Pathocracy and Normocracy

We're still pondering Christopher Rufo's The Cluster B Society. First, some context is needed for the designation "Cluster B," which refers to a group of personality disorders revolving around emotional or erratic traits, i.e., the narcissistic, borderline, histrionic, and antisocial personalities.  

Which leads to the definition of personality disorder: last I checked,  any personality disorder involves enduring and inflexible patterns of behavior or emotion leading to significant subjective distress or objective impairment. This impairment can be in relationships, in work, or in adaptation more generally. 

Untreated, a personality disorder is essentially a lifelong condition, in contrast to presumably time-limited ones such as major depression, and also to even more serious lifelong conditions such as schizophrenia. On the spectrum of severity, personality disorders are somewhere between everyday neurosis and severely compromised reality testing, e.g., delusions and hallucinations. 

It's easy enough to apply psychological categories to a collective, but is this a valid exercise? Take an extreme case such as Nazi Germany. Is it helpful to say that Germany was a Cluster A and B society, with paranoid and antisocial traits? What was the cause of this, and what is the cure?

A somewhat random google search suggests that only 1.5% of the population suffers from a Cluster B personality disorder. If that's the case, how can half of the U.S. be in the grip of a collective personality disorder? 

Well, something is wrong with these people, and we aim to find out what it is. We could say that they're pathological, but by what standard? What is normality? Is there a universal standard for how a human being ought to be? If there are personality disorders, what is a properly ordered personality? 

What if these folks just want to fit in, or are imitating high status people, or were effectively indoctrinated in college? What might look like a personality disorder could be just weakness, stupidity, conformity, status seeking, and other character defects. Just bad breeding, as they used to say.

Rufo correctly notes that

scenes of American public life increasingly resemble a Cluster B psychodrama: victimhood replaces accomplishment as the standard of merit; accusation replaces disagreement as the means of settling disputes; false compassion becomes the primary method of manipulating citizens into compliance; and the whole scheme is enforced with the threat of violence: obey, or suffer the consequences.

But again, if everybody is just imitating everyone else, where do we locate the pathology? By virtue of what standard? In other words, if there is an unhealthy and wrong way to be, this implies a healthy and correct way.  

I apologize for the rambling, but I'm pondering this in real time.

As a result of my psychoanalytic training, I used to think that personality disorders were environmental as opposed to organic or genetic. But now I'm inclined to the view that they are more genetic, although there is always an interaction between genes and environment. 

Take, for example, a woman with borderline personality disorder. Usually we will discover a chaotic childhood with unstable caretakers, but what if this is because one or both of the parents has a personality disorder that is rooted in genetics? In general, mental illness runs in families, but genetic research suggests that the resultant chaos is at least equally cause and (genetic) effect.

Let me just jump to my bottom line take: psychologists began noticing an increase in personality disorders in the 1970s, but the genome hasn't changed since then. What has changed? 

One of the biggest changes has been a loosening of cultural standards, one consequence of which is that mental illness that had been previously repressed is allowed to openly express itself. It very much reminds me of the Ferguson Effect that has led to the spike in crime. 

True, there is more criminality, but this is because of the new absence of constraints and consequences. Criminal tendencies that had previously been "repressed" by law enforcement are now openly expressed. (And criminality itself is heavily genetically loaded.)

You get more of what you tolerate, and our culture has become so tolerant that we're surrounded by the intolerable. If you have no standards, people will meet them.  

It's the same with the alarming spike in sexual pathology and confusion. Ideas and behaviors that had previously been repressed and channeled into healthier avenues are openly expressed.    

 

By definition, everyone starts off immature. It only becomes pathological if the maturational process is arrested. But "maturational process" implies a telos, so one way of normalizing immaturity is to eliminate or ignore the telos of development. In a society of cannibals it is normal to be a cannibal. Indeed, objection to cannibalism might land you on the menu.

So, what is normal? How would we go about defining it in a way that isn't culturally relative? What things ought to be repressed and not tolerated? Rufo writes that 

American college students find themselves in the midst of an unprecedented mental-health crisis. According to the University of Michigan’s Healthy Minds study, more than 60 percent of college students meet the criteria for at least one mental-health problem -- a nearly 50 percent increase since 2013. 

But again, by what standard of normality? And what if much of this is due the psychological Ferguson Effect mentioned above?

That's a Big Question, and this post has already gone on too long, but a couple of days ago I read a post called Truth and Politics that provides some preliminary clues:

In our era, truth is under systematic assault from moralistic fanatics who are at the same time thoroughgoing relativists and dyed-in-the wool subjectivists. The Catholic journalist Karlo Broussard put it well in his recently published booklet, The New Relativism: “The agents of relativism are still out there, seeking to fit the world to their own desires and likes rather than discover and understand the world in order to better conform to it.

It seems there is something intrinsically pathological about relativism, especially when it becomes a new absolute: 

The fervid intensity of the woke absolutists, their endless anger and excoriation, should not be mistaken for a commitment to truth and truth-seeking. Their indignation, their aim to “cancel” -- to morally obliterate -- those they cannot abide is a consequence of the fact that they have left the world of objective truth and measured moral judgment behind.

Speaking of systems and what they tolerate or suppress, this new system permits the unleashing of primitive sadistic impulses on acceptable targets: 

these vehement enemies of Truth with a capital T do not hesitate to accuse their opponents of departing from the only acceptable narratives regarding ubiquitous white racism, the self-evidence of gender theory, the grave threat to democracy posed by conservative populists and moral traditionalists, and the unquestionable need to genuflect before the authority of “Science” as redefined by politically correct elites.

In this upside-down system, the normal are punished: there are widespread "efforts to silence those who still affirm that 'freedom is ordered to the truth and is fulfilled in man’s quest for truth and in man’s living in the truth'”:

Ideological fanaticism is the inevitable consequence of a nihilistic denial of an order of things, of a natural moral order available to human beings through reason and experience.

The new Absolute Relativists

have slowly transformed our institutions into what psychologist Andrzej Łobaczewski calls a “pathocracy,” or rule by psychological dysfunction....

In a Cluster B society, psychological disorders are job qualifications rather than problems to be solved; ideology replaces competence as a marker of distinction....

 We'll end here, even though we're just getting started.