From Political misuses of psychiatry- Part !- "diagnosing Dubya"
As a practicing psychiatrist who writes on political subjects, I notice how psychiatric thinking and terminology has pervaded our culture. It's very useful in helping people who are genuinely mentally ill, but often obfuscates situations which are not properly in the domain of psychiatry.
"Diagnosing Dubya"- is the title of a widely circulated piece I wrote in October 2002 http://www.counterpunch.org/wolman1002.html . It was written when Bush was talking about invading Iraq WITHOUT consulting either Congress or the UN.
At the time, the piece helped to highlight how extreme Bush's position was, and to peel off the Teflon coat which he donned after 9-11 the previous year. Soon thereafter, sanity prevailed, and Bush consulted both bodies, getting a green light from Congress and ignoring the red light from the UN.
Now, 4 years later, people are still diagnosing Dubya. KAthryn Wurmser argues that he is a dry drunk and can't help himself. http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1230-21.htm
A Formal Intervention with a Dry Drunk President
by Katherine van Wormer
Others argue that he has ADD. Or he's psychotic, lost in a fantasy world, and should be removed from office on psychiatric grounds.
None of this addresses the systematic lying and hypocrisy which Bush shows. Nor does it explain why the power brokers in Washington continue to cooperate with him. If he were truly disabled mentally, they would have gotten rid of him long ago. But Bush has survived a devastating election, and gone on to escalate in Iraq, with the cooperation of the "opposition" party, even though the Democrats got a clear mandate from the electorate to get us out of there ASAP. Instead, the Dems have again increased the funding for the occupation, and seem likely to go along with the troop "surge" that Bush is pushing. More dead Americans and Iraqis, more hemorrhaging of the treasury, while Carlyle and Halliburton (Bush and Cheney) get richer.
All the evidence points to a diagnosis of sociopathic personality disorder, which is psychiatrese for EVIL. Bush is a master manipulator and liar, and has systematically accumulated so much power that the loss of his electoral base does not matter. He has entangled so many Democratic Congresspeople in his web of corruption that exposing him risks exposing them to criminal charges as well. We don't know what hooks Bush has into Congress, what sort of blackmail and bribery has gone on, but there is no other explanation for the reluctance of Pelosi et al to challenge him in any meaningful way, given the will of the people they are supposed to represent.
Using psychiatric terminology to describe a demagogue who is destroying the legal basis of government- the Constitution- and plundering the treasury is not only confusing, it diverts the focus of the public from Bush's criminal behavior, where it properly belongs. Instead, people play the intellectual game of diagnosis, which has no possible political application. There is no precedent in this country, that I know of, for removing a high official from office on the basis of mental illness. If the American Psychiatric Association (APA) were to petition Congress to consider impeachment on the basis that Bush is insane, this could conceivably lead somewhere, but the APA is tied into the pharmaceutical companies, which are among Bush's main supporters and beneficiaries, so this will not happen.
I suggest that people refrain from psychiatric diagnosis where Bush (and Cheney) are concerned, and concentrate on the moral issues of good and evil, right and wrong, accountability for criminal behavior, justice.
From The psychopathic origins of Bush/GOP wars, torture, and injustice
Delusions are typically associated with 'psychoses' --schizophrenia, global psychopathology. I am inclined to assign Bush and his supporters into one of two camps: those who are truly 'delusional' and those who exploit delusions for political gain, i.e, those who know better but tell the lies anyway knowing that they will be eagerly lapped up by those whose belief in them is irrational and symptomatic.
Yet another category are those 'Republicans' who may know better but for emotional reasons choose to support Bush. It was Republicans of this sort who supported the disastrous economic policies of Ronald Reagan, 'trickle down' theory, in particular, because it made them 'feel good about themselves'. The tax cuts, they willfully believed, would not merely make them even richer but monies not paid in taxes would somehow 'trickle down' and assuage them of the guilt they might have felt about being petty, greedy, intellectually dishonest members of a self-absorbed and 'psychopathic' elite of 'Right Wing Authoritarians'.
The last string of studies I want to lay before you ... concerns authoritarians' willingness to hold officials accountable for their misdeeds. Or rather, their lack of willingness--which catches your eye because high RWAs generally favor punishing the bejabbers out of misdoers. But they proved less likely than most people to punish a police officer who beat up a handcuffed demonstrator, or a chief of detectives who assaulted an accused child molester being held in jail, or--paralleling the trial of US Army Lt. William Calley--an Air Force officer convicted of murder after leading unauthorized raids on Vietnamese villages.
...
If some day George W. Bush is indicted for authorizing torture, you can bet your bottom dollar the high RWAs will howl to the heavens in protest. It won't matter how extensive the torture was, how cruel and sickening it was, how many years it went on, how many prisoners died, how devious Bush was in trying to evade America's laws and traditional stand against torture, or how many treaties the US
broke. Such an indictment would grind right up against the core of authoritarian followers, and they won't have it. Maybe they'll even say, "The president was busy running the war. He didn't really know. It was all done by Rumsfeld and others."--Altermeyer, op cit
Applying standards inequitably must surely stem from the observed inability of 'conservatives' to infer accurately, in other words, think logically. I've often charged that 'conservatives' work backward from conclusions, in a biased search for supporting premises. Moreover, Dick Cheney is a text-book example, quashing facts that would lead one to conclusions not liked by the conservative 'authoritarian' in power. Just recently, Cheney has moved to quash a report that supports critics of the Bush administration with regard to the greenhouse effect.
"This is the story of a White House and vice president's office that work together to squelch information, to squash it, to stop it from getting to the public so that there would be no information out there, so that there wouldn't be a push for them to act," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who appeared with Burnett at a press conference on Capitol Hill Tuesday. Boxer accused White House Press Secretary Dana Perino of lying about the redaction of Gerberding's testimony and engaging in a cover-up.
--Cheney Wanted Cuts in Climate Change Testimony, Boxer Claims Cover-Up, ABC News
Thus --not only will conservative infer incorrectly from any given set of premises or facts, they will work backward from cherished shibboleths (like 'supply side economics') in bias search for premises to support the conclusions they've already embraced either through ignorance, prejudice or malice. Failing that, conservatives like Dick Cheney, will work actively to suppress information that supports or proves opposing conclusions. It is in this mindset that we find the origins of the GOPs attack on the Bill of Rights.
Altermeyer found the inability of 'conservatives' to be measurable; in fact, he says, conservatives have a problem with 'evidence' in general. This is an issue that seems especially relevant to the debate about 'torture', a debate in which the 'conservative' defense of Bush is flatly indefensible.
Authoritarian followers aren't going to question, they're going to parrot. After all, in the ethnocentric mind "We are the Good Guys and our opponents are abominations"--which is precisely the thinking of the Islamic authoritarian followers who become suicide bombers in Iraq. And if we turn out not to be such good guys, as news of massacres and the torture and murder of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers, by the CIA, and by the arms-length "companies" set up to torture prisoners becomes known, authoritarian followers simply don't want to know. It was just a few, lower level "bad apples." Didn't the president say he was sickened by the revelations of torture, and all American wrong-doers would be punished?
...
Sitting in the jury room of the Port Angeles, Washington court house in 1989, Mary Wegmann might have felt she had suddenly been transferred to a parallel 76 universe in some Twilight Zone story. For certain fellow-jury members seemed to have attended a different trial than the one she had just witnessed. They could not remember some pieces of evidence, they invented evidence that did not exist, and they steadily made erroneous inferences from the material that everyone could agree on. Encountering my research as she was later developing her Ph.D. dissertation project, she suspected the people who "got it wrong" had been mainly high RWAs. So she recruited a sample of adults from the Clallam County jury list, and a group of students from Peninsula College and gave them various memory and inference tests. For example, they listened to a tape of two lawyers debating a school segregation case on a McNeil/Lehrer News Hour program. Wegmann found High RWAs indeed had more trouble remembering details of the material they'd encountered, and they made more incorrect inferences on a reasoning test than others usually did. Overall, the authoritarians had lots of trouble simply thinking straight.
Intrigued, I gave the inferences test that Mary Wegmann had used to two large samples of students at my university. In both studies high RWAs went down in flames more than others did. They particularly had trouble figuring out that an inference or deduction was wrong. To illustrate, suppose they had gotten the following syllogism:
All fish live in the sea.
Sharks live in the sea..
Therefore, sharks are fish.The conclusion does not follow, but high RWAs would be more likely to say the reasoning is correct than most people would. If you ask them why it seems right, they would likely tell you, "Because sharks are fish." In other words, they thought the reasoning was sound because they agreed with the last statement. If the conclusion is right, they figure, then the reasoning must have been right. Or to put it another way, they don't "get it" that the reasoning matters--especially on a reasoning test.
Authoritarians do not 'infer' well; in other words, as a class, they lack critical thinking skills, logic! They are often fail to execute simply syllogisms.
A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in "fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity".
As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report's four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.
All of them "preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality".
Republicans are demanding to know why the psychologists behind the report, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, received $1.2m in public funds for their research from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance.
"This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic cliches and stereotypes," the authors argue in the Psychological Bulletin.
One of the psychologists behind the study, Jack Glaser, said the aversion to shades of grey and the need for "closure" could explain the fact that the Bush administration ignored intelligence that contradicted its beliefs about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
The authors, presumably aware of the outrage they were likely to trigger, added a disclaimer that their study "does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false".
Another author, Arie Kruglanski, of the University of Maryland, said he had received hate mail since the article was published, but he insisted that the study "is not critical of conservatives at all". "The variables we talk about are general human dimensions," he said. "These are the same dimensions that contribute to loyalty and commitment to the group. Liberals might be less intolerant of ambiguity, but they may be less decisive, less committed, less loyal."
How about we teach people while they are still in school real critical thinking skills! Now --that would surely shake up the political landscape and blast holes in the 'conventional wisdom', It would also put more than a few loudmouths, pundits, and poll-impaired consultants out of a job! Somehow --the message must be made clear even to conservatives, in language that they must understand: torture is not OK! EVER! It is immoral and it is a war crime! Bush is culpable and should be prosecuted.
From The Psychopathology of the Republican
The Republican psychology, or psychopathology, is borne of fear and weakness and, thus promulgates both. As one of our strongest Presidents, a Democrat who won a real war with a legitimate enemy said, "The only thing to fear is fear itself." Well, today, in light of the continual "boogeymaning" of the country, we might paraphrase President Roosevelt. "The only thing to fear is fear itself and those who stoke it and those who profit from it. In other words, the only thing to fear is . . . those who reject the basic goodness of man, those who huddle in St. Paul this week and many of those who call themselves "Republicans".
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