Elements of Personal and Collective Self-Sabotage

Excerpt from
Freedom From Self-Sabotage: The Intelligent Reader's Guide to Success and Self-Fulfillment.
copyright 1999. 218 pages. $15.00. Prospect Books

Our humanity is enhanced by our psychological insight. The more we understand psychological principles, the more clearly we see that social conflict is the collective expression of the individual psyche and that human and spiritual evolvement depend on self-understanding.

We co-create the society we live in. We are not separate from what is going on around us. The corruption we see in politics and business is the corruption we carry in ourselves in the form of unresolved emotional conflicts. Society comes back at us with all the flaws we contribute to it. When we are dissatisfied with ourselves, or preoccupied with what we don't have or what others aren't doing for us, the collective is soaking in the same feelings. When we are angry at a neighbor and refuse to talk to him, our society remains fragmented and hostile. When we are self-centered and self-preoccupied, society is cold and lacking in civility, business lacks in dedication to quality and service, the arts and media are indifferent to promotion of higher values, and government leaders are more self-serving than nation-serving.

At the same time, we not only give government its legitimate authority, we maintain a parent-child model of interaction with it. We transfer parental authority onto the institution of government and its leaders because we remain attached to (and thus ready to act out) unresolved childhood feelings of being deprived, controlled, neglected, and helpless. Then we protest when the government reacts like a parent, becoming what we feel to be too controlling and intrusive. At the same time we become angry that the government apparently isn't taking better care of us and is withholding from us our daily entitlements. But the government is not a parent and it can't save us from ourselves.

As just one of hundreds of examples, let us consider the emotional undercurrents behind the mentality of the pseudo-patriot. The pseudo-patriot has an underlying emotional uncertainty about his value as a person. If his country is perceived to be strong, this individual infers that he too is strong. If his country is, in his mind, the best in the world, this individual takes, in an emotional way, the recognition of this as a tribute to his own person. A similar mechanism operates when a person becomes an associate of a powerful individual and uses that union to bolster his own self-importance.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with having powerful stirrings of national pride. When a countryman stands on the Olympic podium while the national anthem plays, our pride and pleasure are appropriate. When national esteem is healthy, we are also remembering and honoring the citizens past and present who have struggled to create and enhance our democracy, prosperity, and respect for each other. But pseudo-patriotism arises from an inner hunger, the felt need to belong to something bigger and more grand than ourselves in order to compensate for how insignificant and unworthy we feel on our own. Any subsequent superior posturing becomes, on a grand scale, petty nationalism.

Since the pseudo-patriot identifies with the nation, he feels flawed and defective whenever flaws are identified in the government or culture. He feels that such criticism is a hostile act made with malicious intent. That is because he himself is emotionally attached to feeling criticized and thus takes criticism personally. Though the nation's democratic processes need vigilant self-scrutiny, he turns a blind eye to social or political flaws and corruptions, just as he is blind to his inner flaws and misunderstandings.

Another form of "patriotism" involves Americans who say they love their country but either hate their government or the authorities in the public realm. National unity is besieged by a "madder-than-hell" crowd of everyday whiners and complainers whose hidden motivation is to sow dissension in order to validate their negative projections. These individuals are convinced that their outrage is validated by the malice and incompetence of others, when in fact that outrage is simply their means of transferring or projecting the conflict and turmoil they generate within themselves. They project their inner discord into the environment and often are passionate and clever enough to persuade themselves and others that their grievances are legitimate.

In contrast, a healthy person is able to distinguish genuine grievances from what would otherwise be his own transference or projection. Should he chose to address these grievances, he is guided by strength, wisdom, and compassion.

The outer is a reflection of the inner. Thus some so-called patriots create a world-view that accommodates their conflict-ridden psyches. They establish their intellectual and emotional foundation through the conspiracies they see, the grudges they hold, and the oppression they feel. The last thing they want is peace in the world because that would hold them accountable for their own lack of inner peace.

Some groups in the United States fear that their own government is their worst enemy. Their readiness to resort to violence is evidence of the unconscious willingness to exacerbate the feeling of being oppressed and persecuted. Fringe groups such as white supremacists consist of individuals who interpret their lives through the lens of the victim mentality. On an emotional level, these individuals interpret the government's attempts to curb the proliferation of firearms as a form of control and denial of rights. While the rest of us can understand that such controls are intended to strike a balance for the common good, extremists are unconsciously prepared to exacerbate their negative feelings out of all proportion to the situation. With protests of righteous indignation and various expressions of pseudo-aggression, they are covering up or defending against their masochistic attachment to feelings of being controlled and oppressed. Their pseudo-aggressive reactions such as murder, bombings, and sabotage prompt the authorities to control them even more.

These extremists and domestic terrorists are completely unaware of the degree to which they are in secret pursuit of the feeling of being oppressed. Often they create imaginary oppressors (powerful Jewish bankers, a United Nations-controlled world government) because their psyche is more interested in creating the sought-after feelings of oppression than in differentiating between what is real and what is imaginary. Meanwhile, they depend emotionally on their guns to compensate for their psychological entanglement in powerlessness and impotence, while their anger and rage are phony exhibitions of strength and power designed to cover up what is really their passivity.

Such fanatical groups usually exhibit a persecution complex, born of their willingness to take on negative feelings of being controlled and oppressed. They have concocted a reality that sees oppressors everywhere because of the degree to which, unconsciously, they are not willing to expose or even consider the lies and denial that protect their personal conflicts and delusions. The tyranny they are so determined to see in the outside world is concocted as a projection of the inner tyranny under which they dance like puppets to sabotaging strings.

Like children, we generate irrational fears through the visual drive or the emotional imagination. We entertain feelings and scenarios in which we see ourselves being neglected, abused, deprived, controlled, annihilated, and otherwise victimized. To cover up our own participation in this form of self-suffering, we inflate the dangers and malice presented by outsiders. When we begin to see how and why we concoct these illusions, we can start to take responsibility for our beliefs and feelings, and to make wiser choices.

Even the good guys carry emotional baggage into the social fray. Behind secret intent and hidden motivation are many examples of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Someone devoted to helping the poor may be identifying with feelings of deprivation, out of an unhealthy attachment to that feeling. Identification with the poor or persecuted, be that people or dolphins, is motivated out of a secret willingness to feel deprived, controlled, and cast off as having no value.

The healthy person does not identify with the neglected or oppressed because to identify with them in their plight means to choose, usually unconsciously, to take on their form of suffering. The healthy person understands the feeling of being victimized and may try to reform a situation out of compassion or for the sake of justice. But he does not identify with the victim.