How Crazy is Obama?

Where any person or body of men, who do not represent the Whole, seize into their hands the power of the last resort, there is properly no longer government but what Aristotle and his followers call the abuse and corruption of one.

That was Jonathan Swift, who looked upon such a usurpation "as a greater evil than anarchy itself; as much as a savage is in a happier state of life than a slave at the oar."

Than again, Swift also spoke of our wholly irrational -- or at least arational -- "love of life, which, from the dictates of reason, every man would despise, and wish it at an end, or that it never had a beginning."

So, Dear Leader and his low information lowlives are putting our irrational love of life to the test, but the primary victims of his follies are and will be those they are supposedly designed to benefit. For example, even more low IQ illegals will only put more downward pressure on the wages of gardeners, housekeepers, and day laborers, while further increasing black and teen unemployment.

In an information economy that is already sorting by intelligence as never before -- the main driver of "income inequality" -- Obama is further reifying a two-tiered system in which the minority of HiQs create the wealth while the majority of LowQs vote.

Thus, while they cannot create much wealth they can surely appropriate it via the abuse and corruption of government. We're already there. Those with eyes open have seen the lightning. When the earth-rattling Thunder will arrive is anyone's guess, as it will no doubt come as a thief in the night, or like an IRS audit. Or, like bankruptcy: very gradually and then all of a sudden.

You know the old crack: never attribute to malevolence what can be more readily explained by stupidity. But the psychologist in me -- admittedly a mere remnant these days -- wants to toss in a third possibility, psychopathology. For there is something worse than mere stupidity, and that is a vast and secure knowledge of things that just aren't so.

I read much more history than I do psychology, but when I do, I am always impressed by the terribly destructive combination of confident error and primitive mental illness; or of crazy people doing evil things in the name of some kooky doctrine they've gotten lodged in their heads.

When I say "primitive" mental illness, I mean that type which causes a man to act out his pathology instead of thinking about it. In other words, for such a person, action is a substitute for introspection -- as indeed it is for a child.

A child doesn't have the vocabulary or self-distance to adequately describe what is going on inside. Therefore, a child psychologist must observe the child in action. His office is typically filled with toys, dolls, action figures, and other objects to which the child will be spontaneously attracted and then use to symbolically play out his conflict.

Perhaps he will pick out a male doll with which to bash a female doll while saying "bad mommy!" Or maybe he'll pick out the male doll, toss it across the room, and yell, "so stay in Africa! I don't give a fuck!," and then score some choom from another doll for the purposes of self-soothing, or to nurture his grandiosity.

At any rate, it is this deadly confluence of Higher Stupidity in Low Psychic Places that should concern us all. By now you all know and have even forgotten about Bion's Grid, which is not a sports bar but a visual means to conceptualize -- or a conceptual way to visualize -- various psychic and cognitive combinations.

For example, it is quite possible -- in this day and age, perhaps even likely -- that the most intelligent person in the world may devote his entire life to extending and refining a lie. In fact, it seems to me that this is inevitable so long as one is ignorant of the source of truth. That is, the sufficient reason of the intellect is the Truth of which it is a reflection and to which it is an adequation. Exclude Truth, and what is intelligence but an elaborate way to be stupid?

Or, to express it in the simplest way possible, to posit absolute relativity is to say that man's ignorance is categorical.

We've had some awfully bad presidents in the past, but prior to Obama, I don't think a single one of them would be characterized as an out-and-out relativist. But Obama is our first thoroughly postmodern president, which also makes him post-Christian, post-literate, post-rational, post-constitutional, post-American, and post-reality.

Let's even stipulate that this cynical product of a nihilistic and spiritually corrosive academia truly believes himself to be a Christian. Well, despite our differences, there is still a thing called Orthodoxy, by which I do not just mean Christian orthodoxy, but cosmic orthodoxy. Again, religion is not about religion, but rather, about Truth. To the extent that a purportedly religious person believes things that cannot possibly be true, and which lack all reason, that can't be religion.

In this world -- and all humans know it, even if they deny it -- nothing can be more privileged than Truth. Scientists are motivated by this, as is our judicial system. Rationality itself is simply impossible -- or pointless -- in the absence of the Truth of which it is a reflection. Again, a thing isn't true because it is rational, but rather, rational because it is true. And if you need the backup of the tenured, Gödel proved with ironclad logic that the most important truths cannot be proved with reason.

But the heterodorks of the left want to have their crock and eat it too, which only results in more hunger, more poverty, more insanity. Which then results in more food stamps, more bogus disability claims, more social chaos, more psychic disorder.

Remember when we discussed Gilder's Knowledge and Power a few months back? Order and disorder are not opposites but joined at the hip, in that the tyrannical imposition of top-down order generates disorder below. Conversely, entropy and information lead to upside surprise, or evolution -- which is why the progressive left is so regressive, since they undermine the very conditions of progress.

I think it's entirely appropriate to ask ourselves, "just how crazy is Obama?" But unless you understand the dynamics of primitive personality disorders, you won't get very far. As alluded to yesterday, narcissism runs along a continuum from normal and healthy, to fragile, to a rigid and shame-intolerant closed system revolving around triumph, contempt, and absence of curiosity.

This latter form can even appear to be the most healthy, in that such a person appears above it all -- cool, poised, no drama. But this is only because the person lives behind a hardened false self to protect the shriveled and vulnerable self within, more or less developmentally arrested at the age it was traumatized by a disappointing world.

Take that same mentally ill child in a consulting room full of toys, and put him in a position of vast power, with access to the biggest and best toys in the world. And then watch him play. Or, if you prefer, watch him fuck with us, like a sadistic kid pulling wings off a fly.