Sunday, March 9, 2008

The Mythology of 9-11.

A fair amount of people believe George Bush had something to do with 9-11. They believe he was in on the planning of it, or just let it happen. I'm not one of them.

Why do I believe as I do? Mostly, it's because of Bush's arrogance. I know that's counterintuitive, and might even appear to make no sense. At first. But give it a little thought, and I think it explains a great deal about the personality of Bush, and why he couldn't be involved in 9-11.

Almost always, people who are arrogant and suffer from hubris -- as Bush most certainly does --- do so because they are covering up feelings of shame and humiliation so deep and so permanent they are unbearable. That profile fits Bush. Oh, does it fit him!

Think of the well-known cliche' about short men suffering from the "Little Man" complex. It's a compensation to cover up profound feelings of inadequacy. Hitler was the same way. He was tortured by inferiority complexes and easily offended and embarrassed and humiliated. Yet he called himself "the greatest German."

Grandiosity on top, to cover the self-devaluation underneath. It's called narcissism.

While I in no way suggested Bush as another Hitler, I do believe Bush uses his arrogance to cover up his deep-seated feelings of shame and humiliation.

Bush has been a loser his entire life. Has there been one job that he's had that has not been handed to him? Has there been even one that he has not failed at? He's even failed as President, although he's convinced he has not. Plus, he was an alcoholic for many years, and has never been able to measure up to his father. The shame and humiliation he must have felt, because of those failures, must have been excruciating.

As a compensation for those unbearable feelings, he developed that arrogance of his. He uses it to deceive himself about what he is. He refuses to look at his flaws. He rationalizes everything. And that arrogance, now so obvious, never became truly pronounced until after 9-11. Before that, he spoke of a "humble foreign policy."

That "humble foreign policy" vanished completely after the attacks on 9-11. The reason, I believe, is because 9-11 occured on Bush's watch. That's why he literally became hysterical and attacked both Afghanistan and Iraq. They were wars started because of his deeply personal psychological problems. He saw them as attacks on him. Had Bush not been President, there might have been no wars.

War as psychotherapy, you can say.

Bush's whole self-image is bound up in his being President. He said, and truly believes, we were attacked "for our goodness." He also apparently truly believes the United States is innocent of any wrongdoing toward the Middle East, ignoring our immensely destructive meddling in it for the last 50 years. His attitude toward the United States is that this country is a holy and sacred place to live -- what he calls the "Homeland."

If Bush was in any way behind 9-11, he would be attacking the basis for his self-image -- literally attacking himself. That doesn't make any sense to me, at all. It would be the same as if he senselessly chopped off one of his hands. The attacks made a fool of him. How could he not have been embarrassed?

Then there is his attitude toward the Middle East. He thinks all the countries there are full of monsters, ones who need to be killed or tamed. Since he considers the U.S. to be an innocent, indeed sacred place, all evil must be projected elsewhere, specifically, at first, onto Osama bin Laden, then Saddam Hussein, now onto Iran.

All of this makes perfect sense, psychologically. Bush considers himself good, and the U.S. good. He believes we were attacked for our goodness, by monsters that must be killed or neutered. Since Bush once said things would be much easier if he could be dictator (meaning he thinks he and the U.S. are identical), why would be attack himself? He wouldn't. He couldn't.

The fact that people think Bush was behind 9-11 is because they think he is a monster.

I don't see any evidence that human nature has changed for 50,000 years. We scoff at people who in the past fervently believed in witches and vampires and zombies, to the point they murdered thousands of innocent people. Yet today, we today believe in home-grown monsters who would attack their own country and kill 3,000 people. We're no better than those deluded people thousands or tens of thousands of years ago.

These bizarre beliefs about monsters appear to be programmed into the human race. Even children instinctively believe in monsters, under the bed or in the closet We think we are good; those outside of our circle are evil. They're monsters, monsters who we believe always attack us for our goodness and would utterly destroy us if they could. We must annihilate them to survive. Let's forget that the threat is always exaggerated, sometimes even nonexistent, like those monsters under the bed or in the closet. Monsters are monsters! There is no good in them! They must be rooted out and destroyed!

We have this tendency to perceive good and evil as separate and distinct entities. Good is with us; evil is with them. We ignore our own evil; we project it onto the monsters we have created. We dwell in a fake innocence. We believe others want to profane us, bring chaos and destruction to the order of our lives. That's not living in innocence; it's living a extraordinarily dangerous lie.

The idea that the sacred homeland is under attack by the forces of chaos is an old one. In the West, it runs back at least to the idea of Heaven under assault by Satan, who wants to conquer it. I'm sure similiar stories are older than that one, and exist in every culture in the world. That's too bad for all involved. I believe it's the main cause of war, and genocide.

It does make sense that the U.S. was attacked by someone else other than the Bush administration. Now as to who that was, that's another story.

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