ShrinkWrapped

The Irrational Core

Sophisticated, urbane, typically liberal and secular, modern man has done a masterful job of convincing himself that he lives a life based on rationality and has no need for the irrational belief system known as religion.  He may have some passing belief in the existence of God, but his God takes no particular interest in him or the workings of his world.  His God is unnecessary and often thought of as detrimental.  Books have been written by prominent atheist/scientists, quite well reviewed, proclaiming that those benighted and misguided people who do believe in God are mentally unbalanced and need to be confronted.  The beauty of the Secular Rationalist is how well he has convinced himself of his belief structure even while we are learning that large parts of that very structure are based as much on faith as any religion.

Psychoanalysis has been controversial since its inception, not just because some of its proponent's theories have been found to be less than consistent, but because it challenges our notions of how our minds work.  Most people find it unsettling, and occasionally terrifying, to imagine that they are not fully in control of their own mental apparatus.  Yet recent developments in the neurosciences have been building a very convincing edifice of data that supports the contention that much of the time our conscious minds are mere spectators to the behaviors that emerge from the workings of our vastly larger and deeper unconscious minds.  The persistence of the irrational at the very core of our mental life has powerful effects on our conscious mind and should give one pause when making definitive statements about the world of reality.

One important implication of the existence of such unconscious depths is that a mind which has an irrational core is of necessity going to be subjected to constantly shifting states composed of instincts, varied self and object representations, related affective states, and a host of other variables that must be integrated into a reasonably stable dynamic equilibrium in order for optimal functioning to take place.  Only when the inner world is as quiet as possible can one make best use of our most precious, most fragile, and most recently developed higher cognitive functions, our rational abilities.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross recently wrote a powerful piece describing what happens when a young man lacks that inner peace and yearns for it:

Death's Victory

Many years ago Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks made us all laugh with their take on the 2000 year old man.  On bit involved Carl Reiner, during the interview, asking Mel Brooks how he had managed to live to such a ripe old age.  The the 2000 year old man replied it was his "Will to live." Carl Reiner misunderstood and was deeply impressed until Mel Brooks remarked that it wasn't his will to live, it was his Doctor, Dr. Will To Live. 

Sigmund Freud, not noted for his sense of humor, believed that within all of us there was a dynamic struggle between the will to live (Libido) and the death instinct (Thanatos).  Many have wondered, including me, whether in the West, especially in Europe and among the American elites, the tension between the two instincts have become unbalanced. 

While aggression is fueled by both Libido and Thanatos, for the liberal West, the connections are often successfully repressed and suppressed.  Because of this success, the roots of aggression, even the existence of aggression, are often denied.

The admirable liberal desire to minimize aggression is overt in the international arena, where almost any use of American or Israeli force is a cause for consternation.  However, such desire to minimize aggression shows up in many other areas of life, as well.  For example, the desire to minimize income disparities, using the legal system and the tax system if necessary, includes the desire to minimize envy, a source of a great deal of aggression in humans.  The desire to protect young people from the powerfully disruptive effects of irresponsibility or to protect women and their families from the pain and damage of a seriously defective baby has led to institutionalizing aggression toward the unborn infant. 

Unfortunately, denying and minimizing aggression is not the same as resolving it, and just as the repressed tends to return, suppressed aggression also has a habit of reasserting itself in often surprising ways, especially if it has its roots in Thanatos.  Assisted suicide is a cause which has been identified primarily with liberals and the left, who have moved from the position of compassion for th terminally ill whose pain and discomfort cannot be alleviated to the position that if someone's life is not worth living, they should be allowed to terminate it in comfort.  In March, 2005, in Libido & Thanatos: Part IV, I wrote about the Groningen Protocols, a frightening set of guidelines for use by Physicians to decide when, in their opinion, a patient's life should be terminated without the patient's or their parent's consent:

The Danger of Fantasy in International Affairs: Palestine

On occasion I have written about the danger that arises when international affairs are governed more by fantasy than reality.  My first post on the subject looked at the way in which the National fantasies (myths) in the West and within the Islamic world dovetailed in such a way as to guarantee misunderstanding and make the feared Clash of Civilizations more likely.  In my second post on the subject, I discussed the UN, a paean to fantasy in international affairs, and suggested that the anxiety that would ensue for people once they recognized the reality of the disaster that the UN has become, was sufficient cause for them to cling to the fantasy that the UN offered a way to minimize the danger of a break down in the international order.

Related to both of these posts is the idea that the source of much of the Arab and Muslim discontent with the West relates to the Palestinian and Arab conflict with Israel.  The fantasy structure includes the idea that there is a pool of support among the Palestinians and among Arabs in general that would support a two state solution with Israel, if only the Israelis would remove the terrible weight of oppressive occupation from the backs of the poor, benighted, essentially innocent Palestinians.  In one form or another, this fantasy animates much of the international community's approach to the situation; it also animates much of the media coverage of the Middle East.

The front page of the New York Times today contains no stories about the Palestinians and a search of the Times site reveals no mention of Hamas or Fatah.  A search on Google news for "Hamas" and "Fatah" brings up a front page with a number of stories from several days ago, but no stories linked from major Western news organizations today.  The top story is from Ha'aretz two days ago: Despite violations, Hamas-Fatah cease-fire holds. 

We have become inured to stories proclaiming the maintenance of Palestinian truces punctuated by attacks against Israelis several times a day, attacks typically ignored by the Western press, but here we see the template applied to inter-Palestinian clashes.  In fact, last night and this morning, the fighting in Palestine has been particularly vicious:

Delegitimizing America

During the 60s and 70s one of the great divides between Liberals and Conservatives involved the question of criminal rights.  Although there was broad agreement, and our system of jurisprudence explicitly supported the idea, that it is better to let 10 guilty men go free than to imprison one innocent man, great battles took place over where to draw an acceptable demarcation.  The far left insisted that any, even the most minimal and non-contributory, infraction by the state was enough to invalidate the entire process.   One (probably unintentional) effect of this approach, was to create barriers to the community's ability to defend itself against human predators.   

One by-product of such an approach was seen in the 1980s when parts of New York City had become uninhabitable war zones and all of New York City had deteriorated into a terrorized silence through the application of such thinking.  For those who are unaware, Rudy Giuliani was vilified specifically for attacking this dysfunctional approach to crime. 

The exemplar of such a liberal approach to crime was and is the ACLU, which has taken more and more of an adversarial position against the government since 9/11 and has sought to extend their writ to the Non-American Civil Liberties Union.

Wittingly, or unwittingly, the effort to extend just such an approach to our conduct of the war on terror is part of a larger attempt to delegitimize the concept of the right to self-defense that is being increasingly incorporated into the thinking of the Western cultural elites; the prime targets of such delegitimization are America and our ally, Israel. 

This is the subtext of John Kerry's warm reception in Davos.