Brandon's Trifecta

Ripperger notes that "contradictory speech is a sign of one of three things."

The first and most common reason is that "the person is dishonest or disingenuous." This is usually the case in politicians and journalists. What kind of naif is Shocked, shocked to find that lying is going on in here!, in the government-media complex?  

Ripperger's second reason for contradictory speech is "real confusion in the mind of the individual." A normal person is sufficiently self-aware to be concerned about his contradictions. I know I would be alarmed if I woke up one morning to find more than one creator, one cosmos, one reality, one truth, one philosophy, one wife, etc.  

Consistency. That's what we strive for at One Cosmos. Although, at the same time, we enjoy the challenge of tossing this or that seemingly contradictory fact into the cosmic hopper, just for the fun of harmonizing it with the rest. 

Anyway, whereas in the case of the dishonest person it is a matter of a corrupt will or "spirit of falsity," anyone can be confused due to a "lack of understanding or due to the difficulty of the object of knowledge in relation to the limits of the human intellect." 

Most people are confused about a lot of things, for example, the appeal of Stephen Colbert. Nothing wrong with that, unless we paper over the confusion and pretend to a certitude that has no logical or factual basis. Then we're shading into mental illness, either functional (e.g., borderline personality) or organic (e.g., dementia).

Speaking of which, James Rosen actually asked the president why he thinks most Americans have profound concerns about his cognitive deterioration, to which Brandon replied I have no idea. 

Ironically, this is probably the most honest thing he said in the entire two hours of desperate obfuscation, dissimulation, and word salad. "One-armed paper hanger" comes to mind. 

Which brings us to the third cause of contradictory speech, that "the person can be mentally ill; in fact, contradictory speech is a clear sign of mental illness."

How convenient is that! For it allows us to recognize and steer clear of mentally ill people, because they spew forth contradictions like a squid releases ink.

Now, many forms of contradictory speech are entirely benign, nor could civilization carry on in their absence. No one is brutally honest at all times. The very existence of good manners is a contradiction. And yet, there are people who cannot manage this -- e.g., babies, savages, leftists. But I threepeat myself.

President Brandon was of course born lying, but in his case there's something more going on; his contradictions are openly contradictory, and yet, he is the only person in the room who isn't confused by his confusion.  

It looks like Brandon has achieved the trifecta, in that he is a congenital liar; is confused but doesn't know it; and is suffering from a progressive neurodegenerative illness. 

Thus, most everything he says is an implicit or explicit contradiction, which is what makes trying to follow him so wearying. One cannot listen to him as one would to a normal person, since most of that he says makes no sense; one must strain to find the meaning, but it is often impossible. Try reading the following, and see what I mean. It's exhausting:

I mean -- and one of the things I find fascinating that’s happening -- and you all are dealing with it every day -- and it will impact on how things move -- is that a lot of the speculation in the polling data shows that the -- that the cables are heading south; they’re losing viewership. You know?

Well, Fox is okay for a while, but it’s not gated. And a lot of the rest are predicted to be not very much in the mix in the next four to five years. I don’t know whether that’s true or not.

*** 

I’ve spent a lot of time in South America and in Latin America. When I was Vice President, I spent the bulk of my eight years basically in Europe and/or in Latin America. I’m in contact with the leaders of the countries in South America, and we’re working closely with making sure that we do everything -- for example, with the -- to deal with helping the countries in question, particularly those in Central America, to be able to help them with their ability to deal with the inter- 

People don’t sit around in Guatemala and say, “I got a great idea: Let’s sell everything we have, give the money to a -- to a coyote, take us across a terribly dangerous trip up through Central America and up through Mexico, and drop us -- sneak us across the border, drop us in the desert. Won’t that be fun?”

People leave because they have real problems. And one of the things that I’ve done, when I was a Vice President, and got support with -- although I don’t have much Republican support anymore -- is provide billions of dollars to be able to say to those countries, “Why are people leaving? And how are you going to reform your own system?” And that’s what we’ve worked on a long time. It still needs a lot more work. And we’re focusing on that.

I also believe -- I’ve spent a lot of time talking about and dealing with policy having to do with Maduro, who is little more than a dictator right now, and the same thing in Chile and Af- -- not the same thing, but with Chile, as well as Argentina.

So, look, I made a speech a while ago, when I was Vice President, saying that if we were smart, we have an opportunity to make the Western Hemisphere a united -- not united -- a democratic hemisphere. And we were moving in the right direction under our -- under the last administration -- the Obama-Biden administration.

But so much damage was done as a consequence of the foreign policy decisions the last president made in Latin America, Central America, and South America that we now have --when I call for a summit of the democracies -- I called that, and a number of nations showed up for this Summit of Democracy -- what is it that’s going to allow us to generate -- we’ve actually had a reduction in the number of democracies in the world. And it seems to me there’s nothing more important.

We used to talk about, when I was a kid in college, about “America’s backyard.” It’s not America’s backyard. Everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard. And we’re equal people. We don’t dictate what happens in any other part of that -- of this continent or the South American continent. We have to work very hard on it.

But the trouble is: We’re having great difficulty making up for the mistakes that were made the last four years, and it’s going to take some time.

Got that?

Now, "one of the most important first principles for psychology is the principle of sufficient reason," which is basically a fancy way of saying that things have causes, and that the cause must be sufficient to explain the effect. 

But "those who suffer from delusions often are not operating according to this principle," in that they "think that certain things are causing their problems when those things (or people) are not capable of it." They blame that for causing this, even though neither this nor that may even exist, let alone be causally related.

The "Voting Rights Bill" is a case in point. All American citizens already have the right to vote. And yet, racists such as myself will supposedly prevent them from voting unless this bill is passed. Nary a sufficient reason in sight.

We'd better stop here: "being around the mentally ill a great deal and trying to think the way they do in order to understand them can lead to the psychologist's own mental illness" (Ripperger).