Submitted By: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger
I’m an easy mark for those who want to approach me emotionally. My own life, with the normal tragedies of living seven decades has let me be attuned to others pain and to view that pain with an empathy born of my own suffering. Working out my own problems via years of therapy in my twenties and thirties, allowed me to finally let myself cry at the early death of my parent’s years before. I had put a “bottleneck” on tears since a teenager, choking sad emotions by constricting my throat and being in intellectual denial of the mourning I felt at their loss. This is not to say that I had no emotional outlets in my years prior to therapy, but they were limited to events far outside the ken of my life. Thus I could identify with wronged characters in movies and could cry at the death of Marin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. In my personal life though, I acted out the role ascribed to me in my High School Yearbook “Mike thinks that life is just a snap of his fingers”. Therapy changed that and allowed me to let myself be aware of and be guided by my emotions.
Emotionally, I am as patriotic an American as you might find. I love this country and I love the fact that I’m a citizen of it. My tears well up at the playing of our National Anthem. The Constitution is a sacred document to me and the aspirations of our “Founding Fathers” seem noble and just. In sports I often find myself moved to tears when athletes or teams overcome adversity and triumph. My family knows this emotional side of me since I cry at movies like “The Little Mermaid”. In personal relationships I am also ruled by emotion. People who treat me with kindness are not only repaid in kind, but I find myself rooting for their happiness and sad at their sadness. It is therefore quite easy to become someone I consider to be a friend and difficult for me to note imperfections in the friendships I’ve made. However, that is on an emotional level and as all humans, I am far more than just my emotions. Intellect and experience play important roles in shaping who we are. On a personal level I have experienced betrayal by “friends” and lovers. In my career I’ve experienced betrayal by those I thought of as friends and co-workers. However, I think those “let downs” are merely a normal part of the human experience. We humans learn and grow from our social interactions, allowing them to inform our interactions with each other.
We humans co-exist though in a larger context than mere personal interactions and that is a society known as “country”. Through the norms and mores of that society we find that our emotions are stimulated by the commonality of our existence as part of a whole. We rely on that society to protect us from predators and from those from other society’s that would do us harm. We unite emotionally in times of crisis and we feel warmth and comfort from being part of the whole. The most emotionally jarring event of the past five decades was the attack on 9/11 that galvanized this country almost as one entity. We commemorated the twelfth anniversary of this overwhelmingly sad event this past week. I need not describe the effect of this event on all of us, since I know that we all have sharp personal memories of that day and the days of anger, fear and confusion that followed. The reactions politically that followed 9/11 has personally scarred those who lived through it and have done great harm to our country. People from all sides of the political spectrum feel betrayed by the events that followed 9/11. Some feel betrayed because the majority of the country no longer supports the military interventions that ensued. Others feel betrayed because there is clear evidence that our government “lied” us into a costly war against a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack. We have become then a nation of cynics when it comes to our government and I will explore why this can be either good or bad for the future of our country.When President Obama spoke this week about intervention in Syria: (transcript below) http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/running-transcript-president-obamas-sept-10-speech-on-syria/2013/09/10/a8826aa6-1a2e-11e3-8685-5021e0c41964_story.html I felt myself sneering as the cleverly written propaganda came forth from his lips with the sound of great sincerity. Could he really believe this crap I thought? Is it just foistering of political propaganda used for him to save face in light of the overwhelming evidence that the people of this country don’t support his “targeted air strike” as a panacea for the use of gas in the Syrian Civil War? Does it really matter? As he explained that we Americans are war weary from more than a decade of fighting wars. These wars in the end were colossal failures and more importantly seem to have been fought for no real reason save for the enrichment of the Corporate Military Industrial Complex (CMIC) and most specifically the multinational oil industry. The President, even if obliquely, acknowledged the futility of this century’s military interventions and the cost borne by this nation’s troops and people:
“I believe our democracy is stronger when the President acts with the support of Congress. And I believe that America acts more effectively abroad when we stand together.
This is especially true after a decade that put more and more war-making power in the hands of the President, and more and more burdens on the shoulders of our troops, while sidelining the people’s representatives from the critical decisions about when we use force.
Now, I know that after the terrible toll of Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of any military action, no matter how limited, is not going to be popular. After all, I’ve spent four and a half years working to end wars, not to start them. Our troops are out of Iraq. Our troops are coming home from Afghanistan. And I know Americans want all of us in Washington
— especially me — to concentrate on the task of building our nation here at home: putting people back to work, educating our kids, growing our middle class.”
To me there most glaring inconsistency in the President’s speech was that while making the case for intervention to stop the use of Sarin Gas, promising that no U.S. Troops would be used on the ground, describing Assad’s government as implacable, our President nevertheless contended that one “targeted air strike” would somehow make things better. The entire proposition seems nonsensical to me and I therefore distrust its sincerity, or as a fallback, the sanity of those who would pursue it.
As Professor Turley described in a blog this week 75% of the deaths in Afghanistan occurred after Obama became President: http://jonathanturley.org/2013/09/12/study-almost-75-percent-of-all-afghanistan-deaths-occurred-under-obama/ . This was of course the man who the country elected in 2008 to end the two wars. While it appears that the Iraq War has ended since most American Forces have been removed, we note that in August the Iraqi government began to plead for additional U.S. help since there has been an upsurge in violence and civilian strife. http://news.yahoo.com/iraq-seeks-help-us-amid-growing-violence-221052797.html . So perhaps the President’s claim is premature. As of January 31, 2012. 4,487 US Soldiers were Killed in Iraq and 32,223 were Seriously Wounded. This does not encompass the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi’s who died in that war.
The rationale for the Iraq War was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that he had been somehow involved in the 9/11 attack. Both of those premises have proven to be untrue. We have spent about a Trillion Dollars on Iraq as shown by the following which gives a breakdown of the human/financial costs of that war. http://usliberals.about.com/od/homelandsecurit1/a/IraqNumbers.htm Is it any wonder then that the majority of the country distrusts our government and is suspicious of any suggestion that there is yet another country where we MUST intervene? Our attack on Afghanistan was not only premised on the belief that the 9/11 attack was executed by Al Qaeda leaders within the country, but was also meant to destroy the power of the Afghani allies the Taliban. We see though that the Taliban still has great power in Afghanistan and that our “greatest 9/11 enemy” Osama Bin Laden was living in Pakistan all along. The truth is that the U.S. originally armed Al Qaeda and the Taliban to fight against the USSR in the 1980’s, as that “great power” was driven from the country, as have been all Afghanistan’s invaders from time immemorial. Both these wars have been unnecessary debacles executed by the manipulation of American emotions stemming from 9/11.
How much a debacle those wars were was highlighted by two actions (admissions) by George W. Bush who bears the responsibility for them and consequently for the horrors that ensued. The first was his skit at The National Press Club where he pretended to look for “weapons of mass destruction” in a mocking manner. He was mocking those of us who believed the lies of his administration that caused us to attack Iraq. The second action was when he was asked if the U.S. knew where Osama Bin Laden was hiding. His response was that Osama Bin Laden was no longer important to him. If this was so then why the hell did we attack Afghanistan under the pretense that we were seeking revenge against Osama Bin Laden? Despite the beliefs of those who would rule us the entire country is not at all stupid and in the light of Bush’s actions should we wonder why people are so turned off to government and so cynical about it?
The germ of this piece has been gestating for years in my mind, but it came to the foreground this week in a reprise article from Russ Baker’s http://whowhatwhy.com investigative website. The article was from 2011 and investigated the probable involvement of powers within Saudi Arabia in funding and supporting the 9/11 attack. http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/09/11/classic-why-suppressed-saudi-911-story/ The background it supplies and the premise of Saudi involvement seems credible to me and fits in with the close ties of George W. Bush and his family to the powers that be in Saudi Arabia. Our current concern with Syria mirrors the Saudi’s constant efforts to attain hegemony in the Muslim world, where they are competing with Iran. Entwined in this is of course Oil, which has been for more than a Century the greatest motivating factor in international relations.
What all of this endless warfare has done has been to unite the majority of the American people, myself included, in a cynical view of our government and its entire doings. How can we trust government if it lies us into wars and wastes trillions of dollars? This cynicism leaks over into all areas of government endeavor. It unites those on both the left and the right of the political spectrum and it could lead to the ultimate destruction of our Constitution and even our country as we know it. Yet how can we argue against this cynicism? The truth is that in the experience of my lifetime government can’t be trusted. With this concept I find myself in unison with the “Tea Party” and simultaneously with “Progressives” in distrusting just about everything government does. Most of the many guest blogs I’ve written here through the years reveal this cynicism in one form or the other. Just type “Mike Spindell” into the search function above and you will see blog after blog expressing my cynicism and distrust of what is occurring in this country that I dearly love. While I am united with many on both the Right and the Left in distrusting the government and politics in general, my analysis of the problem of government is not as uniform.
The corruption of our political system and the failure of government to do its job is not the result in the inherent flaw of any government as the Libertarians and Tea Party suspect. Government doesn’t work because it is corrupted by those seeking power and wealth. Our Constitution is ignored by those who would manipulate the rest of us for their own personal gains. The “Isms” we are presented with as solutions to the vastness of human misery are merely the tools to distract us from the real “game of thrones” being played with us as pawns. My cynicism is well-deserved, as is yours the reader because our shared experiences have proven it to be correct.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” As Cassius laments in “Julius Caesar” this is the state of humans and humanity. It is the constant struggle for dominance engaged in by a few that disrupts and distracts government from its role as the manifestation of the ideals of our society. Whenever those who would see a different world try to change it, they must recognize that it is human flaws, rather than political systems, that distract the care and protection of the populace. Humanity, born of mutual cooperation in our pre-history, still also bears within it the residue of our predatory past. Therefore, even as we of good will who would seek to turn this world into the Utopia that is within humanity’s powers; we must use the cynicism of our intellect to distrust those who would offer simplistic solutions appealing to our emotions to get us to do their bidding. I remain a political cynic and often despair at the doings of the world around me. Yet I will not and the collective we should not, let ourselves give into that despair. In that direction lays the darkness of all the horrors of human history. We must fight on to remake ourselves and humanity into caring and compassionate beings, interacting with each other in harmony. Yet to continue that fight we must recognize the propaganda and mythology that leads us astray. We must view all calls for action through a cynical, skeptical eye, while maintaining our idealistic hope for a better future. It is a hard task, yet for those of us who were not to the manor born it is essential, or else we will continue to be pawns in the hands of the powerful that would destroy us and those we love without conscience or constraint.
Submitted By: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger.
Dredd,
Sometimes Bill Maher gets things so right it is breathtaking.
Pat,
Try this link:
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/03/17/a-real-history-of-the-last-sixty-two-years/
and you’ll see what I thought about the importance of the JFK murder.
JH, that pledge unfortunately has been superceded by the . . . .
Federal Politician’s Pledge:
I pledge allegance, to my party, that subjugates the United States of America and to the duopoly for which it reigns. My nation: worship me as your god, and I’ll grant liberty and justice to those who serve me; maybe.
Hey Professor Turley;
Here’s a great story that needs the telling. Women seek to impeach discriminatory judge in New Jersey.
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/investigators&id=9234665
Otteray;
I too, am disappointed about many policies to which POTUS Obama has gone far to askew as a compromising politico. That being said, I’m also much more aware of the true nature of our POTUS, whence he came, what he does and who he is. Even with all that I know, I forgive him to a point (thoroughly pissed he won’t give U.S. a more noble U.S. Attorney General) – and I greatly admire many of his Administration’s brilliant strategies. (Such as making Hillary Sec of State – and not going for popular vote – but knowing they had to take Ohio, Michigan and Florida).
If you believe in G-d and the devil – or some other form of good v evil as the nature of all things, one has to ponder is it better to have a middle grounder such as POTUS Obama – or the softer (weaker?) Jimmy Carter types.
I’m ecstatic that the people have spoken and we stopped the plan of bullying over Syria. It was a bizarre policy to foster the notion that we must bomb Syrian’s to stop a Syrian from bombing Syrians.
JFK was “THE” Man who signed the Fed out of existence. POTUS Obama is highly unlikely to do anything that profound. Be that as it may, we’ve come a long way in other mannerisms germane. For our nation elected a non-Caucasian with a very odd ball last name that made all WASP’s cringe.
That’s a good thing, no – a Great Thing!
Good piece Mike – Well Said!
Pat,
I said five decades thinking of JFK. For my take on his assassination please enter “A Real History if the Last Sixty -Two Years ” in the search box at the top right of this page and I think you might find we are in some agreement.
Mike, sorry but I am still not seeing that. Skim reading this time I just see Robert Kennedy. But there again I’ve been up all night and I’m not at my best. Again, sorry.
Pat
Mike, I ate some breakfast and am on my way to bed (Yeah, I know I’m bass akwards) but I did read your article on JFK. That was really good. Another day I will actually click on all the links you provided within the article and comments. I was a freshman in high school and like you I read everything I could get my hands on about it. I educated my son on the subject so he would not just accept the LHO killed JFK….move on to another part of history sidestep.
I ran across this the other day:
Some Context for Our Upcoming Bombing Campaign
http://prospect.org/article/some-context-our-upcoming-bombing-campaign
And we wonder why we are broke!
Mike, with all due respect when I read your words “The most emotionally jarring event of the past five decades was the attack on 9/11 that galvanized this country almost as one entity” I was a bit dismayed. On Nov. 22, 1963 this nation had a president shot down in broad daylight in a major American city. In order to draw attention away from that fact and the pithy investigation and an overwhelming consensus that a conspiracy had occurred the new president manufactured a crisis with the Gulf of Tonlken (sp? my spell check is terrible) indecent. Just as the drip, drip, drip of disbelieve came with the Warren Commission revelations and with that national dissatisfaction and a war to change the subject so does the drip, drip, drip that brought the NSA’s abuses to light make it really easy to start another war just to change the subject and the nation’s attention. I am far from convinced that it was not our own intelligence services that used chemical weapons in Syria.
One last thing and then I will shut up and wait to be beat on, you say the following: “Corporate Military Industrial Complex (CMIC) and most specifically the multinational oil industry.”
When Eisenhower gave his farewell address he used the term the “Military Industrial Complex.” I have read, in many places, that he wanted to use the phrase Military Industrial Congressional Complex but was talked out of it by aides. Now that phrase is used by many military reformers but to that “T T” has been added which stands for think tank. But I do like the CMIC. How about CMICC TT?
Mike, I am painfully aware of the message from the Stones. However, I will keep up my currently quixotic quest, Dreaming the Impossible Dream.
Interesting idea, Tony.
“I want explicit condemnation of the duopoly.”
Nick:
The sheer size of our government is what the duopoly uses to keep power. You have to feed the beast or it will feed on you. Wait a minute!! It is feeding on us! And, the attitude of the duopoly is “Whatta you going to do about it, sucka?”
I want explicit condemnation of the duopoly. Think of how Ralph Nader eviscerates it. Those who lament our situation and then “vote for the lesser of two evils” are the biggest part of the problem. That myopia is what the duopoly depends upon. We may not see 3rd party results in our lifetime, but we must do it for our kids or grandkids.
Slarti,
Thank you for your very thoughtful comments which allow me to both clarify and expand where I was coming from in this post. Although it is difficult for me being so naturally “wordy”, I have found that I must pick and choose what to put into a particular essay, or come up with one of enormous length that will in the end turn off the reader from the mere drudgery of going through it and hope they get what is behind what I’m writing. I’m just not that good a writer to always be clear in my distillation of thoughts with greater implications as I’ll try to now explain. In this way you might see that you and I are not so far apart on this issue.
The reason I talked of the importance of psychotherapy in changing my outlook was deeper than mere self confession. As someone trained as a Psychotherapist I feel I have a deeper understanding than the laymen of what it is supposed to do. Therapist cannot “change” people. What they can do is provide a mirror for the patient into who they really are. The idea is that almost all people mature deceiving themselves…..about themselves. No one can teach an individual how to organize their own brain. All of us tend to mature seeing ourselves in a favorable light, or not. Due to this our pre-conceptions about who we are rationalize our actions to fit with those pre-conceptions. Therapy can only try to get people to see who they really are and then with that added information make changes in their lives that they personally deem beneficial, or not. As you wrote:
“I generally accept people’s stated motives at face value since I think very few people are villains in their own minds and I think that actions are the only significant measure on which to judge a politician in any case.”
You are in the ballpark of where I’m coming from but with this difference. I agree that few people are villains in there own minds and that actions are the only true measure of them. However, my training and experience are such that I can’t accept people’s stated motives at face value because I’m aware of how much self deception exists in most of us. Throughout history leaders have personally thought themselves better informed than those they led. They justify their actions based on that greater knowledge and are willing to deceive the masses for what they personally perceive is the greater good. While as I stated in this piece that I too am very accepting of those I meet and if they come in good will I return it in kind. However, after those “first impressions” then comes a growing context of actions and to me the rational person begins to get a better picture of who they are dealing with from the context.
I strongly supported Obama in his first election because I accepted his message on face value. He was “brilliant” as evidenced by his school career. He was charismatic and yet very down to earth. He was a black man with all the history that entailed. He had been trained in the Alinsky method which is one I admire. He was “against the war”. As a Constitutional expert he would understand the illegality of the “Bush Years” and end it. He was for economic justice and therefore he would tame the Wall St. excess. And so on and so forth. When he appointed Geithner, Larry Summers, Donovan and Holder, my confidence in him began to slip because the context surrounding him had changed. When his views on Gay people started to “evolve” I began to be less trustful of him as anything more than a garden variety politician. When he asserted the same Presidential powers as G.W. Bush my faith slipped further. I could go on, but needless to say I came to see that he was not the “change” I had hoped for.
For the 2012 election I supported him but emphasized is was strictly as the lesser of two evils. I had come to see though that while somewhat better than his predecessor he fell far short of what was needed. When you write:
“While their role as enablers doesn’t speak well of the Democrats, holding the line is a far better alternative right now than the wholesale retreat of our civil liberties which seems to happen under Republicans—at least until we can find or create a viable third option.”
Obviously we agree on this point. Where I differ though is that unless we are critical of the mistakes of this Administration a viable third option will never be allowed to thrive.
The issue for me is related to the sheer size of our system, it is orders of magnitude greater in both population and complexity than the system as it was founded and conceived.
As much as people want to think that true sociopaths and psychopaths (which I will just call sociopaths here) are only denizens of the fictional world or third world countries, we live beside them without knowing it, as the vast majority of neighbors of rapists and serial killers let slip every time one of the dumber sociopaths slips up and gets caught.
That lack of empathy, and willingness to harm or defraud to get their own way, is mostly independent from “high intelligence.” There is about a 1% chance of possessing each trait (“intelligence” being defined as in the top 1% of reasoning ability), thus about 1 in 10,000 people possess both; they are in the bottom 1% of humanity as far as empathy or care for anyone other than themselves, and simultaneously in the top 1% as far as their ability to solve problems, strategize, correctly anticipate outcomes and take action without getting caught or found out.
That would explain, certainly, why most people do not personally know (or think they know) a person in this elite category. Not only are they rare, but their ability to deflect suspicion, provide themselves alibis and generally evade detection makes them seem more rare than they actually are.
The reason the size and complexity of the system is in play is that small systems of low complexity (like a farming village) are more transparent.
But a Congressman currently represents about 450,000 adults, from whom they are chosen. That includes about 45 highly intelligent sociopaths, willing to do anything. Now a lot of them may be in business or crime, but politics is a venue practically perfect for a sociopath; a willingness to do anything to win is an asset, the job comes with power and a complete lack of any real job requirements and (practically speaking) near immunity to the law. To top it off, the corruption opportunities in the form of campaign funding are staggering, and worth millions. A smart sociopath politician can be paid off and live like royalty without getting caught. Some of that is due to the complexity of our system and the lack of transparency such complexity engenders.
The reason size matters is statistical; the more people ONE politician represents, the greater the chance that politician is a sociopath. For example, if a politician is chosen from 10,000 people, we expect (on average) one person in that population to be a highly intelligent sociopath. But many opportunities exist for sociopaths to find something more lucrative to do than become a small time politician. There is also a good chance, if the average is just one, that half the politicians elected will be non-sociopathic, and a sociopathic politician might not be able to collude as effectively with non-sociopaths.
However, when a politician is chosen from 450,000 people, we expect 45 of them to be highly intelligent sociopaths. So we have 45 times as much chance that one (or a few) of them will choose the political route, because it is more lucrative to represent 45 times as many people, to receive 45 times as much in campaign donations, and to control 45 times as much tax money that can be corruptly diverted.
Complexity and technology exacerbate the problem; giving the politician more loopholes and routes to fortune, and a greater ability to evade detection.
In short, as the country grows in population and the “ruling class” remains static in number, the proportions favor sociopathy among the ruling class.
The problem with sociopaths, as related to Mike’s article, is that the lack of emotional empathy, caring or feelings of guilt make them excellent liars without the tics and stresses that would normally trigger our subconscious lie detectors and make us suspicious or wary. They fake sincerity well while stabbing us in the back. Appeals to their “humanity” are pointless exercises in futility; they have none, and most people do not seem to comprehend that.
It doesn’t mean all politicians are sociopaths, but it doesn’t take all of them being sociopaths for the system to wind up effectively sociopathic.
The founders originally set a minimum of 30,000 being represented. We would be politically better off with that number, but I think that was a mistake, a lower number like one in 10,000; within a system of tiered responsibility, would provide us with greater protection (from a statistical point of view given our current knowledge of the rate of incidence of mental illness).
For an example of what I mean, we could demand a representative for every 10,000 adults of voting age, and for the role of “Congress” a vote from the entirety of what would currently be 20,000 elected politicians (instead of just 435 in the House of Representatives,). We could handle 20,000 representatives, and we always could have: The evidence is in the Constitution itself, even the founders considered it possible to handle elections of 30,000 voters; they set that as the minimum number of citizens a representative could elect!
In 1776, however, the USA population was estimated at 2.5 million, which probably would have required (counting adults of voting age only) about 125 representatives or less. It would have been a workable system then, and due to communications technology (including the telegraph), a workable system throughout American history.
The two parties will prevail into 2016. The action will be in the republican primaries. The government slashing white supremacist friendly Cruz – Paul faction will take on the more moderate Bush – Christie wing. If Hillary runs, the question remains whether or not she will be challenged by a more progressive democrat. Yesterday, people were talking about Bill de Blasio. Howard Dean has been mentioned. These days I don’t think of Obama as being a good man nor do I think of him in the same vein as I do the leader of North Korea. I have actually seen him compared to kim jon il on the Turley blog. I am neutral because of his favorable positions on healthcare, gay marriage, women’s rights, voting rights,etc . but at the same time I really don’t like the NSA spying so I give him very negative marks on that.
Jill 1, September 14, 2013 at 9:31 am
…
One way out of propaganda is to look at “leaders” in the same way we look at our neighbors. Things will become clear very quickly.
==============================
Well said.
Slartibartfast 1, September 14, 2013 at 4:01 am
… I believe that pragmatism … I generally accept people’s stated motives at face value … the most useful thing … game theory … I choose to support President Obama on Syria (and in general), because I believe … I feel that is the case, but … mostly … my belief … I believe that President Obama is a good man … I choose pragmatism over cynicism.
===================================
Yes, that is easy to see.
It is a belief and feeling you use to choose following Obama to Syria.
To the contrary, most of the country is into knowing what they are seeing.
Slarti,
Sorry, buddy. Going to disagree on the whole “Obama is a good man” issue. He hurt his standing in that regard when he didn’t prosecute the war criminals of the previous administration and/or the Wall Street Thieves and he killed that notion completely when he joined Bush Co. in their treasons by declaring that the POTUS has the ultra vires power to execute American citizens without due process.
That’s so damn unconstitutional it still makes my head spin just thinking about it.