My cyber-twin in the neocon world.
Bookworm on Aug 06 2009 at 3:16 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
Robin, a neo-con who has been writing about her transformation from left to right, has an article at American Thinker today about the speed and completeness of her political transformation. Once she saw the light, her turnaround was complete.
Although some of our details are different (I’m not a therapist, my parents didn’t die in close proximity to each other, and I’ve never had a life-threatening disease), it’s remarkable how her story parallels mine. We were both liberals who imbibed it with mother’s milk, and never thought about its contradictions with our core values and our practical life experience. Once we confronted the cognitive dissonance, liberalism was definitively overly.
It’s interested to see my own psyche in someone else’s head.
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Two things I took away from that. Surviving pain and hardship. Hypnosis.
Those two things seem to be something a lot of, if not conservatives then certainly classical liberals, people on our side have in common.
We have often had to be alone, with nobody to rely upon but ourselves. And in doing so, in being independent, we unleashed more of our potential than ever before and we came to like it. Even though the costs were, of course, high, as is the case with any worthwhile endeavor (you get what you pay for).
Neo-Neocon, if you read her recent articles about her personal healthcare options in the past, went through a great amount of pain. So have I. In Neo’s case, it was due to the inability to even know what solution is available, because the problem wasn’t pinpointed. That was similar, but not the same, as my own.
I know of the neural pain she speaks of. I had it pretty good when it banged my elbow, the ulna, on a desk and it cut right into the nerve there. The entire army to the pinky went numb and then all kinds of flaring and coruscating sensations were felt. In other cases, I had an external skin cut on my chin turn into a lower frontal teeth gum swelling and the low level pulsating pain (until the fluid gunk was drained) was hard to tolerate at times. I couldn’t really focus or concentrate. Often I made it worse by moving the teeth around, since it would hit the nerves and present a greater sensation than the pain. Or I would hit the marble wall with my fist, as a way to introduce something else, any new feeling into the mix to change the monotone quality of the dull ache. This was not something endorphines were helping on, since it was very low level and very omnipresent. This happened for days, although perhaps not a week. It was enough. Any terrorist that will break under water boarding will also break under this. You can feel your resistance and willpower sap away, in the hopes of finding some way to alleviate the pain.
Then there were various other instances in which I could have given up because of rather excruciating and exquisite pain, but I did not. Some deeper reserve of strength, I discovered, I could tap into.
One of the reasons I don’t ridicule those of religious faith is because I’ve seen their inner strength. Whatever they tap into, as a result of their faith or their belief in God, is real. Strength is never something to be ridiculed. Except for the foolish, those like Scalzi or Leftist Morons and Apparatchiks.
Those a lot of these conversions, so to speak, are a result of intense psychological pressure and pain, physical or emotional.
I don’t think that is a coincident. After all, isn’t pain the best teacher? But it isn’t pain inflicted on us by another, it is pain inflicted on us by ourselves, by nature, by happenstance that teaches. Pain used by others on us is simply a way to control us. Pain from the environment or from our own actions is a way for us to grow stronger.
Those with such personalities, and I do believe this impacts and shapes one’s personality, are far less to be manipulated into hypnotic ways of thinking and feeling. Such people with such experiences will be far more resistant to propaganda and psychological operations. They won’t be as depressed when they see casualties and the daily bomb toll in Iraq, because they’ve seen despair and they knew they could conquer it. They had inner confidence. That inner confidence matters. It matters a lot. Without a confidence in yourself, you are left with nothing but faith on your leaders or others to “help you out”. This creates a dependency relationship, in which if your Dear Leader fails your expectations you will then turn on that person. This was the case with Bush, when people relied on Bush’s interpretations of WMDs and then when that didn’t pan out and people felt insecure as a result of it, people started listening to the MSM and the Democrats and listening to their “New Strong Man”.
As Danny said, people are often weak, as well as being stupidly self-destructive in my view.
There’s a difference between respecting a leader, like Sarah Palin, because her strengths mirror and exceed yours and loving a leader like Obama or Bush because they were the “Strong Man” at the Right Place, at the Right Time. The former, you never really lose. In thick or thin, you keep up the faith or the respect or the love or the loyalty. Because you are confident of yourself, your own judgment, and you don’t have to turn on dear Sarah because you are ‘disillusioned’. You weren’t hoping for someone, Strong Man or otherwise, to save you from yourself. But those that did, those who lacked internal strength, who wanted a quick win or a quick buck or a quick salvation from Sarah Palin, or Barack Obama, or McCain, or George Bush, or FDR would often turn on those individuals. It wasn’t the same people for all of those. Often, events would determine such. FDR would die before he could incite enough anger for his loyalists to betray him. Bush would go through 9/11 with the support of the nation, with more than half of the nation turning on him because Bush wouldn’t be their sugar daddy, complete with Red Meat and Gladiatorial Contests and Bread and Circuses.
It is funny, in a respect. McCain and Kerry both ran on their Vietnam war records, so to speak. So did Bob Dole. None of them won. Coincidence? It certainly makes for good propaganda and can inspire folks, but it seems it doesn’t really translate to a lot of votes.
On Hypnosis: One Case
Hypnotism is an altered state of consciousness characterized by a feeling of peaceful relaxation and “letting go”, and increased suggestibility. As experienced from the inside, you are conscious, but detached as though you are observing what is happening to you rather than being in charge of it. It’s as though you’ve temporarily gotten out of the driver’s seat of your body and mind and are taking a turn as a passenger.
That’s how I feel in a fight. Or in any situation where endorphines kick in because of a pain stimuli. I’m on auto-pilot. It’s a peculiar sensation. Some parts I don’t even remember.
And it’s also why it might be dangerous to try this hypnosis thing. I can’t really say what I will do if the person suggesting things to me becomes considered as a threat. I’m not in control, not precisely. Another part of me is in control. I would say “another personality”, but that’s not quite true. It doesn’t speak. It has no beliefs, no advice to give me. It just does what it does. And what it does is not particularly social or civilized. It’s a layer of self-hypnotic commands, you may say, that are instilled on the genetic or instinctual level. I had nothing to do with it, except to refine it. Some people have called it the Machine: certain military members that spoke of watching themselves operate like a robot, without emotion or pity.
Which is why when someone tries to hypnotize me, assuming it works, things may become unpredictable if they should try to play around with my command responses without the overarching consciousness to act as a social and civil barrier. This is not to include, of course, all the various blocks and defenses I placed in my own mind based upon my study of propaganda attack methods: my inherent suspicion of certain people’s motivations, my assessment of their threat. Even if I fully submerge my conscious mind, those will be there. Because they aren’t there on a conscious level. They are there as part of my personality, ego, and reflexes even, by now.
When in this state, your body and mind are suggestible. Stage hypnotists may ask you to act like a chicken, but reputable clinical hypnotists are able to get more useful things done. Hypnosis may be substituted for light anesthesia during surgery, as a pain-reduction technique, and to induce a profound state of relaxation. It can also be used to plant suggestions for change.
Here’s alternative uses. You can tell your body to produce an extraordinary amount of pain killing and euphoria inducing endorphines so that a shattering of a bone feels like bliss in heaven. Imagine the impact upon your ability to fight, then. The injury will still exist and you will still suffer spinal reflexes from the pain, but the pain will not be the pain. It will not hinder your resolve to fight, but reinforce it. Cause you to go further on the offense, not further on the defense, because you’re not concerned about yourself.
Some ancient folks called this the berserker. Often it was induced by some drink or ritual or combination of both. Self-hypnosis? They certainly took awhile to get into a froth.
Theories explaining how hypnosis works are still very much evolving. Hypnosis appears to be a form of dissociation. Dissociation, which is a condition in which parts of memory get split off from other parts, is the active ingredient responsible for creating some forms of amnesia, and, in severe cases, multiple personality disorder.
Now you may get a better sense of why I mentioned “other personality”.
The Dissociated Control Theory of Hypnosis (Bowers 1992) suggests that hypnotic induction temporarily dissociates or separates the brain’s executive command functions (the parts that give orders) from other functions that take orders such as emotion-control, motor/movement and sensory perception functions. This temporary weakening of executive control allows the hypnotist to present commands more directly to a hypnotized person’s brain, without that person feeling the need to criticize or examine those commands for reasonability or practicality.
It’s sort of like resolve, courage, valor, or any number of other things. Force the body to do extremely risky and suicidal acts, without the overall ego interjecting, saying “No, don’t do this, it’s dangerous”.
The human mind often dissociates itself as a defense mechanism. Some stimuli are so traumatic that the brain submerges the conscious mind and its memory for protection. But the instinctual, animal part of us still goes on, so to speak. We don’t go into catatonia, at least some of us do not. We continue to operate, according to training or instinct or desire or grit and determination in the face of insurmountable odds. The brain would say to give up, that it is hopeless. The spirit and body, the instinct to live, keeps on trucking, never admitting defeat. Incapable of admitting defeat.
People want to live in freedom. Not intellectual freedom. Not political freedom. Not economic freedom. The freedom to continue to try to do what their soul tells them to do, and thus suffer the consequences one way or another. To act as they believe they should act, as they were destined to act, without fear, without hesitation, without mental reservations of any sort or kind.
People have said freedom is a powerful force. But I wonder whether they have truly delved into the philosophy of why. Why are humans the way we are.
Suddenly, I grew up. I remember a session with a long term client after I returned from leave. She knew about my parents, and wondered aloud how she might feel when her parents died. She inquired, “Even though I’m a mom, I still feel like a little kid. Do you?”
I answered instantly, “Not any longer.”
Not any longer, defined it for Robin.
Each of us have definitive times in our lives, when we know, we are no longer a child nor feel like one. It can come with births, death, illness, age or all of them. I had experienced all of it by the time I was 22, including the loss of a child. It was not until I was 40 when my father died, that I actually and definitely concluded, “not any longer.”
Older son asked me once (when he was 8 or 9) when will I feel like a man.
I told him, when you don’t have to ask the question.