Obviously, we should never condemn the psychologically and spiritually healthy men and women who realize early in life that they have something valuable in the way of intelligence, determination, wealth, ambition, strength or courage to serve society through a sound quid pro quo. There is very little to be gained by becoming a contrarian. The old Rotary motto, whoever serves best, profits most, seems fair enough. Nevertheless, it has become painfully obvious that many anxious and confused Americans have either grown greedy or have been seriously brain washed by the incessant propaganda of the robber barons and their clever spin doctors. Some very powerful and very selfish persons are steering the American Republic toward isolation from the rest of the world and a suicidal collapse. From culturally neurotic anxiety, which Frank Herbert called the little death — to the major self-deception that Ernest Becker named the ultimate human lie — to the narcissistic yearning to steal everything valuable which spiritual leaders call the besetting sin, a clutch of narcissistic robber barons have chosen to sacrifice America and its people to their own ruthless greed.
Normal men and women, those who choose to live at peace with the world and share the benefits of cooperative toil, are usually psychologically and spiritually healthy enough to reject greedy ideologies and narcissistic evil. They are at peace with themselves. Emotionally mature souls who are mature enough to embrace persons of different races, cultures and classes, don’t need delusions of their own cosmic grandeur in order to feel a modicum of self-esteem. Maturing citizens understand that free and independent souls are nurtured largely by the spiritual, political and financial health of their societies. As a result, more and more thoughtful Americans are fearful and resentful of the ruthless schemes now being orchestrated by our new age robber barons. We hate the way that a few ruthless souls are ravaging the American middle class, dominating the world’s wealth and fighting endless preemptive wars in which our sons and daughters are slain to gain obscene wealth and power for a few. Honest patriots, as opposed to flag waving frauds with their wicked agendas, despair of our Republic’s collapse into an American Empire consisting of a few wealthy lords and ladies and a majority of poorly paid plebes for whom blood, toil, tears and sweat form their daily fare.
Obviously, the United States isn’t the first affluent society to self-destruct for the benefit of a ruthless financial, political and religious aristocracy. Of the twenty-two civilizations that left their footprints on the earth, all but two collapsed from their rigid ideologies and destructive myths and the escalating realization of their ordinary people that the meager rewards of their labors weren’t worth the effort needed to win them. The Roman Republic was destroyed by the robber barons of its day, who then held their possessions, power and privileges so tightly that their rigid Empire couldn’t survive when the barbarians came to pillage. Roman slaves, such as Spartacus, then picked up their pitchforks and torches and joined the invaders. Of course, when push comes to shove, there is usually a lean and hungry society waiting in the wings. Our founding patriots patterned the American system after the Roman Republic with added elements from Greek democracy. And because they were cognizant of the dangers posed by the relentless greed of a narcissistic and neurotic minority, the founders developed a system of checks and balances that has now been overturned by our own robber barons and their ruthless vassals. Our anxieties and the existential frustrations that follow, along with the universal human need to blame someone besides ourselves for society’s problems, aren’t the result of fate. Neither are they God’s punishment for enacting gender and civil rights laws to empower women and minorities as many fundamental religious neurotics preach and hate radio bigots rage.
The wicked new American Empire is being created by a cruel cabal of twenty-first century neo-fascist robber barons, no more in number than a single Boeing 747 could carry on a single flight. They are being assisted by their reactionary neo-con politicians and fundamental neo-zealot preachers. Because they yearn to corner all the wealth and power of civilization and to create a theocratic empire in which fundamental Christianity reigns supreme, the wicked triad of plutocrats, politicians and preachers is creating a financial, political and religious disaster of the first magnitude. The robber barons scheme to increase their own privileges even though such selfishness guarantees incessant social turmoil, more and more poor and homeless families, and the sacrifice of our young people in preemptive wars that serve the aristocracy. Of course, no one is greedy simply because he or she is greedy. There are always hidden reasons why some people are driven emotionally to use and abuse other men and women, why they are willing to destroy the American Republic in a raging lust for possessions, prestige and power. The majority of them have great suppurating wounds in their souls that all the wealth and power of the world cannot heal. They are driven to seek spiritual or intangible satisfaction through secular methods and they simply don’t work.
Ernest Becker published an excellent book about the often unconscious and usually self-defeating aspects of human emotions called THE DENIAL OF DEATH. Becker, like Otto Rank before him, revealed how narcissistic delusions about one’s superiority over the rest of humanity, are neurotic overcompensations used by fearful and frustrated persons to quell their hidden feelings of inadequacy. A significant percentage of the men and women who ruthlessly claw their way along in businesses like Enron and Arthur Anderson, in reactionary politics and the military and even the fundamental ministry, are desperately trying to convince themselves they are not really the inept, inconsequential wretches someone powerful and cruel branded them in their formative years.
Neurotic robber barons of all varieties struggle against remaining the powerless and threatened non-entities whom in their secret hearts of hearts, they still feel themselves to be. Such wounded egoists simply cannot find relief by considering themselves merely normal humans Their hidden pain is so severe they must fabricate a pretense of cosmic superiority that seems to place them on pedestals far above the plebian peasants of humanity. In a real sense, most are identifying with the aggressive manipulators of their childhood. Their motto has become, if you cannot defeat the abusers of society, make a major effort to join them. The destruction of the Republic and the creation of an American Empire are wicked defense mechanisms against fears of inferiority used by fearful persons who have forced their way into high places. The continual clawing for possessions, power and prestige is a desperate attempt to escape the clamoring inner demons that flog them on and on. And yet, despite their delusions of grandeur, conspicuous consumption and a lack of compassion, narcissistic abusers must cope with the many vicissitudes of life. As the timeless Greek Tragedies reveal, ruthless power brokers also crash head long into the tragic quartet of human reality. They also must cope with the pain, rage, guilt and the death dread which everyone experiences to some degree but boil up so painfully within the psychological and spiritual unconscious elements of each crippled human soul.
Secular minded men and women who fail to realize that our species evolved with deep metaphysical needs and with consistent spiritual yearnings, who pursue only the pragmatic aspects of life, must constantly work harder and harder in order to feel good about themselves. Powerful narcissists may never ride a grubby bus, drink cheap jug wine or die in a crowded nursing home, but they sacrifice many youthful ideals. Some cripple their marriages with egoistic affairs as Bill Clinton did, try more or less successfully to cope with their angst, bury their aged parents, fail at appearing godlike and become jaded, old and vulnerable, precisely like the poorest plebes they use and abuse for their own benefit. As Clinton confessed recently while promoting his book, all narcissists suffer from a dark and anxious aspect to their souls. Aging and decline and the life-long dread of death and extinction, although usually repressed into the unconscious, are great democratizing levelers. Some fortunate neurotic abusers and psychopaths eventually discover that their compulsive and obsessive pretensions, in the heroic Hellenic sense, are only illusions. Others live their entire lives with few redeeming virtues as they look out for I – MYSELF ALONE, never maturing into authentic and accepting persons spiritually or psychologically. They cannot believe that their fifteen minutes of fame and prestige have no more cosmic significance than summer thunder on the Great Plains.
Alas, it is the duty of existential philosophers, ministers, psychologists and psychiatrists to be a bit paranoid, to peer beneath the surface rather than take at face value the assertions of compulsive men and women who boast of being superior souls on the side of God and the angels.
Existential psychotherapists and philosophers consistently see deep pain, paranoia, rage and aggression simmering within the souls of narcissistic or neurotic persons. Karen Thompson, in her book THE WAR FOR GOD, revealed quite clearly the ego wounds and frustrations swirling within the unconscious aspects of seriously reactionary and fundamental manipulators. She reported that the frozen ideologies of true believers are symptoms of their discontents and their consistent paranoia about dangerous enemies lurking to betray them. She found that there are always serious psychospiritual reasons why some men and women become narcissistic, paranoid and defensive rather than accepting and open to new experiences and relationships. Greedy elites are frozen in their privileges, much as the Bourbon kings of France of whom it was obvious; They learn nothing new and forget nothing old. We must do due diligence in our important choices, but neurotics have over-learned from their early experiences and relationships that life is dangerous, people are dishonest and that one must remain alert and defensive at all times. Neurotics live with a sense of basic distrust about life, and a great many of the spouses and children of egoistic, anxiety driven persons, fare badly when trying to make their own way. Stanley, a psychology major at Olivet College, was the oldest son of a fiercely dominant man from Chicago’s Near North Side who reinvented himself as a very good neurosurgeon. As he did with everyone around him in his raging quest for wealth, significance and privilege, the father smothered Stan in his fierce determination to make the youngster worthy of his superior self. We all make subjective choices and some of them are disastrous, but the men and women who consistently behave egoistically and remain ruthlessly acquisitive, are overcompensating psychologically for their emotional and spiritual wounds. They are using defense mechanisms that lead to a modicum of relief but they also must endure the many conflicts their greed causes. The life-long mantra of narcissistic abusers, including virtually all the robber barons currently creating a ruthless American Empire, is;
More, more, more! Even vast wealth, power and prestige are never enough to give me satisfying feelings about myself — not until society admits to my total satisfaction my rightful place among the godlike nobility whom the grubby plebs of the world must obey and serve. What good is my wealth and power unless I am accepted by the power elite, until there are sufficient numbers of peasants to envy me?
So much of humankind’s hubris becomes self-defeating. Even Benjamin Franklin who loved the sophisticated pleasures of English life and lived in Great Britain for years, trying to break into the aristocracy, finally saw that the self-styled quality folk would never accept him except as a somewhat successful plebian tradesman. It is ironic; had the British upper classes been flexible to accept this competent and charming man who admired them and tried to join in their revels, their descendents might still have considerable influence over an American Commonwealth. As it is, as lickspittle Tony Blair has shown, England has become a quaint little land that is little more than the wagging tail of the Yankee dog. When Franklin finally recognized the aristocratic British scorn of everything American, he came home and became one of the Revolution’s brightest stars.
We can savor deeply the one goblet of sweet red wine life provides men and women. We can begin by investing our youthful potential bestowed by loving but imperfect parents and the flawed American system into purposeful activities and relationships. And even if we have not been as fortunate as some, we can still assume responsibility for our lives and strive to become what we can be. As Viktor Frankl wrote, There is no condition in life that cannot be improved by holding positive attitudes about it. He wrote the classic book, MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING, after spending three and a half years trapped in the anteroom of Hell, in the Auschwitz murder factory. Fortunately, as we mature, not even God himself can erase one jot or tittle of each person’s meaningful accomplishments from the Cosmic Record. No teacher obliterates a child’s mastery of the multiplication tables. No surgeon recalls a patient to undo a lifesaving operation. Fleming could not take back his work on penicillin. Neither God nor fate can negate the bounty of Borlaug’s miracle grains that saved more than a billion people from starvation. Whatever good we have created, has been written forever, is our own to savor and cherish as potential which may have been squandered, that we have transformed into reality. It doesn’t matter that we are not supremely creative in every given stage of life. Sometimes we need to rest. But we do have every right to relish joyously the satisfaction given us by the sound accomplishments and the good relationships we have enjoyed. On the other hand. we simply do not have any religious, social or political right to behave as robber barons who rip and tear every personal benefit from everyone else and from the very earth itself.
We really should support the honest people who meet society’s needs every day. One elderly man quipped that the merchants of his city have carried him for so long, he is naming them as his pall bearers. Especially exciting is the tide of global entrepreneurship sweeping across Asia and now swiftly spilling over into Africa and Latin America. It was born when one American educated economist from Bangladesh and a few friends escaped capitalistic orthodoxy long enough to invent a solution to Third World poverty through a system of very small banks. The system is only now reluctantly being copied by executives of the World Bank.
The small group of creative souls is organizing a larger and larger post communistic, post industrial system of rural micro banks that is supplying the ten and twenty dollar start up loans that incredibly have taken huge numbers of Bangladeshi families out of poverty in the last decade. You must remember Bangladesh — the economic black hole of Asia. It is exporting rice and goods now and this generous economist and his team did most of it. This really is back street global economics that work as poor people, mostly women trying to feed and educate their children, borrow enough money to buy bamboo strips and permanent dyes and sea shells and wool scraps from which to create beautiful native crafts and a hundred other products. They then sell them for ten times the income previously offered by the aristocratic money lenders who strangled their lives. Some women have bought a cell phone or two and gone into business as the community telephone lady who, for what we would consider pocket change, can put every person in a village without running water or electricity, in contact with all the knowledge and wisdom of every library and university in the world. Or, for that matter, with a government doctor or a wholesale merchant in a distant city. Given the innate human desire to tinker with nature, to make life a little better, it would appear that this new information revolution is just now shifting into high gear. Of course, it helped that Norm Borlaug, a somewhat atypical Iowa farm boy, first kicked the doors open by developing strains of grain that double or triple each farmer’s yield. The new proto entrepreneurs not only borrow the ten or twenty dollars needed to escape poverty through focusing their family’s energy without the interference of some bureaucracy, they can borrow up to thirty dollars if they really need that much capital to get started. The borrowers collectively own each local micro bank and have stopped asking village money lenders, the aristocracy and clergy for permission to succeed through their own initiative. And who says there are no more miracles when emotionally healthy people are spiritually minded in their quest for self-esteem? Imagine what it feels like to go to sleep at night knowing that you have almost single handedly created a micro banking world network that is making life meaningful for millions of men and women. The default rate is non-existent and the growing prosperity is obvious to everyone.
This is something the World Bank with its grandiose schemes for enriching a few robber barons ignored until forced to follow along. Bank executives always find it more cost effective to finance a consortium of generals, aristocrats and politicians that corners a nation’s traditional water supply and then sells a trickle back to the farmers for half of their annual income. And then they wonder why the peasants come, as Pat Buchanan said, over the hill with torches and pitchforks. Which is what world terrorism is all about and why it is increasing steadily in the era of Global Capitalism.
Courageous politicians who have the moral and spiritual courage needed to reject financing by the manipulative raiders of the fast fading Republic, deserve our support. Unfortunately, they seem to be shrinking in number year after year. Not only has the Republican Party turned violently narcissistic in order to serve the robber barons, much of the Democratic establishment, including Bill Clinton and John Kerry have moved over with them. Perhaps they must in order to be viable candidates in today’s climate of fear, frustration and aggression. Unfortunately, political propagandists have become so effective at pandering to existentially alienated men and women, that many voters consistently support politicians and preachers who are betraying them at every turn through their outright lies, television images and glib ideologies. There is very little objective reality in our political campaigning, everything is artfully spun in order to deceive the fearful, the nave and the culturally neurotic because fear does sell better emotionally than hope in times of change and stress. While normal men and women use language to clarify their intentions, politicians and their mind bending spin doctors have become experts at speaking cleverly to conceal what they believe and to obscure what they are doing. Very little is real, virtually everything has become spin. At a recent press conference, George Bush successively smothered four successive questions he didn’t want to answer and spun them into something different and then answered his own questions with egregious deceptions, He is now claiming he never said that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Ladin were co-conspirators in the 9/11 attack. Actually, for months during his run up to the Iraq invasion, he scared nave and trusting Americans half to death by naming Hussein the arch terrorist with doomsday weapons that could be used within forty minutes. He pulled so many swift switches with the color code that almost seventy percent of Americans still believe that Iraq rather than Al Qaeda was responsible for the attack. The entire spin system is deeply deceptive, reality is what the propagandists say it is, until they get tripped up and declare that their previous Truth has become inoperative. According to J R R Tolkien who wrote the world class novel about illicit power and greed, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, politicians, preachers and plutocrats who grub incessantly for wealth and power, use so many rationalizations that they lose the ability to distinguish between good and evil. Fact and fantasy and good and bad choices become blurred, all run together in ways that lead to financial and military disasters for the countless nave people they work so hard to deceive.
In his autobiography INSIDER, Joseph Callifano who grew up in a barely middle class family in Brooklyn, New York, tells about a brilliant career that led him to Harvard Law School and to service with Presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter, along with international fame, considerable wealth and consistent service to humankind. Callifano emphasized that a man or woman who plans on succeeding through their God-given gifts of intelligence, creativity, strength or family fame, needs a moral compass that successfully navigates ambitious persons past the often appealing expedient but ultimately self-defeating choices of life. Otherwise, he said, we are pressed to compromise our values so often that we become prisoners of our own selfishness, becoming consistently self-serving in our well rationalized greed; unable to live a fulfilling spiritual life-style. Callifano testified that he found his moral compass in the spiritual teachings of his church. Many can say the same, although much of the church no longer remains a beacon to light the way for souls crossing the cosmic sea. Many fundamental and orthodox church leaders have compromised their ethical and spiritual integrity by joining reactionary politicians, have focused on a few spectacular issues that distract thoughtless persons from the major problems facing the vanishing middle class and the fast fading Republic.
According to Viktor Frankl and most other existential psychologists, the vast majority of normal persons prefer living a peaceful life with people they love, developing a small corner of the world in which they belong. Very few persons feel compelled to endure the incessant battles needed to acquire great wealth and power. Most of us simply do not have the gnawing neurotic wounds that flog so many robber barons, reactionary politicians and fundamental preachers relentlessly on and on. Contented people realize that while wealth and power may be convenient at times, they are seldom worth the cost one must pay to acquire them. It is deeply disappointing for egoistic men and women to discover, after having expended a lifetime appearing heroic through grubbing for wealth and power, to learn that only the spiritual aspects of life are consistently satisfying. Possessions turn to rust and dust, our power is seized by eager understudies, we become satiated with pleasure and everyone soon moves beyond his or her fifteen minutes of fame. This eventual recognition is why so many people who become weary though excessive consumption cling desperately to a caricature of vigor through trophy lovers, hair transplants, compulsive exercise, botox treatments, Viagra, breast enhancement, face lifts, cryogenic preservation and the like.
Many if not most secular minded narcissists approach the final curtain of life with a major sense of loss: Surely just one lifetime isn’t nearly enough for such a unique and magnificent personage as myself. Even after becoming the most powerful politician in twentieth century France, Charles De Gaulle was overheard muttering late in life; Shipwreck! Shipwreck! My life ends in an absolute disaster. Existential philosophers and psychotherapists such as Soren Kierkegaard, Viktor Frankl, Otto Rank, Carl Rogers, Ernest Becker, Wayne Dyer et al, believe that unless a person has lived spiritually and ethically enough to face the end of life with equanimity, without lingering feelings of guilt and regret, he or she hasn’t become an authentic human, has hardly lived at all. Even one Catholic power broker, a dominant Italian Cardinal within the Vatican Curia, a former candidate for the Papacy, confessed ruefully to a colleague;
If God gave me another life, rather than follow this deceptive and devious route to power, I would pastor a rural parish with just enough theology to preach decent sermons, hear confessions, assign penance and relax on the front steps with a bottle of wine and talk about their prospects with the farmers coming home from the fields and pastures.
Some jaded power brokers eventually seek redemption and an illusion of immortality through belated generosity. The quintessential robber baron Andrew Carnegie built scores of libraries, Carnegie Hall and contributed great sums of money to Carnegie-Mellon University, when he finally realized he could neither consume anything more nor take any of his immense fortune with him. In a yearning for a modicum of immortality, he directed his name be carved in marble over the entrance to every Carnegie Library. I doubt that he cares about his fame any longer. Carnegie was seeking absolution and indeed, he had much of which to repent after a lifetime spent using and abusing his battered and tattered workers as if they were inanimate machines to be discarded when they malfunctioned.
It is obvious that American governance has fallen into the hands of the narcissistic triad of robber barons, reactionary politicians and fundamental and orthodox clergy who betray society by obsessively serving their own interests. The ultimate selfish ideology that leads to greedy consumerism, the fall of the middle class, the death of the Republic and potentially fatal environmental disasters was found initially in the seminal THE WEALTH OF NATIONS from the eighteenth century. It can be summed up this way.
When every selfish person or organization subordinates morals and ethics to net worth, when every ruthless power broker and narcissistic manipulator insists that greed is good and rips everything valuable from weaker persons and from the earth itself, when companies, governments and political parties take every advantage of each subordinate, leaving the people with only enough of the profits of production to survive and to work ever harder without retirement programs, social security, medical care, good schooling and decent housing, the wonderful free market magic starts working. In some miraculous manner, perhaps like the loaves and fishes Jesus blessed, everyone benefits from countless ruthless abuses. We can destroy the middle class goose that produced the golden eggs through its vast purchasing power but society shall continue to prosper because the robber barons and their narcissistic vassals will still be affluent, prestigious, and privileged.
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About the author:
Jard & Roberta DeVille; Psyc. Dept. Chair at Westminster College; leadership psychology at the University of Arizona at Tucson; published psychology books, seminars & psychological assessment instruments. The Book NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST was a best seller. He & Roberta wrote ‘LOVERS FOR LIFE’ and other courses/books together. She’s been a wonderful teacher in Minneapolis for many years. He’s considered by many to be America’s foremost leadership scholar.
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