Oppenheim Arts & Letters

Line 9-30-2011

A problem is a gift wrapped around many surprising and helpful secrets. ;) Shana Tova and Shabbat Shalom from the mid-Atlantic USA where not only seasons change.

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Progressive Catch-All for (My) Facebook Comments Related to Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy

 September 29, 2011 / 9 p.m.:

People are generally good whether or not they know one another. Behind extremist violence, any cause, right or left, I'm gambling that a researcher will find politically channeled bipolar sociopaths, people whose self-concept has integrated with a cause to promote their own validation regardless of consequences to others.

I'm finding a few ways of saying about the same thing (blog title: "Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy"). That otherwise more temperate natures may be susceptible to way outsized enthusiasm may have to do with how cultures educate and armor young minds against the sway of pied pipers (and in English-language culture, by first having and installing a "pied piper" concept).

FB Group, "Balanced Discussion on the Middle East": http://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/268890913134072/

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I'm going to try updating this file with remarks pulled from my part of Facebook conversations in which I've alluded to or mentioned the Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy (FBPS) concept.  Am I thinking out loud?  Yes.  Am I trying to make more permanent some set of thoughts that would otherwise disappear in the course of ceaseless web-based thread chatter?  That too.

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Another Facebook Excerpt

France had prepared to vote for Palestinian statehood: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/world/middleeast/france-breaks-with-obama-on-palestinian-statehood-issue.html?_r=1 Our polite and ever politically correct "west" seems unable to firmly and meaningfully confront the people of Gaza and the West Bank over the character and machinations of Hamas and remnant PLO that given license maintain their grip on political power. What Obama and Sarkozy wish to tender as overtures to the "Arab world", an adulterated and perhaps ambiguous term if ever there was for the bloc that hates Israel, Jews, democracy, and the United States, for starters, has become the weakness that invites war and furthers the indignities suffered by refugees who have been played as pawns in an ugly game for better than 60 years.

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Gird and Sigh - A Sliver of Chat on States of Affairs

Hi, S.,

 The west—and this may be underscored this week by the UN’s hosting a lynch mob of Israel—seems unable to coalesce in getting behind the better inclined in troubled societies.

 By “getting behind the better inclined”, I refer to the allocation of substantial financial, military, and political resources.  From Egypt to Somalia, we do a share of such work, but the challengers are like spreading shadows before nightfall—pervasive, persistent, intimidating within their spheres, and violent, and we let them get away with what they do.

The weaker the body as host, the stronger the eventual medicine, and with such cancers as we behold, that medicine may well turn out at least half as ugly as the problems yet to be expelled. 

The Palestinian community on the West Bank provides possibly the best sense of what is not happening in the middle east, and that is the expression of good people standing up to evil ones.  The old Russian bloc language comes through from the Left, and Ismail Haniyeh from the Islamist corner seems to speak clearly enough to ears that choose to deny what they are hearing.  Such behavior does not reflect differences but rather a state of affairs involving aggressive and still uncontained forces and compliant or hapless and impotent populations.

I’m going to post this to my blog, which I have starved of attention for a while.

I tell you it’s hard getting around to playing music when there is so much pressing on good souls to sail out ahead of mobocracies, thugocracies, and the general fascist and totalitarian tendencies that would seem to want to bloom within even the better established democracies.

Best regards,

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Progressors

Confronted by Irshad Manji's Moral Courage Project, one person noted on Facebook dim prospects for Islamic Reform nonetheless.

I thought I'd reprint my response here, my own blog providing a more persistent platform than Facebook for supporting, for a while, ideas and observations.

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Check out Tarek Fatah's Canadian Muslim Congress, M. Zuhdi Jasser's American Islamic Forum for Democracy; also Daniel Pipe's estimate regarding Islamism.  The scale x population x wilfulness is unknown, leaving that most common question about enemy -- "how many?" -- quite open. 

In Somalia, the discrepency between known Al Qaeda / Al Shabaab figures (fewer than 14,000 fighters) and displaced people fleeing or resisting their administration is 1.25 million, all of them Muslim.

The world's largest Muslim-majority state is Indonesia, and while it sports some punitive and puritanical laws, it would not compare well to, say, Saudi Arabia (or Pakistan with its Hudood laws) as a "sharia state".

While the measuring set continue to look over the size and character of the challenge, I've asked an unkind question: apart from laws that might serve self-serving Muslims, i.e., special dispensations for dress and prayer, what contributions, if any, would Islam contribute today to western legal code? 

Anyone?

Religion as a profession of faith seems to want both dogma and rules that serve it, but the Judaic and Christian ethics and philosophies that form the basis for the western recognition of issues in law have little room to none for reconsiderations involving beheading, honor killing, polygamy, enforced dress codes, stoning, discriminating between men and women in courts and laws, death penalties for adultery and homosexuality, and so on. 

One could go on to other areas of contribution -- art, education, health, politics, science, and technology -- and ask the same about the complement to be generated by distinct Islamic tenets.  I've enjoyed wagging the index finger with "There is no compulsion in religion" and "One scholar is worth more against the devil than ten thousand worshippers" but was not Moses as wise so many thousands of years before the birth of Muhammad? 

Of course, what Muslim identity will mean tomorrow is up to Muslims. 

With such as CAIR undersubscribed, much unknown about true underlying or latent Muslim sentiment, and civil war a presence everywhere in Islam, we can see a portion of the struggle without drawing clear answers.  The reformers or, really, "progressors" may be small today for the numbers they're leading -- that too strikes me as an unexamined queston -- but they are each a part of Islam's best hope for behavior good in the sight of God.

A Glimpse of Good and Evil

Perhaps in language as in life, Christina, natural but accidentally forming and then stable metonymies organize our hearts. Here it would not be enough to note that we are, say, an aggressive, acquisitve, and gregarious species because that level exists prior to the organization of mind and relationships that have a significance, so it seems to li'l ol' us, linked to symbolic nuclei -- simple concepts about dishonor and virtue -- anchoring associated elements.

Posted to Facebook thread, September 20, 2011.

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Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy (FBPS): Structural Note

To avoid the first level of great misunderstanding, the Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy (FBPS) concept must include three large component parts:

1. Presence of or stimulus for bipolar emotion and ideation somewhere in a given population;
2. Social selection for personalities so affected;
3. Transference of affect to surrounding others.

For a political thesis, the above makes for an awful prospect but one also too familiar in the interior designs of conflicted cultures assailed by both autocrats and ideological extremists.  Were the same applied to entertainment communities, well then, we like our movie people and rock stars to be Out There, and not infrequently enough, we mean Really Out There. 

Our entertainers energize us.

My up close and personal experience with overly enthused and somewhat reckless personalities is that when one is in their presence, the whole world expands: undreamed of things become possible: It's Yes!  To that screenplay!  Yes! To that Big Score on Ebay!

Whatever.

Enthusiasm is charismatic and catching, and a Great Enthusiasm may yet be Great; however, those of age, experience, and wisdom as well as more modest temperament should know and recognize the difference between a fair and good potential anything and an impossible dream, or an immoral and unethical one, likely to turn ugly and, in the end, turn out a dismal nightmare.

We may be entering an era in which we will discover just how deeply integrated mood and perception may be with biological processes and states.  Thanks to such good natured and meticulous researchers as Jennifer A. Phillips, cited in reference, we may be able to smooth a path grounded in organic (in psychology, "organismic") reality that moves individual apperception, outlook, and perception toward aggregate social expression and related political dreaming and scheming.

This isn't entirely new. 

The same has been more familiarly expressed as "what's good for the family, clan, or tribe" in light of the demands of a natural environment and (I'll cite Vine Deloria here as well) the influence of landscape on attitudes and beliefs, and from that we may see derived some combination of functional (e.g., provisioning) and spiritual (e.g., praying and sacrificing) cultural behavior. 

What may be different, including some ivory tower ability to look over a broad related universe in ways never before possible, may be the methods in observation by which we may discern and test a broad vision of how things actually work.

Earth --> Biology --> Psychology --> Social Psychology --> Culture --> Language --> Political Culture

Working beside this want of a story that hangs together well may also be the idea of three dimensional political topology such that a culture's politics may be represented some as a mountain with a weighted center topped by a position in relation to other mountains and much other mass, caverns, ridges, and valleys arranged around the center and reshaping and moving it.  Some large systems may prove more stable than others; some may fracture more easily or be fractured by a great ambition accompanied by violence that both stresses and changes those in its vicinity within themselves and socially: but cultures -- as small as a dyad, as large as a modern state -- move, shape, and transform themselves across time.

How they do it draws the curious as well as the intuitive.

How much do we want to know? 

I should hope we might come up with something between an ignorant and perpetually guessing comprehension and, perhaps, a too Divine or mechanical and patterning perception.

We want to know a little more than we do today, but we may also wish never to comprehend our own predictability.

Some things, and in this day we have reason to hope, shall be left to God and the universe.

Historians, of course, have struggled with this form of looking and seeing for ages; fiction writers have long wrestled with it -- i.e., an intuitive approach to life's mechanics and mysteries that both creates the dots and draws the lines between them; but here with so great a compilation of data, knowledge, and philosophy at hand, we may well develop a kind of "cultural technocrat" that working on the engines far beneath but attuned to surface rhetoric may suggest helpful, even evolutionary, course corrections.

Reference

1. Phillips, Jennifer A.  "Tracking Down the Footprints of Bipolar Disorder."  ProQuest, June 2005: http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/bipolar/overview.php.

2. Deloria, Vine.  God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, Golden, Colorado: North American Press, 1994.

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Bipolar Political Sociopathy (BPS) in Three Dimensions

• Continuous delusional apperception -- both deep mistrust of states-of-affairs and delusions of grandeur -- and reductive black and white reasoning.
• Excessive messianic and narcissistic modalities.
• Insufficient conscience, emotional containment, guilt, and shame and absence of perception regarding boundaries personal, political, and social.

With "bipolar disorder" associated with psychology and interests in individuals, "bipolar political sociopathy" may provide a more applicable, broad, and social concept with which to work through the presence of seemingly aggressive, high-handed, and unreasoning leaders and excessively zealous followers across domains with the litmus being the want of absolute control over others, the want of death and destruction to whole societies, and the achievement of an unsurpassable magical utopia, the greatest relief possible from the hardships, ironies, and viscissitudes of human and human social existence.

Transposing the bipolar disorder concept toward a more general cultural or social perception of behavior poses a few problems, starting with as yet open and indefinite relationships between genetic and environmental contributors to the more familiar and restricted personal syndrome; however, where conflicts and the search for cause may be involved, the intuitive hunt for motivating factors that lead to examinations of culture, custom, and language may fruitlessly displace and overlook this other and possibly more correct and legitimate dimension in motivation.

Development of Insight

I had the gift within the past 18 months of encountering in friends, separately, and there's no need here to divulge the arrangement, evidence of autism, Asperger's Syndrome, bipolar disorder (the whole shebang too), and treated bipolar disorder (received as a volunteered surprise confession in casual conversation).  While it's easy to say, "everybody's different," it's much harder to say the same fecklessly when those differences lead to financial ruin and social isolation as a consequence of effects on others in the path of the pathology.  Moreover, while everybody may be "different", most of a contemporary, post-Enlightenment, western or modern Asian, or, frankly, global cast of mind are able to recognize aspects of themselves in the excesses and foibles of others.  The casual drinker, for example, either knows or knows about drunkenness, certainly has an awareness of the potential for alcoholism, but adjusts his own behavior toward a moderated functionality determined by a sense of what may be appropriate, comfortable, and necessary in light of how the drink makes him feel plus social contexts and obligations.

In addition to empathizing with my friends and seeing them perhaps as a writer would want rather than as a psychologist might, I've also been surprised some by my response to the presence of -- and this would be accurate with one personality in manic phase with pressured speech -- the energetically enthused.  One may catch the buoyancy and optimism of such a pal, such a borrower, such a madcap friend, fellow, and leader while the insensate recklessness of the same becomes more and more apparent and, I should hope for the healthy recipient of such a fine but dangerous and self-defeating glow, separating.

If most of the world wakes up a bit cautious and dour, observant and emotional but not too so in response, there may be good reason for it, for in those who wreck their bank accounts and careers or their countries and treasuries in uncontained, really unconstrained, flights of speech and ambition and associated actions, many quite extreme in their insensitivity to norms or the depths of their inhumanity, all others have examples of where not to follow or, God forbid, lead.

Adverse Subcultures and the Small Crowd's Power of Approval

For the excesses that come of bipolar disorder, those "out there", as one friend put it ("Jim, you don't understand . . . I mean I am really Out There!"), may surface through behavior in public or, dismally, through the flow of red ink dripping off their credit cards, or, perhaps helpful, aberrant behavior in the presence of family or other intimates, but sometimes -- and would this were so "only in America" -- the same may inspire a following. 

For one thing, as mentioned, a great enthusiasm -- about just about anything, or anything, including murder -- may prove infectious, especially one insufficiently encountered, examined, or otherwise known; for another, a good idea may be a good idea whatever the circumstances or conditions attending its inspiration: even if born of madness, who is to condem, know, or tell?  Notional "sociopathy" requires deviance as discernable from perceptions of baseline normative values (In statistics, some consider worthy of study the realms beyond 1.5 standard deviations from the norm, the spreading rim around the familiar bell), but in large populations, the meaning of "Out There" (or "Far Right" or "Far Left"), may involve numbers large enough to constitute cultures and societies of their own.  Given potency in cash, determination, press, and weapons, the same "Way Out There" may become "Right Here and Now" for everyone (whether they like it or not), and should the catchy program with its gathered converts, fans, and zealots prove not such a good thing out in the world larger and more variegate than itself, disaster most certainly ensues or tells.

Stress, Biology, and Perception, Most Briefly

Growing up spoiled with a library, Pyschology Today, lol, and much time with the literary and the musical, among other things, one may emphasize the role played by culture and language in the formation of identity, general perception, and self-concept, and this much at the expense of biological contributions to the same, but age and its frailties along with the accumulation of a lifetime of physical experiences may urge a greater appreciation and curiosity about the relationship between raw biological and social circumstance on the psychology of perception in every aspect, i.e., from how one feels today to how one feels about a political candidate.

In that stress has been associated with bipolar disorder and its amelioration addressed by an array of symptom-addressing pills, the possible "organismic" contribution to Bipolar Political Sociopathy (BPS) should not be overlooked.  This is not to say the sociopathic drug lord became so because "he was stressed out, man," but looking into the character of stress and its coursing through an integrated mind-and-body console may turn out to relate well to the BPS concept. 

Conclusion

Not to leave this note too obtuse, a good objective concept packaging together the three bulleted dimensions as listed at the top of this post should apply equally as well to drug gangs, racist organizations, inherently violent political movements, and all-consuming cults of every sort, for in their extremity, social mechanics, including the mechanics of their development, and leader-follower psychology, they may be considered more similar than different in their social construction and draw.

Pure meadow pies?

It's possible, but let's have a look anyway.

Reference

Tartakovsky, M. (2009). Bipolar Disorder Fact Sheet. Psych Central. Retrieved on September 8, 2011, from http://psychcentral.com/lib/2009/bipolar-disorder-fact-sheet/. 

Tartakovsky's description provides, imho, a mild overview of the bipolar disorder symptoms that may have transitive relevance in political and social realms.  However, my experience with friends is that symptoms associated with real psychopathology may be quite distinct and unmistakeable--a person with Asperger's really will miss a series of cues, including a loud and clear "Let's wind this up," to end a conversation; diagnosed but untreated bipolar syndrome really will ascend into the ether with declarations about, say, how great and fit the person feels with the weight being down (and all) -- except looking, even while listening, tells the weight either isn't down or the stomach is still "way out there," as usual (and if there's a problem, it's not in the form or weight of the person but rather the attitude expressed towards both in the form of a delusion expressed with great sincerety).

There is nothing subtle about such illnesses or syndromes and their ancillary behaviors. 

In political and social circles, most, so I pray, there should be nothing perceived as subtle either about disingenuous and vicious ranting and many nefarious activities beside, but, as noted, the most egregious stances may be embraced as perfectly justifiable, even reasonable, and cause for greater recruitment be it for gun running, drug distribution, general mobsterism, or "political action" in the form of the world's darkest lies and bloodiest and most reprehensible acts of terror.

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