During the dark days in the 1930s and 40s when European civilization seemed intent upon committing murder-suicide, Sigmund Freud developed the concept of the death drive, Thanatos, the alter-ego of Libido, in an effort to explain the spasm of death and destruction unleashed in the heart of Western Civilization. He remained uncomfortable with the concept for the rest of his life, yet there continue to be events and times which defy conventional understanding and cry out for an explanatory mechanism. Freud believed that Thanatos arose from within our very cells; that we were programmed to age and die, and this programming sired the equivalent of a drive toward death.
Modern biology, especially the study of human cellular metabolism and aging, is increasingly revealing that there is no such structure as programmed senescence. Aging occurs due to failures of the repair mechanisms in cells and the slow accumulation of errors in metabolism. Thanatos does not inhere in our cells.
[The exception is the apoptosis pathway for cell suicide, which is activated in the face of dangerous metabolic/genetic errors in the cell, but that is a different and very complicated story.]
Yet the need to destroy ourselves often seems to be nearly as powerful as the need to build. This can be noted from the most individual to the grandest international stage.
When our behavior leads to paradoxical outcomes, the question of the self-destructive core becomes significant. When the outcome of an action is the opposite of the conscious intent, the law of unintended consequences can be invoked and may be adequately explanatory, but oftentimes the disparity is so overt and, in hindsight, so predictable that a more Psychological explanation is warranted. Examples abound:
• Yesterday Bill Clinton, with the overt aim of assisting his wife and his return to the White House made a comment that was manifestly untrue. While Clinton has a well deserved reputation for parsing the truth in ways that obscure, one wonders about this kind of unforced error during a Presidential campaign:
Why We Called It Clintonesque (Update: Bill Would Have Voted For War)
Campaigning in Iowa, Bill attempted to rewrite history by claiming to "oppose[] Iraq from the beginning" -- leading ABC and bloggers to uncover a treasure trove of statements that expose that assertion as a lie....
So as late as last year, Bill was telling Democrats that he supported the vote on the AUMF. He supported the war. He's either lying now, or was lying last year, and/or lying in 2003, 2004, 2005 ....
As one blogger noted (apologies for not remembering where I read this): Hasn't Bill Clinton ever heard of Google?
Correction: Here is the quote from the New York Post today: Bill Clinton has always been a stranger to the truth, but is it possible that he's never heard of Google?
• Roger Simon has been documenting Hollywood's continuing obsession with making movies that no one wants to watch in the service of pressing forward the idea that, what, American soldiers are monsters? Since Hollywood values money and status more than almost anything else, this would seem to be more than a little self-defeating.
• The Israelis are begging for peace from people who not only won't shake their hands but will not even deign to listen to what they have to say! Furthermore, they are pledging to work with people who cannot possibly deliver on the promises they refuse to make even if they wanted to! Haven't we been here before?
• Radical environments want to save the planet by eschewing reproduction, which raises the question of whom they are trying to save the planet for? Consciously determining to sever your connection to the future of your own culture, not to mention biology, done presumably for entirely altruistic reasons, raises a significant question of the self-directed harm involved.
• The Islamofascists, with the conscious intent of protecting their future offspring, attack the vessels who carry them:
The problem with Islamo Fascists is their warped belief only brutality impresses people. It is a classic signature of extreme insecurity, so it is doubly confounding to most people who are reasonably confident and not spooked to violence by the smallest things. For example, what is so impressive about starving pregnant women as a way to prove manliness?
Local Taliban militants seized and burned thousands of kilogrammes of food destined for pregnant women in a tribal area of Pakistan, officials said on Sunday.
...
A Taliban activist said they were destroyed because “foreign NGOs want to harm our future generations.”
While there are myriad examples of self-defeating behavior available everyday, I would close with this story, which documents the self-destructiveness of an American identity group, an perhaps a spreading, though nascent, awareness that this is problematic for those who claim to speak for the group:
Taylor's death a grim reminder for us all
Jason WhitlockThere's a reason I call them the Black KKK. The pain, the fear and the destruction are all the same.
Someone who loved Sean Taylor is crying right now. The life they knew has been destroyed, an 18-month-old baby lost her father, and, if you're a black man living in America, you've been reminded once again that your life is in constant jeopardy of violent death.
The Black KKK claimed another victim, a high-profile professional football player with a checkered past this time.
...
Well, when shots are fired and a black man hits the pavement, there's every statistical reason to believe another black man pulled the trigger. That's not some negative, unfair stereotype. It's a reality we've been living with, tolerating and rationalizing for far too long.
When the traditional, white KKK lynched, terrorized and intimidated black folks at a slower rate than its modern-day dark-skinned replacement, at least we had the good sense to be outraged and in no mood to contemplate rationalizations or be fooled by distractions.
Our new millennium strategy is to pray the Black KKK goes away or ignores us. How's that working? About as well as the attempt to shift attention away from this uniquely African-American crisis by focusing on an "injustice" the white media allegedly perpetrated against Sean Taylor.
...
HBO did a fascinating documentary on Little Rock Central High School, the Arkansas school that required the National Guard so that nine black kids could attend in the 1950s. Fifty years later, the school is one of the nation's best in terms of funding and educational opportunities. It's 60 percent black and located in a poor black community.
Watch the documentary and ask yourself why nine poor kids in the '50s risked their lives to get a good education and a thousand poor black kids today ignore the opportunity that is served to them on a platter.
Blame drugs, blame Ronald Reagan, blame George Bush, blame it on the rain or whatever. There's only one group of people who can change the rotten, anti-education, pro-violence culture our kids have adopted. We have to do it.
According to reports, Sean Taylor had difficulty breaking free from the unsavory characters he associated with during his youth.
The "keepin' it real" mantra of hip hop is in direct defiance to evolution. There's always someone ready to tell you you're selling out if you move away from the immature and dangerous activities you used to do, you're selling out if you speak proper English, embrace education, dress like a grown man, do anything mainstream.
The Black KKK is enforcing the same crippling standards as its parent organization. It wants to keep black men in their place — uneducated, outside the mainstream and six feet deep.
The problem of masochism and self-destructive behavior remains one of the most difficult conundrums that Psychiatry deals with. We do not have a particularly coherent theory to explain what compels individuals, let alone social groups or nations, to behave in ways which are self-destructive. Oftentimes we cannot even agree on what constitutes self-destructive behavior, yet, on occasion, as noted above, the outcome of our behavior becomes so unmistakable as to be undeniable (except to the most committed ideologues.) It behooves us to examine our own self-destructive tendencies; our enemies, the non-fictional death-eaters who worship death and aim to include us in their prayers, will not go away easily.
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