Jay, that's an interesting commentary. I've seen similar stuff in the corporate world [where a bullet to the brain is not the final denouement].
People seem to confuse themselves with the companies they run, the company's money they have, the government they are in charge of, the client's funds a lawyer has, the people a politician claims to represent. The initial "We" becomes the royal "We" which becomes "Me".
I think it's because being social animals we have a strong sense of need to belong and desire to be high up the pecking order and if possible, the alpha male/female. We also have strong egos, which is part of that environment and also a natural part of staying alive in a dog eat dog world [and that applies to all living things].
Because evolutionary history is that territoriality and possession is ten points of the law, relatively modern obscure, arcane and abstract ideas of property rights and associated legal jargon [where possession is only 9 points of the law] tends to leave people feeling as though they own and are in charge of something when it is really not theirs at all. They know it isn't, but their emotional drives, stemming from millions of years of evolutionary history is battling them and emotional drives are a good match for our thinking selves.
Hence, the absurd spectacle of well-off actresses shop-lifting, wealthy people stealing more, well-off lawyers [in anyone else's book] stealing from clients' funds.
I've seen people in my corporate life confusing the company's money and property with theirs. They live and breathe the company and it subsumes their lives, so it's understandable that they come to identify with it so strongly that they don't see a dividing line between themselves and the company. Hence the trauma many people feel when they are cut loose from a company.
I know the feeling myself - a sense of loss having quit and gone my own way and I'm not too prone to such things, avariciousness etc.
The whole business is amazing and drives stockmarket booms and busts, mass genocide and all sorts of human mayhem.
I wonder whether millions of "little emperors" will be especially prone to such problems due to a spoiled upbringing giving them an excessive idea about their importance in the world.
I have a theory [as always] that depression is a similar manifestation of frustrated identity where the external world won't match the internal identity of the person, leaving them disappointed, frustrated, angry and often suicidal as they live an eternal loop of failed expectations which they can't escape because they are trapped by their early childhood experiences which gave them expectations they've learned to believe are part of their identity. I don't believe it's a chemical imbalance or other nonsense like that, which is a way of moving 'the blame' from the person to an external agent, as though it's something that 'happens to' the person and an external agent can 'fix'. I do think an external agent can 'fix' the problem, but it's an environmental change which will probably conflict with the person's self-identity, so they'll resist the change anyway.
Or something like that! I'd rather speculate on that than gold.
Always optimistic, constantly happy,
Mqurice |
