Personality disorder test

This article is an elaboration of my comment to Maureen Dowd’s NYT article, “Sick to Your Stomach? #MeToo.”

“A personality disorder can be defined as the global, seamless emotionalized attitude or belief system that encases and protects a person who failed the psycho-developmental stages of progressive maturity. This definition would apply to Narcissistic Personality, Borderline, Antisocial, Schizotypal, Dependent Personality and the rest. It would probably also apply to most of the senators who have pre-judged Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and who will doubt her on Thursday. Their ideas are caused by emotion, and their emotion is the salve on their failure to be fully grown, mature human beings with normal moral feeling. That may sound drastic, but I'd bet my next ten years' salary on it.”

Maybe it would deflate people’s sense of moment and horror to consider that Personality Disorder may not be the exotic specialty of this “troglodyte” (Ms. Dowd’s term) president, but could be legion among politicians. Politicians – men and women who want power to take from the anonymous masses; who are guided by big, cloudy systems of heterogeneous positions united only by a “Left” or “Right” mood; whose thinking is not guided and turned by reality but whose reality is pre-established in their feeling.

Many years ago, a little innocent in my field, I read with surprise a psychologist’s statement that “most families are dysfunctional.” These days, most people seem to know that. I’d like now to propose a possibly unexpected fact – that personality disorder is pandemic, as terrible as it may seem for a person to grow into a self-protective universe of developmental arrest and escapist, homeostatic ideas and emotions.

We see it all the time, that family and friends, famous and poor, blowhards on bar stools and highbrows in universities speak their loud wisdom not from their long trials in the wilderness, not from considering a horizon of possibilities with ignorance and dispassion, but from templates forged in their childhood and adolescence. Why do we give credence to these frozen embryos and infants with their adamantine platforms, conspiracy theories, global prejudices? Why does a single person accept Tomi Lahren or Steve Bannon or Theodore J. Kaczynski or Donald Trump to be a considerable human being and not the bent delusion program they are?

How can we determine who among us is the skewed and out-of-time world of a personality disorder? (Setting aside whether there is a good purpose in doing so.) Many times, it is obvious. Someone we hear broadcasts his belief, his certainty, day in and day out, that seems intangible and oddly scented. This is because it is not an idea so much as it is his need. It cannot be tested. Bannon’s belief in “saecula” and “a cataclysmic event that destroys the old order and brings in a new one in a trial of fire.”* A Narcissist’s certainty of his unique specialness and perfection. A televangelist whose voice is rabid and whose doctrine is booming; while a parishioner’s, in a different church, are not. Often, though, it is not visible or audible. Some writers believe that President Obama is a Narcissist, though canny enough to hide it, to appear genuinely good and empathic. Trump, stupider and impulsive, can only pull himself an inch away from stating “I am perfect!”, though “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it”** lurched very close to godliness.

Maybe the best approach is to look inside. Do you feel, in a perversely honest moment, there is something about your belief, your certain conviction, that disembodies you, sets you apart from the world? Do you need the belief, the felt rightness of it, or are you grounded in reality without it? A scientist creates a theory, accepts it and values it. Possibly his theory holds for ten or twenty years, but then is disproven by other experimenters. He accepts that, and moves on. He is jazzed by the universe. He still exists whether he is right or wrong.

See if you still exist without your idea.

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* https://www.businessinsider.com/book-steve-bannon-is-obsessed-with-the-fourth-turning-2017-2.

** Transcript: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/full-transcript-donald-trump-nomination-acceptance-speech-at-rnc-225974.