|
    
OPEN LEFT CAMPAIGNS
Less Recent
|
 Friends of the Earth thanks the OpenLeft community for the ideas you generate and your contributions to the progressive movement. blog advertising is good for you blog advertising is good for you
LIBERAL INSTITUTIONS
STATE BLOGS
|
||||
Not everyone in the system is an NPD type, but the milieu, the culture and tone, is set by the dynamics of the personality type. And the personality type requires a large coterie of weak egos who try to attach themselves or associate themselves with the dominant personalities and thereby feel big and important themselves. So, they flatter and follow the power to manage their own deeply felt insecurities.
They collectively turn a blind eye to that which the culture does not want to see, and attack with prejudice and character assassination anyone who holds up a mirror to the whole system , anyone who, by word or example, who unflatteringly tells the truth (Dan Froomkin, for example). This is a survival imperative, not merely from a financial perspective, but from the perspective of psychological functioning. Because the alternative to the collective loss of grandiose self delusion is complete psycho-emotional impoverishment, shame, despair, madness, and uncontrollable rage.
I saw an excellent production of King Lear last night with Stacey Keach. One way of looking at the play is to see Lear's decompensation, and the dramatized, externalized reality of the death and destruction that follow the loss of his grand delusions of his own potency (brought about by his need to have his equally disordered, plotting, hateful daughters flatter him), as the dramatic result of what happens when the narcissistic bubble bursts. That's when the rage beast gets loose, and in smaller doses, we see that from the Villagers every day. We see it also in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in death by health care spreadsheet.
The political culture of the country is a really sick place, as is our financial culture.
I blog at www.firedoglake.com.