American Bumbling in the Middle East Illustrates Andrew Bacevich’s Washington Rules at Play — Plus a Psychological Explanation for Our Self-Destruction from Paul Verhaeghe

06 October 2014

If one expects leadership and public opinion to make sense, one is going to be disappointed

These days, cynicism regarding institutions and culture is wisdom.

For example:

(i) Professor Paul Verhaeghe’s thought — that neoliberalism is “an economic system that rewards psychopathic personality traits” — explains the United States’ self-destructive military response to ISIL/Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

(ii) And our response to ISIL also demonstrates Professor/Colonel Andrew Bacevich’s observation about the viciously destructive primacy in American politics of his Washington Rules.

If you want to know why stupidity reigns across most of the western world, read on.

Let’s start with Paul Verhaeghe’s cultural insight into what is wrong with today’s times

Dr. Verhaeghe is Chair of the department for psychoanalysis and counseling psychology at Ghent University. His recent article in the Guardian made a handful of points about our “neoliberal” culture.

Note — definition

Neoliberalism is the silly philosophy — “silly” meaning that History has repeatedly disproven its assumptions — which pushes the ideas of free markets, deregulation, drowned government and the complete privatization of all things. Whatever former government service is not profitable goes out the door. And greed across the board is a virtue.

Dr. Verhaeghe implicitly says that:

(1) Neoliberalism and the idea of the primacy of the individual pressures us into thinking that we are:

(a) solely responsible for our successes and failures

and that

(b) we are definitively seen as a failure, if we are not visibly successful, as judged by culturally imposed standards.

(2) The personality traits that neoliberalism encourages are psychopathic:

The first [success requirement] is articulateness, the aim being to win over as many people as possible.

It’s important to be able to talk up your own capacities as much as you can – you know a lot of people, you’ve got plenty of experience under your belt and you recently completed a major project.

Later, people will find out that this was mostly hot air, but the fact that they were initially fooled is down to another personality trait:

you can lie convincingly and feel little guilt.

That’s why you never take responsibility for your own behaviour.

On top of all this, you are flexible and impulsive, always on the lookout for new stimuli and challenges.

In practice, this leads to risky behaviour, but never mind, it won’t be you who has to pick up the pieces.

(3) Our institutionalization of these antisocial beliefs results in ordinary people having to undergo constant evaluation — against a scale of unrealistically set standards, often interpreted by fools:

Constant evaluations at work cause a decline in autonomy and a growing dependence on external, often shifting, norms.

This results in what the sociologist Richard Sennett has aptly described as the “infantilisation of the workers”.

More important . . . is the serious damage to people’s self-respect. Self-respect largely depends on the recognition that we receive from the other . . . .

Dr. Verhaeghe concludes that neoliberalism is founded on lies. There is, he thinks, no such thing as unrestricted choice.

Complete self-government and self-management are impossible. In part because both are founded on the idea of a “perfectible individual” — a concept that it does not take a person of much personal and historical insight to recognize is not true.

Enter President Obama’s half-assed, militarized response to ISIL/Islamic State

It is probably safe to say that “everybody” knows that the Administration’s “no American boots” on the ground in the fight against ISIL is not going to work. And a slightly lesser portion of us have intuited that getting some of Syria’s anti-Assad militias to help us will not work either.

We pretty much know that the President’s plan is unsustainable, even in pursuit of the slender objectives that he laid out.

The proposition that anti-Assad militias could divide their attention(s) between the Syrian government and “them other guys” is so unrealistically and militarily absurd that I have to ruefully admire the President for getting away with selling it.

I have to similarly “respect” the President’s domestic political calculation that the public is too ignorant to recognize that a predominantly Christian nation’s intervention into an Islamic sectarian fight (Sunni versus Shia) will not be ultimately well received by our non-western allies or their adversaries.

The President’s non-sides-taking course is a religious and geopolitical one that it is clearly impossible for the United States to sail — without getting painfully back-smacked in the long run.

Why did this smart man commit us to such a foreseeably self-damaging course?

Answer — political ass-covering, articulate hot air, combined with not the slightest chance that he, or anyone else, will be held responsible for national security mistakes of even egregious magnitude.

Just look at President George W. Bush and his partner in war crimes, Vice President Dick Cheney. Both still happily active. The latter, indeed, still spouting and being listened to in his quest to absolve himself of undeniably having been wrong about both Iraq and American foreign policy, generally. Plus all the hundreds of Congress people who went along with the errors.

Not to mention, similarly, the thousands of bankers, who completely escaped paying for their criminally massive responsibility for the 2008 recession and its long aftermath. Who are now prospering to an even greater degree.

Accountability is not the American Way, today.

And the Washington Rules?

The “Washington Rules” are former Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich’s forumlation in explanation of recent American history. The rules mean that the Military Industrial Complex runs Washington DC. Every president, from either political party, will always eventually succumb to the Complex’s diseased penchant for pursuing unachievable, but highly profitable endeavors at world domination.

The fact that such imperial designs cannot be achieved does not matter to anyone. In our neoliberally narcissistic age there is no downside to being a warmonger, a politically approved thief, an incessant liar, or simply just wrong in obviously catastrophic ways.

It is, fundamentally, all about “me” and “my” temporary worldly success.

Which may explain why both Professors Verhaeghe and Bacevich imply that American personal and cultural spiritual awarenesses have been lost.

The moral? — In attaining leadership, wealth or recognition, viciously antisocial behavior pays

Thus, a cynical view of American reality is more accurate than most, at present.

Pertinent to this idea, the Obama Administration’s Terrorist of the Month plan does not need to work. It can backfire and virtually no one in authority will care. The intervention’s only goal, in an admittedly geopolitically difficult situation, is generating the illusion that the President is doing something.

Given the silliness of the Commander in Chief’s anti-ISIL plan, his political calculation has to be that:

(a) the public’s long demonstrated love affair with amnesia will hold past the end of the President’s term

and

(b) our Establishment Elite’s continuing ability to profit monetarily and politically from other people’s suffering will be sustained.

You can bet that the American ISIL control plot would not be in progress, had it threatened to markedly diminish the Establishment’s profits and power.

A corollary take-away message is that — when our sense of personal individual power and responsibility are grossly exaggerated, as they are in a neoliberal culture — we tend not to see that the nation’s collective “soul” is also dangerously inflated.

We do not understand that:

(a) we are, at best, only a flawed super-hegemon among other nations

(b) that we do not have the physical power, and often the ethical right, to stamp our almost always ignorant and frequently unrealistic perspectives on the rest of the planet —

and that,

(c) not doing such arrogantly unachievable things will actually benefit us as a people, national strength-wise, in the future.

As both professors imply in their writings, this is ultimately a spiritual question. Its moral nature explains why institutionalized narcissism — which is what neoliberalism boils down to — is so psychologically damaging to the average person. Especially those of good heart.

PeteFree.com

American Bumbling in the Middle East Illustrates Andrew Bacevich’s Washington Rules at Play — Plus a Psychological Explanation for Our Self-Destruction from Paul Verhaeghe