ShrinkWrapped

The Children of the Lies

Yesterday Middle Son brought some fliers home from school.  One featured the iconic image of Che Guevara which has been so enduring over the years and the other the clenched "black power" fist made popular by such luminaries as Huey Newton in the 60's.  (He reported a third flier featured a likeness of Michael Moore but didn't bring it home.)  The fliers called on all "Progressives" to come to a meeting to fight off the nefarious recruiters who were apparently coming to the school to induce vulnerable poor children to join the military.  There is so much wrong with this that it is hard to know where to start.  (For example, even NPR admitted a week ago that recent recruits have been above average in socio-economic class and educational achievement compared to the overall population.)  The idea that these most privileged children, primarily middle class and upper middle class, who live in a bucolic suburb north of New York City, living lives of ease and material bounty never before experienced by mere mortals, would object to recruiters for the major force standing between them and those who would like nothing better than to enslave or kill them, creates a profound discontinuity.

The children who posted these fliers apparently believe that we are fighting an immoral, illegal war, based on lies, that the military sneakily induces poor children to join under false pretenses as cannon fodder for the rich plutocrats who run the country; they believe they are protecting the helpless poor from being exploited by the war machine.  They are awash in virtuous indignation.  The fact that this is a truly reactionary position is irrelevant; what is more interesting is how these young minds have been damaged by the propaganda of the media, aided and abetted by the dominant New York political party's liberal ideologists; needless to say, the media/Democrat conflation in New York is, if anything, more out of touch with reality than in most places.  It is possible that some of these children know that Che Guevara was a mass murdering psychopath, but I suspect for most, their only knowledge of his exploits is from puerile Hollywood efforts and the white washing of history that has been a staple of the left leaning media since the 60's.

Gagdad Bob somewhat metaphorically describes what happens to young minds which are raised on lies and half truths:

Narcissism, Disintegration, Suicidality & the Fall of the West: Part III

Previous posts:

Introduction

Part I: Narcissism and Drive Containment

Part II: The Natural History of Narcissism

Why Narcissism?

The traditional depiction of a Psychoanalyst includes a certain pre-occupation with the sexual lives of the patients. This had some truth to it at one time. When the early analysts were laying the theoretical scaffolding for the science of the mind known as Psychoanalysis, most of the patients they saw were relatively well to do, coming from traditional two parent families, and suffering, so it was thought, from the need to suppress and repress their sexuality in order to become part of civilized society. Most children were not the center of their parent's universe in their earliest years, usually having to share their parents attention with multiple siblings; they had to learn to share at an early age.  Furthermore, children who enter a world in which deprivation and loss is an all too real threat have minimal opportunity to develop over abundant narcissistic expectations; no parent could afford too much of an emotional investment in a single child when the risk of losing children approached 50% before age 5:

Killing the Golden Goose

In this case the Golden eggs are new pharmaceuticals that keep us healthier longer.  I am not ashamed to admit that I would like to live to a ripe, old age, and reamin healthy for as long as possible.  Among other things, the Pharmaceutical industry has done its part to ensure that I, and many other people, remain healthy and age more slowly than our parents or their parents, yet the greed of liability lawyers and lottery-hopefuls bringing law suits, is threatening to destroy an entire industry and at best, will slow down the development of new life-saving and age-slowing drugs.

Merck is firing ~11% of their workforce and the entire industry has been contracting.  Vioxx is not the only problem Merck is facing, but the lawsuits over Vioxx are emblematic of the convergence of greed, entitlement mentality, and the nanny state that is threatening our Pharmaceutical industry:

Merck's cutbacks were the latest in a string of firings throughout the troubled industry, and could bring the industry's worst bloodbath ever with as many as 30,000 pharmaceutical employees thrown out of work, experts said.

"Recalls, legal troubles and the lack of new blockbuster drugs have forced pharmaceutical employers to adjust payrolls," said John Challenger, CEO of global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.

"Merck's troubles go beyond the Vioxx debacle. Throughout the industry, we are seeing an all-out search for the next big prescription drug that will become a profit blockbuster," he said.

The liability crisis is self-explanatory; people who have been harmed by a product essentially find a lawyer who will help them play the lottery, which is our court system, in order to make a fortune out of their injury.  Depending on the venue, the choice of jurors (who rarely have any expertise in understanding the complicated physiology involved in medication reactions, and the trade-offs involved in taking medicines, all of which have side effects that can be life threatening for some unlucky people.)

Changing Minds

Kerry wondered, in a comment on my post yesterday, Hollywood, the Mediacrats, & the War, what makes it so difficult for people to change their minds:

What do you make of the split in reporting from Iraq/Afghanistan? That is, there are surely some pivotal facts, were they more widely known, well reported, and trumpeted by the Dinosaur Media, which would change perceptions mightily. For example, how many Americans know there is an Iraqi Military Academy now? I'm not expressing this very well. It seems there is a huge split in the American people-I wish the rift could be torn open in one big, "I didn't know that, that changes everything" moment. As a psychiatrist, could you remark sometime on this facts gulf?

I wish it were as simple as showing people a fact or a collection of facts, which would suddenly lift the veil from over their eyes and allow them to see.  In fact, much of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis deals with exactly those forces which interfere with people's ability to perceive and react appropriately to reality. 

I have written a great deal about "mental models", also known as templates, or symbolic representations.  For example, the word "dog" is a mental concept or symbolic representation, that encapsulates multiple aspects of what "dog-ness" means; we use the word because it conveys the meaning of "dog-ness" to those who share our language and assumptions without having to describe all of the dog's attributes every time we want to say we saw a dog.  Children, when first learning language, will commonly call any four legged animal a "dog" until they are able to differentiate what is common, necessary, and sufficient for the concept of "dog-ness".

As we become more sophisticated in our language, our concepts become larger and more sophisticated.  For the last 30-40 years, to a 1960's coastal baby boomer,  "progressive" symbolized everything good in politics.   Whether correctly or not, we believed that progressives were simply better people than curmudgeonly Republicans (was there ever anyone who looked more like a curmudgeon than Richard Nixon?) who only cared about profits for themselves and their friends. 

Hollywood, the Mediacrats, & the War

If you receive most of your information about the War in Iraq, you might conclude we are losing the fight.  If you have blogosphere sources of information on the war, you will recognize the immense amount of progress we have made.  In just a few weeks now, the Iraqis will be returning to the polls and electing a full fledged government, at which point it will be clear that the terrorists have lost and democracy has won.  This raises an interesting question.  The Democrats (and their allies in the media) have been insisting that the Iraq war is a quagmire of Vietnam proportions.  They also have continued their theme that the nation was lied to and misled into war by Cheney, working his ventriloquist magic through Bush.  This leads to a limited number of possibilities:

1) They could be correct; the war is a disaster and Bush lied us into it (the Democrats have been careful to avoid attributing any motive for such lies).  If this is the case, the elections will have to be a failure in order to support their case.  Why they would tie themselves so closely to Iraq failure is a mystery to me (unless one posits an unconscious need to fail on their part.)

2) They are wrong but don't realize it.  Perhaps they are receiving faulty intelligence on the war form their allies in the Media; this means they are tying themselves to a failing industry that has been hemorrhaging money and viewers for several years.  This doesn't seem like a winning strategy.

Real Estate Narcissism

Architectural Digest is the (self proclaimed) International Magazine of Interior Design.  It is the closest thing to high end "real estate porn" that I have ever seen.  I do not subscribe to the magazine, though it is available for about $2 per issue.  I receive a complementary copy every month (It is a monthly and I do not know if it is available at your local newsstand but tend to doubt it) probably because New York Psychoanalysts have traditionally had a wealthy clientele and Architectural  Digest is directed at that audience.  Occasionally I will fan through the pages to see how the rich and richer live but do not recall ever reading an article until this morning.

I bring home the magazine when I receive it because my wife enjoys looking at houses and occasionally finds an idea she can adapt at a lower order of magnitude financially.  She noticed an article, "In with the New" about a New York Brownstone renovation which she immediately brought to my attention.  It encapsulated so much of what is wrong with our culture that I had to blog about it.  The article opens by describing a problem that is so serious that it brings a person into therapy:

Lauren V was seeing a therapist, but not for the usual reasons: "My only problem, really, was real estate," remembers the New York film producer, then a screenwriter.  "My husband and I thought, naively, that we could buy an apartment with a view of Central Park with the money we had, but the only place we could afford was one with a tiny view through a bathroom window."

Her therapist helpfully told her of a brownstone that had just come on the market.  V and her husband, Robert B, a communications executive, made an appointment to see it and found a turn-of-the-last-century town house on a neighborly Upper East Side street.  The interior, however, had been so poorly remodeled that the couple would basically be buying the shell. V saw the potential, but her husband hesitated: "Can't you nag him into it?" asked a friend.

She did, and they succeeded in placing the winning offer.  "Oh my God," said the therapist at the next session, "you outbid my other patients."

[Although the article uses full names, I am avoiding the last names of the people involved; if they want to cede their confidentiality, that is their business, but I do not want to be a part of what they are doing.]

So, where should I start?

Narcissism with Real World Consequences II

Narcissism has real world consequences.  When a threshold is reached in an individual where their investment in their own self-esteem regulation overpowers their interest and relatedness to others, they begin to show all the features of the Narcissistic character traits I have been describing.  They tend to be arrogant, self centered, exquisitely sensitive to being hurt while exceptionally insensitive3 to how they hurt others, and generally unappealing.  When the person in question is a parent, their children suffer.  When they have positions of authority, many people can suffer.  Some of the worst monsters in human history have exhibited all the hallmarks of the Malignant Narcissism I described here.   There is every indication that Kim Jong Il fits right in with his predecessors, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao as well as his contemporaries, Mugabe, Assad, Ahmadinejad, and Hussein (and please do not try to convince me that there is a difference between Mao and Hitler because one was a fascist and one a communist; they were both totalitarians and their similarities far outweigh the rationalizations they derived from their competing political philosophies.) 

A post by Betsy today links to this article by William F. Buckley in which he describes how Christians who are caught practicing their religion are horribly persecuted, tortured (real torture, not "abu Graib" torture), and murdered.  Betsy asks the question:

Thanksgiving

In America, we have so much to be thankful for that we often take it for granted and fail to appreciate how special this nation is;  as a member of a traditionally mistreated minority, I appreciate the wisdom and moral clarity of our founding fathers, who established a nation which was by no means perfect, but allowed for evolutionary and revolutionary change to take place and be incorporated into our system.  Whether you attribute our wealth of spirit and material goods to an Almighty God or to our most excellent luck in having had the collective wisdom of our founding fathers to establish the Unite States (and thus far, the wisdom to keep our United States free and prosperous), no one ever said it better than the President who guided this nation through its most perilous days:

Proclamation Establishing Thanksgiving Day

October 3, 1863

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies.  To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.  In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union.  Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle, or the ship; the axe had enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.  Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years, with large increase of freedom.

Leadership in a World of Narcissists

In my efforts to elucidate the underlying dynamics of narcissism and the intra- and extra-psychic contributions to the development of problematic narcissism, I sometimes overlook some of the more overt results of developing a culture of narcissistic enhancement.  I was reminded of this by reading Armed Liberals post from yesterday.  On the anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination, he commented:

In a certain sense, his brief (and really not terribly effective) presidency marks the apogee of post-war American confidence. We may have been worried that the Russians might nuke us, but somehow we were filled with a kind of optimism that we could make it though, and not only make it through, but make it better.

I attribute no small part of that to the systemic collapse of leadership - both in the quality of being able to lead, and of being able to be led - in our society.

The Democrats Have Allies who Want U.S. Forces out of Iraq

The Democrats are not alone in seeking the immediate withdrawal of the United States forces from Iraq.  There are locals in the neighborhood who agree that:

...the US was mainly responsible for widespread violence in Iraq.