Larry Hart
I have hesitated to publish this post after writing it. I have hesitated because it has in some respects been overtaken by current events, in particular the large scale protests resulting from the tragic, pointless, and stupid killings of Breonna Taylor asleep in her home, George Lloyd helpless on the ground, and Ahmaud Arbery running in vain for his life. And so as you read further I want you to be aware that I recognize from both a psychological and Christian perspective the difference between pathological anger and defiance, and the sort of righteous indignation that summons into the moment the courage and will to nonviolently resist egregious injustice. In fact, I think that as you read you will discover this post to be about the sort of disorders of the heart and mind that lead to racism, wanton violence, and oppression.
Stuck
It takes no great powers of insight to know that something has gone terribly wrong in American life. That, in the language of systems psychology, American society is at every level (families, churches, work places, schools, businesses and government) “stuck.” We are stuck in anger, stuck in anxiety and stuck in self-centeredness. After the publication of W. H. Auden’s Pulitzer Prize winning poem The Age of Anxiety, it became common to characterize modern Western society in just that way––as the “Age of Anxiety”. And with Christopher Lasch’s highly acclaimed book, The Culture of Narcissism (1979), more and more social scientists came to think of American society as caught in a web of both anxiety and pathological self-absorption. In Systems Therapy and Leadership Psychology, to be stuck means to react to people and events out of our own inner fears, anger, dysfunctionality and emotional and spiritual immaturity rather than showing a capacity and ability to respond with maturity and clarity to what is genuinely required in the moment.
Among the things I quickly learned once I began counseling work in a clinical practice was the importance of being able to make a complete diagnosis. Psychological difficulties are often created by multiple conditions. For example, someone may be suffering from a substance abuse disorder as well as trauma and a mood disorder all simultaneously. What I am going to suggest here is that contemporary American society, in addition to narcissism and anxiety, is suffering from something like Oppositional Defiant Disorder and it is destroying us. We are, as a society, very immature people trying to make decisions requiring great maturity.
ODD
Adults with a diagnosable oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), are mad (angry and resentful) at the world, they tend to be aggressive and may lose their temper easily and often. They show a pattern of feeling put upon and victimized. Whatever is wrong is the fault of someone else. They are negative and argumentative, and feel misunderstood, pushed around, disliked, and “hemmed in.” Feelings of powerlessness can turn them into bullies, and may even lead to violent behavior. They frequently defy or refuse to comply with rules and laws even if the rules or policies are for the common good. They are determined not to be told what to do. They are constantly anxious that something is going to be taken away from them––money, property, freedom, privileged status, superiority, power, or a way of life that may never have been; that is, they may have never actually have had any of the things they are so afraid of losing. Their thinking is not only generally adversarial, but is further characterized by what is known as dichotomous, all or none, either or thinking. A changing world with its shifting national and global racial demographics is painful, intolerable, and unbearable for them, and so they fabricate their own fragile “reality.”
Stories From the Heartland and Other Places
In Mishawaka, Indiana a 7-11 clerk told a man that, as stated by the CDC and posted in the store, he needed to wear a face mask in order to be served. The man became angry, threw a hot cup of coffee on her and left. He then returned to the store and when asked to leave punched the clerk hard enough to knock her to the ground and kicked her before leaving again. I read an interesting reader response to this posting from someone who knew the store and is a regular customer there. His comment was that two of the women working there are “arseholes” which makes him question the story. He knows they are bad people because he himself has been refused service for refusing to wear a mask. At the Dollar Store in Flint, Michigan a security guard told a woman that her little daughter would need to wear a face mask in order to come into the store. The woman argued with the guard and then left. Twenty minutes later her husband and adult son returned and shot the security guard to death. At a Target Store in Los Angles two men attacked a security guard who pointed out they needed to wear a face mask in that store. Three times now protesters, some armed with assault rifles, have taken over the state capital of Michigan. They screamed in the faces of uniformed state police officers, and entered the Senate gallery overlooking lawmakers. They showed nooses, Confederate flags, and displayed signs saying: “Tyrants Get the Rope!” Governor Whitmer and legislators were repeatedly threatened with violence. I read where a crowd protesting the shut down in Commack, New York heckled News 12 reporter Kevin Vesey. Then I watched a video clip which shows Vesey not only being heckled but physically intimidated by Trump red shirts. In Encinitas where I live not far from the Pacific Ocean, a woman organized a rally against the temporary closing of a beach trail. At one point in her campaign for the freedom to spread COVID-19 she voiced her sympathetic understanding for those who carry weapons to protest events. As I write protestant fundamentalist congregations and even Roman Catholic dioceses are congratulating themselves on defying orders to close for worship until it is safe to reopen.
Etiology
We are not discussing ODD here as a “scientifically” clinical issue involving real individuals, and this post most certainly should not be read in that way. Rather what we are doing is looking at it more metaphorically, although not entirely so, as a way of understanding the decline and dysfunction of America. This, of course, means that tracing its etiology, or causes, is extremely difficult and involves even more speculation than what we have engaged in so far. With that disclaimer or bit of caution, then, it is interesting to note the following.
ODD in children and adults seems to correlate somehow with alcoholism and drug addiction in families. Such families, whether they include both or one parent, are usually characterized by: communications that are contradictory and inconsistent, expectations and demands that are unreasonable, psychological, physical, and/or sexual abuse is common, as is the use of negative reinforcement and high levels of negativity and pessimism. There is a lack of any predictable structure in the home. Parents may reprimand a child for forbidden behaviors while at the same smiling, which the child easily perceives even if the smile is only inward. This is all particularly interesting when we consider the ever growing problem of alcoholism and drug addiction in the U.S. There are some twenty million people suffering from alcoholism (the newer clinical term “substance abuse” just sounds too much like a euphemism for me to use) and one out of eight struggle with both alcohol and drug problems simultaneously. Each alcoholic/addict will directly impact at least five others negatively. Someone with one alcoholic parent has a forty-percent chance of becoming alcoholic and with two alcoholic parents they have a sixty percent chance.
But what actually interests me as much as anything is an observation the psychiatrist Harry Tiebout made in his investigation of alcoholism during the early 1940’s. Tiebout said that the alcoholic is characterized by two personality traits, defiant individuality and grandiosity. The alcoholic, in the grips of his or her disease, generally engages in a kind of self-deification that tolerates no interference from anyone. The symptoms of oppositional defiant disorder should not be totally unexpected in a society where substance abuse is epidemic.
Mood disorders like anxiety and depression, lack of a positive attachment to a parent, overly permissive parenting in which parents too often and too easily give in to a child’s demands, and Hyper Activity Attention Deficit Disorder all appear to have something to do with ODD. And what is white middle class America, if not a society both anxious and depressed at once; always hyper busy working or playing to fill up life; yet, seldom feeling fulfilled in any meaningful way by all the frenetic activity. We are, as a society, hyper vigilant, constantly nervous, angry, and wary that someone may do something that impinges upon what we want, like, or desire.
Power and Powerlessness
The Clinical Psychologist Rollo May in his book Power and Innocence, argued that the old saying: “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” is most certainly true. But, he said, its reverse is also true: “Powerlessness corrupts, and absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely.” May was greatly influenced by Alfred Adler, who with Freud and Jung was one of the three earliest pioneers in depth psychology. Following in the steps of Adler, Rollo May believed that we all have an innate need for power in the sense of a basic competence in the stuff of daily life; as well as, a certain confidence that we are contributing to the common good. To the extent that we know what we think, feel, and do is meaningful; and, that what happens to us is important and matters to others, especially those who are closest and most important to us, to that extent we experience a sense of power and significance. If, instead, said May, we feel powerless and insignificant––like nothing we do or feel matters to others then problems result. At first the person who feels powerless may become more assertive in his or her relationships in an attempt to redress this felt absence of power. If that fails they may become more aggressive. If nothing they do helps at all they may simply give up on life, and embrace what May called a kind of pseudo-innocence––denying their legitimate need or desire for power and sinking into a neurotic style of life; or, he said, and this is particularly relevant to what we are saying here, they may erupt in violence. Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated John Kennedy in 1963, and Timothy McVeigh, along with James Nichols who helped McVeigh carry out his diabolical 1995 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, are nearly textbook perfect cases of how corrosive the feeling of powerlessness can be. But notice that the question is not how powerless an individual actually is, but how they perceive their own life situation, and how they choose to deal with it. Ironically, in the end a sense of powerlessness leading to irrationality, oppositional attitudes, defiance, and violence only serves to solidify such persons and movements in historical memory and consciousness as bizarre and pathetic.
When Derek Chauvin pressed his knee on George Lloyd’s neck hard enough to asphyxiate him, to kill him, it was not an act of power, but of angry and defiant impotence. In that moment he defied his training, both in general and specifically, he defied the criminal law he had sworn to uphold, and he defied the most basic and inner moral laws of being human. And Ahmaud Arbery was not chased down and shot to death by powerful people, but by people who are afraid and angry––that’s what Make America Great Again is all about. It is about people who are afraid that as national demographics change, as society changes, as the world grows more complex and confusing they are losing a way of life which was once under control but is now threatened by chaos.
Control is, of course, always an illusion. In this case what is mistaken for control is merely nostalgia for what was once familiar to a particular group, and we are always prone to prefer the difficult, even painful, familiar over an unknown and unfamiliar good. It is, in fact, this feeling of comfortability with the familiar that feeds the illusion of control. However, the greater mistake is in the failure to recognize that genuine power and significance must be discovered rather than seized, and can only be discovered in living a life which contributes to the good of all. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was Black and he was not weak. He was strong, and his power was in his faith and in his character.
Ineffectual Answers
What I have presented here is of course merely a hypothesis without any scientific research data. What I do know, is that past research suggests probably eighty percent of the American people would need to reach a higher level of moral and faith development in order for the nation to move forward effectively. What I would guess, is that some twenty to thirty percent of the American population is, to return to our original word, “stuck” in anger, in anxiety, in the dysfunction of neurotic opposition and defiance. When an armed and “unregulated militia” (to use the opposite term of the U.S. Constitution) can take over a state capitol that is, as they say, “Not an encouraging sign.”
Most of the things we might think would be effective in dealing with ODD on a societal level are unfortunately not only useless but frequently counterproductive. Arguing, debating, reasoning, pleading, lecturing, or threatening most often serves only to exacerbate the problem.
Edwin Friedman, the rabbi and psychologist, who was at the forefront in applying systems theory to family counseling as well as effective leadership, observed:
The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax of eloquence or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the choicest words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the real figures of speech.
(Edwin Friedman in Friedman’s Fables,)
In his leadership courses Friedman further recognized that a group, a community, a nation or society may become so stuck that it is no longer capable of choosing healthy and effective leaders.
It is most likely already too late to preserve the American Empire. For one thing greed, selfish-ambition, injustice, and violence are inherent in the very nature of empire; so that, every empire is always doomed from its inception by its own genetics. But I do think it possible to build a sustainable America––a sustainable democracy, a sustainable habitat, a universally sustainable economy and way of life, a sustainable system of justice and peace.
Looking for a Miracle
For this to become reality would, of course, be nothing short of and nothing less than a miracle, which is why it must be regarded as a possibility rather than a probability. It would require a critical mass of people who are neither angry nor anxious, who are guided by the higher values of compassion, human solidarity, justice, and generosity of spirit, people who neither want to oppress nor to be oppressed, and for whom “serving” and “helping,” and “caring” are not merely the self-marketing words of politicians. Both Pace e Benet with its Campaign for Nonviolence and the Poor People’s Campaign led by The Rev. William Barber recognize that winning an election here or there or gaining majority support for a particular issue is no longer sufficient. What is needed is a transformation of values which will result in a peaceful, but clear and firm resistance to the present social order of falsity, injustice, and violence without employing its same strategies and tactics. Indeed to use the same methods as the world is acquiescence to the power that is dark. But one person, dedicated to living the precepts of love and nonviolence with purity of heart is more powerful than all the forces of brutality in this world. For me personally this is simply a part of what it means to be Christian. I would say more, but then you would think I am a kook, and my wife says that while she does not mind being married to a kook she would prefer that not everyone know it.