- There is a great struggle defining the
mental health as well as the future of this nation. Perhaps the concerns
I'm hearing, and the condition of the country, is best summed up by two
movies. One of them is Rosemary's Baby. In the movie, an unknowing young
woman is subtly confused and taken over by a conspiracy of Satan worshipers
whose intent is to make her bear the devil's child. The plot becomes more
convoluted and bizarre until the night her husband, who is part of the
conspiracy, drugs her food and the Satan worshipers come to get her. As
she is lain out on a bed naked, and the devil arrives to have sexual intercourse
with her, with her last bit of lucidity she voices the realization, "This
isn't a dream. This is real."Many of you have expressed the view,
"This isn't a dream; this is real," followed by the implicit
self doubting comment, "I think." The present situation in this
country is so grotesque that it strains the mind to believe it is real,
and we are also being told not to believe it is real.
-
-
-
- The second movie was called Suddenly,
Last Summer, starring Elizabeth Taylor in her much younger years (1959).
In the movie she is obsessed with her cousin Sebastian, a young man who
seems physically and otherwise distant from her. Cousin Sebastian and his
mother (played by Katharine Hepburn) dress Taylor provocatively, which
attracts the attention of teenage boys at the local beach < whereupon
the cousin strikes up friendships with the boys, while ignoring Taylor.
When she begins questioning what is going on, her cousin and his mother
present her as being high strung, and get doctors to prescribe increasing
amounts of drugs to calm her nerves. Part of the movie presents scenes
as seen through Taylor,s drugged and confused eyes. As the movie goes on,
it begins to appear as though Cousin Sebastian is a homosexual, and he
and his mother are using Taylor as bait to procure boys while keeping her
drugged from realization and protest. Taylor's confused attempts to explain
the situation are met with outside disbelief and justification for increased
doses of stupefying drugs. She is slowly pushed to the point of losing
conscious functioning sanity.
-
-
-
- At the end of the movie the cousin is
killed as a sadomasochistic act by some of the boys he's been preying on.
During the attempt to sort things out, a young psychiatrist (played by
Montgomery Clift) is brought in to examine the supposedly insane Taylor.
After hearing her story, the psychiatrist looks up and says: Let us begin
with the premise that everything this woman has been trying to say is true.
-
-
-
- The condition of this country is as warped
as the plots of those two movies. For us, unlike for the character played
by Elizabeth Taylor, there is no psychiatrist to intervene and validate
the truth.
-
- Liberalism as Mental Disorder
-
- I make no secret that I'm of the position
that the radical left, and modern liberalism, are profound forms of mental
disorder. There are several liberal/leftist subcultures. Leftists are typically
characterized from among the following constellation: weakness of intellect
and intellectual discipline, regardless of education; absorption with personal
drives and impulses; failure to resolve the conflicts of adolescence or
conflicts between themselves and reality; a diffuse bitterness toward life;
self-absorbed immaturity; a primitiveness of personality; an almost sadistic
propensity for destructiveness; poor levels of personal relationships;
and numerous other things < including a narcissistic desire to be intellectually
cute. This places me in direct opposition to probably 85 percent of the
present psychological and psychiatric professions, who are predominantly
liberal. The politics and public affairs of this nation increasingly boil
down to a case of two groups of people who have different views of sanity.
-
- It is not possible to begin to explain
the source of mental disorder in less than hundreds of pages. What we will
be primarily concerned with here is present, past, and generational incidence
of mental disorder in this country.
-
- Psychologists and, to a lesser extent,
psychiatrists, in recent decades have usually completed politically correct
curricula in which the quality control has become as much political as
clinical, whereupon they have been turned loose upon society like flocks
of blackbirds every semester. Many of them are not capable of working beyond
the level of cookbook evaluations and superficial psychotherapy. More than
a few of them write books of the quality of the heralded study released
last week where two University of Michigan researchers accused the political
right of being responsible for overweight problems in women. Psychology
in this country appears to have progressively become an elitist effort
at authoritative mental condemnation of those opposing the political and
lifestyle left. Most of the professors I had years ago proudly wore the
badge of, and conferred a sense of pompous superiority upon themselves
through, belittlement of and antagonism toward American culture.
-
- A clinical psychologist friend who has
one of the most successful practices in the country commented, "There
are people (clinical psychologists) in the field who are working on their
own problems and know it. There are people who are working on their own
problems who don't know it or won't admit it." Too much of psychology
is filled with psychologist's problems and personal or political agenda.
-
- There are, and have been, a dwindling
number of high quality minds remaining in the field who are well trained,
capable of deep level work, and who show serious insights. One of these
appears in a psychiatric text, Borderline and Other Self Disorders, by
Donald B. Rinsley, M.D. (published by Jason Aronson, 1982), and offers
a complex, serious analysis. Much of the text employs very technical terminology
and presumes an advanced background in psychiatric study or theories of
personality. However, in several instances Dr. Rinsley is frank and direct
to the point of expressing an exasperation which I share. While Dr. Rinsley
may or may not agree with every opinion of mine, nor I with him on everything,
in the preface of his work he says:
-
-
- "My view of wider sociocultural
determinants is largely in agreement with that of Christopher Lasch (1977,
1978) who has related the decline of the nuclear family and the so-called
culture of narcissism to the increased frequency of personality disorders.
Dysfunctional childrearing, the failure of the public schools to impart
basic literacy skills, and the bloated welfare bureaucracy have spawned
a widespread psychology of entitlement with its notions of success without
effort and income without productivity. The unfortunate children of perplexed,
disarticulated, and dysfunctional families, now graduated from undisciplined
schools with open, curricula, and social promotions, are the next generation's
borderline and narcissistic personalities. Thus, the combined failures
of the family and the school as vehicles for the child's progressive socialization
leave these young people unprepared for the responsibilities and expectations
of the wider culture to which they belong.
-
- "...To paraphrase the late Philip
Wylie, we have indeed spawned a generation of narcissists who now flood
our public and private therapeutic facilities."
-
-
- The narcissistic personality is a technical
term for a personality disorder having many of the characteristics previously
discussed here. The borderline personality, somewhat similar, is a very
primitive, immature, and pathological personality also incorporating many
of the characteristics discussed so far.
-
- Later, in Chapter Seven of his work,
under the heading of "social trends and borderline phenomena,"
Rinsley writes:
-
-
- "Of significance is the fact that
the borderline concept reached its full prominence during the turbulent
decade of the 1960s. That period was marked by ... the proclaimed defection
by youth and young adults from traditional values and morals, epitomized
by the so-called Playboy Philosophy which, in effect, extolled subjective
hedonism; the appearance of the so-called woman's liberation movement,
with its often militant feminism and its associated "unisex"
philosophy; the pervasive mistrust of authority figures who, like God,
had been "demythologized," reflected in a proliferating civil
litigiousness and a resurgent antielitism and egalitarianism. Minority
activism, assumed a variety of forms, while all varieties and manifestations
of discrimination and inequality were to be expunged from society by legislative
action or judicial decree. Szasz (1961,1965) proclaimed that mental illness
was a myth, subserving society's need to imprison nonconformists and other
undesirables in mental hospitals without due process of law, while other
activist writers, such as Herbert Marcuse (1955) and Norman O. Brown (1959)
claimed that, in effect people became sick only because an oppressive,
archaic social patriarchy made them so, and Laing (1967) declared that
"madness" and "sanity" were ultimately indistinguishable.
-
- "During this period, the generation
gap, and the expanding use of illicit drugs appeared to reflect the increasing
mutual alienation of children and parents, the former turning [in] increasing
numbers to a burgeoning welter of alienated adults, including self-appointed
"gurus," who exhorted them to "turn on, tune in, and drop
out," not infrequently in drug-suffused communes where they could
seek asylum in group pseudomutuality. The failure of parental authority
found concomitant expression in the public schools, where a growing number
of educational practices, including "child-centered" curricula,
"open" classrooms, ungraded classes, "social" promotions,
and purposeful grade inflation produced increasing numbers of "graduates"
who could not adequately read, write, or reckon and who could only mistrust
the adult parental and pedagogic surrogates responsible for their predicament.
-
- "The disturbed, identity-diffuse
adolescents who emerged from such confused families and classrooms could
readily confound freedom and license. Many proceeded into a new wave, of
sexual liberation, while others, in reaction to it, embraced a resurgent
asceticism with its renunciation of marriage and parenting. A host of arcane
culture-alien religions,, many based upon Eastern mystical imports, made
their appearance as alternatives to traditional institutional religion
which had since become demythologized, secularized and popularized and
many young people embraced them in the vain hope of achieving a sense of
identity and acceptance which they had never achieved at home, in school,
or in church; indeed a substantial number of them exhibited patterns of
thought, affect, and behavior typical for borderline disorder. Small wonder,
then, that the 1960's could be termed the decade of the borderline, the
period of the new narcissism, (Johnson 1977)."
-
-
- I have expanded and detailed important
factors paralleling Rinsley's analysis in other places. What has occurred
in massive numbers is environmentally reinforced hyperdevelopment of the
Freudian Id, deficient or twisted Ego/Superego development, concurrent
with an absence of an internalized sense of reality.
-
- Generational Trends
-
- The May 7, 1987 edition of Newsweek dedicated
a large portion of its content to a discussion of mental depression in
young adults, meaning chiefly under the age of fifty. A psychiatrist from
Cornell University Medical College, Gerald Klerman, was quoted as saying
that coming to maturity in the period from 1960 to 1975 had a profound
adverse impact on the likelihood of depressive illness.
-
- On page 131 of the September 1992 special
issue of the Scientific American on the mind and brain is a graph of what
is described as "an alarming generational trend" of a far greater
risk of developing bipolar mental illness or related psychosis.
-
- The March 27, 1987 issue of Time Magazine
contained a graph of suicide rates compiled by the U.S. National Center
for Health Statistics. By 1965, when the new cultural trends and values
were beginning to be felt, the suicide rate among teenagers and young adults
had nearly doubled from what it was in 1955. By 1970, when a clear social
psychosis was coming into cultural predominance, the suicide rate had more
than doubled. By 1975 it had nearly tripled and by l980 it had more than
tripled. It was quadruple that of 1952. (Those who remember the early to
mid 50s as a happier and saner period, do so with considerable justification.)
-
- A series of landmark studies published
in the Archives of General Psychiatry (volume 41, 1984) covering < if
not the largest < one of the largest and most thorough samples ever
taken (close to ten thousand people), indicated that about 20 percent of
Americans showed symptoms of severe mental disorders in the previous six-month
period. The proportion of problems was nearly twice as great in the under-forty-five
age group as in those over forty-five. (The study refers to people under
forty-five years of age in the period 1980 to 1982.) At early ages, people
in the younger age group had already gone through far more psychological
crises than people in older age groups had throughout their lives. It is
also known there was a great increase in the number of people chronically
hospitalized for mental disorders in what was then the under-forty-five
age group.
-
- The age-45 dividing line was probably
chosen somewhat arbitrarily. Without having access to the original data,
my strong suspicion, particularly after correlating comments by Klerman
and others in other articles, is that if the dividing age of comparison
were dropped to 40 or maybe lower, reflecting the so-called "generation
gap" touted in the 60s, the difference in indication of generational
mental disorders would have been far more pronounced, if not massive.
-
- Note that to obtain a nearly two-to-one
generational ratio requires an overwhelmingly formidable 27 percent (more
or less) disorder rate in the young group compared with a 13 percent rate
in the older group. The difference between these two numbers is the difference
between disorder as an anomaly versus disorder as a significant demographic
prominence and major generational/cultural direction. In the period since
the study, the 27 percent (assuming it was that low) mental disorder group
has further ascended the social and political structure, displaced previously
more stable generations, and now also occupies the White House.
-
- This series of studies has been the subject
of occasional discussion for the last 14 years. It has also been the subject
of studious avoidance. It reveals a reality of the last nearly four decades,
particularly the leftist activism period of the 60s and 70s, that there
has been absolute generational and political determination to avoid.
-
- It is my belief that depression and certain
other problems in younger people tend to be symptomatic of a more profound
psychological maladjustment and split with reality than seen in older people.
It is also my observation that severe maladjustment may be hidden or deferred
in younger people. For example, the excessive reliance on, and dedication
to, the youth culture of the 60s and 70s produced a group of youth who
rode high on the present at that time, but who were completely unprepared
to adjust to the certain eventuality of becoming 40 years old.
-
- Another aspect of this concerns how to
evaluate serious thought disorder and the part it may play in mental evaluation.
Often subjectively without symptoms, thought disorder requires a more thorough
evaluation than could be done in the above studies. The definition of thought
disorder also depends upon whether the person doing the clinical or other
evaluation disagrees with what the person being evaluated is saying. If
you are as nutty, and nutty in the same way, as the person you are talking
to is, then the two of you agree that there is no real problem, and blame
others as non-believers. If Laing (1967) declared that "madness"
and "sanity" were ultimately indistinguishable, it does not mean
they were really undistinguishable, but that he may have been in a too
confused, or unwilling, state of mind to be able to distinguish the difference.
Many psychiatrists and psychologists from the 60s and 70s generations have
been quite protective of thought disorder that was a source of radical
generational pride.
-
- For years the feminist movement has been
apoplectic about degrading, sex-object- oriented, disrespectful, or unwanted
physical contact of any kind from men, even to the point of seeking out
and banning semi-private calendars or pictures featuring women in male
portions of the workplace. All accusations of sexual harassment or rape
were demanded to be treated with unconditional seriousness and punished
without mercy or acceptance of any excuses whatsoever. In recent weeks
I read a speech by Hillary Clinton demanding, of all things, absolute morality
in the workplace.
-
- Yet, in contradiction to this professed
belief, the woman's movement has contorted all logic and reason in defense
of Bill Clinton's groping attacks on women, strange silence on what should
reasonably be viewed as serious accusations of rape against Bill Clinton
which he doesn't personally deny as being true, and even criticism or ridicule
of women bringing such charges. I receive mail from angry, liberated female
clinical psychologists accusing me of pathological hatred of Clinton for
bringing the subject up.
-
- Is this contradiction and denial to be
regarded as thought disorder? Forty-five years ago it clearly would have
been classified as being obviously such. What constitutes serious thought
disorder has since been redefined to the point of nonexistence if it supports
countercultural liberalism. What would have been viewed as seriously nuts
at a time in this culture when the suicide rates were much less, when the
clinical depression rate was greatly less, and so forth, is now a significant
widespread sociopolitical movement.
-
- Intergenerational Intimacy
-
- There has been recent sociopolitical
right-wing furor, best vocalized by an enraged Dr. Laura Schlesinger, over
a series of serious psychological papers by highly credentialed psychologists
and academics asserting sex between willing minors and adults should be
described in neutral or positive terms such as adult-adolescent sex. Sex
between men and boys is euphemized as "male intergenerational intimacy."
It is not now viewed in recent diagnostic manuals as a disorder unless
it interferes with the adult's work performance, social life, or discomfort
level. Thus, a 45-year old man engaging in sex with 15-year old boys supposedly
doesn't have a problem if he shows up for work on time. Furthermore, it
is not child abuse if the condition of children or adolescents is not worsened
according to the standards of people trying to rationalize and practice
it. Child sexual molestation is being moved out of being considered a mental
disorder to being legitimized in this country, with open hunting license
on kids who are being declared fair game. If the present progression continues,
the parent who sends one of their kids off to school to have him or her
molested on the way, or by a teacher, will eventually be convicted of a
right-wing homophobic hate crime for protesting.
-
- Nothing will convince me that rationalizing
this is healthy. That there is not rioting in the streets and rioting within
the psychological profession over these trends is a sign of a sick society
and a sick irresponsible profession that is in control of formal societal
standards and professional certifications.
-
- It is my absolute conclusion that the
rate of serious mental disorder in this country, particularly in the baby-boomer
Clinton age group, is five to 10 times that of 50 years ago. Twenty-seven
percent doesn't cover it. In fact, mental disorder has become sufficiently
widespread to have enough social and political power to redefine itself
as not being mental disorder, but rather as being brilliantly liberated.
-
- But redefining doesn't always work and
you are still stuck with the consequences. Members of the liberated age
group could not even live with each other's shared celebrant of generational
liberated irrationality. See the April 4, 1986 page one story in USA Today
entitled "A generation of divorce--For women in their 30s, 6 of 10
marriages fail."
-
- Here is a set of pertinent collateral
academically-oriented figures. A Sept. 23, 1988 Washington Times piece
discussed a report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
A test with a score scale from 1-500 points was administered to 240,000
students to measure proficiency in science. The results showing percentages
of people achieving various levels were reported as follows:
-
-
- 9-year olds
-
- (percent)
-
- 13-year olds
-
- (percent)
-
- 17-year olds
-
- (percent)
-
-
- Level 150
-
- Knows everyday science facts
-
- 96.3
-
- 99.8
-
- 99.9
-
-
- Level 200
-
- Understands simple scientific principles
-
- 71.4
-
- 91.8
-
- 96.7
-
-
- Level 250
-
- Applies basic scientific information
-
- 27.6
-
- 53.4
-
- 80.8
-
-
- Level 300
-
- Analyzes scientific procedures and data
-
- 3.4
-
- 9.4
-
- 41.4
-
-
- Level 350
-
- Integrates specialized scientific information
-
- 0.1
-
- 0.2
-
- 7.5
-
-
-
-
- The study shows students were quickly
acquiring facts by rote, but were not developing the ability to analyze
and integrate information. Most students were not developing analytical
capacity beyond the thirteen-year-old level. This characteristic is not
restricted to the sciences. Virtually any intellectual test incorporating
questions requiring serious integration of information shows typical Americans
of recent generations lack the capacity to think logically and integrate
information. Many, if not most, Americans in recent generations are profoundly
incapable of valid serious reasoning processes requiring more than two
steps to complete the analysis.
-
- A panel of educators evaluating the test
information stated:
-
-
- " Our nation is producing a generation
of students who lack the intellectual skills necessary to assess the validity
of evidence or the logic of arguments, and who are misinformed about the
nature of scientific endeavors."
-
-
- It should be added that this was not
a novelty. We have been producing them in a steady stream for 35 years.
-
- A study released in September of 1993
found few students could solve worded math problems that required thinking
and understanding.
-
- Unfortunately, this is not strictly a
science problem or an academic problem. It is a serious symptom of an underlying
deficient personality system or psychological problem. It's also the result
of a cultural drift into irrationality and a culturally reinforced irrationality
during the last 35 years. It's also result of growing up in a bland egocentric
fantasy-filled environment in which development of, and responsibility
for, realistic decisions were not a necessity. The secondary result of
these elements is shown in poor scores on tests requiring disciplined realistic
reasoning. It persists through the doctoral educational level.
-
- Sanity and Conspiracy
-
- This is not merely an academic performance
problem. The word problems they are unable to solve are not only mathematical.
The same pattern of deficiency also has day-to-day personal and social
consequences. These patterns result in failing the ultimate test of people
running their lives in a reasonable manner. Beginning in the 60s, our nation
has seen several generations of people a large proportion of whom haven't
the intellectual skills, the self discipline, the inclination, or the sense
of reality to assess the validity of evidence or the logic of choices or
consequences or arguments in virtually any aspect of their daily lives.
They lack the mentality to run their own lives with competence. As a result,
they are destroying themselves and each other--and are becoming depressed
as a byproduct.
-
- Not only is mental disorder five to ten
times as prevalent as 45 or 50 years ago, but the character of mental disorder
has changed substantially. Those days which saw a predominance of office
patients with true neuroses are long gone. Patients then presented problems
which affected narrow portions of personality, while they were lucid in
other areas. Fundamental rational thought processing was still broadly
functional, as were elements of conscience, providing a lucid psychological
platform or leverage for treatment. But not today. In the last several
decades, serious therapists have commonly complained about the absence
of patients of quality or depth. (Finding therapists of quality and depth
for patients of quality is equally difficult. Trying to find serious high
quality practitioners for referrals is like looking for a needle in a haystack.
The present state of the profession is simply untrustworthy.) I've had
good clinicians complain about being ready to explode if one more person
breezes into their office with another idiotic so-called "life style."
-
- If some of us are appalled, frightened,
and even driven half crazy by the maddeningly and complacently silly or
psychotic levels of denial, by the superficiality, by the abysmal immaturity,
by the primitive level of personality structure, by the too-easily employed
distorted rationalizations, by the lack of contact with basic reality that
we deal with in our daily lives, hear in our college faculties, and see
on TV and in high political office, we can nevertheless know that the reality
of our perceptions is validated by mental health figures as well as those
patients being seen in therapist's offices. Unfortunately, however, those
severely pathological characteristics and functioning are environmentally
predominant enough not only to socially support, but to imbue supreme self-confidence
in, those people possessing such characteristics.
-
- Presently, like the character played
by Elizabeth Taylor, the sane are apt to be the ones subjected to social
criticism. Even the First Lady will go on TV to accuse the sane of being
part of a vast conspiracy for making reasonable observations that are absolutely
true. Hillary will then hand the sane off to people such as presidential
representative James Carville, who is a psychotic Daffy Duck cartoon equivalent
of the Energizer Bunny. If a high school girl can't walk into the Oval
Office without danger of her clothes being torn off, if the president is
masturbating and engaging in oral/anal sexual stimulation at the very moment
he is ordering troops into Bosnia, if the president shows serious indications
of serious thought disorder along with high levels of psychopathic deviance
and serious paranoia, if there are reasonable accusations of rape consistent
with past patterns of behavior, if the president is openly insulting and
ridiculing, Carville quacks, "It's about sex, I tell you! This is
war! This is war!" Like the rabbit in the battery commercial on TV,
he keeps on going. Professor Alan Dershowitz then says it's about racism.
-
- Freedom is Just Another Word for Nothing
Left to Lose
-
- There is no sane respectful attempt to
address, or admit, the serious reality of the situation. It should be a
matter of legitimate serious concern that we have two brat graduates from
60s and 70s pathology with some very serious mental problems in the White
House. We have people with very serious mental problems supporting them.
They have thrust their psychotic inner theater of the absurd upon the nation,
and there's not sufficient cultural integrity or sanity left to stop or
counterbalance it.
-
- Such is the evolved state of post-60s
psychotic America.
-
- The effect of the mental health crisis
on the politics and government of this country has been both subtle and
powerfully catastrophic.
-
- First: The political atmosphere has become
psychotic in that it follows no logic, consistency, or sense of reality.
We have people in high office who are defiantly silly supported by defiantly
silly constituents. There is no sense of the serious real. To some extent,
what we have is goofy middle-aged kids who don't understand they are destroying
the country, or couldn't care less.
-
- Second: Personal and political freedom
affords an exercise in vitality to a mentally healthy person. But, to someone
who is depressed or preoccupied by internal turmoil, freedom becomes an
unenjoyable useless quantity. Consequently, we now live in a society where
many people no longer want or value freedom. Personal freedom and the responsibility
that goes with it are abrasive intrusions or demands upon a crippled self-absorbed
internal state.
-
- Freedom has become transformed from a
chance for opportunity, to being a threat to a depressive or confused inner
personal condition. To a hospitalized schizophrenic, freedom is useless
or unwanted. To many people, not hospitalized, but imprisoned or sentenced
to psychological solitary confinement by their own internal pathological
state, outside imprisonment or oppression is inconsequential or even welcomed.
We are facing the serious problem that the mental health in this society
is so degraded as to cause America's opportunities and economic advantages
to be viewed as irrelevant.
-
- Freedom in this country has come to be
the equivalent of good food on a bad psychological tooth.
-
- Demands for simple basic responsibility
and maturity have become looked upon as impossible or as repressive as
a oppressive communist society. Freedom and socialism/communism have become
either subjectively equivalent, or the second preferable to the first if
it promises a world of custodial care.
-
- Until the mental health problems are
culturally addressed, instead of culturally proselytized for the self-indulgence
they offer, freedom and opportunity will be viewed as irrelevant, or even
the enemy, in this society.
-
- Third: The mental health crisis in this
country has propelled us into the politics of torture, struggle, and torment.
In my political life I want roads and bridges that are in good condition.
I want national defense. I want competent educational systems that produce
competent graduates. I want to hear understanding of rational monetary
and economic analysis. I want to hear candidates articulating the principles
of a free society. I want office holders who act with seriousness, honesty,
and respect.
-
- What is instead occurring is a political
contest to see which candidate's form of mental disorder resonates with
prevalent forms of mental disorder in the general population. Bill Clinton
says he feels people's pain. Hillary Clinton is poised to snap up a seat
as Senator from New York, and possibly the presidency, on the essential
platform that the mess she has made of her personal life, and her angry
warped rationalizations of it, resonate with the confused mess other people
have made of their lives. People identify with Hillary's image of struggle,
with her constant empty angry dynamism, and with her posturing and confrontational
indignation. Bill and Hillary's empty marital relationship and sterility
produce emotional resonance in millions of others leading similar lives
with similar incapacities in an emotionally turbulent generation that has
had a 60+ percent divorce rate and a 32 percent out-of-wedlock birth rate.
Her pathology feeds into the prevalence of pathology in America.
-
- Hillary Clinton's qualification for any
serious position would be considered ludicrous in a healthy rational society.
To those increasingly few of us remaining who do not view posturing infantile
temper tantrums as a form of intellectual brilliance, Hillary is not a
particularly intelligent, talented, or deep woman. With the possible exception
of abortion and allied 60s radical countercultural agenda that appeal to
those who have never left, or grown beyond, 60s and 70s perpetually angry
adolescence, Hillary Clinton has shown absolutely no knowledge of anything.
But while abortion, internal sexual conflicts, and crummy shack jobs or
marriages may be a personal obsession to many people in this country, they
are not what makes this country run. Yet, every poll shows Hillary could
walk into a state where she has never lived and be swept into office by
a landslide < entirely on the basis of alliance between her own and
other people's personal problems, angry immaturity, mental disorders, and
incompetence, without a demonstrated word of knowledge about anything that
really makes the nation work.
-
- Undoubtedly, handlers would feed her
a cram course of superficial babble about military tactics and strategy,
economic policy, geopolitics, or other areas to get her through staged
public appearances during the campaign that would be seized upon as instant
support for belief by the already neurotically captured or committed. If
she can continue saying nothing substantial about anything and avoid all
serious debate, she is in.
-
- Fourth: Not long ago I talked with a
woman about the source of so-called social problems in this country. Her
eyes welled up as she talked about helplessness and desperation being the
root cause of the problem. But these were assertions about people she had
never met and knew nothing about. She was really projecting a history of
her own miserable life and her own marriage. Describing other mythical
people instead of herself allowed her to release the repressed backlog
of emotion she was forbidden to realize and express more directly.
-
- People are commingling and co-channeling
their personal problems into interpretations of so-called social problems
that are ungoverned by any mental discipline. The sad lyrical interpretations
of life and the feeling of abstract struggle, described by the radical
left, stimulate waiting feelings of desperation or struggle in people's
personal lives and drive the afflicted to leftist philosophy and causes
like dried emotional leaves before a storm. In the psychologically deteriorated
condition of the country, many people are constantly on the verge of tears
anyway, and the political left releases and re-focuses their diffuse sorrow
and discontent into the political process. There is a complex system of
language of double meaning that has evolved in which people using political
language are also describing their personal condition.
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- In this sense the political left offers
a vicarious false or symbolic sympathy and catharsis to the depressed or
emotionally wounded in this society. The fact that socialism is intrinsically
oppressive and economically catastrophic is secondary to its satisfaction
of that catharsis and need. It also satisfies a suicidal bent that I have
been convinced for more than 35 years exists deep in the leftist movement
and personality.
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- In many cases the political left is an
indirect plea for help forced upon others. These are often, on deep levels,
suicidal people who defy the pain of personal realization and change, but
are attempting to force others to take charge of them by threatening to
commit suicide in such a way as take us with them. This is one reason why
their political and social thrusts are destructive to themselves and everyone
else.
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- They remind me a little of women who
are self-destructive hoping that a man will care enough and show that he
loves her enough to set her straight. Unfortunately, what they often wind
up with is exploitation by cold sadists whom they defend. The political
equivalent is Josef Stalin.
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- In other ways leftists are a little like
the little kid who acts out scenes in an attempt to obtain security and
structure, and to make his parents show concern, discipline him and take
charge, even though the kid protests when this happens. Only these are
big kids. They will push the limits by destroying the educational system,
by turning America over to its enemies, by turning children over to sexual
predators, by attempting to impose an authoritarian oppressive society,
by taking away your guns so you can't fight back, and by sweetly denying
every bit of it, until discipline is forced upon them. Like the components
of a swirling galaxy suddenly without a gravitational field, they are flying
off into the deep space of progressive irrationality in the absence of
the pull of sanity.
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- All people have a touch of sadism in
them. Leftists are often people whose sadism has long been allowed to get
out of control because it is indirect, intellectualized, and deniable,
rather than physical. They are going to push the limits of defiance until
it is either externally brought under control, or they will destroy those
around them. When analyzed from these frames of reference, leftist politics
is absolutely consistent and makes absolute sense. But it doesn't do much
for the country.
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- Other dynamics of the political left
often parallel the dynamics of many actors and actresses. Indeed, Hollywood
is a cultural center of the radical left. Due to personal incapacity, many
actors and actresses seem to be people who desperately substitute the diffuse
affection of audience applause and approval for close love relationships
in their personal lives. Many leftists seem to be people who have failed
at, or are incapable of, close love relationships and want to substitute
a diffuse one-world socialistic love-in where they are assured of a type
of abstract unconditional acceptance within a purifying socialistic masochism.
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- Fifth: The type of values and behavior
seen in the empty Clinton lives is the values, behavior, pathology, and
emptiness many people have been desperately defending in their own lives.
The Clintons have been able to transfer that defense to a defense of themselves
without missing a step. The woman who is married to a Bill Clinton-type,
or has been used in an affair with such a Bill Clinton, immediately identifies
with, or defends Hillary, Monica, or Bill < or somebody < according
to whatever she has been using to rationalize such relationships in her
own life. The man who has been trying to justify to himself his staying
in a marriage with a brat like Hillary, defends Hillary. The man who treats
women the same way as does Bill, defends Bill. The man who wants to be
able to get a woman pregnant, then run off and leave her; and the 50 percent
of women in this country who are having abortions in those situations;
are emotionally resonant with the Clinton's life-style and pro-abortion
stance.
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- And so, one way or another, half this
nation has been drawn into intrinsic indirect interest in an ongoing sixties-values
soap opera played out by a couple of spoiled goofs who have taken significant
control of the country on this basis. The second half of the nation is
in turmoil because of their inability to find, within the upside down world
of virtual reality synthesized and maintained by the liberal media, any
desperately-sought confirmation at all for the obvious fact that the first
half and the two spoiled brats are obviously and destructively nuts.
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- Some years ago a study, which there is
no room to detail as we wind down this segment, found that happy families
with kids tended to be overwhelmingly Reagan Republicans. It's no accident.
They were content with life.
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- A greater number of years ago Aldous
Huxley wrote that anyone seeking to impose an authoritarian government
would do well to encourage promiscuous sexuality among the people.
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- This brings us to Sixth: The turbulent
failure of interpersonal relationships in this country < to no small
extent resulting from the sexual revolution of the 60s, which was designed
by the original advocates to be crippling, in addition to destroying the
nation's mental health < has been politically as well as socially catastrophic.
Personal emptiness, dissatisfaction, and unhappiness are politically exploitable,
and should be encouraged by leftist political strategists. From a leftist
standpoint, happy fulfilling personal lives and family lives are retrograde
institutions that do not produce dissatisfaction that can be directed into
a political movement. They are further retrograde in that directing one's
self toward, and finding primary satisfaction in, the family unit is subtractive
from orientation toward, and finding primary satisfaction in, substitute
bonding with the socialist state, with the political movement, and with
the leader. The motivation for engineering personal dissatisfaction in
others is as much an expression of resentment toward those others as it
is political strategy (lest such engineering be looked upon purely as the
invention of an ingenious plot). It just happens that the two coincide.
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- Too many people are sublimating the anger,
frustrations, and desperation of their personal lives into a compulsive
attack upon the cultural and economic system that has provided more for
more people than any other in human history. In their bitterness toward
life, they are in a state of diffuse antagonism toward everything. They
have a monkey on their back. In the Clinton vernacular, this is encoded,
in deliberately vague language, as "people who want change."
What kind of change? They are diffusely unhappy and prepared to displace
or act out their frustrations on society instead of changing themselves.
Many of them have an absolute hatred of this country because of their bitterness
over their personal lives. In their angry egocentric thinking America is
viewed as unfulfilling and has defrauded them because their private lives
are destroyed. This hatred has fueled the revolutionary leftist movement
in this country.
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- They obsess and carp constantly about
how wrong this county has been and the necessity for political change.
You can't argue with them intelligently and get agreement on anything because
the argument is not really what the argument is about. The argument is
really about their desire to attribute their personal problems to the culture
instead of themselves. You may think you are discussing foreign or domestic
policy with a woman when what she is really talking about is a symbol,
or indirect emotional expression, of the fact somebody got her pregnant
and left her. Until that hidden issue, the one she refuses to talk about,
is settled, all logical discourse is doomed to failure. I have found this
pattern to be typical of men and women in the political left over more
than 35 years.
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- Precious Bodily Fluids
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