Help Wanted: External Enemy, Must be Existential Threat

We'll start with some arresting passages from Who Are We?, until one engages my blogging gear and we take off from there. Maybe we can even find their hidden unity and wrap them all together.

National interests derive from national identity. We have to know who we are before we can know what our interests are.

Historically, the emergence of nation states in Europe was the result of several centuries of recurring wars.... [But] in one estimate only seven of one hundred and ten wars between 1989 and 1999 were not civil wars. War is now more often the breaker of states than the maker of states.

The notions of nation, national identity, and national interest may be losing relevance and usefulness. If this is the case, the question becomes: What, if anything, will replace them and what does that mean for the United States?

Historical experience and sociological analysis show that the absence of an external "other" is likely to undermine unity and breed divisions within a society.

"You" and "I" become a "we" when "they" appears...

To define themselves, people need an other. Do they also need an enemy? Some people clearly do. "Oh, how wonderful it is to hate," said Joseph Goebbels.

Humans, Freud argued, have only two types of instincts, "those which seek to preserve and unite... and those which seek to destroy and kill." Both are essential and they operate in conjunction with each other. Hence, "there is no use in trying to get rid of men's aggressive inclinations."

"A part of being human," as a committee of psychiatrists put it, "has always been the search for an enemy to embody temporarily or permanently disavowed aspects of ourselves."

BING! This I think goes to the essence of the left: they simply cannot exist without projecting disavowed aspects of themselves into conservatives. We aren't the violent ones, obviously. We don't riot when we don't get our way. We don't burn down our cities. We don't use violence to suppress contrary opinions on college campuses.

The other day I read that fifty percent of the crime (or maybe it was the shootings) in this country occurs in two percent of the counties -- and you can be sure they aren't red counties. Without looking, I would bet they are Democrat strongholds that have been run by Democrats for decades.

Let's be honest. In other words, let's indulge in a thoughtcrime, which is to say, unvarnished truth. We don't need gun control. Rather, we need to prevent people who cannot even control themselves from controlling guns. Who might these people be? Who and where are these people who are incapable of governing themselves? They are not evenly distributed. Not remotely. If not for certain violence-prone subgroups, America would have the crime rate of Tonga.

In any event, you always know what a leftist is thinking, because it consists of what he accuses conservatives of thinking. In short, his imputations and accusations are just his own impulses and emotions experienced by proxy.

Think of, say, Keith Olbermann. It is difficult to imagine a person more unhinged with fascist-level rage. But we are the fascists. Right. Isn't it obvious that he is simply managing the content of his own disturbed mind via imaginary others? What is MSNBC but a kind of mental therapy for liberals in need of projected enemies? Lawrence O'Donnell? I've never been close to that angry in my life, over anything. What would be the point? It doesn't help solve the problem.

It all comes back to, as Bion put it, the problem of thoughts and what to do with them. Yes, they're a problem, and our whole life consists of managing them. I am reminded of the man who, on his death bed, lamented that his life had been full of troubles, the great majority of which never happened.

Think of the SJW. Whether male or female, her life is FULL of troubles: racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, patriarchy, white privilege, etc. There can be no peace of mind in such a psyche, ever. Rather, her life takes place amidst a swarm of imaginary threats and enemies.

But don't even try to relieve her of this burden, because without it, she will be left to her own buzzing hive of envy, hatred, and persecution. A paranoid deprived of enemies is literally reduced to psychosis; in order to heal, the person must own these psychic fragments and rebuild a coherent sense of self without projecting them into others.

In developmental terms, it is called transitioning from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position. It is very difficult to achieve this with a single patient. Impossible when dealing with millions of them, especially when their delusions are reinforced and rewarded by the dominant cultural establishment. And when sanity is positively punished.

Which it always is: for you will be persecuted for my sake. If you are not being persecuted, then you're doing it wrong. Ah ha! How then is this different from the way the leftist feels persecuted by his imaginary demons? That's a very good question. I'll come back to it.

In any event, for all practical purposes, the best one can hope is to manage what amounts to a psychotic core in such a way that it doesn't cause too much destruction. Not for nothing is politics called the organization of hatreds.

Like anyone short of a saint, I have a Greedy and Acquisitive side that cannot be satisfied. I don't try to completely stifle it, nor do I project it into my ideological enemies. But I don't let it wreck my life, or detract from my Infinite Satisfaction for the Gift of the Moment.

Rather, I let it blow off a little steam by, for example, collecting CDs. Or, I let my aggression out by hating the San Francisco Giants. Or, this weekend it will be the Arizona Dirtbags. Who knows, maybe John McCain will be in the stands, so I can double my enmity. But it's all harmless. Like the way dogs play by enacting their aggressive instincts. Except I really do detest John McCain. But I don't want him dead. I just want him to go away.

Which is one of the main sociological purposes of sport: I HATE YOUR GUTS HA HA HA! Which is why it is so distressing -- and depressing -- for the genuine haters of the left to inject their unmanageable rage into our fantasy space. The point is to pretend we're at war, not to actually foment civil strife.

Back to the question of how to tell if you are no different from an SJW who uses the political space to manage her psyche. It's too vast a subject to cover in the remaining time. It's really another way of asking, What are the characteristics of objective psychological maturity? I'll try to tackle this tomorrow....