This is well written and informative. I agree with the fact that delusion is the hallmark of serious mental health issues.
Schizophrenics, Psychopaths Holding America Hostage
~snip~Almost weekly, more studies are published strongly suggesting that the chaos and destruction built into the greenhouse gas phenomenon has been underestimated and that climate-related extreme outcomes are happening even faster than worse case predictions of even a few years ago. Our own Pentagon, the insurance industry, the World Bank, the United Nations, the American Meteorological Society and virtually every other country in the world accepts the science. The American Republican Party and the Fox News/right wing entertainment complex are the only organizations in the world that deny the validity and reality of the science. And because the Republicans control the US House of Representatives, there is no hope any legislation will be passed to address the climate crisis. Inability to discern reality is the hallmark of schizophrenia.
One of my professional friends - smart, well-educated, and seemingly otherwise sane - has been relentlessly trying to sell everyone I work with on the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama's real father was an African-American communist activist, Frank Marshall Davis, and that Obama's secret agenda is mind control and the collapse of the American way of life through diabolical UN-mandated sustainable land use planning - a pillar of Glenn Beck's circus tent of amazing conspiracy theories. People who believe others are reading their minds, controlling their thoughts, or plotting to harm them are usually medicated to make them safe to live among us. But institutions that promote the same paranoid delusions are rewarded with handsome profitability.
For the first time since the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of American citizens have petitioned the federal government to allow their states to secede from the union. This is more than just a new expression of undying racism. It is also a sharp detachment from reality. The efficacy of tax cuts for the rich as an economic stimulus, has no empirical substantiation - in other words no basis in reality, just like global warming denial.
Much has been written about the Karl Rove/Republican/right wing/Fox News bubble and their group delusion in truly believing that their polling heralding a Romney victory was superior to everyone else's reality. Rove is also widely thought to be the source of the famous quote from a George W. Bush insider, offered to Ron Suskind for an article in the New York Times Magazine in 2004, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." That's how schizophrenics talk and think.
Psychopaths often appear normal, even charming. Underneath, they lack conscience and empathy, making them manipulative, volatile and often (but by no means always) criminal. The psychologist Kevin Dutton in his book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths, notes society, and especially Wall Street, admires and rewards many of the qualities of psychopaths - fearlessness, emotional sterility, supreme confidence, ruthlessness, lack of remorse, refusal to take responsibility, narcissism and delusions of grandeur. Who could argue that those characteristics virtually defined the Wall Street crowd responsible for blowing up the world's economy in 2008? In fact, a recent study showed psychopaths were four times more common among business leaders than among the general population. [1]
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