American politics increasingly resembles nothing so much as the thinking and behavior of people characterized as having "Borderline Personality Disorder." The sine qua non of the Borderline is encapsulated in the concept of "splitting" which is an unconscious process whereby people (objects) and concepts are divided into all-bad and all-good. There is no nuance or complexity in splitting; it alleviates the tension of ambiguity and helps the troubled character make sense of their often inchoate yearnings and desires that are in conflict with the prohibitions of their own conscience or societal mores and laws. It leads to unstable mood states and elevated levels of affectivity (highs and lows), unstable relationships (since a person can go from all-good to all-bad by virtue of the inevitable failures that occur in every relationship), and instability in their work life for many of the same reasons (with the addition of problems tolerating authority.) Our politics are the politics of the Borderline.
[Please note that I am using BPD, a Psychiatric diagnosis, only as a model of functioning. This is not meant as an actual diagnosis of any person or political party; it is meant as an additional explanation, along with all the other political, sociological, biological, etc, that attempt to explicate often inexplicable human behavior.]
[In diagnostic terms, splitting is usually thought of as a defense, though it is far more pervasive than what is usually thought of as a psychological defense. Psychological Splitting has its roots in the earliest period of life (generally 12-18 months) when the child is developing "object constancy". That is, the infant must take all of its disparate images (object representations) of the important people in its world, and fuse them into a single, complex object. The "bad" withholding mother must be fused with the angry/loud mother with the loving/holding mother and the satiating/nursing mother to form one image that carries all the many meanings of mother. Since self-representations emerge and form from a maternal-infant matrix, problems in the secure development of an infant's maternal object constancy lead to problems in the person's own inconsistent self-representations. When, for reasons of constitution or early developmental vicissitudes or mother-infant dysfunction, the fused images of objects are insecurely integrated, the person then has a later tendency to regress to splitting under stress. This leads to many of the related issues for the Borderline, which can include intermittent problems with reality testing, affective instability, and the frequent presence of "vertical splits in the ego." The core defect in the Borderline is the existence of poorly integrated (ie, "split") self and object representations.
It is difficult to convey how pervasive this can be. For the Borderline, distinct affective states (and the attendant, particluar split self- and object- representations) are experienced as if they have no relation to previous or future affect states. For example, a patient may be enraptured by an idealized other (boyfriend) but once disappointed, all the good feelings toward him dissipate and she now declares she "always knew" he was a loser but in the past "it didn't register" or she "didn't care." On an emotional level, the boyfriend is a different person and so is the Borderline herself, who explicitily experiences herself as a different person. Where once she was a femme fatale, now, having been disappointed, she is an eternal victim.]
A key point about the BPD is the persistence of "vertical splits in the ego." As a patient once eloquently described this to me, she had always known one and one existed, but had never added one and one together before entering therapy. For this particular patient, she had always known that her father was cold and occasionally overtly cruel, and had always known she chose to become involved with men who were sadistic in their relationships with her, but had never connected the two points even though in retrospect she could see how obvious the connection was. For patients with the most severe problems in the BPD spectrum, they can develop overt learning disabilities that do not have the usual neurological substrate that we often expect with severe LD. When obvious facts must be kept separate in the person's mind, the act of integrating data can be universally impaired. The classic example is the patient who was physically abused as a child yet knows (because she was told throughout her childhood) that her mother only hit her because she loved her. Being beaten for minimal provocation alternating with lavish overindulgence do not equate to being loved. The only way the child can tolerate the contradiction is to avoid doing the summing.
The explicit failure to add one and one and get two perfuses our societal discourse. We demand energy independence and CO2 neutral, green power, which does not yet exist and can not be scaled in the foreseeable future. Those most vocal about the need for minimizing our Carbon footprints are often the most profligate in their use of energy. At the same time the experience of the last 100 years should tell us that the best way to clean up the environment is to increase the level of wealth. There is a clear arc of development that stars with cheap energy, wealth creation, and the formation of a threshold level of Middle Class which then demands that attention be paid to the environment and can afford to pay the cost of safe guarding the environment. For that great majority of Americans who have no historical memory, the air and water is many times cleaner today than in the 1960s when the environmental movement began as a mass movement. China today, while still an authoritarian country, is already in the early stages of the transition. As the Chinese become wealthier (in part because they have had access to inexpensive energy) they initially sought development at the expense of the environment but are now beginning to make the turn toward more environmental consciousness. Such a turn is inevitable and can only be truncated if we decide to impoverish us all by refusing to develop our own energy and imposing additional costs while empowering our enemies as a bonus.
Just as there is no ability to add one and one in regards to energy, the Health Care debate (what there is of it) suffers from the same shortcoming. There is simply no way we can extend health care insurance coverage to everyone (including illegal aliens), while ignoring personal responsibility for one's health, and maintain high quality care for all without massive increases in costs. There are not enough rich people to pay for everyone's health care and the outcome must be to cause us all to become poorer, which will cause all of the worst case scenarios that have already occurred in other nations that have tried to institute universal (free) health care. We will have less Doctors, less good Doctors (as the best find other ways to make a living that is freer of bureaucratic interference and third party fee setting), more expenses, and rationing. This is as sure as one plus one equals two, yet our political elite refuses to do the math and our MSM apparently cannot even recognize numbers anymore.
And this does not even include any discussion of the all-too-predictable "unexpected" consequences of the government nationalization of GM and Chrysler. A hint, GM and Chrysler sales will crater and there will be no possibility of a return to profitability. That is simple math, not prognostication.
Finally, with the North Koreans becoming ever more irrationally bellicose, we can see the outcome of appeasing bullies on an international scale. When the most feral and brutal are treated as statesmen and when all the demands are placed on the civilized while no repercussions accompany rogue states' ill behavior, allies will tend to hunker down and belligerents will tend to become more belligerent.
Americans want peace and contentment so strongly that we are willing to refuse to notice one and one and when it does cross our threshold of awareness, we refuse to add the numbers. When a Borderline patient meets reality, they suffer terribly, even as they make all around them miserable. Therapy requires many years of consistent interpretations of reality. The therapist must act as a stable object willing to tolerate the Borderline's rage and disappointment and continue to point out what needs to be pointed out. A charismatic politician willing to risk defeat by constantly iterating the reality that we cannot continue to behave as if we can have something (everything) for nothing may well lose an election but if by chance he or she were to win, we could actually start dealing appropriately with reality once again.
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