Your Psychodollars at Work and the Tax on Liberal Fantasy

What’s the big story of the day? The foiled terror plot, right? I could write something about it, but I don’t want to repeat what so many others are saying, and saying better than I could say it anyway. What is so striking, as Dr. Sanity puts it, is that the “report is being discussed on the lefty blogs with the usual paranoia and smug self-righteousness of those in complete denial about 9/11 and the current war on terror.”

“More than anything--more than taking the Islamic fanatics seriously even when captured in the act of planning major attacks--they are afraid that any success anywhere in the war on terror reflects well on Bush (otherwise known as the "real" enemy of civilization). AND THEY CANNOT ALLOW THAT TO HAPPEN, CAN THEY?”

As a matter of fact, yesterday there was a little survey on dailykos, asking their morally insane readers if the plot was “legit” or just “more drama from BushCo to keep us all afraid.” To even run such a poll speaks volumes about the mentality of these kooks--as if having an election to decide whether or not reality is real makes you a reasonable person. In other words, for the left, this is not a dispute between two competing versions of reality, but a dispute between the reluctant acceptance of reality vs. the full-fledged embrace of paranoid fantasy. At present the vote stands at about 50-50, but yesterday it was running three-quarters in favor of the delusional flight from reality.

It has become a cliche to suggest that these psychologically damaged hordes represent the future of the Democratic party. Rather, they represent the present of the Democratic party, and I find this much more frightening than the Islamo-fascists. First, if all human beings were equally psychologically mature and in touch with reality--not just here in America, but in Europe and a few other civilized places--we would be able to defeat the jihadis in about a week. The terrorists only thrive in the interstices created by the psychological denial of their enemies who refuse to believe that they have enemies. They live in the shadows thrown by the mental pathology of large elements of the West. Of course the jihadis are sick, but they are allowed to roam free for the same reason liberals emptied out the state mental hospitals in the 1970’s and created the “homeless” problem.

In many ways, the war on terror is a tax on fantasy--the price we pay for living in denial. After all, the plot that was foiled yesterday is nearly identical to the one that was thwarted in 1995, when Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed planned to blow up airliners over the Pacific Ocean. Was that plot legit, or just more drama from ClintonCo to keep us all afraid? Clearly it wasn’t the latter, because few people were afraid back then. Our psychological denial was running at over 90%, whereas now it is closer to 50%.

Much of the tension in the world derives not from anything visible in the horizontal world, but purely from the vertical world--the world of psychological and spiritual development. For example, there is no question that the dispute between the Palestinians and Israelis has nothing whatsoever to do with land that has been “colonized” but with the Arab psyche that has been colonized by vicious and genocidal mind parasites. The “disputed territory” is entirely in the Arab mind. If they wanted a state for Palestinians, they could have had it at any time since 1948. They could have it today. That’s not what they want. What they want is to act out their psychopathology (although “want” is misleading, for, in the absence of insight, they are compelled to act it out).

It is no different with the problems of America. Most of them are a result of the gulf between the psychologically mature and immature. Liberalism once was an ideology aimed at assisting the weak, but somewhere over 30 years back it became a doctrine of assisting and promoting weakness. Sounds like a subtle distinction, but it makes all the difference. For example, just as the terror problem could be solved tomorrow if Arabs adopted Israeli values, the problem, say, with black underachievement in America could be solved equally rapidly if blacks adopted Asian American values (which, by the way, the majority of blacks already try to do--it is only a vocal minority of professional victocrats such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who want to maintain the current plantation system, because that way they retain the title of Head Negro bestowed upon them by their white liberal masters).

Is it not obvious that the prison system is a tax on fatherlessness? I don’t have the statistics at hand, but I believe that over two thirds of violent criminals are from fatherless homes. In fact, a quick googling reveals that “Seventy-two percent of teen-age murderers, 70 percent of long-term prison inmates and 60 percent of rapists come from fatherless homes.”

This all reminds me of one of Petey’s brain waves I wrote about a few months back, rebroadcast here for your reading pleasure.

*****

I was driving home from work yesterday, silently lost in my meditations, absorbed in the changeless realm that lies just above the afternoon commute, when Petey startled me from my reveries by blurting out, “psychodollars!”

Petey often operates in this abrupt and slightly cryptic manner, as if I could possibly know what he was talking about. The abruptness comes from having no recollection--or pretending to have no recollection--of what it’s like to cope with a sympathetic nervous system. I’ve told him that it took me forty years to finally be reasonably comfortable about being uncomfortable in my own skin, but he can’t relate.

Anyway, “go on,” I said. “Care to give me a hint?”

“Psychodollars. That’s the tax on fantasy--the price we pay for not having our calendar synchronized with the Arab Muslim world.”

“Go on. I’m listening.”

“You know my idea--geographical space is developmental time. Different cultures and sub-cultures reflect different levels of psychological development and maturity. If you fail to reach that level, then you are punished by your culture, either directly or indirectly. But if you surpass that level and become too mature, you also get whacked.”

“Are you talking about what liberals do to conservative blacks again?”

“No, I’m talking about the Middle East. Imagine a Palestinian who woke up one morning and didn’t have the paranoid delusion that Israel was responsible for all their problems. No, he says, we’ve created our own hideously dysfunctional culture, and only we can change it. He decides to publicize his thoughts, to write an editorial.”

“I know, I know, that would be his last editorial. It’s hard enough to write when you aren’t hanging upside down from a street lamp on the Boulevard of the Martyrs with your testicles missing and a couple of lumps obstructing your breathing. But what does this have to do with psychodollars?”

“I’m getting there. The Arab world is stuck in the wayback machine, mired in the dark ages, right? If every other country were in the same neuro-developmental time, then their oil would be worthless, because there’d be no advanced nation that would have any use for it. But because there are countries like us, from their 'psychological future,’ the petrodollars flow in, from the future to the past--from the cognitive first world to the cognitive third or fourth world.”

“I know about the petrodollars. What about the psychodollars?”

“Normally to get that kind of dough, you have to do something--achieve something, make something, know something, even BE something. But these are people who never had to go through the awkward historical phase of actually familiarizing themselves with the properties of matter or coping with the real world, much less mastering their own minds. So they’re rewarded for their backwardness and barbarity, and they even develop a superiority about it, just like the southern slave holders did in the US. They felt like they were superior to northerners, because they didn’t have to get their hands dirty or work at the ‘servile arts.’ They could just sit around reading Greek philosophy and pretending they were royalty. Slaves did all the work.”

“I'm still not sure where you’re going with this, Petey. It's almost time for Hugh Hewitt, and Lileks is going to be on. I think I'd rather listen to him.”

“Remember the garden of Eden? Some people get offended when I say this, but psychologically, you can interpret it as a fable of infancy. The omnipotent infant believes that he’s responsible for creating mommy and daddy--Adam & Eve. He’s got it all backwards. Adam and Eve created him, but he thinks that he created them. After all, he has a desire to be fed and held, and ‘boom,’ there they are, as if created by magic. Why shouldn’t he believe he created them? He doesn’t know any better. Then, when the parents challenge his omnipotence, he banishes them."

"The Islamists are like the baby. They don’t realize that we’re much older and more mature, and that we created and sustain them with our petrodollars. So they’re trying to banish us. From earth.”

“Hmm. I see what you mean. The war on terror is really just the giant sucking sound produced by the dynamic tension between the top and bottom floors of the psyche, to mix a few metaphors.”

“Exactly! Psychodollars. That’s the money we have to pay as a result of having sent all those petrodollars to a bunch of infantile cultures that think they’re superior to us. It’s the billions of dollars it costs us to defend ourselves from the cultural pathologies of the Arab Middle East, flush with their own malicious psychodollars that they’ve converted from petrodollars. I’ll bet if you added up both sides, there would be something like one psychodollar for every petrodollar. Think of it--what’s the combined cost of homeland security, airline security for every single flight, port security, border security, support for Israel and bribes to any so-called 'moderate' elements in the Middle East, year in, year out, national defense, the war in Iraq, the cost to the economy as a result of 9-11. It’s all psychodollars--the extra money we have to pay for giving so many petrodollars to psychos who want to spread their pathology and pull the future back into the past.”

“Er, so what’s your solution, Petey?”

“That’s the easy part. Do the same thing with them that we do with our own infantile, anti-American citizens with superiority complexes and too much time on their hands. Just rename the whole area The University of the Middle East, make everyone a tenured professor, and let them work out their feelings by writing irrelevant books and attending dopey conferences. Now that’s a smart use of psychodollars. In fact, you could save even more money by combining the university system with the mental hospitals, and calling it a ‘looniversity bin!’"

"Ahh, that last part was a little joke. You can laugh.”

Petey vanished, leaving me to ponder what the actual solution might be.