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America the Narcissist By: Sam Vaknin on 7/11/2006; 8:12 AM By Sam Vaknin Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited" The majority of worldwide respondents to the last two global Pew enter surveys (in 2002 and 2006) regarded the United States as the greatest menace to world peace - far greater than the likes of Iraq or China. Thinkers and scholars as diverse as Christopher Lasch in "The Cultural Narcissist" and Theodore Millon in "Personality Disorders of Everyday Life" have singled out the United States as the quintessential narcissistic society. This pathology can be traced back and attributed to a confluence of historical events and processes, the equivalents of trauma and abuse in an individual's early childhood. The United States of America started out as a series of loosely connected, remote, savage, and negligible colonial outposts. The denizens of these settlements were former victims of religious persecution, indentured servants, lapsed nobility, and other refugees. Their Declaration of Independence reads like a maudlin list of grievances coupled with desperate protestations of love and loyalty to their abuser, the King of Britain. The inhabitants of the colonies defended against their perceived helplessness and very real inferiority with compensatory, imagined, and feigned superiority and fantasies of omnipotence. Hence the rough, immutable kernel of American narcissism. The United States was (until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s) and still is, in some important respects, a pre-Enlightenment, white supremacist society. It is rife with superstition, prejudice, conspicuous religiosity, intolerance, philistinism, and lack of social solidarity. Its religiosity is overt, aggressive, virulent and ubiquitous. It is replete with an eschatology, which involves a changing cast of demonized "enemies", both political and cultural. Americans' religion is a manifestation of their "Chosen People Syndrome". They are missionary, messianic, zealous, fanatical, and nauseatingly self-righteous, bigoted, and hypocritical. This is especially discernible in the double-speak and double-standard that underlies American foreign policy. American altruism is misanthropic and compulsive. They often give merely in order to control, manipulate, and sadistically humiliate the recipients. Narcissism is frequently comorbid with paranoia. Americans cultivate and nurture a siege mentality which leads to violent acting out and unbridled jingoism. Their persecutory delusions sit well with their adherence to social Darwinism (natural selection of the fittest, let the weaker fall by the wayside, might is right, etc.). Consequently, the United states always finds itself in company with the least palatable regimes in the world: together with Nazi Germany it had a working eugenics program, together with the likes of Saudi Arabia it executes its prisoners, it was the last developed nation to abolish slavery, alone with South Africa it had instituted official apartheid in a vast swathe of its territory. Add to this volatile mix an ethos of malignant individualism, racism both latent and overt, a trampling, "no holds barred" ambitiousness, competitiveness, frontier violence-based morality, and proud simple-mindedness - and an ominous portrait of the United States as a deeply disturbed polity emerges. ============================================================== AUTHOR BIO (must be included with the article) Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician, Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and Suite101. Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of Macedonia. Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com
Pre-enlightenment? White Supremist? By: r.c.fancher on 8/3/2006; 6:37 PM If one is going to refer to White Supremecy, one can also refer to liberties taken in the name of cultural & ethnic diversity, such as firing workers just because they're White, & burdening White officeres to show special restraint when confronting minority suspects. There are legitimate ethnic issues that White Supremecy gives a bad name to. If White Supremecy defines you as American, what does declaring it so define you as? Michael Savage said it well when he said "Boarders, language , culture." Any other country you go into, it's considered your burden to assimulate your language to theirs. Not the other way around. It's my understanding that no nation has ever changed it's primary language or primary ethnicicity without a very negative effect on the replaced culture. A strong example is encumbant dispatchers being terminated from the fire department because they didn't know the language of some of the firefighters on dispatch. How about requiring the firefighters learn english b/4 they get hired? All White people are not White Supremecists, nor are all people who make this declaration. It's the so called pre-enlightened backwards nature of our culture that frees people here up to say the things you do.
RE: America the Narcissist By: Brian Webber on 7/30/2006; 1:56 PM When you quote a malignant racist and homophobe like Savage you lose any credibility you might have had. BTW, this whole "I lost a job because of a black man" thing is a myth. No one has ever been able to prove that such a thing has actually happened. It's always "well, my brother says..." or something like that. P.S. You do know that English is one of the hardest languages to learn right? I mean Christ there are people who are born here, to two English speaking parents, who can't speak it correctly!
RE: America the Narcissist By: Brian Carnell on 7/30/2006; 11:06 PM Brian, 1. Agree with you about Dan Savage. 2. Completely disagree with "this whole...thing is a myth." In fact there are plenty of cases where courts were willing to call illegal quota systems what they were - illegal quota systems that discriminated against white employees. HUD, for example, appears to engage in blatant racial and sexual discrimination and has been forced to settle at least one lawsuit brought by a WM employee. And there are dozens of others. When, as a society, we continue to institutionalize racial and sexual discrimination, it seems odd to be shocked or surprised that it continues to occur. I would not say that this is anywhere near as pervasive as other, more traditional forms of racial and sexual discrimination, but all forms of it should be intolerable.
RE: America the Narcissist By: Brian Webber on 7/31/2006; 3:01 AM I was talking about MICHAEL Savage. Dan Savage is the gay advice columnist who I read every week. MICHAEL Savage is the one who got fired from MSNBC for telling a caller to "get AIDS and die you pig." But yeah I can see your point about discrimination. After all, what chance for advancement have white men ever relaly had in thsi country? Yeah, that was sarcasm.
RE: America the Narcissist By: r.c.fancher on 8/4/2006; 2:23 AM Re:English is one of the hardest languages to learn.. I mean Christ there are people who are born here, to two English speaking parents, who can't speak it correctly! _______________________________________________________________________________ Which makes more sense, to NOT hire applicants because they can't speak the one language the encumbant workers understand, or to fire encumbant encumbant workers because they don't understand the language of the new workers as well as their own? It's not a matter of what's hard & what's easy, it's a matter of who should adjust to who? To make it the encumbant's onas to adjust to incoming help is post facto & retroactive. If they met the terms to get hired in the 1st place, they've met the terms to stay hired. Everything else revolves around this. PS If someone doesn't learn correct English from 2 articulate parents, who will they learn the easier language from & what would that language be? Are other languages really that easy?
I see what he means. By: r.c.fancher on 8/3/2006; 6:34 PM Namely about other developed nations being less racist. I think I remember some time in the post 911 past where the UK officials actually owned up the fact that racially profiling White elderly women at airport check points was counterproductive to racial egalitarianism, something American security would do well to follow. heh-heh-heh-heh!
Re:English is one of the hardest languages to learn By: r.c.fancher on 8/19/2006; 12:23 PM Ah. That would explain why Tonto is fluent in all tribal tongues, but only speaks broken English.
RE: America the Narcissist By: Brian Webber on 8/24/2006; 9:29 AM On the other hand, if you start yanking everyone who looks Arabic out of line, then they'll just recruit people who don't "look" Arabic, and racial profiling will continue to be a bad idea. When you narrow the net, it's easier to get around. Not that the racists who push for the idea care, they just need us to be afraid so they can stay in office. People who aren't perpeutally scared tend not to vote Republican.
People who aren't perpeutally scared tend not to vote Republican By: r.c.fancher on 9/23/2006; 1:46 PM Good point. I'll never let fear of Global warming influence my vote again.
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