It is always problematic to attempt to diagnose populations or political opponents using Psychiatric nomenclature; at the same time, it is extremely tempting. Most of us imagine our ideas to be reality based and rational. As such, when people disagree with us and appear to use arguments that fail to reach a threshold of cogency, it is all too easy to consider them psychologically disordered.
It seems to me that the primary purpose of any such diagnostic efforts should be to offer ways to combat what one sees as dangerous or distorted argumentation.
As an example, I have referred to Post-Modernism and Political Correctness as aspects of a thought disorder. Both PM, and its derivative PC, construct an illogical scaffolding that interferes with an accurate perception of reality. What emerges from this is the knowledge that for the PM/PC adherent, their beliefs are inseparable from their sense of themselves and are almost never amenable to logical debate. The only real hope of making a mutative interpretation would be to develop a relationship with the person which will enable them to consider your arguments and your facts without immediately dismissing you as an evil enemy. This is easier said than done.
As a caveat, I would add that I have much less qualms about diagnosing our enemies and I think it remains important to differentiate enemies from opponents. Islamists want to kill me; they are my enemies. Most leftists and liberals are opponents; they may want to institute policies that I believe will empower the Islamists but their goal is not to kill me. This may make them "useful idiots" but does not make them enemies.
There is also a cohort, rather larger than generates comfort, of those on the Left, whose anger and distaste for America and the West too easily slips into overt anti-Americanism. Many of these people also express a very thinly disguised anti-Semitism. They tend to hate free markets and the chaotic individualism of America, and prefer collectivism to such an extent that they are de facto enemies of the West.
That being said, two recent efforts to offer diagnoses of our enemies are worth consideration.
Yaacov Ben Moshe at Breath of the Beast, in his post Cultural Insanity - Part I - The Diagnosis, takes as his starting point a post by Richard Landes and comments on the psychological concurrence between the left and the Islamists:
... Landes’ view is much more robust and able to account for the reality of the conflict between Western Civilization and those who wish to rule the world with collectivist systems.
That point, elegantly stated, traces the stark fault line between the strangest sets of bedfellows the world has ever seen and the most successful civilization in history. The fatally conjoined, murderously quarrelsome twins of the Sunni and Shia Caliphate Cults and the liberal/socialist/communist/collectivist bastard children of The West (fascists all !) all have this in common, that they simply lack the ability to see the cultural frame of world events in any but the narrowest perspective. This is more than a willful blindness and it is not a product of stupidity of ignorance either. As I observe the smug, suicidal behavior of the progressive/socialist/liberal left and compare it with the belligerent, intolerance of the Caliphate Muslims seem to me to be in the grip of a similar kind of mental illness. They are all “collectivists” and there is something about people who believe in giving up one’s rights and prerogatives to a group of any kind that renders them unable to behave in a broader self-interest- even while they believe that they are doing the righteous thing. One way to explain this apparently inexplicable behavior is that it represents a cultural analog of a mental illness known as Borderline Personality Disorder.
Yaacov goes on to describe the text book diagnostic criteria for Borderline Character Disorder. The DSM-IV (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Psychiatry) is actually a rather crude instrument for diagnostic purposes. It essentially diagnoses based on overt symptoms and has little to offer in the way of etiological underpinnings of the diagnostic entities described. That being said, along with the manifest symptomatology of Borderline Personality Disorder, there are two additional aspects necessary for understanding the phenomena Yaacov describes.
The first concerns the defensive operation known as "splitting".
Dr. Sanity, in comments about a Victor Davis Hansen article, makes the point that the Left is able to switch mental states, a form of dissociation (related to splitting) that Yaacov points out is part of BPD, with relative ease:
Interesting to note that what "gives the pre-modern fascist killers a pass" is the post-modern rhetoric and dogma of the left. It is precisely this inherently psychologically dysfunctional cognitive strategy that is able to shift, "without a blink" from one subjective conviction to its exact opposite without a shred of self-awareness or mental dissonance.
Minds under the postmodern spell are simply not capable of appreciating the irrationality; nor are they capable of even appreciating the irony of their contradictory discourses .
There is a common pattern in the lefts childish rantings: a subjectivism and relativism that comes across in one breath; alternating with a dogmatic absolutism in the next. In other words, it is a waste of time to look for sense or logic in their incessant adolescent demands.
The ease of transition has to do with the global nature of the syndrome. A person with BPD has a multitude of poorly integrated internal self-representations. Without getting overly technical, this means they are predisposed to splitting, since their inner world is split into distinct self and object amalgams. When something threatens their sense of themselves, they are quite easily able to shift into a new internal state that dismisses the pain of the failed state.
For a crude example, a woman with BPD who is rejected by a boyfriend, which would threaten her sense of herself as smart, talented, and desirable, could easily slip into a self-representation of a "femme fatale", drink heavily, pick up a stranger (or strangers) and gratify her intensified desire to be desired.
For a leftist whose sense of himself depends on being smarter and more caring than selfish and evil conservatives, when a leftist position fails, they are quite capable of shifting positions on the fly. For example when the Gorelick wall between foreign and domestic intelligence prevented us from discovering the 9/11 plotters, the inquisitors on the 9/11 panel had no problem attacking the Bush administration for failing to connect the dots they had prevented them from connecting. Note that 6 years post-9/11, the left is attempting to once again make it impossible to connect the dots by revealing secret terrorist screening programs, attempting to interfere with successful counter-terrorist intel collection, etc. You can be sure that if another attack succeeds, they will once again rail at those who failed to connect the dots.
For both Yaacov Ben Moshe and Dr. Sanity, there is an additional aspect of the pathology of the collectivists; it is such a deeply ingrained aspect of collectivism that it is barely noticeable until one looks for it. That is, the pervasive lack of empathy on the Left. The Left cares deeply about populations but not at all about individuals. Even worse, the Left cares deeply about populations only so long as they serve to advance the agenda of the left. (A classic example would be the Left's support of Israel when they were still victims and their intense antipathy to the state of Israel ever since the Israelis refused to remain victims.) People are merely objects whose existence serves to confirm the goodness and correctness of the Left.
Otto Kernberg wrote one of the seminal books about BPD: Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. Kernberg recognized intuitively as well as intellectually, that BPD is inseparable from narcissistic pathology. The Narcissist and the Borderline exhibit different aspects of damaged narcissism. Both, because of their own inability to experience another person as an independent creature with his own desires, lack empathic understanding of others. Other people are objects in the worst meaning of the term and much of the Borderline's and the Left's Pathology follows from this disconnect.
It must be stated that there are plenty on the right who lack empathy; h0wever, the Left's political philosophy structures this lack as an integral part of their politics. People are only important when they serve the collectivist function. It is no coincidence that conservative red staters give so much more Charity than liberal blue staters.
Collectivism represents the failure of empathy on the grandest scale; it allows and encourages the worst atrocities in the name of the collective, all the while enabling the Leftist to think of himself as a loving, caring, and good person.
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