The West’s darkest hour: Psychohistory

“Writing about Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, Pierre Boulez stated that it was the comeback of barbarous hordes in our century, what I may call the Id’s revenge.” —César Tort

My book The Return of Quetzalcoatl is being published in the blogsite Gates of Vienna. The book explains a phrase that in the past I used in the masthead of this blog: “The legacy of Lloyd deMause and Alice Miller might unearth the psychological roots of the West’s suicide.”

Update of 3 March 2010

Seven chapters plus the Preface were published in the Gates of Vienna (GoV) blogsite. A couple of days ago Baron Bodissey, the GoV administrator, informed me that he won’t be publishing the rest of the chapters. Reason: After realizing for the first time in my life that Jewish influence on U.S. immigration has been very noxious, and saying it openly in my blog, the Baron told me that he won’t be publishing the rest of the chapters. According to him, in my blog thread I had welcomed comments from real National Socialists who believe that the Jews are inferior and that they must be exterminated!

Jesus. I was absolutely flabbergasted by this e-mail, since the long Tanstaafl article republished in my blog explicitly states: “I do not say that Whites are the master race and Jews are subhuman. I do not say that I want to exterminate Jews. I do not secretly crave such things and I resent anyone who projects their own imagined hatreds into my head.”

This projection aside, even after I rebutted the Baron about it, he expelled me from publishing in his site because I stated in my blog that I am no longer a philo-Semite.

If the Jewish question is a forbidden topic in mainstream media, supression of free speech even in the blogosphere makes one feel a little angry. I had been publishing chapters in GoV since last July, and I don’t know where the rest of my book will have a proper readership.

On the other hand, I believe it was a necessary step to say adieu to false friends: those exclusively concerned with the Islamization of the West but indifferent to the dilution, and eventual extinction, of their own ethnic group (and thus of Western civilization).

The good news is that I have made new, real friends: white nationalists.

Update of 9 March 2010

I have published Chapter 8 in this blog. Also, below I include a draft of the "Postscript to The Return of Quetzalcoatl for the GoV edition" that was never published at:

Monsters from the Id

Having in mind the excesses of the Third Reich’s violent yang, in his essay Empire of Yin Takuan Seiyo hints some dialectics: “Thus will excess yang always bring about a counter wave of yin, which will generate a third—and usually destructive—force vector.” But in the same essay Seiyo does not seem to assert in absolute terms that the Oriental concept fully explains the etiology of the current debacle in the West: “It is difficult to deal with the dystopia of the West partly because we don’t have an accurate concept of its genesis.” Furthermore, after publishing his Empire of Yin, in his book From Meccania to Atlantis Seiyo writes that 500 years from now archeologists will be slicing through the stratum of the broken remains of European and American cities wondering what had destroyed this civilization, where “all the answers are no answers” for the simple reason that “it’s not the real answer, except if this be a society of madmen.” Seiyo adds:

What we are witnessing is a voluntary self-destruction carried out by democratically elected political leaders on acquiescing populations that, largely, refuse to see The Emperor’s New Clothes even as his naked arse is at arm’s length from their faces.

Note the phrase “acquiescing populations.” Free Hal has noticed it too in a brief Gates of Vienna essay that elicited a substantial amount of comments.

All the answers about the cause of our self-destruction are ultimately no answers. However, in science and especially in medicine it is considered barely scientific to approach a disease if its cause is not well established. Mental disorders for example are so mysterious that after a century of research professionals are still debating whether they truly belong to the medical specialty in the first place.

In a similar vein of Seiyo’s, Fjordman wrote:

Well, the West is currently stark, raving mad, and sometimes actively hates itself. I’m scratching my head trying to find out where this self-loathing comes from. Maybe we feel guilty because we are so successful and rich and accomplished that we just can’t take it anymore. But where do such ideas about guilt originate from?

From an insecure attachment to our parents, of course. We are all mammals, and primates to boot. And since among the primates we have the record of the longest childhood, a super-Stockholm syndrome makes adult children of abusive parents turn the other cheek for nonexistent wrongs, as explained in my first chapter. This is the real curse of the Homo sapiens, but we are barely starting to discover it. To illustrate this hypothesis I would like follow Seiyo’s lead in From Meccania to Atlantis with still another 1956 sci-fi film: Forbidden planet, where the “monsters from the Id” destroyed a very advanced culture because of unconscious forces that the inhabitants of that planet were clueless about their existence.

In the epilogue I mentioned the ancient word “daimon,” which I first read in Stefan Zweig’s The Struggle with the Daimon. The daimon symbolizes the forces of the Id. Analyzing specific individuals, in my blog I have posted a couple of entries about these daimonic forces that nobody in the counter-jihad, or even in the broader conservative movement, seems to know. Actually, very few in the mental health professions are familiar with it, as is demonstrated in my previous books written in Spanish. In English, see for example my analysis of Teresa, an European who hates the West that I know personally. I believe that this analysis can be extrapolated to other people who, like her, celebrate mass migration in Europe.

Why do I reject the current explanations on the Islamization of the West that border on conspiracy theories? Because there are many people like Teresa among the “acquiescing populations,” not only among our ruling elites, as Free Hal has reminded us in his article linked above. We must look for a deeper psychological explanation for our self-loathing.

The Return of Quetzalcoatl

No human being has an absolutely secure attachment with his or her parents, as hinted by Colin Ross since the beginning of my book. It is no wonder, therefore, that after the two world wars, with an “empire of Yin” as the psychological Diktat for good-thinking in the ensuing zeitgeist, our inner rage could only find an escape valve by re-directing it against ourselves.

According to the late legend, Quetzalcoatl was a white god who disliked the practice of human sacrifice; he bled his penis instead. Now, in the twenty-first century, the white self-harmer god has returned. We may not perform human sacrifices, but we do self-sacrifice the yang element from our character. Liberalism—which besides the unholy trinity of race, gender (feminism) and sexual orientation includes political correctness, pseudoscientific environmental scares, demographic decline, cultural collapse in the form of mass immigration, multicultural dogma and cultural relativism; false feelings of guilt for our colonialist past, willful blindness before a revived Islam and even two minutes hate in the form of massive, anti-Western demonstrations—is but an immense teoatl: a Nahua word I mentioned only once in the book as a metaphor of an orgy of self-sacrifice. All of this teoatl has a common denominator: the debasement of our culture and ethnic group. What we are dealing with is a new incarnation of the Id monster that nobody in the West, and I mean nobody, has identified yet.

Since Lloyd deMause sides the political left, he has never used his own notion of group fantasy to analyze the present mad world where all the answers about the cause of our self-destruction are ultimately no answers. On this point I would like to make an observation. Mental health clinicians have noted that if anger toward the real perpetrators—abusive parenting—is blocked, either depression or self-harming behavior will eventually emerge. This is also the conclusion of my analysis of Andrew Solomon, a prelude of my analysis of other Western self-haters here.

In group fantasies you either sacrifice others or sacrifice yourself. Since the 1960s the West has chosen, Solomon-like, the second way, self-injury: something analogous to the deliberate infliction of tissue damage with or without suicidal intent, as the mythical Quetzalcoatl did. Since in this postscript I do not pretend to offer anything else than a prolegomena to this complex subject, let us put the working hypothesis in a nutshell: Due to unresolved childhood trauma, since the latter half of the last century the unconscious hatred toward the abusive parents has been transferred onto pathological hatred for our parents’ culture, i.e., our culture. This may sound rather far-fetched, but at least in clinical observations at the Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma it can be ascertained that the self-cutters formerly abused at home say that the cutting makes them feel alive or reborn. At least in psychiatric settings, both Seiyo’s “madmen” and Fjordman’s “But where do such ideas about guilt originate from?” can be understood under the light of the trauma model and the locus of control shift.

Even though pre-Columbian sacrifice was infinitely cruder, the unconscious drive that moves both self-harmers and the white westerners who are bleeding their civilization to a certain death might be the same. As we saw in the second part of this book, Mesoamerican sacrifice of others only replaced self-sacrifice. Amerindian sacrifice was, ultimately, the sacrifice of the ego. We also saw that, paradoxically, child sacrifice was practiced throughout history during the most prosperous times. Likewise, in an infinitely higher plane such as Western civilization, according to deMause the economic depressions in modern nations are caused by growth panics. From this viewpoint, the elaboration of fantastic climate scenarios by environmentalists is no less than their fear before our prosperity. A related suicidal ethos compels us to sacrifice the future of our children and grandchildren who might end up fleeing an Europe under Islam. From the psychohistorical viewpoint, the drive for civilizational suicide behind this unconscious force, either by Mesoamericans (whose culture disappeared cyclically) or modern westerners, has the same etiology.

Throughout history humans have identified a variety of scapegoats as substitute objects for their unresolved traumas due to poor parenting. Once the West itself is the identified whipping-boy for the current group fantasy, it is considered fair-play to project even the most psychotic forms of self-loathing onto ourselves, like president Clinton telling an Arab audience that it is “very positive” that whites will be no more the majority in America in the next few decades.

Nevertheless, I am not a psychoreductionist like deMause. Emergent stages such as economics, politics, social movements and especially art seem to move in a logic of their own. This translation of my book should be read in the context of what I call the eagles’ view in counter-jihad: the bloggers whose privileged perspective see what is happening in the world from a cloudless sky. The eagles are like geographers: they can describe the seas, the rivers, the land, the forests and even a mountain from the above. But they cannot explain why a rising volcano, or an earthquake, came up just there in their visual field. I on the other hand understand myself as a sort of geologist of the psyche. The plate tectonics of the inner, unconscious selves or daimons, explains how the mountain was formed or why the world is about to explode among the fury of pyroclastic flows and megatons of vomited magma. My chosen field of knowledge does not contradict the eagles’ point of view. Twentieth-century plate-tectonics modeling only complements and explains nineteenth-century observational geography. However, the study of the monsters of our unconscious is so disturbing that I very much doubt that conservatives will takeover psychohistory from its treasonous owners.

Why do I publish my fourth book in Gates of Vienna then?

Like Dr. Morbius of Forbidden Planet I must confess I had a premonition about the coming catastrophe. Perhaps it is too late to start looking for a Spanish publisher: it takes time to find one and still more time to see if it will ever be translated into English. I decided therefore that the manuscript should be exhumed out into the blogosphere, what Baron Bodissey appropriately calls the monastery of Lindisfarne. If there is indeed something as cataclysmic as the fall of the Roman empire in the future that might start to reverse the current paradigm, a survivor will find someday at the monastery’s library a dusty, marginal and far-fetched psychological model that might help him to figure out where could the monsters that destroyed this civilization have come from.

____________________

Update of 3 October 2010:

Presently I believe that the cause of Western malaise is threefold: (1) Liberalism, understood as the last phase of Western Christian civilization as Conservative Swede argues; (2) the Jewish problem that very strongly and efficiently catalyzes liberalism, and (3) the monsters from the Id as explained here, especially among the most extreme cases of cultural self-hatred and self-racism among whites.

An overtly “monstrous” Id is only one side of the psycho-historical approach. The Id’s revenge can take subtler forms too. Today, a poster at Mangan’s answered the question, Why did change happen so quickly in the 1960s? He responded by pointing out the unprecedented buying power of the young; and that the generation that survived the depression and that won World War II wanted nothing so much as to spare their children those miseries. The anonymous commenter also noted that those parents thus spoiled their children, the Baby Boomers, who were indulged and had money to spend.

I myself entered the discussion at Mangan’s with this comment:

Rick Darby said... “I have no all-explanatory theory of what caused this. Probably morals had been changing through the '50s, but in a clandestine way. By the early '60s, the changes surfaced in a generation that had a less strict upbringing than earlier ones.”

Perhaps psychohistory could be useful here, both Lloyd deMause’s approach (childrearing) and Julian Jaynes’ psychohistory (long time ago mankind suffered a cataclysmic breakdown from its schizoid stage). The theory is a little complex but a short post of mine in this thread at Gates of Vienna may give an idea. In a nutshell I would say that an entire psychoclass in modern times, what deMause calls helping mode of childrearing, has cataclysmically confused liberty with licentiousness.

Update of 23 December 2010:

Having read Michael O’Meara’s Toward the White Republic I realized that there is a fourth factor which should had been listed as factor #2 in the above list.

O’Meara is a nationalist who believes that the United States is “the principal enemy of the American nation.” Although he does accept the Jewish Problem as a very serious problem, he states, “this enemy is not the omnipotent Jew” “but the corporate, technocratic elite.”

Corporate capitalism is our main enemy according to O’Meara. As he states on page 93, because the system prioritizes money and greed, the country’s historical racial hierarchy was overturned; the social engineers ethnically cleansed whites through the flooding masses of Negroes; whites being resocialized as mindless, deracinated consumers. The contents of page 91 provide a very vivid illustration of how this corporate capitalism destroyed far more our traditional culture than the terrible totalitarian regimes that the people of the Eastern bloc endured:

When Thomas Molnar, who played an important role in the US conservative movement of the 1960s and ’70s, returned to his native Hungary after the collapse of the Soviet empire, he found, to his astonishment, that traditional culture and education, which had virtually disappeared in the West, were still very much alive in the former Soviet bloc.

From this viewpoint, the One Ring in the LOTR saga, the ring of greed and power, is the real culprit, as Michael Colhaze has speculated recently at Occidental Observer.

Thursday, July 02, 2009

Why Muslims belong to a lower “psychoclass”

I believe that part of the etiology of Western self-hatred and its eventual suicide could be understood in terms of deMausean “growth panic” theory. But in this entry I would like to quote something about the primitive Islamist mentality. The following article is an abridged version of a piece by Robert W. Godwin, “The Land that Developmental Time Forgot.” Godwin uses Lloyd deMause’s childrearing model to understand both the Muslim mind and Islamic terrorism:

Bob Godwin

In his excellent book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, the economist and historian David Landes writes that it is impossible to understand the dismal economic performance of Muslim nations “without attending to the experience of Islam as faith and culture.” Likewise, Bernard Lewis, the preeminent scholar of the Muslim Middle East, blames the slow pace of progress in the Islamic world on various cultural factors—in particular, the theological shackling of independent analysis, which has tended to “suppress enterprise, experiment, and originality and to reinforce a fatalistic world view.”

After having gotten off to a fine start just four or five centuries earlier, Islamic civilization peaked in around 1200, since which time it has been “mostly downhill,” leading to the “economic and intellectual backwater” of today. “History,” writes Landes, “had gone awry.” Perhaps it is not farfetched to speculate that Islam may have gone the way of other large-scale dysfunctional civilizations, such as the Aztec, had it not been for the fortuitous discovery of oil under their feet, which essentially rewarded their cultural maladaptation with a constant flow of uncreated wealth.

In this article, I would like to attempt to define some of the variables that have caused Islamic culture to fixate, regress, decay, and fail to prosper on so many fronts. In today’s politically correct academic climate, even raising this issue is a controversial proposition, because it assumes that some cultures are more healthy and advanced than others, and that it is possible for an entire culture to become “sick” and developmentally stunted. However, since September 11 we have all learned many disturbing facts about the Islamic world that make it difficult for even the usual academic suspects to accuse us of being racist and Eurocentrist for criticizing such practices as female genital mutilation, stoning adulteresses, burying homosexuals alive, amputating limbs from suspected thieves, etc. In fact, it is more than just intellectually naive to think of all cultures as equally healthy: it is a dangerous delusion.

In order to comprehend the “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West, we might begin with Howard Stein’s thesis that developmental time is embodied in cultural space, so that to study various cultures around the globe represents a literal form of time travel, as we encounter groups that have attained different levels of psychological development. As Lloyd deMause has demonstrated, it is possible to take a “bottom up” approach to culture, and show how early childhood experiences lead to the various cultural practices that define a given psychoclass. In describing the brutal child-rearing practices prevalent in the Middle East, deMause has surely identified the dysfunctional axis around which the culture of the terrorist revolves and renews itself. If, as psychohistorians believe, any given culture reflects the psychological development of its individual constituents, there are many aspects of Islamic culture that can be traced directly to childhood trauma.

While most academics continue to blame the cultural pathologies of the Middle East on the legacy of colonialism, the Muslim world has now been free and independent for at least fifty years, enough time to organize itself around its own center of psychological gravity, so to speak. In other words, various nations in the Islamic world have developed a broadly similar pattern of cultural beliefs, practices, and institutions that reflect the unresolved needs and conflicts of their collective childhood. Therefore, although the Western and Islamic worlds are surely engaged in the “clash of civilizations” predicted by Samuel Huntington in his prophetic book by the same name, it is not as if “civilization” is an arbitrary construct set apart from unconscious psychological factors. In fact, if Huntington is correct that there is no evolutionary cultural trend toward universal liberal values of liberty, democracy, individualism, private property and the rule of law, then our historical situation is truly hopeless, and perennial civilizational conflict is inevitable. However, if deMause and like minded psychohistorians are correct, then our present clash of civilizations is really only the outward manifestation of a “clash of psychoclasses,” and there is every reason to believe that the world of Islam can proceed through the same evolutionary process that saw the Christian West gradually master external and internal (emotional and cognitive) reality over the past 500 years, as childrearing practices became increasingly humane.

Unfortunately, just when the West was breaking away from a primitive “hand-me-down” form of mythic knowledge, and turning down an historical road that pointed to the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Scientific Revolution, Islam took a wrong (but very emblematic) turn which involved “closing the gate of Ijtihad,” or independent analysis.

According to Daniel Pipes, the adage “better a hundred years of repression than a day of anarchy” encapsulates the dread of social disorder, or fitna, that “lies deep in Islamic civilization.” Because of the anxiety involved in making the break from childlike conformity to authoritarian religion, the Islamic world refused even the printing press, because it was “seen as a potential instrument of sacrilege and heresy.” For this angst-ridden society, “the truth had already been revealed. What led back to the truth was useful and permissible; all the rest was error and deceit.” Again according to Landes, “Nothing did more to cut Muslims off from the mainstream of knowledge.” Unlike the West, the Islamic world did not develop the cognitive sophistication to conceive of any separation between the religious and secular. For all practical purposes, this meant that the cognitive domain or “reality principle” was dominated by a superimposed grid of fixed and final knowledge, so that it became very difficult to actually learn from experience.

The preoperational mind—specially when it is arrested and structured around a complex of developmental trauma—is simply not equipped to “think through” its cognitive dissonance; instead, it must eliminate the cause of it, through violence if necessary. Certainly this is a major preoccupation of the Koran, which declares that “the infidels are your undoubted enemies” (Sura 4), so kill them wherever ye shall find them (Sura 2), because “they will not fail to corrupt you and long for your ruin” (Sura 3).

These types of sentiments would not be so problematic if they were understood, like the Old Testament, as a developmentally earlier form of religious expression that could be modified or softened through time. In the West, there is a long history of biblical exegesis, commentary and criticism. But even today Islamic theology remains mired in the Dark Ages, still hewing very closely to its original mythological formulation. The omnipotent fantasy that the 7th-century Koran “contains all the truth required in order to guide the believer in this world” was tantamount to civilizational suicide. As a result, “the Muslim world has been in paralysis since religious extremism rose in the twelfth century.”

What this means is that mainstream Islam is comparable to the most extreme form of Biblical fundamentalism, certainly to the right of a Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. Actually, according to historian David Gress, the qualifier “fundamentalist” only makes sense in the West, where there is something to weigh it against. But in Islam these types of ecumenical distinctions are out of bounds, because in the Koran there is “no possibility of error. Therefore the question of fundamentalism versus critical analysis had never arisen in Islam. No Muslim had ever felt himself entitled to read the Koran in any way other than the literal.”

What the Islamic fundamentalist gains in the form of a comforting omniscience, he loses in terms of being able to adjust his thinking to the dictates of reality. But rather than seeing this concrete, inflexible adherence to scripture for the cognitively debilitating weakness it is, Islam openly regards itself as superior to the West because it offers “more perfect knowledge of the world.” Therefore, the all too obvious economic and cultural supremacy of the West leads directly to paranoid and conspiratorial thinking. For all these years, we have been under the mistaken impression that the epithet “Great Satan” was nothing more than typical Islamic rhetorical excess when in fact, it is the signpost of a deeply paranoid psycho-political reality.

It is a natural mistake to assume that radical Islam is opposed to the West only in terms of some definable thing that we are doing, such as “defiling the holy soil” of Saudi Arabia with our armed forces. Rather, what we are again primarily dealing with is a clash of psychoclasses, in which the fundamentalists object to the very form of our thought: a form of thought that makes possible such things as democracy (because it values individuation from coercive group fantasies), formal operations, scientific thinking, rational economic development, equality of the sexes, and modernity itself.

In short, it is a battle between the cognitive/emotional past and present of the human species, no different than if we had somehow entered a time warp and were fighting the barbarian hordes of Genghis Khan. Even when logical, formal operations thinking is employed by the terrorists, it is in the service of perverse paranoid-schizoid envy and sadism, so that they have no interest in designing planes, only crashing them; building magnificent skyscrapers, only destroying them; curing disease, only spreading it. The very real problem we are facing is an adversary with a dangerous combination of primitive psychological development but access to sophisticated weapons and technology that their level of cognitive integration could never have produced on its own. If it could have, the human race would have been extinguished several thousand years ago by barbarians with weapons of mass destruction.

The preoperational style of thought predominates between the ages of two and seven, and if a child is traumatized at that time (as vividly described by deMause), it can lead either to a general stunting of emotional and cognitive development, or to a cordoned off part of the psyche where the trauma is held “in escrow” for later processing. If such an individual is traumatized later in life, it may “resonate” with the old trauma, causing the person to enter a trance-like altered state. In such a trance state, the individual may become highly suggestible especially toward intimidating or charismatic authority figures. Radical Islam, as embodied in the Koran, Hadith and Sharia, is the spurious cure for the type of childhood trauma described by deMause. It is an absolutist, closed, dogmatic system that looks backward to the lost perfection of a fantasized, infantile past. Anti-evolutionary to the core, it believes that “progress” consists of undoing the historical developments of the past millennium and returning to a time when there was no freedom of inquiry, no deviation from the “already known,” no individual rights and no due process, a time when the word Islam was literally true: “submit,” usually at the end of a sword.

In his book, The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy, Daniel Pipes provides example after example of the type of preoperational, magical, paranoid thinking style that pervades the Muslim world. Even sophisticated Middle Easterners “interpret great public issues through the prism of conspiracy theories” which are “virtually immune to rational argument.” While we of course have our paranoids as well, this is a cognitive style that only exists on the fringes of the West, e.g., in the Militia movement on the right or among radical environmentalists on the left.

[An] attitude that may be traced to the Koran tells followers that women are “a pollution.” The pervasive male sense of superiority over women is actually a cultural defense mechanism against unconscious maternal fears. And again, this fragile sense of manhood feeds directly into the violence of the region, because “violence is the quintessential, testosteronic expression of male entitlement.” What we have to imagine is the incredible disorientation these “chosen” men feel, growing up with unrealistically high self-esteem, and believing they are heirs to a superior civilization, but all around being confronted by the social and political disaster that is Islam. Something has gone wrong… and someone must pay. Thus the search for scapegoats begins.

According to Huntington, in recent years Muslims have been participants in twenty-six of fifty ethnopolitical conflicts, and two-thirds to three-quarters of intercivilizational wars. “They also have had a high propensity to resort to violence in international crises, employing it to resolve 76 crises out of a total of 142” between 1928 and 1979; and when they do involve violence, conflicts involving Muslims tend to be heavy in casualties. Huntington concludes with an empirical statement that nevertheless attracted a great deal of controversy, that “Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards.”

Yet another outcome of anxiety-based male sexual superiority is the inability to integrate the psyche, in particular, to experience enduring loving and sexual feelings toward the same object. Here again there is a ready-made cultural defense mechanism that legitimizes this developmental arrest: polygamy. Islamic tradition allows up to four wives, and even if most Muslim men are not wealthy enough to avail themselves of this option, there are all important psychological implications for a society that does not hold out monogamous heterosexuality as its ideal. This probably contributes to the fact that women are not regarded as quite fully human in most of the Islamic world: they are simply degraded figments of the projected male psyche. And we also see evidence of part-object relating carried over to the afterlife, with the childlike fantasies of scores of young virgins (as opposed to frightening or polluted adult women) waiting upon the elect.

From a psychohistorical standpoint, the societal attitude toward women and sexuality is no small matter. Along with childrearing practices, the status of women is one of the hinges of cultural evolution. In fact, according to Landes:

In general, the best clue to a nation’s growth and development potential is the status of women. This is the greatest handicap of Muslim Middle Eastern societies today, the flaw that most bars them from modernity. If we view gender relations as a continuum running from nothing to full equality, the Muslim countries, especially the Arab Muslim countries, would bottom out the scale.

And obviously, the treatment of women circles back on the treatment of children. Indeed, if we consider only the staggering rates of female illiteracy in the Islamic world (again, endorsed by Muslim tradition), having an illiterate mother presents an additional barrier to a child achieving a more developed formal operational style of thinking. And it goes without saying that depressed and terrorized women cannot help but unconsciously transmit this terror to their children.

In deMause’s article, he describes how the Muslim child develops a tyrannical superego that forbids the experience of pleasure and short-circuits the spontaneous expression of the will. In the Muslim Middle East “there is little evidence of the idea of a carefree childhood,” and “in adult eyes, the period of childhood is a nuisance, and childhood activities, especially play, are a waste of time.” When these children grow up, they impose the same joyless tyranny on the next generation of children, preventing any freedom of thought, expression, will, creativity, or dissent. For example, teaching methods in the Middle East are very different from our own, emphasizing rote learning as “the major method of teaching. Throughout the Arab world memorization has been a common element of education.” This involves forcing the child, under threat of corporal punishment, to mindlessly memorize lengthy passages of the Koran perfectly, so that the indoctrination “still remains with the individual throughout his lifetime.” As such, children are not encouraged to reason or develop formal operational capacities.

Of course, the ultimate myth is not just the resurgence of Islam as the preeminent global power, but the delusion of how that would come about. The fundamentalists believe that Islam is the magical solution to all the world’s problems, and that “Muslim strength follows directly from living the sacred law of Islam,” or Sharia. The way the fantasy goes is this: about a thousand years ago, Islam flourished with great armies, wealth, and cultural attainments surpassing both Europe and China. All of this followed, according to Islamist doctrine, from the fact that all of the “good children” of Islam strictly followed the “parental” law of the Sharia. Likewise, when the Islamic world became “contaminated” by Western and Jewish influences, it became weak and vulnerable.

In attempting to analyze the motives of the terrorists, I see evidence of a superego so violently suffocating that we are essentially dealing with people who have become psychically “dead” through childhood trauma. A clue to this was provided in a statement from one of the Al Qaeda terrorists after the commencement of the bombing of Afghanistan, when he said that the terrorists “love death the way Americans love life.” Again there is a temptation to dismiss this as rhetorical bluster, but I believe it reveals a great psychological truth that we ignore at our peril.

Let me be explicit: the nineteen terrorists who went down with the planes, the ten more who were planning to do so, the thousand or so “sleeper” terrorists still hiding in the U.S., the hundred Palestinian suicide bombers since 1993—all were and are already dead emotionally. Just as the terrorists’ psychic “death” is something that happened in the past but which they were not mature enough to experience, physical suicide involves “sending the body to a death which has already happened to the psyche.” The need to experience death for these soulless “living dead” is equivalent to the compulsion of a neurotic patient to either act out or remember unconscious conflicts; suicidal terror is repetition compulsion taken to the highest extreme. [As Boltas put it:]

The person who has been “killed” in his childhood is in unwilling identification with his own premature mortality, and by finding a victim he transcends his own killing, psychically overcoming his own endless deaths by sacrificing to the malignant gods that overlooked his childhood.

And for this unconscious drama to be emotionally complete, it is critical that the victims be innocent, just as the terrorist once was before being converted to the cult of death by his parental “body snatchers.”

We see this necrophilic inversion of life and death in much of the Middle East, in a way that beggars belief. For bin Laden, this is the natural order, because true Muslims “all seek martyrdom and want to meet Allah as soon as possible. One billion Muslims are capable of turning their bodies into bombs which are equal in force to all the weapons of extermination and mass destruction possessed by the Americans.”

______________________

Note of 29 August 2010: I have removed some paragraphs from this article according to my new mind after a lightning struck me. Robert Godwin’s complete article, twice as longer of the above abridged version, contains numerous endnotes.