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I'm sure that psychologists have a name for this malady, I just can't remember it.
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I'm sure that psychologists have a name for this malady, I just can't remember it.
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...and I vaguely remember being somewhat interested in it one time...but it slips my mind...(flipping through the latest Barefoot Contessa cookbook and feigning concern...)
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Yes, they do. It's called Cranial Rectumitis.
I don't know if there is a technical name for this malady, but I understand what's happening.
Years ago a populist writer named Eric Hoffer wrote about "The True Believer." These are people who don't just "believe" actually, so much as they identify themselves with a cause. It becomes who they are. They are impervious to discrepant information, and will find fellows of like mind. Together they can stand off the whole world if need be.
The question is, What happens when the source of their identity, the "cause," collapses in the face of reality?
This has been observed for example in the case of end-of -the world prophecy groups, who sell all their belongings and go to stand on a mountain somewhere, waiting for the rapture, or the alien spaceship. When midnight comes and goes, and they are still there, what do they do?
Same thing happened on Nov 2 for these lifelong leftwing crackpots: the very ground of their personal identity --the thing which had given their life meaning-- sharing in the power and the glory of the promised Kerry victory and the defeat of the feared and hated Bush, followed by the long and dearly held childhood millenial dream of installing a state-controlled utopia(with them and their friends in charge), collapsed in the face of reality.
This loss is intensely personal to these people in a way which normal people, with normal attachments, can hardly comprehend. It is truly of pathological dimensions.
It is what we see on DUmmie funnies, the loss of critical judgment, the outright denial, and the repudiation and rebuke of anyone who attempts to speak reality to them.
The source of it all is a fundamental infantile narcissism, the wish to be all powerful and all knowing, and the trauma which occurs when that wish is dashed by reality. The thrilling fantasies of omnipotence are replaced by the powerfully shameful exposure of inadequacy and impotence.
Hence the temper tantrums, the rage.
When apocalyptic prophecy fails, some just drift away,disillusioned; some rationalize that their faith redeemed the world and they go away feeling as if they were victorious; some retreat into a more isolated core of true believers and keep the faith that the prophecy is yet to come true, they just got the date wrong.
We will see the same with leftwing true believers now. Some are disillusioned by the 'rats and politics generally and will disappear;
some will claim, as on DU, that with the trivial petulance on Jan 6 they had achieved some kind of glorious victory, "a beginning;"
some, will redouble their efforts, twisting reality into yet one more vindication that their "mission" is of even greater grandiosity than before.
They are after all, the few, the band of brothers, who have the secret insights, who will save the nation and perhaps the world. They remain, in their own eyes, heroes: indispensable, all-wise and all-knowing, and most of all, very special people.
Long answer to a short question. Cheers.
paranoid schizophrenia with severe psychotic break from reality.