Worth reading... Again..and again.......
WMDs And The Psychology Of Fanaticism
By Arianna Huffington
By all accounts, the behind-the-scenes battle within the Bush
administration over just what information should be used, or spun, or
hidden, to make the case that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat
to
America and the rest of the world was a knockdown, drag-out fight
between
the facts and a zealous, highly politicized, "who needs proof?"
mindset.
And, at the end of the day, the truth was left writhing on the floor.
Hey, why let the facts get in the way of a perfectly good war?
This pathological pattern of disregarding inconvenient reality is not
just
troubling -- it's deadly. And it's threatening to drag us into a
Sisyphean
struggle against evildoers in Syria, Iran, North Korea, or whatever
locale
Karl Rove thinks would best advance "Operation Avoid 41's Fate."
Since I'm not a psychiatrist, I consulted the work of various experts
in
the field in order to get a better understanding of the fanatical
mindset
that is driving the Bush administration's agenda -- and scaring the
living
daylights out of a growing number of observers.
Dr. Norman Doidge, professor of psychiatry at the University of
Toronto,
has identified among the telltale symptoms of fanatics: an intolerance
of
dissent, a doctrine that is riddled with contradictions, the belief
that
one's cause has been blessed or even commanded by God, and the use of
reinforcement techniques such as repetition to spread one's message.
Sound like anyone you know? George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld,
Karl Rove, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle... come on down!
According to Doidge, one of the essential features of fanatics is their
certainty that not only is their cause good "but that it is the only
good,
an absolute good." Or as President Bush famously declared: "There is no
in-between, as far as I'm concerned. Either you're with us, or you're
against us."
This absolute intolerance of dissent, says Doidge, often extends beyond
the fanatics' enemies -- frequently leading to a "campaign of terror"
against those within their own ranks. If you're wondering what this has
to
do with the Bush administration, you might want to give a call to
Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and George Voinovich.
After having the temerity to question the wisdom of the president's
massive tax cut plan, the senatorial pair became the targets of
withering
TV attack ads, sponsored by allies of the White House, that portrayed
them
as "so-called Republicans" and compared their opposition to the latest
round of tax cuts to France's opposition to the war in Iraq. It was a
Night of the Long Knives, GOP-style.
Another crucial element of a fanatic's faith, according to Professor
Dixon
Sutherland, who teaches religion at Stetson University, is that he
"sees
himself as acting for God... You have a circular logic that is very
powerful that combines God's authority -- through the Bible -- with a
messenger who carries out that authority."
Tom DeLay, for example, saw the 2000 election as a choice between a
"biblical worldview" and the worldview of "humanism, materialism,
sexism,
naturalism, post-modernism or any of the other -isms." And the
Republican
Party, of course, represented the biblical worldview, God and all
things
good.
Gustav le Bon, a social scientist known for his crowd psychology
theories,
has stressed the importance of repetition as a weapon in the fanatic's
arsenal. Repetition breeds blind acceptance and contagion.
"Ideas, sentiments, emotions and beliefs," writes le Bon, "possess in
crowds a contagious power as intense as that of microbes." As James
Moore,
co-author of "Bush's Brain," says, "If the president says it over and
over enough, people will believe it, just as Karl Rove got him to say
over
and over that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11."
The technique was so successful that a poll taken by the Pew Center in
2002 showed that 66 percent of Americans believed that Hussein and bin
Laden were both behind the attacks. In the words of that giant banner
that
Rove had placed behind the president following his Top Gun landing on
the
USS Abraham Lincoln: "Mission Accomplished."
Wonder why the WMD are MIA? The answer may lie in the DSM -- the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I know it can
sound
a bit cheap to call people you disagree with nuts, which is why I refer
you to the psychiatric literature. And keep an open mind, something the
Bushies stopped doing a long time ago.
-----
Arianna Huffington is the author of "Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate
Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining America." For
information
on the book, visit www.PigsAtTheTrough.com
If you have questions or comments, contact Arianna at
arianna@ariannaonline.com |
