ShrinkWrapped

The UNICEF Report: Child Poverty in Perspective

The results are in, and are being touted by the usual purveyors of "news":

U.S., Britain Faulted on Child Welfare

The United States and Britain ranked at the bottom of a U.N. survey of child welfare in 21 wealthy countries that assessed everything from infant mortality to whether children ate dinner with their parents or were bullied at school.

...

One of the study's researchers, Jonathan Bradshaw, said children fared worse in the U.S. and Britain -- despite high overall levels of national wealth -- because of greater economic inequality and poor levels of public support for families.

''What they have in common are very high levels of inequality, very high levels of child poverty, which is also associated with inequality, and in rather different ways poorly developed services to families with children,'' said Bradshaw, a professor of social policy at the University of York in Britain.

A ShrinkWrapped reader sent me a challenging e-mail:

Why are those narcissistic European nations doing a better job of raising their kids? Maybe laissez-faire capitalism isn't the answer?

I will leave aside the question of whether or not the United States, and presumably England which fared even worse in the report, actually practices laissez-faire capitalism, though the Libertarians I know might take issue wit the characterization. However, such a provocative story deserves closer analysis, and I decided to down load the UNICEF report on Child Poverty in Perspective and see what I could learn. Not surprising for a UNICEF report, the intentions are admirable:

Paradigm Shift and Paradigm Collapse: A How-to Guide for the GWOT

There has been several long discussions here recently detailing many of the opposing positions on the Global War against Islamic fascism. A prominent divide occurs between those who claim that our enemies represent only a small fraction of the Muslim world versus those who believe that Islam itself is the enemy. Although I would take issue with the idea that only a small fraction of the Muslim world supports armed violence against the West, in an important way both sides are correct.

[In most surveys of Muslim public opinion, the level of support for such activities as suicide bombing ranges from lows in the 10-20% range, up to 75% in the Palestinian population, and even if only 10% of the Muslim world supports terrorism against the West, we are talking about more than 100 million people, not a small number.]

The Muslim Ummah is nothing so much as a large tribal affiliation. Most Muslims are Muslim because they were born into the faith and just as, in all likelihood, most Jews and Christians have a relatively basic knowledge of the key tenets of their faith, I suspect most Muslims, even those who have memorized the Koran, have only a fairly superficial grasp of the core theology of Islam. One's faith is rarely dependent on a deep knowledge of theology; we typically rely on our Rabbis, Priests, Ministers, and Imams to help us clarify the core beliefs of our religious tribe.

The understanding that we are dealing with a large tribal affiliation, one that has significant areas of fundamental disagreement with the beliefs of the tribal affiliation known as America and the larger Anglosphere, ie those of us who believe in liberal democracy and free markets, is informative. What is currently at stake in our war is ultimately the determination by the Muslim world of how Islam will be defined.

Know Your Enemy: Ayman al-Zawahiri

al Qaeda's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is back in the news, issuing various threats, blasting Bush, and making calls for Muslim unity against the infidel.  I recently spent some time putting together a Psychoanalytic look at Zawahiri, using open source material, which may offer some illumination into the mind of a brilliant, psychopathic savage. 

Although I used a number of sources, all the quotes in this post are from the New Yorker profile of Zawahiri by Lawrence Wright from 2002.

Ayman al-Zawahiri: A Study in Humiliation and Grandiosity

Ayman al-Zawahiri was the first born child, along with a twin sister, of a prominent Egyptian family. There is little concrete information available on-line about his early life but later evidence suggests, not surprisingly for first born Arab boys, that his mother adored him.

"Ayman and his mother share a love of literature. "She always memorized the poems that Ayman sent her," Mahfouz Azzam told me."

At the same time, his birth was quickly followed by the arrival of numerous siblings. This combination of being the first born male of fraternal male/female twins, followed by the rapid arrival of multiple siblings, in a highly patriarchal society, is a recipe for heightened Narcissistic pathology in the child. The Mother’s adoration tells him he is the favored child (and he almost certainly was) while her need to attend to the sister and then the younger siblings, often leads to feelings of neglect in such situations. The partially neglected child who is promised "everything" and has to often settle for so much less of the mother’s love and attention, can be particularly vulnerable to feelings of rejection; failures are intolerable and must be denied or externalized.

Saying Whatever Comes to Mind XXVI

The Sanity Squad has been at it again, truing to make sense out of a two year Presidential campaign.

Join Neo-neocon, Dr. Sanity, Siggy, and me as we turn our attention to the never ending campaign.  Download or listen to the Sanity Squad: Election Creep; you will be enlightened.

Misunderstanding Paranoia

The New York Sun has an interesting editorial report on Mayor Bloomberg's visit to the State Department yesterday. In Bloomberg at Foggy Bottom, our Mayor discusses the economic benefits of keeping the UN in New York and the article contained a number of remarkable statements, but the one I find most revealing is this:

In addition to the financial benefits that would accrue to New York were the United Nations to be moved out of the city, there is the political — or even moral — dimension to the question, on which the mayor, in his remarks in Washington yesterday, gave a little homily as well. "From America's and the world's point of view, I don't agree with a lot of the things that are said in the United Nations," he said. "But it's kind of hard to argue, I think, that talking — it may not bring you anything, but I don't see any downside. And just maybe, every once in a while, people looking each other in the eye and talking will come up with some ways to make the world a safer, better place."

This is, of course, nothing more than a restatement of the conventional wisdom that talking, usually inaccurately described as diplomacy, is always beneficial and always preferable to the alternatives. This idea is worth examining.

Consider the paranoid patient. The fundamental psychological process in paranoia is projection, the unconscious defense whereby a person attributes his own (disavowed) impulses, thoughts, and feelings to others. The paranoid often feels suffused with helpless murderous rage, which is unacceptable, and projected into the outside world. "I do not hate and want to kill you; you hate and want to kill me!" When paranoids become dangerous is precisely when their projection is most intense and feels most real to them. At those moments, the plots which surround them and focus on them are absolutely real to them. Once their reality testing has become so impaired that they cannot see anyone as neutral or benign, they are at risk of acting on their terror and attacking others.

Two Vignettes

On Saturday night a friend who spoke from the left side of liberalism asked why we should object to Iran having a bomb.  After all, it is only fair that they be allowed to have a bomb because we have them and Israel has them.  When I pointed out that no member of the government of Israel or the United States has ever declared their intent to destroy Iran while the destruction of Israel (and the Jews) has been a central tenet of the Iranian government since their 1979 revolution, he responded, "aren't those just words?" 

Over the weekend, in an exchange of e-mail with another friend, he sent me a link to one of the varied and sundry articles in the MSM reporting on the UN assertion that the question of human generated CO2 causing Global Warming is now settled.  I sent him a number of articles which featured specific scientific questions that have not been answered yet by the Global Warming modelers and wrote to him:

The proper scientific answer to the question "does human generated CO2 cause global warming" is "I don't know."

In response he wrote the following:

If your point is that it is a complex issue then how can you be so firm in your denial of global warming.

He continued:

Paradigm Shift and Paradigm Collapse

The human brain, with its incredibly complex network of connections, is certainly one of the most complex structures in the universe.  It has the ability to perform an unimaginable number of operations each and every second, yet even with such advanced computing power, the brain relies on simple models of the world in order to function adequately.  Recent research suggests that we build our visual map of the world from combining a mere 12 distinct variables; we fill in the dots, as it were, by using past mental maps.  Without spending too much time on the neurobiology of brain functioning, I would suggest that such models of the world are the correlates of our mental paradigms, which we use in order to understand the world in which we live. 

Our paradigms work extremely well in a world that is relatively stable.  Our minds and brain are "designed" (I am not commenting on whether by an Intelligent Designer or by unintelligent Evolution) to continually scan the environment for change.  Any change is dangerous until and unless proven otherwise.  As technology began to alter our environment, for most of human history, the changes were in the direction of greater stability and safety.  After all, much of technology actually insulates us, sometimes literally, from environmental vicissitudes.  Compare our existence to the pre-historic hunter-gatherer.  We have extremely reliable food supplies, climate controlled environments, protection from the invisible terrors (illness, infectious disease) that were once thought to be capricious acts by the Gods, etc; except for those unfortunate times of paradigm collapse, ie war and natural disasters, life for technological man has been, on the whole, much more stable and predictable than for our ancestors.  Even war, with all its disruptions, had a more predictable course, eventually resulting in a clear winner and clear loser, and both winners and losers knew what was at stake.

The Cold War and, especially the period between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, represented a unique period of illusory stability which was shattered by 9/11.  However, the underlying changes to our society had been eroding the sense of stability and undermining our paradigms well before 9/11; such underlying changes are accelerating.

Understanding how paradigms shift and what happens when they collapse can be helpful in understanding the pervasive sense of insecurity that is shared across the political spectrum in the Western world (not to mention in the rest of the world, torn between modernity and the wish for an Utopian, regressive past.)

Israel and the Lynch Mob

Lynch mobs do not behave in ways which reward rational responses.  When hundreds of angry, fearful people are swept up in the irrational tide of hatred that leads to lynchings, there is no way to reason with them.  They "know" that the perpetrators of great crimes are guilty.  They don't need any facts and no amount of argumentation will convince them otherwise.  In fact, those who have the temerity to oppose the lynch mob are likely to become identified with the victim of the mob and end up injured or murdered in the mob's quest for "justice."  The best way to stop the progress of a lynch mob is to specifically single out a leader, point a gun at him, and let him know in no uncertain terms, that if he does not call off the lynching, he will be the first victim of the mob.  Of course, any lawman who does such a thing recognizes that he is putting his own life on the line and the outcome is always uncertain; since the mob is caught up in a rage and has left their rationality far behind, the threat can just as easily increase their rage as shock them into rationality again.

This is the dilemma for the Israelis and for their friends in America.  Israel is surrounded by the incoherent rage of the lynch mob.  Many Israelis, just as many Americans, and even more Europeans, do not want to believe that this is the case.   Mitchell Langbert at Democracy Project has posted two Articles by Dr. Alex Grobman, whose recent book, Nations United: How the UN Undermines Israel and the West was published in November 2006.  The first article offers this warning:

Irrational Terror

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

            -- Friedrich Nietzsche

As I have described in many posts, rationality is a very late development in human history and is quite fragile and easily disrupted.  When higher order cognitive functioning is disrupted, we regress to earlier modes of thinking; ie, the irrational core re-asserts itself. 

[In Psychoanalysis, we foster such regressive states in order to reactivate earlier self and object states and earlier conflicts in order to re-examine them in the light of the present and come to a more adaptive and functional resolution; alas, it is impractical to put an entire country on the couch.]

We are living in a time of intense stress.  The stress arises, in part, from the accelerating rate of change in society that threatens so many who have difficulty adapting to near constant dislocations.  This leads to intense anxiety about the future, encapsulated by the fears that the world is coming to an end because of Global Warming.  The stress also involves a difficult war with savages who have shown us our vulnerability in ways that even the cold war failed to make real.  Everyday the worst aspects of the savagery in Iraq and around the world, in all its bloody glory, is brought into our living rooms by the ubiquitous 24 hour news services and the always "on" internet.  In response to such stressors, our society is clearly regressing to more primitive modes of thinking.

Saying Whatever Comes to Mind XXV

The IPCC report on climate change calls for drastic cuts in CO2 emissions. How do we figure out if such measures are necessary—and what would be the costs of making an error in either direction? Has “Chicken Little left the barnyard?” This hot topic, and the efforts in the MSM and Congress to rein Bush in on Iran in this week’s Sanity Squad.

Listen in or download Imminent Overreaction, as Dr. Sanity, Neo-neocon, Siggy, and I attempt to shine some light amidst the heat.