decompensation (n): The deterioration of existing defenses (see defense mechanism), leading to an exacerbation of pathological behavior.

The folks with medical training who read me are probably going to wince at the over-simplification, but decompensation means reality tears apart the delusions, and the person holding the delusions proceeds to become unstuck. It's almost always a crisis moment, and contrary to all the happy delusions about how it has a purgative or cathartic effect, the fact is decompensation rarely has a good outcome. The best you can hope for is that the person will recover from it.

Eventually.

The thing is, those defense mechanisms are necessary, not only to our self images and general emotional heath, but to our very survival. Strip them away, and the person loses their ability to cope, and that in turn severely affects their ability to function, both as members of society or as individuals.

As a basic rule, the stronger the defense mechanisms and the more divorced from reality the underlying system of beliefs and assumptions, the more spectacular the decompensation. Minor breaks in your self-image system might lead to relatively minor depression and some soul searching. You finally got a chance to tell off the boss, for instance, and didn't. You spend a few days wondering what kind of weenie you are, and then you get over it, and usually manage to convince yourself that next time, you'll give him a talking to that he'll never forget. If, on the other hand, you have a more pathological affective structure that leads you to believe that you are Jesus, son of God, and something happens to force you to realize you're not, that's when you are likely to end up scampering up a flagpole screaming obscenities about John Travolta and waving your penis at the police officers and their tranquilizer rifles below.

Everyone has defense mechanisms, and most of them are not only normal, but actually beneficial. Most people see themselves as good, and try to live up to that. Most people are in part amoral and self-centered, and so those self-opinions of one's beneficence serve a social and personal good. We all see ourselves as unappreciated heroes, at least from time to time.

This is good. If we thought we were amoral scum, we would tend to act that way. Luckily, there's more to us than that, and having evolved as social animals, we have these traits in order to make us able to function with ourselves and others better. It's a good system when it works right.

This is all well-known, if imperfectly understood, as it applies to individual humans. But what about groups of humans? What about whole societies?

Societies attempt to address demands that are both aggregate and conflicting. While it's more than a bit fanciful to describe a society as having a personality, it does form a kind of an uber personality, a collective unconsciousness. The only way this pretend aggregate personality (let's save wear and tear on the keyboard and give it a name: how does Carl Young sound?) The only way Carl can function with all these fragmented and conflicting demands from the various social and ethnic and demographic sections, all those individuals, is with a persona that, in an individual, would be utterly pathological. The conflicting demands of religion, commerce, freedom, class, sexual mores and variance in educational levels all lead to a gigantic mess in which, in order to function as a part of Carl's world view, you have to believe seven impossible things before breakfast.

Societies, rightly or wrongly, are perceived to have personalities. I attended a lecture on the Enneagram the other night, which maintains that humans have nine distinct sets of character traits that make up nine general personality types. Nobody in the audience seemed startled when the lecturer noted that nations correspond to the Enneagram types as well, using India, Switzerland and the US as examples. ("America is very three-ish" he explained). I doubt the lecturer was stereotyping, but rather describing where the top rise of a personality bell-shaped curve might appear in an Enneagram. From my very limited understanding of the Enneagram, America DOES seem "threeish."

So, let's go ahead and, just for shits and giggles, imagine that societies all have pathological personalities, and that further, they have different types of pathological personalities.

Can a society decompensate?

A horrifying thought, but a quick look at Russia suggests that the answer is "yes." That the social structure of the old Soviet Union was rigid, predictable, and deeply dishonest and divorced from many realities seems beyond dispute. I used to watch Soviet diplomats spew amazing nonsense, not because they believed it, but because the people they represented believed it, and so we would hear that the Soviets had to defend themselves from Afghanistan, or that the peace loving government of Egypt would never attack Israel (this was back in the early 60s, obviously). When the USSR collapsed, Russia found itself homeless, unclothed, broke, powerless, and surrounded by strangers it imagined to be hostile and derisive, and Russia didn't have a single fantasy left to cling to.

The whole society decompensated, and has continued to do so to this day. They aren't even reproducing, with the result that for perhaps the first time in history, the population of a country that is not experiencing war, famine or extreme poverty is dropping. The USSR had 260 million people. Russia had 180 million of them. By 2050, the population of Russia is expected to be about 110 million. Not only are they not reproducing, but they are murdering and drinking themselves to death at a horrifying rate.

With a patient who has decompensated, you put him in a safe, cloistered environment, where stimulus is kept very low key, and you attempt to reassert as much of his previous perception of life as is practicable. Putin, for better or for worse, seems to be trying that with Russia, restoring a capitalistic version of the staid gray and oppressive communist regime, something I call "USSR, Incorporated". It may not be a good answer for the immense problems Russia has, but it may be the only answer.

Can it happen here? It appears to be with the political right wing of the country.

All their defense mechanisms have been challenged. They comforted themselves that they were the group that championed fiscal responsibility, and under five years of unchallenged rule, have racked up the greatest debts in history. They believed they were the group that avoided needless foreign intervention, but have gotten America into two pointless, costly, and bloody wars with no end in sight. They believed they were the group that represented God, and had to confront Abu Ghraib, and national and international scorn for their efforts to push "intelligent design," and now find themselves, for the first time in many years, being asked to justify their religious beliefs. They thought they were the group for freedom and rights, and have to cope with people being thrown in jail for years without charges, the Patriot Act, and spying. They thought they were the group that championed small government, and have seen government grow by a full third in just the past five years. They considered themselves the group of probity and responsibility, and are seeing dozens, if not hundreds of scandals erupt, suggesting widespread venality and corruption. And finally, they are learning that a "free market" means an enslaved populace, because the people running the markets want a captive and uninformed consumer base.

They control government, so they can't blame Democrats. They control the media, so they can't blame liberals. They control the money, so they can't blame socialists.

In fact, the only thing they don't control is themselves.

So why do I think they are decompensating?

The Cindy Sheehan thing. Here is one gold star mother, and a couple of hundred supporters, who up until last week were camped in a ditch two miles from Putsch's toy ranch, holding a vigil. Just a year ago, the right would have refused to pay it much attention, ordered the media not to talk about it, and watched it all dry up and blow away.

But now, it is perceived as a massive threat to them, this one lady and her smallish group. And they have responded by going right over the top. Rush Limbaugh actually accused her of faking her complaint, comparing it to the fake memos that Dan Rather got sandbagged with, and then denied saying it, and when presented with proof that he had said exactly that, did something unheard of and shut his yap. The smear machine went into overdrive, and the sheer nastiness of the whole thing went into overdrive. Pro-Putsch demonstrators showed up to chant "We don't CARE" to the bereaved mother. Matt Drudged ginned up a fake quote that tried to show she had completely changed her tune about Putsch since meeting him in April of 2004. (Matty overlooked the fact that one in three Americans have changed their minds about Putsch since then, according to the popularity polls). Larry Northern used his pickup truck to run down the markers made to honor fallen soldiers, and the right wing tried explaining that he was a frustrated Vietnam war hero, until it came to light that he was born in 1959, which made him a bit young to have been in Vietnam.

That's just a part of it. Letters to the editor claim that opposing the war means you've sided with Osama bin Laden against America. Questioning Putsch's economic policies means you hate American business, as does any mention of global warming. They've started a fresh round of counterattacks on that, incidently.

And of course, there is the war. The latest pravda from the right is that if we hadn't gone in and saved them from themselves, the Iraqis would have suffered an even more catastrophic social collapse than they have now. There might be an element of another defense mechanism there: projection. Like the dozen or so previous rationales for the war, this one is a lie, and it's a particularly idiotic lie since despite the deprivation of UN sanctions, and the corruptness of the vile Saddam regime, Iraqis were relatively stable and prosperous. Compared to now, any way. Not to be outdone, Newsmax resurrected the fantasy that Saddam really did have weapons of mass destruction, covered up by the liberal media. He supposedly had 500 pounds of yellowcake, which doesn't quite explain why the administration tried to shaft Joe Wilson for reporting that Saddam wasn't currently looking for yellowcake. Logic is a little bird. The pressures of reality are increasing at a rapid rate, and the ability of this group to fend them off with lies and fantasies is becoming weaker and weaker. They're getting ready to scramble up that flagpole.

The trouble with decompensation is that if the afflicted had a pathological personality before it happened, it will become far worse during and immediately after.

The right has lived in a fantasy world where only the evil liberals prevented them from creating the heaven on earth that the founding fathers wanted. Now that pretense has been stripped from them, and they must confront the messy reality of what they have created in a country where liberals were made voiceless.

They are vile now. Expect them to become even worse.

Topplebush.com
Posted: August 25, 2005