Part I: The Suicidal Pursuit of Perfection
[Parts of this post were originally published in December, 2005.]
Many years ago a young woman entered Psychoanalysis for chronic problems she was having in maintaining her relationships. She announced at the start that she was an ardent feminist and that her feelings about this were not subjects for analytic review. Early in her treatment, her primary interest seemed to be to initiate arguments with me over male perfidy and oppression of women. It was not easy to maintain my neutral position in the face of near constant attack. (Her attacks felt like assaults, usually couched in terms of the patriarchal form and design of the analytic situation where I sat back like a typical male authority figure and made her suffer from my inane and stupid comments.) After several months of this I began to wonder if I would ever be able to actually start the process of exploring, as therapeutic allies, how her mind works, rather than remaining stuck in the "inherently oppressive" analysis, which was the only way she could experience my efforts. The breakthrough came when she casually mentioned toward the end of one session that her ankle was bothering her and she was annoyed (she was almost always annoyed about something, I might add) that she wouldn't be able to jog that night. Since I knew that she was living in a marginal area of Manhattan and this was at a time when crime was at high levels and much in the news, I had concerns that her jogging might be putting her at risk. When I asked her where she jogged, she confirmed that she jogged in a relatively dangerous area. Her response to my comment to that effect was that women should be allowed to jog wherever and whenever they wished without fear of predatory men and that nothing and nobody, including me, was going to stop her from doing what she wanted.
I was greatly relieved that it did not take long for her to recognize that her angry feminism (which had roots in long term feelings of disgust with her mother and envy of her brother's exalted position in her family) was inadvertently providing her with a rationalization for dangerous and self destructive behavior. I should point out that both of us agreed that she and every other woman should be free to jog wherever and whenever they wished, but reality required that until such time as this Utopian ideal could be arranged, prudence dictated that she jog at a different time and place as was her wont. When, as often was reported in the news in those days, a woman was assaulted and badly injured near the area she had been jogging, she responded with an anxiety attack; she was stricken with the thought that it could have been her and that there was an unconscious part of her mind that had been inviting just such an outcome. This was the true beginning of a very successful analytic treatment.
This young women's politics were typical of the naive, unexamined New York liberalism, leaning left, that is adopted by most of those whose sense of their own sophistication exists in marked contradistinction to their appearance to the typical denizen of "fly over" country. New York liberalism consists largely of sympathy for the deprived, guilt over one's affluence and advantages, and anxiety over aggression and competition. It is a political philosophy that rests on a deep well of emotion and a small dollop of rationality. As such, New York liberalism lends itself to manipulation by the more purposeful, if less overt, partisans who comprise that small cadre of intellectual leftists that are entrenched in academia and hold many important positions in the MSM.
Liberals, like my patient, often demand that we see the world as it should be, as opposed to what actually exists. This fuels their demand for perfection by their leaders. This leads to idealistic demands for a perfection that is impossible to attain.
When their pursuit of perfection, in themselves and others, fails, as it inevitably must, they are prone to terribly self-destructive despair and depression. It is important to note that the despair has always been lurking; it is held at bay by short term success in using external buttresses to defend their fragile self-esteem. As long as they are seen as smarter, or more ethical, or more correct, or more powerful; as long as they have an audience, people who will look up to them, they can maintain their image of themselves as better than others. It is when such maneuvers fail that they are prone to despair.
In my original post, from which I have liberally quoted (no pun intended) I was struck by how the demands of the Civil Liberties absolutists, if acceded to, would have very likely led to the exact opposite reaction that they claimed to desire. If we extended all due process rights to enemy combatants, something never done before by any nation under attack, the likelihood of another 9/11 level attack would be increased and few would argue that another 9/11 would not be followed by draconian measures that would render the original Patriot Act a devoutly wished for result. Furthermore, the absolutists of the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, etc, seemed unlikely to settle for small victories but seemed to use every, even partial, step forward, as a reason to make new demands. Their demands could never be satisfied by any responsible government determined to protect its innocent citizens.
We see just such thinking in evidence in some of the discussions of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, which I commented upon last week in Al Qaeda and The Oslo Syndrome.
The combination of fear, perfectionism, intolerance of the vicissitudes of reality, and Utopian (Messianic) fervor that fuels the Left are particularly alluring elements that have traditionally attracted the Jewish intellectual to the Left. The admirable desire to change the world into closer alignment to the way it should be is ubiquitous on the Jewish Left, but their confusion between what is and what should be puts them, and us, in danger.
My premise is that, just as in my young woman patient and among the Civil Liberties absolutists, hidden within the desire to change the world is a suicidal tendency, evident in graphic instances throughout recent history, that the Jewish left ignores to its peril.
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