Oppenheim Arts & Letters

FB Excerpt Mentioning Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy

Despite Muhammad's invocation, "God favors those who restrain themselves," it has been interesting since I've been tracking the Islamic Small Wars -- about four years -- discerning how egotism (especially in regard to God's most personal favoring), narcissism, and sociopathy (complete lack of consideration for and empathy with others) play out in each theater.

Recently, I accidentally re-posted (on Facebook) the news of the execution of John Allen Muhammad, the Washington beltway sniper, and in retrospect see in him all of the hallmarks of one who would spoil for and provoke a large scale religious war.  I can only imagine that in his head, he and his sidekick were the volunteer advanced guard working on the fringes of the Great Satan, licensed by God Almighty himself to murder with impunity.

My blog features a section titled, "Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy" that tries to tease out this delusional, messianic, sociopathic narcissism that goes along with -- and this familiar on the individual level to those diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder -- loss of containment.  So far off the norms are these types that the instructive "God favors those who restrain themselves" proves always true because from both evolutionary and social perspectives, modest strong self-containment is in the normative region of human nature and accounts for much that we call good behavior.

In the reference section of this post, all I've done is a quick look-up of two other American Muslim terrorists, each name and story becoming a window into the mentality driving such crimes. 

Speaking as the "bum of the family" -- I think I got that notion from my dad . . . not that I believe it, but I, perhaps the family too, has paid a price for my being a pretty good photographer, writer, and musician -- the idea that I and my fellow humans possess ambition, identity, and a personal sense of mission, hidden or acknowledged, in our lives seems common, and those who "lose it" or "go off the deep end" or "have a breakdown" have, I believe, a great sense of their own theater while throwing caution, credit, and reputation (also their integrity, honor, and humanity) to the winds. 

These that stain themselves before Allah with the want or reception of innocent blood may fit the same social-psychological class.

As mentioned early in the Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy (FBPS) section, one must differentiate between the concerns psychology has with its focus on the individual's experience involving the mind and the social and political curiosity expressed in the FBPS concept.

Reference

Brown, Angela K. "Fort Hood Shooting: Jury Selection in Nidal Hasan Trial To Be Discussed at Hearing."  Huffington Post - Crime, July 6, 2012. 

Ernst, Jonathan.  "Sniper who terrorized Washington executed."  Reuters, November 11, 2009.

Scherer, Ron.  "Faisal Shahzad calls Times Square bomb plot 'war,' pleads guilty."  The Christian Science Monitor, June 21, 2010.

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FB Excerpt - A Note on Remapping Normative Values

Google Translator renders the third line of the YouTube description as: "Saudi man insults the dignity of the expatriate Bangladeshis and ask him to kiss his hands and feet to turn the force but in God."

Tarek Fatah posted the above to his Facebook wall.  I had two responses to it, one noting the DSM IV description associated with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  As mentioned elsewhere in my related section, "Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy", one should not transpose work developed to serve and study the life of the mind of the individual and many related disorders to political or social science contexts without many disclaimers, modifications, and questions.  Nonetheless, from the western context, the display of self-aggrandizement in a context involving a demonstration of dominance and submission in human behavior carries with it evidence of a today out-of-bounds narcissism, something most, worldwide, irrespective of location, race, and religion, not only don't admire but more actively reject and revile.

Here is the text of my second post on that same thread:

Just to chime: 1) I agree the example of one or a few should not be made emblemmatic of a larger culture without greater cognizance of the whole of that culture.  2) Cultures, which may be delineated by language x customs x attitudes (and other social norms) may be viewed only at this junction in time as having evolved in comparative isolation in respose to the many exigencies posed by biology (not race -- species wide), geophysical environmental demands, and mind, which may include many accidents involving the invention of language and language concepts.  That may included a preferred psychology transmitted culturally -- not biologically -- through language from one generation to the next.

For grounding, I may recommend two books out of left field -- actually: linguistics: Dan Everett's _Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes_ and _Language: The Cutlural Tool_.

My view of the topic-starting video is that it may be representative of cultural ends once more isolated from a wide and varied audience.  Why not exercise power in service to one's own greatness, grandeur, potency, etc.?  Who's judging?  What consequence is there to come of hurting someone else, apart from the experience of greater obedience to one's own self? 

The natural universality of any cultural ethos -- I'll gladly include mine -- may be questionable but given some choice between compassion, empathy, and self-containment (!) as cultural values and the want of power over others (whether they like it or not) and the uncontained expression of related impulses, the good in humanity may drift toward the better choice.

Today, that's a global choice.  Your choice.  Our choice.  Most here seem to have found the behavior illustrated by the video repugant.  A good sign, I'd say.

It is a mixed fortune for me that the Greater Conversation to which I contribute via Facebook provides both inspiration and material for my blog.  For the entertainment and its distraction, I no longer know how or when I will get around to more primary reporting, if ever, and a commentary closer to "breaking news."

Then again, perhaps those journalistic ideals are not so important in light of whatever signal I might be able to send and sustain in the world at this time.

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Facebook Excerpt -- On Putin's Role in Syria

Russia is Syria's Great Power; Putin is Bashir's Big Brother.

Putin, while enjoying influence in Syria and having the power to curb the Assad regime, has also proven himself a dictator and in line with that behavior -- complex in its own way -- hasn't the capacity and will not respond to an end-game on the basis of either compassion or justice. He may, however, pursue the course that either best reflects on himself or otherwise engineer the image that does the same.

In rhetoric only has Putin distanced himself from the Assad disaster.

Russia's geopolitical status and military dependence on Syria as a client state has not changed from the Soviet era.

Probably, I should not quote myself, revise myself, nor reprint myself.

I grew up wanting to write fiction (and may go ahead with that), but commenting on politics seems to draw from the same wells.

How should we want things to be?

How are things really?

Reference Not Cited

AFP.  "China and Russia reaffirm support for Syria."  The Telegraph, May 30, 2012.

Berman, Ilan.  "The Russian-Syrian Connection: Thwarting Democracy in The Middle East and the Greater OSCE Region."  Pundicity, March 9, 2005.

Besemeres, John.  "Which Putin will stand up?"  Inside Story, March 28, 2012.

Gessen, Masha.  "The Dictator."  International Herald Tribune, May 21, 2012.

"Since May 6 — the day before Putin was inaugurated for his third term as president — police in Moscow have made more than 1,000 arrests. They have carried out no fewer than 100 beatings. They have also confiscated, destroyed or damaged several thousand dollars’ worth of private property, including a generator, several café tables, a cash box with money collected by street activists and copious amounts of food — including sandwiches taken out of people’s hands as they were eating."

Green, S. A.  "Kremlin Targets Jewish Tycoons in War on Critics."  The Jewish Daily Forward, October 31, 2003.

With Green's article in mind, I've suggested on Facebook that it seems natural enough that the Jewish mind, soul, and spirit would find a contemporary Pharoah in Putin, another self-aggrandizing and overbearing narcissist for defeating with help by way of the hand of God or absent that energy, the people, so grossly preyed upon.

Loiko, Servei L.  "In Russia, some seek justice in European Court of Human Rights."  Los Angeles Times, March 22, 2012.

Petrov, Nikolai.  "Putin Won't Liberalize Anything."  The Moscow Times, March 20, 2012.

Sapa-AFP.  "Putin declines to back Syria's Assad."  Times Live, March 2, 2012.

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Note: I haven't yet mastered how to use the online, probably spied on, doubtlessly robotically scanned source compilation site that has from the web's earliest appearance been "Delicious", but . . . for any who may be interested, my list resides at http://www.delicious.com/commart/.  I've more tabbed on "Putin" and "Russia" and much less on on the political psychology involved in the Syrian debacle but may suggest that exactly that personal and transactional area in human behavior holds many keys to the creation and maintenance of genuinely civil and peaceful societies.

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Facebook Exerpt - Comment on Narcissism - 4-15-2012

As with the realspace cocktail party, the surreal cyberspace one may bury a good thought or two in a flurry of inspired chatyping, so, and as I have stated in a related post, I'm inclined to snip and export some thoughts (out of context) whose expression had been inspired by the want of making a point in a thread continuing on Facebook.

This one comes loosely related to a snit between two members participating in people's diplomacy over the middle east conflict.  Enough said about that: my true target here remains a psychological component among conflict drivers, specifically narcissistic scripting:

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Probably, the discussion should take place where it seems to have been generated or in private. However, I would like to chime in with the suggestion to spend a little time getting our heads around a fascinating subject second only to my interest in myself: narcissism.

:)

I kid around with this but a little because there seem so many pointers to damage or the threat of it when discussing ad hominem attacks, the glorious and inglorious images held and projected by ourselves and others for ourselves and against some others, and the presence of a will to harm others and hide the same under cover of "honor", "faith", "loyalty", including "patriotism", and other self-concept-preserving devices that place innocents in the path of a destructive mentality.

 

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A few minutes before signing on the Facebook this afternoon, I had shared this (with a few changes made in this copy) in correspondence with a favorite associate:

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Have you ever asked X about his relationship with his father or mother?

Part of the theory of narcissism, as I care to know or add my invention to it, is that it functions as a corrective to a damaged ego.  

 

We get beaten up; we write ourselves a better script; and we go forward in quest of the fulfillment of that better image.  This perhaps healing and necessary strategy may be part of our "human condition" but as observed around the world, whether motivated by fear of or feelings about dishonor, poverty, or personal and political impotence, the mechanism needs its limits.

In the middle east conflicts, quests for power, so I feel from observation, involve not only the possession of autonomy through the possession of money and the acquisition of the obedience of loyal others but also the sadistic urge to dispossess others of their physical and inspiriting assets: the Jews must lose their businesses and homes; the pretty girl gets acid in the face; the victim of rape needs four witnesses to attest to it (something like that) before being further dispossed of self-esteeem, even the possibility of it, byt being charged with adultery.

Do you see the pattern?

For the worst, this is not a matter of knowing where their nose ends and mine begins.  

 

The desire, urge, and yearning to damage others -- too willfully, as you have put it, "oppress us and abridge our rights" -- is the whole  point.  They can dress up a two-legged-bomb or an IED in Islamic poetry and rhetorical psychology, but the real psychology is some are out to do mayhem and murder because, frankly, it makes them feel like they're doing something (perhaps "at last"), or have done something, and they are powerful for having gotten away with it.

 

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I take care always to say "some" because I really believe it is only "some" and not even the zealous count among them for carrying within their hearts malicious desire plus the ability to energize it in political form and play out the same with degrees of violence shaped by circumstance, social alliance, and opportunity.

 

Along similar lines, I had last night the privilege of watching Constantine's Sword, the film narrated by James Carroll as a questing figure, one with the book on which the documentary had been based -- Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History -- and otherwise co-written and documented by Oren Jacoby. 

 

Those familiar with the film know it works backwards from an imbroglio involving the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Spring, Colorado having to do with the pervasive on-campus prosyletizing of an evangelical church and efforts by both outside and inside forces to maintain the force as a cohesive Christian sword, a way not in keeping with " . . . that all men are created equal" or with the nation's commitment to the firmest divide between church and state, to the third-century's "miraculous" inspiration of a general inclined toward conquest beneath the sign of the cross, a symbol he himself is responsible for promoting (over images of fish and sheep) as the go-to icon of Christianity behind which his armies would go on to conduct their slaughter, create for him, Constantine, a new empire, and make Rome, sunk back into paganism, forever and irrevocably Christian.

 

Constantine also had built in his time a colossus of himself.

 

Nowhere in Judaism or Jewish culture and life will one find, say, a Colossus of Moses (don't bother -- I've already tried to find one online, but you might enjoy reading about Edwin Moses, a "Colossus of Sport" or Moses Solomon, the "rabbi of swat" . . . a "clouting colossus of the southwest"  . . .  "who couldn't catch a fly without flypaper").

 

Here is a comment most cogent from The New York Times ("When Love of Religion Leads to Hatred of Others" by Stephen Holden, April 18, 2008) on the book, the movie, and the matter:

 

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What must Middle Eastern Muslims feel, Mr. Carroll wonders, when George W. Bush throws around concepts like good and evil and uses the word crusade to describe the Iraq war? Mr. Carroll worries that we may be heading toward an all-out holy war between state-supported religious extremists.

 

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If you watch the documentary, you'll hear James Carroll note that "No war is holy."

 

We're learning -- well, at least I hope I'm not alone in this -- what makes for "religious extremist" leaders, and it's not very pretty if you call it "malignant narcissism" (and suggest the evident religious zeal inevitably turns out a cover for other urges) and go about the business of studying and comprehending what that is while also looking into the range of what it is in the needs of the followers (and perhaps of ourselves) that so frequently endorses the distinctly ignoble, inhuman, and outrageous beliefs, dreams, and pursuits of what become history's Caligulas, monsters who cannot contain themselves but handily spread their insanity to legions.

 

Additional Reference

Post, Jerrold M.  "Current Concepts of the Narcissistic Personality: Implications for Political Psychology."  Political Psychology (14:1) March 1993, pp. 99-121: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3791395

Post, Jerrold M.  Leaders and Their Followers in a Dangerous World: The Psychology of Political Behavior.  Ithaca, New York and London, Cornell University Press, 2004.

Wikipedia.  "Malignant Narcissism": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malignant_narcissism

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Ye Who Would Wish to Help Man, Write for God

In the design and engineering of a properly motivated conflict complex, pandering may count first among the evils available to speech. 

Of course the Emperor's clothes look dashing even though he's not wearing any.

And not one of anyone's ilk would have burned the Great Library of Alexandria.

Looking for the root of all evil? 

Forget about money. 

Look here:

• bluffs
• cheats
• concealments
• deceptions
• deflections
• denials
• exaggerations
• equivocations
• false analogies
• false claims
• frauds
• fabrications
• innuendos
• libels
• lies
• misrepresentations
• obfuscations
• omissions
• understatements

From there, the basics of lying, one might go on to similarly pleasant and damnable behaviors: bribery (and patronage), conning, intimidation -- basic infernal leverage, those three.

To get really down and dirty, one might go on to behaviors lending themselves to disinhibition in various dimensions -- addiction, eroticism, gluttony, masochism, sadism, etc. -- which may involve matters of degree and where to place the sort of limit about which most and one's self would say, "no more -- not another bite!"

Somewhere in my Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy concept, one might notice that the (privately sane) rock star's public excesses have a way of being contained by concerns for the bottom line, the next show, the continuing good will of the fans, and such, making the wrecking of the hotel room an expensive publicity stunt (it was probably a lot of fun too but not the sort of behavior to bring home to the mansion), and there are internal contrainers too, those little devils that say, "Enough already, that will do for a buzz or a photo-op."

Those who go beyond, really get Out There, so much so they really need to be caught in a net and caged.

The nanny can't keep the baby quiet?  Well then, throw a pot of boiling water over her head!

Some of the people seem upset about something?  Send out the army!

Not getting along in or with the modern world?  Blame the Jews!

Probably the first lie, whatever it may be, and getting away with it, creates the first license, and if the one who does it or the culture that indulges the same is not careful, the gyre around greed and power take off.  The militia may not really care, but for $50 per month, they'll go out on the streets and gun down protestors without flinching, just so long as they're not outmaneuvered, outnumbered, and outgunned themselves.

Greed or fear may subdue conscience, or so regularly and ruthlessly abuse it as to make it go away (and make it corrosive and shameful in the most hellish ways to have it back and nagging over one's every breathing moment).

I will tell you it's frightning when one starts to see the outline of a low-level drudge doling out torture at Evin Prison (reference: Then They Came for Me) and start to connect that with Iran's Revolutionary Guard, an even more potent more private force under the direct control of Ayatollah Khamenei, and then with perhaps less involvement but certainly some presence Russia, Turkey, Syria, and their interest.  That's a lot of evil come from selling a "Zionist conspiracy" that doesn't exist (and Jews as devils, except that in realspace, all over real life, really, I and mine are producing publications, engineering miracles in healthcare and other productive areas, and volunteering services involved with every do-good possibility on the planet: in fact, if you happen to see solar arrays decorating floating villages in Peru, do blame the Jews).

In any case, the arms racers and suppliers, legitimate and black market, have their best days.

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Let me take you to the other side in my idealism: if you would wish to help people, write for God. 

This is not to say don't take some money for the effort, but if it's going to be a good effort, put away that tempting contract with the Devil.

Average mediaphiles know the basics:  if in journalism, you will make every effort to publish work that is "clear, accurate, and complete"; if in soft science research, you will do all that may be done to establish expert validity for proposed dimensions and variables in your theories and go on to produce "valid" and "reliable" data as well as fully plausible and challengeable hypotheses and theories.

Perhaps even as pundit with an attitude, curiously about how things work and delving into them to ferret that out may seem more fair to the work than conveniently spooling out a familiar schpeil on a soapbox.

Convenient honest will not be enough to turn the darker tides: in fact, I should think it evil to invent or promote "alternative viewpoints" to influence politics or score social points, all of which is just ass licking whether of individuals or in-groups or ambitious organizations with agendas.  What the heavens -- God, nature, the nagging signal from one's better moral compass --  beg for are accurate and clear analyses and assessments of things as they really are. 

A mind in which all things are possible and all possibilies and proposals are equal has absolutely no value to anyone, least of all the whacked-out owner of such confused perceptions and low standards.

No need to be mechanical or neutered, bereft of personal interests and social affinities and alliances: the truth to be observed and reflected in things won't care, for if you have uncovered a little bit of true story and real knowledge, such a notation, organic and quite independently of your efforts will withstand challenges from many directions and, if surviving, attain growth and stability until debunked, which may never happen, or once settled, grown repetitive and tiresome, and finally played out and punched out by the best who should have beaten it, integrated into something greater.

Leave the cant, parroting, propagandizing to minds already chained by habits, constrained perhaps by their watchers or "handlers", numbed by bad old desires and dreams, and dependent on "mission approval" for confidence.

Discern, test, assert; be accountable, responsible, universal in reflection and statement; what doesn't work, stop defending, let it go, adjust; eschew constructivism, embrace coherance; and not least important, leave room for creativity, empathy, and imagination.

Consider even becoming comfortable with the ineffable.

I would not mean to prod any into flying in the face of local or fashionable social conventions and expectations for the sake of it, and yet, if you have stumbled upon a right path where others seem to you lost and walking off the cllifs, go with God -- and great good, comprehensive, valid, and reliable data -- and invite the lost to scout the new frontier with you. 

Enjoy one's skeptics most of all.

Just don't toady to them.

Should one as an analyst, writer, or researcher be one's own best fan, remember: whatever the best findings, the most truthful conclusions, none will change if true, and if not true and undermined by peers, none will repair themselves merely to be kind to you. 

Get over it.

Move on.

A Dios.

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Integrity - What It Means

Another of my Facebook comments:

This is not only about anti-Semitism, for a look at the systems from which the rhetoric springs may tell about that. This line of battle in "intellectual battlespace" is about power and language, and we are due an international dialogue on the meaning of integrity in culture and language, its competition with loyalty (perhaps) and its role, most certainly, in the development of license making way for barbarism.

In that evil, so I have come to believe, starts with a lie, and in that we have wrapped around the earth a common global communicating system, this well may be the time to launch a "great conversation" about the natural invention of language as a cultural technology and within that construct assumptions about cultural behaviors favoring or disfavoring the possession within each person of good conscience.

We might also delve into what makes deceit possible, probable, or even imperative in human social relationships and focus on that until we have a clear picture of how "The Emperor's New Clothes" works as a kind of psychological thriller involving its little bit of social drama. 

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Along these lines, I cannot too highly recommend reading linguist Dan Everett's observations in Don't Sleep, There are Snakes.  Click here for a review in Time and go on to Amazon to get it.

What I've latched on to in Everett's story is how wildly chancey the creation of the basis for language may be as well as the launch of cultural customs that become inseparable from it and also fixed or suspended in time by it.

Earth, the life on it, and humanity may be the only cosmic jokes going in the overwhelmingly inorganic universe, but even so, my fellow travelers, let's make the most of it and set to work on getting a good and kind grip on our cross-cultural, interlingual communicating and related purposes.

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Politics - Delusional Codependence

One is a nut.

Two is a conspiracy.

Three is a cabal.

Four is a political party.

Displays of confidence and enthusiasm contribute to charismatic power: the entertainer smiles!  The politician kisses the baby!  We say of the comedian and his room on a good night, "Great energy, man!"

Where intentions are good, i.e., "to educate, inform, and entertain" or, say, to improve community health and sanitation systmes, as well as "in bounds" and in the realm of the doable, possible, or just an inch over the edge, the crowds pile aboard and produce that something we call progress -- or just a good show or an improved downtown business environment.

However, whether on The Hill or in Hollywood or nurtured in the womb of The Enterprise (any sector), a not too secret self-aggrandizing motive may course through the social environment with more or less approval, much including approval, even enthusiasm, for those whose intentions turn on the sordid business of acquiring power over others to redound solely to the limitless beauty of their own glory in all of its unbridled sadism.

We expect actors, artists, politicians, and priests to reach for and appreciate, albeit with appropriate humility, a measure of greatness, and by rights, we seem to like our leaders (as we do our heroes) a little larger than life.  We don't expect the same to turn out shits (unless enjoying the flavor of a general and woeful cynacism), but some of them sure do, and Way Out There in the scale of their ambitions, the angered depths of their frustrations, and the heights of their preferred self concepts (nearer to God than to thee, such a one might imply or say), the same may acquire license as well as helpful and like-minded associates, equally uncontained and unencumbered by a more common human conscience, empathy, and kindly reasoning sensibility.

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers," wrote Shakespeare (Henry IV, ii) and with similar interest in lusts for power and conspiracies and outrageous gyrations and machinations to obtain it.

That we haven't taken the lesson from the Bard doesn't mean we haven't kicked it around some, and widely so.  This passage concerns itself with a basis in Jainism:

 "Codependent Origination, though not traditionally applied to political affairs, provides a psycho-social model of the human condition that is compatible with classic Realist political texts.  It finds much behaviour dependent on delusion (or ignorance), desire and aggression.  These are termed either the 'three fires' or the 'three poisons'.  They are the propellant fuels of human behavior and require discipline if they are not to stimulate suffering, aggression and death" [1].

In "Political Codependence and Cults of Personality" [2], Sam (Shmuel) Vaknin moves into this area through the dimensional gate that is narcissism (oh, let us count the ways).

At least one author in social psychology -- David Thomas, at first quick web glance at least, seems to have developed a profession in organizational psychology --  offers this observation in the definition of "Codependent, enabler, follower, covert narcissist, inverted narcissist, co-narcissist" [3]:

Codependency is a condition that affects a large percentage of the adult population. Individual characteristics vary in degree from individual to individual. Codependent patterns of behavior include, among others:

• Avoiding decision making and confrontation
• External referencing (always checking outside oneself before making choices)
• Subordinating one's needs to those of the person with whom one is involved [the narcissist]
• Perfectionism
• Over-controlling
• Manipulation
• Lack of trust
• Lying

Often, the same person displays both narcissistic and codependency (co-narcissistic) behaviors, depending on circumstances. Both narcissists and codependents tend to assume that in any interpersonal interaction one person is narcissistic and the other codependent, and often can play either part.

One may see the measures of silliness here in degrees (who is without tendencies along some potential psychopathological path?) as well as the transitive challenge in moving a description of individual and personal behavior toward one involved with social organizations . . . and yet, right there in that bulleted list are quite a few, if not all, of the hallmarks of the Islamic Small Wars and the autocrat-producing atmospheres in which they exist.

However, let me not restrict this to Islam's internecine conflicts but rather maintain the same dimensions, motivations, and variables exist and apply universally where violent and far out of kilter political mobsterism -- Burma, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, etc. -- prevail as the organizing principle of the society.

One may see complications ahead for "Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy (FBPS)" and now this helpful appendage that I will hereafter call "Delusional Political Codependence (DPS)", but one may see the parts moving, the juggernaut of the Out There and cloaked malformed charismatic, the lift off for the closest of fellow travelers, the lift of the enchanted acolytes in a cause that opens their gates to a new and endless dawn, one that may be as boundless as it may be boastful, cruel, pitiless, and ruthless.

Reference

1. Grey, Maggie.  "The Emptiness of Codependent Origination."  The Culture Mandala, 7:1, December 2005.

2. Vaknin, Shmuel (Sam).  "Political Codependence and Cults of Personality."  Global Politician, n.d.

 3. Thomas, David.  "Codependent, enabler, follower, covert/inverted/co-narcissist".  Definition.  Winning Teams, n.d.

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X <------> Affective Experience : Grammatical Hueristics

Thesis: whatever "X" may be, the affect set by it, directly or learned, sets in place a rule predicating next encounters in familiar "if-then" terms.

1. Earlier experiences stage later ones.

2. Earlier experiences may become indistinct in their integration with accumulating data, i.e., essentially forgotten.

Relevance: studies of beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, cognitive styles, apperception, perception, culture.

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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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