[casi] American Mental Health and Politics

[Darin Zeilweger <dzepplin@DELETETHIScharter.net>]

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  American Mental Health and Politics


      by Robert L. Kocher

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 ¾ whereupon the cousin
strikes up friendships with the boys, while ignoring Taylor. When she
beings 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 ¾ 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 ¾ if not the largest ¾ 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 ¾ 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ¾ or somebody ¾ 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.

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.

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.

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.

This brings us to Sixth: The turbulent failure of interpersonal
relationships in this country ¾ 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 ¾ 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.

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.

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.

Precious Bodily Fluids

A 60s movie, Dr. Strangelove, portrayed an ultra-right-wing General Jack
Ripper, who was obsessed with communist infiltration involving people's
"precious bodily fluids." It was, of course, a transparent allusion to
his channeling of his worries over his sexual infertility into
irrational fears of the Soviet Union. The idea that so-called
"politically right-wing people" are people channeling the fears and
frustrations from dysfunctional personal lives into comical or lunatic
political causes has been made into a believed cliche by left-wing
writers who put it into TV and movie plots. The truth is, while it is
sometimes a dynamic of the Political Right, it is more characteristic of
the Radical Left than the right. Look at the way Bill and Hillary
Clinton are living, with rapes and groping attacks and immaturity and
chaos and anger ¾ which is real life, not an ideologically crazed movie,
for God's sake, and decide who really has the problem. Half the pillars
of liberalism live like psychiatric case histories. Correlated marital
profiles and voting patterns also suggest this to be a widespread pattern.

Unfortunately, using political outlets for emotional release of
frustrations from personal problems makes one feel slightly and
momentarily better, but does not solve personal problems. It does,
however, create big political problems.

The days of rational discussions of defense, public works, and the care
of widows and orphans are at an end in this society. What we are getting
is obsessionally focused causes and movements. An accurate understanding
of American politics requires analysis of convoluted psychopathology.
America is now under total attack by madness and angry immaturity. That
attack, and the struggle to defend against it, has become the center of
political life in this country.

There are two distinct types of maladjustments here. There are those who
have been nuts, or who have been trying to drives us nuts, for the last
35 years. And there are those of us being driven to distraction, and who
are trying to find an explanation ¾ or who can barely believe it. I will
confess to feeling like going home and hiding under the bed at times
after hearing Hillary Clinton, Eleanor Clift, or Alan Dershowitz.

People on the so-called political right live scared. They know they are
under attack. They try to employ rational processes to understand the
arguments attacking them. But no such understanding is possible because
the arguments used against them are not rational. In desperation to
understand the situation, a few of them talk about the coming of the
AntiChrist, which is the best they can do at their level of
sophistication and frame of reference, but which has a strange, and for
some people, frightening, tone that the political left exploits to
mischaracterize and ridicule all opposition. However, what they are
trying to understand is very real, and if one substitutes the words,
"mass insanity compounded by mass angry defiant immaturity," for
AntiChrist, their arguments aren't so far from the mark.

Many people on the Political Right are frightened because they are too
busy with life to spend the years of study necessary to refute the
unified carefully prepared attack from the left. The intellectual
resources in the educational system are stacked against them. They have
limited access to in-depth alternatives. It is the purpose of this forum
to serve as a resource. In the last 40 years, with the reliance upon
liberal TV and other liberal controlled institutions as the basis of
intellectual focus and continuity, some very important premises have
been displaced and forgotten.

It's important to realize when dealing with the radical left that these
are often irrational people whose sadism has long been allowed to get
out of control. They are going to push the limits of defiance until they
are either externally brought under control, or they will destroy you.
Whatever they do usually has a sadistic or destructive twist in it. When
analyzed from that intent, leftist politics is absolutely consistent and
makes absolute sense. In the last 35 years, it's one of the few
consistent elements I have found in one of the main leftist subcultures.

For those who wonder if what they are seeing is crazy, it is, and it
isn't a dream, it is real. For those who are trying to say what they are
seeing is crazy, let us begin with the premise that what you have been
trying to say, however inarticulate, is true. For some of you who feel
crazy, trying to reason with crazy people as if they were sane will make
you feel that way.

References

Myers, JK, Weissman MM, Tischler GL, Holzer CE III, Leaf PJ, Orvaschel
H, Anthony JC, Boyd JH, Burke JD Jr, Kramer M, Stoltzman R: Six-month
prevalence of psychiatric disorders in three communities 1980-1982. Arch
Gen Psychiatry 1984;41:959-967.

Robins LN, Helzer JE, Weissman MM. Orvaschel H, Gruenberg E, Burke JD
Jr, Regier DA: Lifetime prevalence of specific psychiatric disorders in
three sites. Arch Gen Psychiatry 1984;41:949-958.



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