The Rot from Within: Character Disorders of the Republic

The Rot from Within: Character Disorders of the Republic

By Robert Logan
Antiwar.Com
July 17, 2010

In reading a number of books on the destructive manipulative behavior of people with personality disorders I became increasingly struck by how the behavior of our politicians and our nation, especially with respect to foreign policy, was so precisely described.

The lesson from this study is not just sobering, but taken alongside the invincible tide of history – the collapse of every empire – the prognosis for our nation is bleak.

The most important book for me was titled In Sheep’s Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People by Dr. George Simon. The title and tactics identified within it accurately describes not only our national leaders, but our national character. Our nation has not just one, but multiple destructive personality disorders.

I do not mean this in the metaphorical sense, but in the direct clinical sense. Dr. Simon indicates that in a repressive Victorian society individual citizens suffer more neurotic kinds of disorders because they have natural human sexual desires that are relentlessly suppressed and vilified, resulting in anguish over reconciling natural human urges with extreme social sanctions against them.

In more recent decades, with the "anything goes" revolution in the 1960′s and onward, the kinds of personality disorders in his clinical work came to be more dominated by the opposite end of the spectrum, known as character disorders. Neurotic disorders are from "too much conscientiousness". Character disorders are from "not enough conscientiousness".

Character disorders are destructively aggressive. The most interesting to me is a type called "covert aggression" where underhanded, deceitful tactics are used to serve highly narcissistic and flatly evil objectives. Covert aggressors use "innocent" cover to give plausible deniability to base motives of power, greed, and even sadism. The foreign policy of our nation is exactly so described – aggressive wars cloaked in "humanitarian" garb.

If you look at the tactics for covert manipulation, they describe the tactics of our national leaders in both parties perfectly:

Lying, denial, selective attention/inattention, rationalization, minimization, diversion, evasion, guilt-tripping, shaming, playing the victim, vilifying the victim, playing the servant role, seduction, project the blame, feigning innocence, playing dumb, brandishing anger…

There are almost no national politicians that base their positions on an over-arching set of principles maintained consistently across the issues. An example would be Ron Paul. I can’t think of any others. In general they are lying, hypocritical, deceitful cowards cloaking their manipulative actions in sheep’s clothing.

Continued. . .