American Politics and Psychology

Perception of the truth about the real environment, especially an understanding of the human personality and its values, ceases to be a virtue during the so-called ‘happy’ times; thoughtful doubters are decried…. This, in turn, leads to an impoverishment of psychological knowledge, the capacity of differentiating the properties of human nature and personality, and the ability to mold minds creatively. The cult of power thus supplants those mental values so essential for maintaining law and order by peaceful means. A nation’s enrichment or involution regarding its psychological world view could be considered an indicator of whether its future will be good or bad. – Andrew M. Lobaczewski, Political Ponerology, p. 60

American politics is about the lies we tell ourselves, as a nation. Our politicians do not generally offer us a menu of solutions, but a menu of self-deceptions. They tell us how innovative we are, and how powerful we are, and how strong our union is. That we are dying, as a society, they do not tell us; for the family is dying, fatherhood is under attack, motherhood is under attack; and that coldest of all cold monsters, the state, is taking charge of everyone and everything. Hope and change, it is called. But everywhere, as the poem says, the “ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

In other essays I had suggested that conservatism has become the work of political undertakers whose job it is to make the corpse appear better than it did in life. Meanwhile, liberalism partakes of a neurotic venture – a void in search of a void, a weakness incapable of conviction or endurance yearning for order and authority precisely because it hasn’t any. It is this weakness which best characterizes our inner state, in political terms – as an emptiness of soul by way of a fabricated compassion for a suffering humanity. It is a fraud all around. And those who believe it are both perpetrators and victims.