What Neither the Left nor the Right will Say

As a liberal-leaning moderate, I’m worried about the current suicidal tendencies of conservatism.

You see, I don’t want to live in a one-party state. Not one dominated entirely by the left or the right. The only way my liberalism can function effectively is if it has the balance of honest conservatives to temper it. And at this point the conservative movement seems to have descended into a complete self-destructive narcissocracy.

Narcissocracy is not exclusive to the left or the right. However, there are social trends that bring one or the other of these to the forefront at certain times. In the sixties and seventies, the pendulum swung to the left, producing a dangerous narcissocracy where a large part of the country actually approved of – or at least refused to denounce – Jane Fonda posing in an anti-aircraft installation that was aimed at young Americans.

Even Ms Fonda has since acknowledged that what she did was just not right.

And politically, it backfired. The biggest political impact of what she did was to help usher in thirty years of conservative dominance by allowing the right to define liberals as disloyal Americans.

Those on the right will tell you the country is in danger because of left. Those on the left mirror the same argument back. The real danger is neither and both. We need balance. We need solid conservatives to protect the core values of our heritage. And we need progressive liberals to move us forward. Conservatives warn about the left threatening Medicare and Social Security, without acknowledging that if conservatives had always had their way, neither would exist. Liberals would like a free hand to institute a plethora of new programs without acknowledging that conservative restraint often makes their own programs run better.

What neither side is willing to say is that we need each other.

As in, “one nation indivisible.”

But at the moment, badly divided.

The pseudo-conservatives of the far right seem now to have lost all sense of self-irony – a sure symptom of narcissocracy. They see no irony in claiming the First Amendment as a rationale to make other people shut up. They see no irony in using the most inflammatory labels on anything proposed by the “opposition,” even if they once endorsed it themselves. The see no irony in using the Pledge of Allegiance as a means to shut down political discussion. They see no irony in denouncing the president for addressing school children to tell them to study hard, then setting an example of disruptive behavior in a joint session of Congress that would not be acceptable in a junior high school classroom.

Real conservatives should be worried. Yes, it can win short-term victories. Yes, it can embarrass the left and even put a stop to doing what the majority of the people elected them to do. But in the long run, it robs the movement of any legitimate role in the balance of the country.

The divisive narcissocracy of the pseudo-conservatives is now nearing the level of Jane Fonda’s anti-aircraft stunt. Is that what you want to be your place in history?

Thank you, Professor Frankfurt

The technical term for the much of the debate going on in the public forum right now is bullshit. That’s not an expletive, that’s the term Princeton philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt defined in his scholarly book On Bullshit. Professor Frankfurt can explain much of the political vitriol out there right now. The accusations aren’t lies. They’re bullshit.

The difference between a liar and a bullshitter, according to Frankfurt, “is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying.” Both truth and lying require discipline because a good liar has to pay careful attention to where the boundaries of truth are in order to hide the truth. For people only interested in throwing political hand grenades, however, Frankfurt’s bullshit provides freedom from annoyances like putting quotes in context, checking facts, and admitting that people who disagree with you are not under the control of Satan.

Nobody with any real sense really believes all the bullshit of either side. But it feels so good to say it that it takes on a life of its own and pretty soon it becomes “common knowledge” and there you are with an immutable truth that “everybody knows” (at least those who live in your narcissocracy) but just happens to be false.

As Churchill said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

The Myth of Myths

Headline, Time Magazine, July 3, 2009: 5 Media Myths Debunked by Michael Jackson's Death.

The problem with this headline is that the article it introduced had nothing to do with myths. A myth, according to this misuse of the word, is something patently false. Something that should be "debunked" because it is bunk.

But using the word in this way breaks Mark Twain’s rule number 13 of writing: “Use the right word, not its second cousin.”

What Time means to say is “five fallacies,” or “five misconceptions.” But you can find the same mistake in virtually any American periodical at least a few times in any given issue. There is no other word that publications misuse so often or with such gusto. And that's a problem because there is a real meaning for myth that is very important for us to understand. Our civilization lost a pearl of great price when it perverted the meaning of myth.

In between absolute truth and absolute false, there is whole spectrum of truth varietals and falsehood hybrids. There’s subjective truth, empirical truth and common knowledge. Then there is that popular form of falsehood professor Harry Frankfurt describes in his book On Bullshit. There is Stephen Colbert’s truthiness.

And there are myths.

A myth is a story that has power in the esoteric realm – the inner person – whether or not it’s true in the exoteric world that we usually call “real” truth – objective, empirical, provable facts. But esoteric truth is hard to grasp, vaporous, insubstantial. Not really real.

But don’t be fooled. The inner world is real. There is reality in esoterica.

Some myths actually contain exoteric truth, but that is not what gives them their power. What makes a myth powerful is the way it resonates with the inner life. Myths are the dreams of a society. They are dreams we all share. The reason certain stories can still make us cry thousands of years after they were first told is because they touch something deep in the human soul.

Was there really a Prometheus? Was there a man who was chained to a rock and had his liver eaten by vultures day after day because he dared defy the gods to give the power of fire to mankind?

It doesn’t matter.

What matters is that if we break away from the "common wisdom" we were taught and seek individual enlightenment, we become Prometheus, and we suffer for that defiant sin as he did. If you have really searched for enlightenment, then you know the promethean pain of having your guts ripped out.

And we find ourselves in other myths as well.

Was there really a Hamlet? A Romeo and/or Juliet? Was there a real Scarlett O’Hara, and if so, was she like Vivian Leigh? Did Jonah really live inside a big fish for three days? Was there really a man who embodied the myth we call Elvis? Is there a goddess of love called Venus who leads us to such heights of ecstasy and depths of pain? Is Darth Vader real? Is Richard Nixon? Snow White?

Whether these people really lived or not makes little difference in the esoteric inner world where their myths continue to have power and influence our lives.

That’s not myth in the way Time meant it in the headline of July 3. It’s not a lie. It’s real.

In fact, nothing is more real than myths.

Narcissism and narcissocracy

The traditional definition of narcissism is excessive self-love. The term comes from the ancient myth of Narcissus, a beautiful young man who fell in love with his own reflection. The word was adopted by psychology to describe psychological conditions of out of proportion self-involvement, including narcissistic personality disorder. We take the definition psychologists use and add an important factor that media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out: Narcissus did not know it was own reflection he had fallen in love with. The person he saw in the pond and tried to kiss and embrace was an illusion, but the young man thought it was a real person, someone else.

This is an important factor in understanding narcissocracy as a social phenomenon. This kind of narcissism confuses the subjective with the objective. And that is the source of the tsunami of falsehood, half-truth, truthiness, bullshit and stupidity that pervades modern America.

How can such smart people be so stupid?

“I’ve found a flaw.”

The voice in the congressional hearing room on October 28, 2008 was that of the most renowned economist in the world, the one who had guided the largest economy in world for eighteen years. Now, at the age of 82, Allen Greenspan had discovered that a fundamental assumption on which he had based his decisions was not correct.

“The whole intellectual edifice…collapsed in the summer of last year,” he told the committee investigating why the world economy was in meltdown.

“Were you wrong?” asked a congressman.

“Partially.”

Yes, and Evel Knievel was similarly partially wrong when he calculated his motorcycle jump over 19 buses and crashed breaking 37 bones.

March 17, 2008: An embattled Hillary Clinton, fighting for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States, describes some of the experience that qualifies her for that job: “I remember landing [in Tuzla, Bosnia] under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.” Others who were present dispute her account, but she sticks to her story till video shows a scene that doesn’t look at all like the one she described. She hastens to assure the world that her slip was not a problem because she really knows better. She even wrote about the same incident in a book and told the story accurately there so, see, her memory isn’t that bad.

So let’s get this straight: she knew that’s not how it really happened and that – that makes it OK?

February 12, 2008: Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court tells a BBC interviewer that torture does not violate the Constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment as long as the intent is to extract information rather than to punish. According to Justice Scalia, who is known as an “originalist” who believes in interpreting the Constitution exactly as its authors intended, the only people we could torture without violating that document, are those who have not been convicted of crimes.

We can imagine him explaining this rationale to James Madison.

Greenspan, Clinton and Scalia are not idiots. They have had the best educations our civilization has to offer, further enriched by decades of experience. Yet in these cases they look like the emperor parading down the street naked. Greenspan and Clinton have at least partly acknowledge their mistakes in these instances. Scalia has not retracted his statement on torture and presumably stands by what he said.

What happened? How can such smart people be so stupid on matters of such importance?

The Hindus call her Maya, the goddess of illusion. When we look on the dance of Maya, we think we see reality. But things are seldom what they seem when Maya takes the floor. We find it hard to take out eyes off her because she shows us what we will ourselves to see instead of what is.

Allen Greespan has spent a lifetime focusing on economics, the study of human beings and what is valuable to them. In 1996 he warned the country of its “irrational exuberance,” but in the end he was betrayed by his own faith in rationality. Maya deluded him. He failed to realize that faith in human rationality isn’t rational.

The problem with Hillary’s Bosnia sniper gaffe is not that it was the error of memory. It was an error in self-perception. Her image of herself as a woman under fire worked its way into a false memory that she repeated even though it contradicted her own writings. She wasn’t just describing an event, she was describing her self. The sniper bullets were not just a detail, they were a reason we should make her the most powerful person on earth. Her misunderstanding was not about what she did, but who she was.

And Justice Scalia no doubt viewed himself as the guardian of the hopes and dreams of the framers of the Constitution, even as he made public statements far more supportive of the oppressive, bloody regimes against which the founders rebelled.

Each of these statements was the direct result of a misperception about the self of the speaker.  The problem was that they thought they were looking out the window at the world when they were actually looking into a mirror at their own reflected images. And in each case, these learned and intelligent officials were surrounded by others who reflected back to them the image they had so carefully built up, and amplified it in the process.

The person who looks into a magic mirror and thinks he’s looking at the world is a narcissist. The people who surround him and reflect his deluded image back with amplification are Echoes. When the two combine, they form a closed system like an echo chamber where delusion itself becomes the ruling force. Intelligent people become stupid, decisions are made not by any person, but by the delusional system itself.

This is narcissocracy.