of the left has come to resemble a faith based belief system.  In such a system, facts become relatively unimportant; what is important is to maintain one’s faith.  In an interesting, thought provoking article in New York Magazine, Kurt Andersen writes:

New Yorkers think we are smarter than other Americans, that the richness and difficulty of life here give our intelligence a kind of hard-won depth and nuance and sensitivity to contradictions and ambiguity. We feel we are practically French. Most New Yorkers are also liberals. And most liberals, wherever they live, believe that they are smarter than most conservatives (particularly George W. Bush).

And finally, most liberals and New Yorkers suspect that we may be too smart for our own good. It is a form of self-flattery as self-criticism. During these past few years, I have heard it said again and again that liberals’ ineffectiveness derives from their inability to see the world in the simple blacks and whites of the Limbaughs and Hannitys and Bushes. (Why else, the argument goes, did John Kerry lose?)

Maybe. But now our heroic and tragic liberal-intellectual capaciousness is facing its sharpest test since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Back then, most of us were forced, against our wills, to give Ronald Reagan a large share of credit for winning the Cold War. Now the people of this Bush-hating city are being forced to grant the merest possibility that Bush, despite his annoying manner and his administration’s awful hubris and dissembling and incompetence concerning Iraq, just might—might, possibly—have been correct to invade, to occupy, and to try to enable a democratically elected government in Iraq.

The entire article, When Good News Feels Bad, is well worth reading for a look at the cognitive dissonance so many in my home town are struggling with (or avoiding altogether.)

There are some important issues at work here and I hope to explore this more in the next week or two.

The Left's Inadvertent (?) Anti Americanism

One of my areas of interest in blogging here is to understand how intelligent people, many of whom I know and respect, can have so much difficulty recognizing what we are facing in the War on Terror (as with so many others, a poor choice of names, but it is what we are stuck with now).  After all, if we are not at war with Islamic fascism, then much of what we have been doing since 9/11 is overkill.  Our invasion of Iraq was never necessary, we should never have reelected Bush, and we should be getting out as quickly as possible (as we are doing, of course, but not how the Ted Kennedy's of the world want.)  A number of items have come up recently that bear directly on this question.

Yesterday, Lynne Stewart, always referred to as a Radical lawyer, a champion of the down trodden,a  feminist and activist was found guilty of aiding and abetting Islamic terrorists.  Here we have a sophisticated, intellectually gifted woman who professes to care deeply about the poor and victimized and yet can convince herself that the system is so corrupt that it needs to be destroyed even if so many of the victims of the destruction will be the very poor and down trodden she purports to be working toward.  After all, as a feminist, how could she not see the contradiction between feminism and Islamism?  The Powerline folks have some interesting perspectives on this story, worth taking a look at.

On another note, the Eason Jordan imbroglio continues apace.  Some wonder why this should be such a big deal; why are the bloggers jumping all over this story?  Clearly, the MSM does not see it (yet) as very interesting.  Here is Bill Roggio's (from Easongate) take on the question:

The War on Terror is not only fought in the trenches, we are fighting media bias against American culture and Western civilization. Our terrorist enemy has mastered manipulating the media to promote them in a neutral light and the Coalition in a negative light. The media’s ease of use of the terms “rebel”, “resistance”, “militant” and many more clearly shows they have refused to properly frame this fight as against an evil and abhorrent enemy. Mr. Jordan’s statements, if true, demonstrate that some in the media are actually on the other side.

Hindrocket at Powerline reported yesterday on another story of bias in a Washington Post article about the recent Tsunami, seemingly unrelated ti the War on Terror (but intimately related, which I will attempt to show).  He writes:

Very few people realize how often mainstream media sources say things that just aren't true. Sometimes the reason is malice, more often it's ignorance or prejudice. A fascinating example of a libel directed against the Catholic church--undoubtedly the world's most frequently defamed institution--was brought to our attention by reader Matthew Kowalski. On New Year's Day, the Washington Post published an article by Jose Antonio Vargas titled "Seeking the Hand of God in the Waters". The article reported on various efforts to find theological meaning in the South Asian tsunami.

The other item I would like to connect is today's Victor Davis Hanson  article.  For any who do not know who VDH is, he is one of the clearest thinkers in the blogosphere and in the media.  He is a classicist who has a very long view of history and can often help place things into a historical perspective sadly missing in most reporting.  In his article Why Democracy? VDH comments:

While modern forms of democracy are sometimes hard to define, we more or less know them when we see them: All citizens are eligible to vote and hold office, a free press flourishes (emphasis mine-SW), and the rule of constitutional law trumps fiat. Thus should Iraq become a true constitutional government, it is less likely to invade a Kuwait, pay subsidies to suicide murderers, send missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia, or gas its own people.

In all these citations, there is a common thread.  The War on Terror is being fought not only in the Middle East, but in tour living rooms, on our televisions, and on our computers.  We are fighting an information war, and the terrorists have know this for 30 years.  Most terror is Theater.  It is meant to demoralize the enemy so that he will surrender without putting up  much of a fight.  When Western Intellectuals and Media mavens slant their reporting and use their language to undermine the war, they are effectively aiding the enemy.  When the New York Times prints upwards of 45 front page stories about abu Graib, this is not in the service of preserving our democracy (though that is what they tell themselves) it is undermining our ability to defend ourselves.  When a few low lifes put panties on prisoner's heads in an Iraqi prison, this is not torture; it is humiliation, which can be profoundly infuriating, but it is not torture.  In my earlier posts on Language, Memory, and Distortion and Language, Perversity, and the MSM I explored some o f the ways in which language is used to disguise rather than illuminate reality.  If the left wing bias in our MSM does not self correct and continues to resist the self examination that would illuminate their own biases, our free press will continue to endanger themselves.  We are no longer living in a world in which the New York Times, CBS, NBC, and ABC news control what we see and hear.  Yet, we still need the MSM; only they have the resources to bring important stories to the majority of the people who do not have the itme or the inclination to spend hours a day searching out the news themeselves.  I would add that our Universities, with their continuing efforts to constrict free speech  (always in the name of PC sensitivity and never restricitng the language of the left) are furthering endangering our freedoms by their abuse; freedom without responsibility cannot remain free for long.

" Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me. " George Orwell

Today, it is not just pacifism that is pro-fascist.

Feb. 8, 2005: Homeostasis and Conservatism

Homeostasis: The ability or tendency of an organism or cell to maintain internal equilibrium by adjusting its physiological processes. 

Another way of saying this is that homeostasis is the complex set of operations that govern the organism's resistance to change.  All living creatures use feedback loops to maintain their homeostasis.   In an individual, when homeostasis fails, the organism becomes ill or dies.

As an example, in a human being, when the amount of fluid in the extracellular space begins to decrease below certain fairly specific limits (there is a dynamic range), various ions, chiefly sodium, increase in concentration.  Through various routes which have not been fully elaborated, cells in the Hypothalamus react to this with a signal to the pituitary gland which then releases a hormone, anti-diuretic hormone (ADH), which not only causes the kidneys to more efficiently conserve water, but also signals the brain/mind that it is time to seek out some libations.  Once the person drinks his fill,  the sodium concentration returns to within normal limits and the sensation of thirst fades away.  There is more to this of course, the stomach and mouth react, the blood vessels of the periphery are involved and many other things are affected as well, but this is essentially how thirst and fluid regulation work in people.  If the dynamic equilibrium cannot be maintained, if  the person cannot get anything to drink, the next steps in homeostasis would involve shutting down unnecessary bodily functions.  The person would stop sweating,  which can then impair temperature regulation.  This is followed by more urgent emergency efforts to save electrolytes.  The kidneys shut down completely.  The  "goal" is to maintain the osmotic balance in the brain as long as possible.  Once the concentration of Sodium goes too high, the neurons in the brain can no longer function properly, some fire chaotically, leading to seizures, and when enough cells are damaged, death follows. 

It is also possible to have too much water.  Polydipsia is a condition most often seen in severely disturbed individuals (or occasionally in untreated diabetics) who drink upwards of 15 gallons of water a day.  They can suffer from hyponatremia (low sodium), which can cause seizures and death.  In this condition no ADH is released, the kidneys work at maximum output and can actually handle an impressive amount of fluid before the system breaks down.

Physiologically, there is a narrow band of acceptable concentrations of Sodium ions in the blood and the body does a very good job of regulating the concentration.

Non living systems can be thought of as influenced by homeostasis as well. (For those more inclined to a mechanistic view, homeostasis can be thought of as related to entropy versus order in systems.  The amount of energy in a system will always tend to a minimum state as time goes on, unless the system is acted upon with a new source of energy.  Systems thus tend to move toward lower energy states as time goes by.)  The weather is an exceptionally complex system, filled with feedback loops that are not well understood, despite the arguments of the Global warming set.  [They use computer models, which they admit are incomplete, to produce scenarios that are based on assumptions and very small sample sizes.  They may be right, but for all anyone knows, the effect of CO2 on the global weather is swamped by the effects of increased water vapor (a much more powerful greenhouse gas) which may be more related to the sun's energy flux than anything we are doing.  Caution is advised.] 

For a simpler example, think of the recent tsunami:   Where two large tectonic plates meet and crunch, there is a build up of energy which is typically released in small tremors over a long period of time.  This is a stable structure.  The periodic energy release allows the structure to remain stable in a dynamic system.  When the energy becomes too great to release in measured amounts, as when the release is blocked for a long period of time, the energy builds until there is a catastrophic release.  This is how the planet geologically manages the tendency to maintain stable energy states. 

One thing that should be clear from describing both a human homeostatic mechanism and a geological one is that homeostasis is a deeply conservative principle.  Homeostasis is a measure of the resistance of a system to perturbations (change); it doesn't get more conservative than that.  Human beings are fundamentally conservative, as are all living things.  People and other loving things adapt to changed conditions only when forced to do so; those that don't adapt, die.

What, you might be wondering, does this have to do with psychoanalysis and politics?  Bear with me.   I have pointed out how people are conservative in a physiological sense.  However, people are also deeply conservative in a psychological sense.  The human psyche is organized in a manner to maintain optimal functioning.  This means that dysphoric states (depression, anxiety, panic, trauma) are to be avoided if at all possible and this involves, among other factors,  maintaining a healthy self esteem and self regard.  Sadly, self esteem had been misunderstood more than almost any other psychoanalytic concept.    Some clarity is in order and will be supplied shortly.

To quote Garth Alger: "We fear change." (Dana Carvey)

Language, Perversity, and the MSM

I was planning on taking in the President's SOTU address, nursing my cold, and continuing my exposition tomorrow, however, two particular instances of the MSM perverse fascination and idealization of language bear commenting upon. 

Hugh Hewitt has a summary and links to many bloggers commenting on  CNN's Eason Jordan, at the Davos Forum, accusing the American Military of assassinating journalists Journalist Assassins.  He does this with no evidence to back him up, in front of international press, presenting perfect sound bites to al Jazeera from a prominent member of one of the foundations of the American MainStreamMedia.  I suggest you go to Hugh's site to read the details.  Take this as exhibit one.

The second item I would like to comment on is the New York Times article by Sarah Boxer (for links to the article and the blogoshpere's response, start with this from Glenn Reynolds) in which she suggested that the Iraqi brothers who blog at Iraq the Model were CIA plants.   As with Jordan, she offers no evidence (she took a throwaway line from an anti-war blogger's site, with no attempt at confirmation and printed it in the Paper of Record.)

Both of these examples of vile accusations, without a shred of proof, not meeting even minimal journalistic standards of fairness or accuracy, are evidence of a perverse orientation to language.  These so-called journalists believe that what is important is sophisticated use of language, devoid of reality.  In this world, one says whatever one wishes, the more elegant, the better.  If the journalist is particularly inclined, they tailor their remarks to evoke the approval of their audience, usually a collection of others who value words above deeds.  Interestingly, their particular approach also suggests that words don't really matter, ie, their words have no effect in reality.  Boxer would be appalled if one of the Iraqi brothers were to be killed; she would never recognize her culpability.  Here is a comment from Jeff Jarvis on the article:

Ms. Boxer, don't you think you could be putting the life of that person at risk with that kind of speculation? In your own story, you quote Ali -- one of the three blogging brothers who started IraqTheModel -- saying that "here some people would kill you for just writing to an American." And yet you go so much farther -- blithely, glibly speculating about this same man working for the CIA or the DoD -- to sex up your lead and get your story atop the front of the Arts section (I'm in the biz, Boxer, I know how the game is played).

How dare you? Have you no sense of responsibility? Have you no shame?

The answer, of course, is "No!"; she has no shame; she doesn't realize that her words are more than mere specks on paper, but may actually have real world consequences.  I suspect that Eason would never admit that his inexcusable comments might expose American service men and women to risk, or in fact, would continue the job of assaulting America's image in the world that the MSM seems to take as their primary job these days.  In fact, they often argue that our free press is one of the glory's of our nation (and they are correct) but they fail to see that when they sacrifice their job of obtaining and reporting information in the service of telling a deeper Truth that only they are privy to, they damage themselves, damage the MSM they are a part of, and more unfortunately, damage the democratic adventure itself.

Psychoanalytically, perversion involves simultaneously the acting out of an individual's fantasy, using the other as an object for gratification.  The reality of the other is essentially denied.  They exist to play a part in the fantasy world of the pervert.

In my two examples today, Boxer and Eason pervert the language; they use words to enact their own agenda while denying the reality of the other, those who might be affected by their words.  Their words matter more than any actions, yet their words have no impact...

Language, Memory, and Distortion

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”         

ATTRIBUTION: Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898), British logician, author, humorist.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, chapter 6 (1865).

On the conventionality of language

Psychoanalysts must be especially wary of language and memories.  At one time, memories were thought to be immutable; once encoded, a memory was never lost, merely unavailable.  The evidence for this came from the early Neurosurgeons, who found that if they electrically stimulated different parts of the cortex, they were able to evoke long forgotten memories.  Similarly, Freud believed that neurosis was caused by repressed memories; that is, childhood trauma were believed to exert their deleterious affects in the present by being forcibly, unconsciously, kept out of awareness.  These objectionable memories were always threatening to emerge, and often did in disguised ways, producing symptoms.  The child who witnessed events too horrible to describe would develop hysterical blindness as an adult.  While these are over simplifications, and our understanding of personality, development, and mental illness has advanced a great deal from those days, these ideas live on in the popular imagination.  Recovered memories (and their attendant law suits) were a growth industry at one time and continue to be used as convenient explanations for all sorts of dysfunctional behavior.  [In my experience, most abuse is, in fact, remembered, but often in attenuated form with the affect split off from the memory; the job in that case is to help the person understand just how traumatic their experience was in an emotionally meaningful way.]  In the last few years we have come to appreciate how plastic our memories are.  It is remarkably easy to produce false memories in some people; it is also remarkable to what extent our memories change over time.  Until a child is about 7 or 8 (when most of the Central Nervous System has finished Myelinating) memories are encoded primarily in visual images.  Once the brain is sophisticated enough to do so, the child begins to encode memories primarily through language.  This is a primary reason early memories are so illusive; we just don't think that way anymore.

Orwell wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.".  Scroll down Wretchard’s site to his post from Friday, January 28^th, titled “A Trip Down Memory Hole Lane” to see how the modern day fascist obliterates the past in order to control the present. 

You might wonder what this has to do with the meanings we assign words.  Words are symbolic representations of objects or attributes.  Roger Simon wrote a post two days ago on the media use of the word “Insurgents” to describe the fascist Baathists and al Qaeda murderers in Iraq.  The media managed to convince themselves (as has much of the Democratic party) that Iraq is indistinguishable from Viet Nam, that is, a quagmire.  These words are meaningful.  In a very real way they determine how one views the war in Iraq.   Many have become so wedded to these types of words that their sense of reality has been impaired.  The New York Times, which I still glance at from time to time, seemed absolutely shocked that the Iraqi people would prefer to vote for their leaders rather than submit to the ministrations of a Zarqawi.  Bill Roggio quotes from the Times and adds his own take on the subject. 

The necessity to oppose the Bush administration at every turn has unwittingly forced the Left to align with the enemies of liberty. Quick to seize on the statements of Senator Kennedy, the New York Times publishes a history-challenged article titled "Flashback to the 60's: A Sinking Sensation of Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam", which attempts to draw comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, demonstrating their political opportunism and ignorance of history. The last real victory of the Left, the destruction of American efforts to fight communism in South East Asia, has warped their view of the American application of power. All future conflicts are viewed through the distorted looking glass of Vietnam. The analogy is severely flawed, the difference between Vietnam and Iraq could not be greater.

Once you appreciate how words capture events, relationships, objects, and encode them in long term memory, you can start to appreciate how important it is to choose our words wisely in describing events.  Journalists used to pride themselves on attempting to be objective; too often now, they see themselves as advocates; neutrality need not apply.

Several people have commented to me that I am doing something similar on this blog, ie unfairly categorizing people and dismissing them; I have been told my language demonizes the Left and the Liberals and that is the equivalent of the calling the Republicans the party of Fundamentalists who are intolerant in the same way the Jihadists are.  (I asked for examples and none could be produced;  I would ask again that if anyone sees anything to support the contention, please let me know.)  This is a common meme in certain precincts, ie that Republicans are fanatics just waiting to usher in either Armageddon and the Rapture or a fascist dictatorship.  The left, and I include large parts of the Democratic party, in the blogosphere, and among their leaders, as well as the bulk of the MSM, and much of the University Professoriate, has lost the ability to differentiate between Bush and Hitler, between a “fascist” whose language you oppose and those who behead people and use children with Down’s syndrome as suicide bombers and would gladly bring on another Holocaust.  As long as the killers are seen as Insurgents the war at home will continue and the true nature of the enemy will remain disguised. 

One very hopeful note: the Iraqi people clearly see the “Insurgents” as fascists and terrorists.

That’s it for now.  I will return to the plasticity of memory and its impact on perception in a future posting.