Seymour Hersh's
interview on CNN yesterday has set alarm bells ringing again that George W. Bush may be seriously mentally ill. In considering that possibility and what it might imply, there has been some back and forth about the nature of what precisely we as a nation are facing in the Bush administration - are these individuals "crazy", are they "evil", are they merely "statist fanatics" and no more than a transient shift in the political winds? Do moralistic terms such as "evil" even merit a place in any serious discourse about a branch of government?
More evil and madness after the fold.
Perhaps a useful place to begin is with a quote from Renoir: "
Everyone has his reasons." No one intends to do wrong in life. No one. Ever. Not even Hitler had bad intentions or thought he was doing anything wrong. Or as Thomas Carlyle wrote: "No man at bottom means injustice; it is always for some obscure distorted image of a right that he contends: an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated, in the wonderfulest way by natural dimness and selfishness; getting tenfold more diffracted by exasperation of contest, till at length it becomes all but irrecognisable; yet still the image of a right."
So if George W. Bush - in his blinkered, deluded way - is determined to bring more evil into the world (I have no other word for the killing of innocent men, women and children) yet is not intending to do evil then what exactly is going on here? Are we merely to concede that he's "clumsy"? That he is endowed with so much power that he is like a child accidentally crushing ants in his single-minded enthusiasm to build a sandcastle? Which brings us to the subject of this diary.
In Paul Levy's fascinating analysis, The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis, Bush, it is proposed, despite his manifest evil actions, is not innately evil. He is instead a sufferer and carrier of a psycho-spiritual disease latent in all of us. Malignant Egophrenia, posits Levy, is a "field phenomenon", and any understanding of the casually cruel actions of George W. Bush cannot be considered without an understanding of how that field operates.
The most relevant passage from Levy's essay with regard to current events can be found here:
[Bush has] become so fully taken over by the disease, all the while not suspecting a thing, that he's become a "carrier" for this deadly disease, thus infecting the field around him. He's become a portal through which the field around him "warps" in such a way as to feed and support his pathogenic process. A non-local, reciprocally co-arising and interdependent field of unconscious denial and cover-up gets constellated around Bush to enable and protect his pathology. People who support Bush are actually complicit with and enabling Bush's madness in a co-dependent, self-reinforcing feedback loop that is `closed,' which is to say it is insular and not open to any feedback from the `real' world.
Bush supporters are not merely disinterested in seeing that they are in denial of reality; on the contrary, they actively don't want to look at this, which is to say they resist self-reflection at all costs. Bush and his supporters perversely interpret any feedback from the real world which reflects back their unconsciousness as itself evidence that proves the rightness of their viewpoint. All of Bush's supporters mutually reinforce each other's unconscious resistance to such a degree that a collective, interdependent field of impenetrability gets collectively conjured up by them that literally resists consciousness.
This jibes to a quite shocking degree with the thrust of Hersh's primary source of alarm: that Bush is unreachable, lost in a "gray world of religious idealism". What is to become of the ship of state when the captain vanishes into an ideological fog?
There have been any number of attempts to put Bush "on the couch" and any number of diagnoses proposed: dry drunk, sociopath, psychopath, spoiled brat and on and on. None of these, however, have quite succeed in explaining the massive infrastructure that has arisen in support of this man's delusions and agenda. Paul Levy's diagnosis of Malignant Egophrenia seems to paint the most accurate and uncomfortable of all possible diagnosis. Bush, though a very different man than an Adolph Hitler, suffers and spreads the same disease. And the cost of that disease is ultimately counted in dead bodies.
With Bush as president it's as if we're in a car going over the speed limit being driven by a drunk adolescent who has fallen asleep at the wheel. It's our responsibility to recognize the extreme danger of our situation and come together to do something about it, whatever that might be. If not, if we continue to passively and helplessly watch what is playing out in front of our very eyes, then we have no one to blame but ourselves.
We have to all come together to get this man out from behind the wheel before it is too late.