There is no sane respectful attempt to address, or admit, the serious reality of the situation. It should be a matter of legitimate serious concern that we have two brat graduates from 60s and 70s pathology with some very serious mental problems in the White House. We have people with very serious mental problems supporting them. They have thrust their psychotic inner theater of the absurd upon the nation, and there's not sufficient cultural integrity or sanity left to stop or counterbalance it.
Such is the evolved state of post-60s psychotic America.
The effect of the mental health crisis on the politics and government of this country has been both subtle and powerfully catastrophic.
First: The political atmosphere has become psychotic in that it follows no logic, consistency, or sense of reality. We have people in high office who are defiantly silly supported by defiantly silly constituents. There is no sense of the serious real. To some extent, what we have is goofy middle-aged kids who don't understand they are destroying the country, or couldn't care less.
Second: Personal and political freedom affords an exercise in vitality to a mentally healthy person. But, to someone who is depressed or preoccupied by internal turmoil, freedom becomes an unenjoyable useless quantity. Consequently, we now live in a society where many people no longer want or value freedom. Personal freedom and the responsibility that goes with it are abrasive intrusions or demands upon a crippled self-absorbed internal state.
Freedom has become transformed from a chance for opportunity, to being a threat to a depressive or confused inner personal condition. To a hospitalized schizophrenic, freedom is useless or unwanted. To many people, not hospitalized, but imprisoned or sentenced to psychological solitary confinement by their own internal pathological state, outside imprisonment or oppression is inconsequential or even welcomed. We are facing the serious problem that the mental health in this society is so degraded as to cause America's opportunities and economic advantages to be viewed as irrelevant.
Freedom in this country has come to be the equivalent of good food on a bad psychological tooth.
Demands for simple basic responsibility and maturity have become looked upon as impossible or as repressive as a oppressive communist society. Freedom and socialism/communism have become either subjectively equivalent, or the second preferable to the first if it promises a world of custodial care.
Until the mental health problems are culturally addressed, instead of culturally proselytized for the self-indulgence they offer, freedom and opportunity will be viewed as irrelevant, or even the enemy, in this society.
Third: The mental health crisis in this country has propelled us into the politics of torture, struggle, and torment. In my political life I want roads and bridges that are in good condition. I want national defense. I want competent educational systems that produce competent graduates. I want to hear understanding of rational monetary and economic analysis. I want to hear candidates articulating the principles of a free society. I want office holders who act with seriousness, honesty, and respect.
What is instead occurring is a political contest to see which candidate's form of mental disorder resonates with prevalent forms of mental disorder in the general population. Bill Clinton says he feels people's pain. Hillary Clinton is poised to snap up a seat as Senator from New York, and possibly the presidency, on the essential platform that the mess she has made of her personal life, and her angry warped rationalizations of it, resonate with the confused mess other people have made of their lives. People identify with Hillary's image of struggle, with her constant empty angry dynamism, and with her posturing and confrontational indignation. Bill and Hillary's empty marital relationship and sterility produce emotional resonance in millions of others leading similar lives with similar incapacities in an emotionally turbulent generation that has had a 60+ percent divorce rate and a 32 percent out-of-wedlock birth rate. Her pathology feeds into the prevalence of pathology in America.
Hillary Clinton's qualification for any serious position would be considered ludicrous in a healthy rational society. To those increasingly few of us remaining who do not view posturing infantile temper tantrums as a form of intellectual brilliance, Hillary is not a particularly intelligent, talented, or deep woman. With the possible exception of abortion and allied 60s radical countercultural agenda that appeal to those who have never left, or grown beyond, 60s and 70s perpetually angry adolescence, Hillary Clinton has shown absolutely no knowledge of anything. But while abortion, internal sexual conflicts, and crummy shack jobs or marriages may be a personal obsession to many people in this country, they are not what makes this country run. Yet, every poll shows Hillary could walk into a state where she has never lived and be swept into office by a landslide ¾ entirely on the basis of alliance between her own and other people's personal problems, angry immaturity, mental disorders, and incompetence, without a demonstrated word of knowledge about anything that really makes the nation work.
Undoubtedly, handlers would feed her a cram course of superficial babble about military tactics and strategy, economic policy, geopolitics, or other areas to get her through staged public appearances during the campaign that would be seized upon as instant support for belief by the already neurotically captured or committed. If she can continue saying nothing substantial about anything and avoid all serious debate, she is in.
Fourth: Not long ago I talked with a woman about the source of so-called social problems in this country. Her eyes welled up as she talked about helplessness and desperation being the root cause of the problem. But these were assertions about people she had never met and knew nothing about. She was really projecting a history of her own miserable life and her own marriage. Describing other mythical people instead of herself allowed her to release the repressed backlog of emotion she was forbidden to realize and express more directly.
People are commingling and co-channeling their personal problems into interpretations of so-called social problems that are ungoverned by any mental discipline. The sad lyrical interpretations of life and the feeling of abstract struggle, described by the radical left, stimulate waiting feelings of desperation or struggle in people's personal lives and drive the afflicted to leftist philosophy and causes like dried emotional leaves before a storm. In the psychologically deteriorated condition of the country, many people are constantly on the verge of tears anyway, and the political left releases and re-focuses their diffuse sorrow and discontent into the political process. There is a complex system of language of double meaning that has evolved in which people using political language are also describing their personal condition.
In this sense the political left offers a vicarious false or symbolic sympathy and catharsis to the depressed or emotionally wounded in this society. The fact that socialism is intrinsically oppressive and economically catastrophic is secondary to its satisfaction of that catharsis and need. It also satisfies a suicidal bent that I have been convinced for more than 35 years exists deep in the leftist movement and personality.
In many cases the political left is an indirect plea for help forced upon others. These are often, on deep levels, suicidal people who defy the pain of personal realization and change, but are attempting to force others to take charge of them by threatening to commit suicide in such a way as take us with them. This is one reason why their political and social thrusts are destructive to themselves and everyone else.
They remind me a little of women who are self-destructive hoping that a man will care enough and show that he loves her enough to set her straight. Unfortunately, what they often wind up with is exploitation by cold sadists whom they defend. The political equivalent is Josef Stalin... liberals/liberalism."