The best diagnostic clues may come from the Freedom of Information Act. I have been reading de-classified documents from the CIA about Iraq this week. The docs reach back to before the time Saddam murdered his way into power…
…so far back in fact that Saddam’s name is spelled Hussyn, and so far back that the writer of some of the documents called him Saddam Tikriti, Tikriti used as his surname, the writer seeming not to realize Tikriti was the name of both Saddam’s tribal affiliation and home place; and as such, is attached at the end of everyone’s name who is from that tribe, sort of as if after our surnames, also was tacked on the name, “Usa.”
Nonetheless, it was breathtaking to see that Iraq was in the 20th century a constitutional republic that was hijacked, that Britain had once occupied the entire area and still had an interest in Iraq via Tony Blair, that this was not a new and sudden interest, but an old exploitative one of memory
… and that in the old moldering war between Iraq and Iran, the USA took up with Iraq, befriended Saddam, even though the CIA records from that time clearly provided more than one report that Saddam was vicious and unreliable and had closed out, exiled or murdered any who didn’t agree with him or threatened him. A template of a dictator…
According to the CIA top secret reports now declassified, still with some blobs of black Magic Marker purporting to shield names… although any person who can draw a psychological “complete-this-picture-test” can, more than half the time guess what lies under the black blot. It is clear from the documents that the USA has an 8 decade long, at least, history of sleeping around in the mideast, first this side, then the other, with thus far, no lasting fealty.
Then we come to the present, to one of the strangest CIA documents declassified that tells in some detail, if one were so inclined, how to smuggle any number of things and people and parts through in port containers. It is right there in black and soiled white on the page
… and so also, are continuous reports on Syria, Saudi Arabia, and other mideast countries, reports that say in essence, not about the most often good citizens per se, but about those in power over the citizens… ‘unstable,’ ‘unreliable processes,’ ‘old religious avengings expected to go on yet for decades,’ ‘egregious harm to large numbers of minorities,’ ‘known terrorism groups’ in each country..;. and one wonders how George Bush could ever have considered selling management of US ports to mideast interests. Doesn’t anyone read the CIA documentations to him, those clear documents that advise, have advised for decades now, to the exact contrary?
What is the psychology of a President who doesn’t read his own Intelligence arm’s classified or declassified documents about the very country he is waging war on/for… Why doesn’t he have an astute reader who reads for him? What is his psychology anyway?
Actually, he does have readers; that’s the job of his cabinet and all, ALL his advisors. In reading so many direct reports of his meetings, his speeches, his casual conversations, I find evidence over and over, that President Bush only listens to the one note he himself can sing… and he waits to hear that one bellowing note in others and then grabs that one-note singer to his breast as long lost brother, ghost of sister future. That’s the Brownie Good Job, the Alberto Gonzales, go get em, the Harriet Miers hubris shot.
The other readers who sing what they know, the wiser ones who sing many notes, who sing open doors and ideas, who sing wisdom and who sing history, who sing about customs and culture and who sing cautions and warnings… those President Bush appears to simply not hear. Tone deaf. Waiting to hear only the one bellow of a note that runs into his ears like honey. Proof to him, that others are loyal to him, to his ideal, to his idea.
So, not only does there seem to be complete disrespect for past CIA intelligence on Iraq, even caviling about disregarding and running right over it by the current Admin, but also how textbook the definition of chauvinism has been played out by this Admin: That one note= chauvinism. This is what I would understand underlies chauvinism, and I don’t at all mean the overly leukocyted versions some of the old guard feminist used to use without explanation:
Here… chauvinism: exaggerated patria; allegiance to the father, to patriotism, unable to be ‘patria potestas’ liberated from the father’s weal… to be confined to what the father, that is the dominant principle of the psyche, the dominant principle that holds the entire rest of the psyche hostage… what ‘the father’ thinks is best for all… fealty to father thereby means fealty to unexamined principles …based on ‘loyalty without thought.’
To think beyond one note only, is to be banned entirely. To think=disloyalty.
I would venture a diagnosis for hubraic chauvinism: There is an old fashioned word for it: megalomania.
Megalomania as a concept has nowadays most often been absorbed into the diagnosis of bi=polar disorder, which used to be called manic-depression. People with this disorder do not get up in the morning and decide they will be this way. We shrinks believe they themselves suffer at the mercy of it; that insofar as we know, it is at one level an organic disorder that imbalances the brain chemicals needed for stable mood and ideation and down to earth sense of identity.
Megalomania can be considered in several lights, and properly needs many pages to define in all its aspects. But essentially megalomania is a heightened state of impracticality and over-enthusiasm which bolsters, at best, a deflated ego. At its most difficult, megalomania presses a person into outer behaviors that reflect an inner and ongoing excoriation of ego. This appears to come from an interior and dogged sensation of carrying an ever-wounded sense of inferiority.
In a way, one could say a leader, any leader, who is not stable in depth and breadth of personality and development, rules a people and a nation to compensate their own illness. Their lashings out, their determinations, their rewarding of persons, and their penalizing of others, are actually being used as medicine to mediate their own lostness.
And they reward those who can sing the one note they recognize as soothing. And they ostracize, punish, try to shame, those whose notes they do not recognize, because those notes cause them agitation and remind them, they cannot think well, and are therefore inferior. They cannot think well, not because they are stupid, but because they are sewn into an organic brain chemical disorder, that without intervention of an actual medicine, grabs them out of themselves and heads them into where angels properly fear to tread.
Persons with this disorder who do not take lithium and Dilantin and other combinations of drugs, newer and older, both… often attempt to self-medicate with alcohol, illicit drugs, sometimes buddyship… finding like-kind who soothe them almost into somnolence.
Megalomania has the feature of being obsessed with the exercise of power, especially in saying how life will be for others; this can masquerade as an inflationary intention of good for others, when in fact, because of lack of realistic parameters, and worse, inability to judge other humans abilities and needs in depth, they actually cause others grotesque suffering instead of the shiny vision the disordered person told everyone was their truest, highest goal.
Megalomania blinds its host to how to weigh persons, personalities, trajectories, outcomes accurately. It is well known that the person suffering from this disorder has vapidness and poor judgment, as a result. They cannot imagine outcomes anywhere near the mark, nor do they see causations nor what is acausal, accurately. Still, it is not something the person rises each day determined to do; the illness has a hold of them.
This disorder creates in the persons’ mind, delusion about their power reach and their importance in the world. When given great power, they typically become despots, or weaklings who must be guided by the vizier, because at one extreme, there is often an incipient and labile psychosis that makes them feel invulnerable to criticisms.
Under continual criticisms they do not, like normal people, react in ways that will lessen the criticism, no matter how harsh or violent that criticism becomes… because they are deluded and simply cannot hear, or respond to pain… not in self… not in others.
In a manic state, the person feels no hurt, no agony, and often because these are the markers of conscience, they do not feel their own conscience crying out for a better, or different way of life. Thus, they cannot imagine anyone else’s pain either. Megalomania can carry an oddly anesthetized state of mind.
Sometimes a paranoid disorder is operative also, and this makes the person suffering from megalomania cause others to suffer even more, as he points them out as “disloyal” … that being the word more often than not: disloyal. The paranoid overlay determines the worth of people by whether they cause the host to feel badly or not. If they cause the host to feel bad, they are traitors.
In paranoia, it is truly imagined not that people are necessarily ‘out to get me,’ but rather that the person so afflicted has been chosen by God, and others are trying to spoil God’s plan. They imagine themselves to be The Protector of God and must fight off any pretenders or infidels. They are not able to imagine that God may be five billion-aeterna times more capable of taking care of whatever God takes care of, than they are.
But that is megalomania: feeling as though one is ultimate power on earth and thereby deluded into thinking one is ‘called’ in ways most others, who think within a broad spectrum of normal, would never agree with. Protecting civil liberties, acting effectively toward the needs of the vulnerable, cannot be imagined in a state of megalomania; the space of protecting humans is taken up with protecting the person’s premise of God.
The megalomaniac cannot imagine that they are caught in delusions of grandeur. A delusion, incidentally, having a seed of truth in it, but the conclusion drawn is in complete error. “I am the father of this family” may be true. “I am the father of this family and therefore I do with them what I want,” is not at all true in the sense of one following the other as cosmic law. But the megalomania causes a person to not see their lust for power as their attempt to self-medicate.
Too, a relatively well-balanced person ought not be too hard on themselves for not realizing this disorder immediately in one suffering from it. Seasoned shrinks sometimes miss the diagnosis too, the reason being that the person with this affliction walks and talks and combs their hair and holds a job and shows up for just about everything…. they just sort of seem excitable and enthusiastic, and often this is energizing to be around; they dole out rewards from whatever resources they have, and oddly, if they have few resources to grant others wishes come true with, the fact that something is seriously awry becomes obvious more quickly.
Conversely, when a person with this disorder has many resources, say they are wealthy, or have endless ‘contacts’ … the disorder may for quite some time go un-noticed, for many people are lining up to get in on the bounty, on the gift-giving; and some who are more wily come to plunder, knowing full well which one note to bellow. If you think of the weakling princes and kings of history, they are most often controlled by smiling treacherers who fawn on them publicly all the whilst singing the one-note song, but disdaining them and worse, behind their backs.
And sure enough all who rush to stand in line singing the one note, despite their motives differing, are rewarded grandly, with status, appointments, limelight, smiles, power, and for some, most importantly of all, by being granted entree into ‘an inner circle,’ even though it is one that seeps poison and anesthesia and a malignant insistence on group-think everywhere it goes.
Even so, even in the midst of it all, even with good people holding up mirrors on every side, those suffering from megalomania and causing others to suffer as a result too, do not see their egotism… they do not see themselves as inflated, as constantly intruding and stepping over other people’s boundaries. They see ‘not enough yet.’ They see, ‘still need more.’ They see, ‘wanna be a hero, anyway I can.’ They see, ‘If I cant be a hero, I can at least dress the part.”
There are any number of dictators who dressed themselves as though they were great warriors what with their pot bellies and flat feet and poorly shaven faces and lack of real muscle and all. And not to say any of those physical characteristics are inferior, they aren’t; I know many profoundly lovable and loving people with one or more of those exact features. But rather, to say that megalomania causes a person to have extreme lack of self-sight. It is the folie de grandeur, that causes this, a conceit that comes not from thinking one is great, but from the core self believing one is nothing… and that this horrible truth must be dressed up at all costs, and the high agitation that comes from knowing one is inferior, must be soothed by oneself and by others, also at all costs.
I think the display George Bush made of himself dressed as a warrior aboard the “Mission Accomplished” ship, a warriorship he had not earned, in fact had treated desultorily when he had his chance long ago, a warriorship he could never earn now as a middle aged softbody… I think it was seeing him dressed out with banner staged behind him, that I thought ‘things just aren’t adding up right here.’
The petulant assertion: I am the Decider. The ever-present breathless, running out of breath too fast, way of speaking, what we call, ‘pressured speech,’ and the nervous snickering that is not laughter but more like a strange unmanly ‘heh heh heh,’ at words and thoughts and situations that are not even remotely funny, as though hearing something private that is funny only to himself… Watching other people laughing then, but not knowing why they’re laughing… an old old directive: whatever the king thinks is funny, you better think is funny too, or else…
well….you know sometimes its just plain ordinary people who are the wisest about the matters of seeing into others psychologically, about seeing the materia of a gross inferiority complex… as a military wife for two decades to a man USAF for 21 years, I can only relay this about Bush dressing up in pilot gear on the deck of ‘Mission Accomplished’ ship, as though he had ever flown more than a kite…
…like out West where the old ranchers say about tinhorn wanna-bes, ‘The bigger the hat, the fewer the cows’… well, amongst the military vets who have many years in, they’re a bit more polite: “Not all the Han Solo gear hanging on the front of a city cowboy, can grow him a real pair.â€