Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.
By Sam Vaknin — Author of “Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited“

Even mega-states are typically founded by a small nucleus of pioneers, visionaries, and activists. The United States is a relatively recent example. The character of the collective of Founding Fathers has a profound effect on the nature of the polity that they create: nations spawned by warriors tend to be belligerent and to nurture and cherish military might throughout their history (e.g., Rome); When traders and businessman establish a country, it is likely to cultivate capitalistic values and thrive on commerce and shipping (e.g., Netherlands); The denizens of countries formed by lawyers are likely to be litigious.The influence of the Founding Fathers does not wane with time. On the very contrary: the mold that they have forged for their successors tends to rigidify and be sanctified. It is buttressed by an appropriate ethos, code of conduct, and set of values. Subsequent and massive waves of immigrants conform with these norms and adapt themselves to local traditions, lores, and mores.

Back to the United States:

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.

The "American Dream" in itself is benign. It involves materialistic self-realization, the belief in the ideal of equal opportunities and equal access to the system, and in just rewards for hard work, merit, and natural gifts. But the Dream has been rendered nightmarish by the confluence with America’s narcissistic traits.

America’s internal ethos is universally-accepted by all Americans. It incorporates the American Dream and the conviction that America stands for everything that is good and right. Consequently, as the reification of goodness, the United States is in constant battle with evil and its ever-changing demonic emissaries – from Hitler to Saddam Hussein.

There is no national consensus about America’s external ethos. Some Americans are isolationists, others interventionists. Both groups are hypervigilant, paranoid, and self-righteous – but isolationists are introverted and schizoid. Theirs is  siege mentality. Interventionists are missionary. They feel omnipotent and invincible. They are extroverted and psychopathic.

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. Victims frequently internalize their abusers and themselves become bullies. 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.

The Civil War was fought between 2 America’s: the South, a perverted rendition of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the North, a harbinger of modern, multicultural immigrant societies. The North and the American Dream prevailed, the slaves were freed, and the Southern way of life, that of "gentlemen with leisure", was replaced by a workaholic society where everyone is a slave to money and leisure is an ever rarer commodity.

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 (the 1935 anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws and the Nazi sterilization law were modeled after American anti-miscegenation and sterilization statutes), 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.

Also Read

•    Islam and Liberalism

•    Narcissistic Collectives

•    The Cultural Narcissist

•    The Roots of anti-Americanism

•    And Then There Were Too Many

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By Kap Kirwok

Sometime in June, the ever controversial Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said the then Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama had an ‘inferiority complex‘ because he is black and if elected might ‘behave worse than whites‘.

Now that Obama will be President, it is time to examine this ‘inferiority‘ accusation more closely.

   By Newbreen.com

When a black person projects confidence, he is accused of putting on airs; he is overconfident, too cocky; or they will simply say he is imitating the white man — ‘acting white‘, as they say in the US.

When a black person projects humility, it is said he is acting true to character — subservient, inferior, slavish and lacking in confidence. In short, he is accused of suffering from an inferiority complex.

Will the ascension of a black man to the most powerful office on earth restore some respectability to the black man’s battered image?

I doubt it. The black man has a millennium old image problem. Racial prejudice against black people runs deep, with antecedents that span centuries. The historical and psychological roots of racial prejudice against blacks are many and complex, but you could reduce them to four words: military conquest and enslavement. Throughout history, any people that have been conquered and ruled or enslaved are always treated by the conquerors as inferior.

It is why the British imperialist poet, Rudyard Kipling, in his poem, The White Man’s Burden, uses words such as ‘half-devil and half-child‘ to refer to the conquered people of the Philippine Islands, while exhorting the white empire to act as the almighty lord to all ‘inferior’ races.

Prejudice

While blatant displays of prejudice against black people are less overt today compared to Kipling’s time, they are no less frequent and virulent in their subterranean form. In a recent article in the New York Times, columnist Nicholas D Kristof reports on studies by several scholars, which showed rampant unconscious bias and racism towards black people.

Prejudice against black people is so deeply ingrained and embedded in the psyche that racially discriminatory and prejudicial behaviour often operates subliminally. It is sad and tragic. But the greater tragedy is this: even black people themselves are caught up in unconscious discrimination towards people of their own race.

There is a popular and free test on the Internet that you can take to test the level of your unconscious bias. It is called the Implicit Association Test and is run by a team of psychologists led by Prof Tony Greenwald of the University of Washington.

Choosing the whites

The test is designed to probe unconscious biases in people. It is one thing to lie about one’s true thoughts and feelings; it is entirely another to not even know what is truly in your mind. For example, well-meaning people who say they have no racial prejudices might be surprised to discover they are in fact unconsciously racist.

When such people are faced with a decision that requires making a choice between a black and a white with similar qualifications and experience — such as in a job interview setting — they will always choose the white person.

If you think you know your mind well, you might want to withhold that judgment until you have taken the Implicit Association Test. It has the potential to shock you.

The implication of all these is the black man’s burden is double in weight. On top of the weight of conscious and unconscious white racial prejudice, there is the extra baggage of conscious and unconscious black inferiority complex.

It raises a disturbing question. Will the black race ever rid itself of this double load? Conquering and enslaving another race is out of the question, at least not in this millennium. Becoming the president of the most powerful country on earth will not do it either. For every good an Obama-type does to the black man’s image, there are a million negative images competing to nullify the effect.

Inferiority complex

There is one way to do it and it is not by decolonising the mind through the promotion of native languages, as Ngugi wa Thiong’o suggests in his book Decolonising The Mind. It is not by merely urging Africans to ‘drop the inferiority complex’, as Gambian President Yahya Jammeh recently said.

It is only through a combination of strategic humility and strategic pursuit of self-interest in a determined effort to raise black people’s development — individually and collectively — that our millennium-old image problem will be addressed. It means recognising that we are in a hole (literally and perceptually) and then using any means necessary to climb out.

Olbermann: Divisive politics is anti-American. GOP ticket’s willingness to say anything to win ultimately damages America.

In a Special Comment, Keith Olbermann lists examples of hateful, divisive politics from the right that actually do more to undermine America than the bogus accusations of anti-Americanism being leveled against Barack Obama.

By AngryToast.com

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