Truth vs Falsehood (39 page)

Table 3: Function of Mind—Attitudes

Self-respect stems from self-honesty and allows for the dropping of cantankerous, contentious defensiveness and the “chip on the shoulder” attitude of ego inflation, with its focus on unrealistic expectations. In a normal childhood, the give-and-take of teasing and kidding helps the maturation process that diminishes over-sensitivity and feelings of being slighted when the ego has not been catered to. Children call each other “dumb” but learn to get over it instead of being neurotically, reactively defensive.

The secret of success is that it is quite simple to change others merely by changing oneself. Is New York City a cold, rude, callous place or friendly and polite? It all depends not on how New Yorkers are at all but on who we ourselves are. A very evolved person considers New York City a friendly, almost home-town-like place. An immature person sees it as cold and rejecting because the world mirrors the reflection of one’s own projected perceptions.

Success is the automatic byproduct of constructive attitudes and simple, common-sense basics, as were described by Jack Canfield in
The Success Principles
(2004). The process is not arduous but very enjoyable and self-rewarding. Success is the consequence of rather simple principles.

The development of higher mind is strongly supported by early-life exposure to aesthetics, especially classical music, the arts, ballet, and nature, as well as religious upbringing (even if it is rejected in later life), all of which have a positive influence on developing interconnected energy patterns and neuronal configurations in the physical brain itself.

Freedom and the Ego

The basis of war, crime, and all social conflict, including genocide, is diagnosed as originating from the core of the ego itself, specifically the infantile ego, with its impatient wants, loud protests, and unrealistic expectations. With maturation, the grandiosity of the ego (‘unruly ox’ of the Zen ox-herding pictures) becomes quieter, tamer, and easier to ride. The evolution of psychological consciousness occurs by several different mechanisms, as shown below.

1.  
Repression:
The primitive drives are repressed, subsequently denied, and then projected onto others (social paranoia).

2.  
Surrender and Sublimation:
With good parenting, narcissistic primitive drives are given up in return for a better gain, such as love, acceptance, and identification with supportive parents and authority figures.

3.   Compliance:
This is a way of avoiding maturation and represents the continuance of primitiveness because egocentricity is only suppressed, and the omnipotence/grandiosity of the inner narcissistic ‘king baby’ attitude persists. This results in seeing all thwarting of inner wants as arbitrary, hateful authoritarianism, which results in resentment, rebellion, defiance, and persistent immaturity. This duality also leads to serious distortions of reality, such as splitting events into the perpetrator/victim model that is then projected onto society with extremely dire consequences. It is this split in the narcissistic ego that has cost the lives of over one hundred million people in the last century.

Thus, the failure of maturation leads to pathologic personality disorders, including criminality, chronic political dissidence, and the egomania of the grandiose tyrants and dictators who kill not only their countrymen but even their own family members.

Freedom Versus Infantilism

The infantile ego misinterprets freedom as indulgent libertinism and the instant gratification of hedonism, with no concern for others. In attenuated form, this person constantly pushes the envelope and seeks to overturn any and all restrictions. It also leads to the unrealistic expectation that there should be no consequences for transgressing boundaries. This is the artificially induced expectation that is now notable among teenagers who have been inculcated with the idea that they are victims and therefore not answerable for social transgressions, resulting in deleterious attitudes (as was noted by Bill Cosby who saw that the adolescents were victims of politicized ‘victimology’ brainwashing).

Extremism eventually precipitates counter-reaction as the “shock jocks” of the public media have recently discovered. Abuse of a ‘good thing’ and nonintegrous exploitation are self-defeating because they violate the basic requirements of social structure and survival. Exploitation of freedom leads to its loss.

Frustration of the narcissistic ego is the most frequent trigger for hatred, which, in current society, is freely expressed openly towards all authority figures and institutions. Politically, the infantile ego is atheistic and anarchist, which tends toward paranoia and the prevalent perceptual distortion that sees all situations in terms of perpetrator/victim. Over the last few decades, lack of social development has been blamed on the “me” generation of the 1960s in which it was “cool” to flaunt all social conventions. The downside was the naïveté of that position, which ignores consequences that, as was discovered, can be quite grave indeed, including even death or life imprisonment.

As was explained in the evolution of life on this planet, the earliest life forms were innately ‘greedy’, and in the human, this persists as a constant hunger/wantingness/desire that is insatiable. The persistence of an unmitigated narcissistic ego in adulthood leads to a personality that is bitter and basically feels ‘deprived’. The inner vanity cannot be satiated, which leads to being ‘sensitive’ to real or imaginary slights. Thus, status seeking, jealousy, and envy in the form of malice and gossip are social attributes that characterize “back stabbers” who turn on a friend or become a “whistle blower” out of malice rather than integrity. (The situation makes the difference.) Thus, such persons are not capable of loyalty and are quick to sell out others and violate their trust. The same psychodynamics apply to those who turn against their own country, fellow colleagues, or comrades in arms.

That hostility to (parental) authority is intrinsic to current political trends is exemplified by the progressive disenfranchisement of legal parental authority and functions that are now replaced by government-sponsored school agendas, e.g., sexuality, ethics, etc. This is characteristic of all totalitarianism, in which programming of children replaces traditional parental functions (e.g., Hitler’s youth, Mao’s China, and Islamic militants). Children are deliberately programmed with “new think,” memes, and social and political attitudes. The state replaces the parental role and then makes the rules. Because the young are vulnerable and malleable, they are routinely preyed upon by power seekers, from Islamic Mullahs to supposed ‘liberationists’, all of whom seek control and feed off the naïvetè of the young.

With maturity, social life is seen as a balance and consequence of trade-offs in which animal impulses are sublimated in return for higher gains, such as love, security, success, respect, self-esteem, and personal liberty. Whether a boundary or social/legal regulation is restrictive or protective is reflective of a point of view rather than some external reality. Society thus reflects collective ignorance but also collective wisdom, which often comes at the price of great suffering and pain. Unrestrained by society, the narcissistic ego is like an engine without a flywheel, and with maturity, one begins to understand that police, laws, ethics, rationality, and morality ensure one’s true freedom by denying its illusory substitute of unaccountability and nonresponsibility.

In the intellectual realm, infantilism sees reason, logic, morality, and ethics as arbitrary authoritarian impositions and restrictions, and, therefore, that sublevel of society glorifies the criminal, the criminal culture, and the vulgar. It sees the anarchist as a hero and concordantly vilifies esthetics and beauty. The ego is clever and can rationalize its infantile motivations of hatred and violence by either getting rid of God or, paradoxically, by justifying the massacring of others in the “name of God” (Allah), i.e., Jihad.

The Dream “Freedom” of the Id

The inflated infantile ego ‘demands’ and grandiosely feels ‘entitled’ to and is indignant over its ‘rights’ and expects to be allowed self-indulgence with no consequences or accountability. Therefore, social structure is seen overall as the great frustrator of impulsiveness. The core of the ego is a rebellious anarchist, atheist, and exhibitionist that expects life to be an endless Roman orgy, including intoxicated abandon and polymorphous, perverse sexuality that permits abuse of the naïve and vulnerable. Even children are exempt from restrictions, and their victimization should be approved by society and even made legal by the sophistry of declaring that such predatory behavior is excused as “free speech” (e.g., child pornography). The same mind processes seek to change the meaning of the term “free speech” to instead denote totally free and unrestricted ‘expression’ or ‘behaviors’. Thereby, the wolf is disguised in the sheep’s clothing of a political slogan.

What identifies the core of the narcissistic ego is its inability and refusal to accept personal responsibility, and any such request is vociferously rejected as being oppressive. It feeds off the false sense of empowerment of being the ‘victim’ and distorts reality in order to be seen as the victim. At this point, social discernment falters under a barrage of propaganda that obscures the differentiation between progress and regression. It cannot discern the difference between progressive and degenerative, despite history’s example that all great empires have fallen by virtue of moral decay from within rather than by aggression from without. The reason for this is quite obvious—as the calibration level diminishes, so does the level of power; therefore, the inner strength to survive is lost, both individually and collectively.

With maturity, authority is seen not just as a ‘bad guy’ where the criminal is pictured as a victim; on the contrary, authority as societal representatives is seen as protective. To the criminal, the police are enemies; to the law abiding, they are friends. Integrous people feel more secure if they know that public events and streets are under video surveillance, but a guilty and nonintegrous person, because of the innate paranoia that accompanies such attitudes, resents and hates public surveillance, which they feel is an invasion of their ‘rights’. Surveillance cameras are a part and parcel of current society and exist because of the narcissistic personalities that abound in that society. Casinos and department stores are as sophisticated about surveillance as are governmental investigative agencies and frequently even better at it.

Narcissism is inherently paranoid and therefore constantly tries to hide, which is an absurdity in today’s world of computers, which keep an ongoing dossier on everyone in minute detail that is available worldwide. Every detail of ‘personal’ life is automatically revealed as a cumulative trail that tracks any purchases, inquiries to web sites, financial moves, clues to interests, politics, education, and more. Everyone lives in the public domain and protestors merely come up on the Internet databases identified as such.

The projection of distorted perception has disastrous fallout when political pressure groups misapply it to governmental agencies. The current disasters in America and elsewhere in the world affecting American embassies and military operations are the unintended consequence that followed well-intentioned but naïve and unrealistic constraints on critical agencies, thus impairing their capacity to function in protecting the lives and welfare of the citizenry. Historically, the same naïveté also blinded Secretary of War Stimson’s (cal. 180) forewarnings of the Japanese movements prior to World War II, a similar event that was abetted by the lack of reality testing exhibited by Neville Chamberlain (cal. 185) who, after meeting with Hitler, returned to England with the slogan “Peace in our time.” (Hitler scoffed at his “stupidity.”) Appeasement of terrorism calibrates at 155. It is viewed with contempt as weakness and cowardice and invites aggression (i.e., wolf-pack animal mentality). Below calibration level 200, the strong attack the weak; above 200, they protect the weak.