Feb 19, 2017
I’ve put together a number of frames, ways of thinking about cognition and human interaction in my unending (and unending-able) quest to understand people. People is weird, so it’s hard work, and is only ever sort of right.
Let’s randomly pluck a name from today’s news and look at him through the filter of these frames. For that random selection, the OOWSNN (Orange One Who Shall Not be Named) is in pretty much every story, so I guess it’s him. This ties the last blog to some of the others as well.
So, let’s go back in time and look at little OOWSNN. He may have only been a Pink One Who You Wouldn’t Want to Talk Too, then, but I’ll keep referring to him by his present title for simplicity. He comes to adulthood as a oldest son of a Brooklyn Slumlord…sorry, real estate magnate. Crime rates are rising and the rich are concerned about massive taxes (90% at the high end) and disintegrating opportunity – for favoured sons of the rich, anyway.
Treating coloured people as equals, let alone women – the equality stuff in the constitution was supposed to just cushion the ‘no rules for the powerful’ stuff that been the rule of life since the beginning of time, and was only in there to throw off the hoi pollloi. Taxes are theft. This and associated thinking is likely to have been imbibed with his mother’s milk.
OOWSNN’s youth had him sent to a military school to try and control his unruly behaviour (I think I heard that somewhere, so by his rules, it’s the truth) and manages to get a degree from a respected institution, Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania – graduating in 1968 – they must be so proud.
By 1971 he was running his father’s company. US Today estimated he’d been involved in over 3500 legal proceeding during that time – Roughly 50/50 plaintiff /defendant. Ok more 4/3 – …pedant. During the earlier portion of this time, the Italian Mob was very active in construction in New York and he had business dealings with a number of ‘mobbed up’ firms.
So through making some educated guesses, and a few wild ass guesses, a picture emerges. Here is a guy, who’s survived…occasionally thrived, in a rough industry, by being a hard man and a bully. “I’m not going to pay that contractor, and sueing me would bankrupt him so he’s outta luck” type stories are attached to many of his projects, ok pretty much all of them. In the books about him, he’s always a tough guy. The guy who followed him around for a year and a half to write a book about him (Art of the Deal) has fascinating things to say.
He has always surrounded himself by sycophants, with people that would puff his ego – and he’s totally cool with criticism if it runs the right way – ‘too tough’. He doesn’t appear to have any long term friends he regularly interacts with (I haven’t look too hard, so that’s of questionable veracity) outside of his children. His whole word has been about him for ages. How could he not be a bit narcissistic with that background.
It’s all about him. He has to live up to, and surpass his Dad – the authority figure of his formative life (Yes that’s tritely Freudian, but Freud had lotsa of good thinking). He is clearly a sociopath, in the clinical sense – he has no empathy. He doesn’t understand why people react in ways that the do because he cannot put himself in their shoes.
It is likely he’s also a psychopath, basically a sociopath with no conscience. He doesn’t seem to have any moral grounding. He lies and cheats and threatens and sues others, without the slightest sign of remorse…or awareness that the societal norms of morality, or any social norm at all, should apply to him.
He’s also probably quite bright, in both the memory and cause and effect sense, but for reasons discussed below, isn’t well read, or able to form a sophisticated world view. His world is very simple and very small. Titles and standing are important in a name dropping building him up sense (look at all the important people I know), but are meaningless if those people, with titles and standing ,are critical of him (what does she know, she isn’t as rich as me).
If Putin were to come out and call him weak, OOWSNN would NEED to do something aggressive, because he’s built Putin up as a tough guy so he’d have to show his alpha dog thing even more than usual. Won’t happen, Putin probably gets it perfectly and knows he’s got a good thing.
So what his SIT (self image thing). Clearly it’s wrapped in toughness. There is a offshoot of that around virility (poor little handed, sexual assaulter), but even that’s a tough virility (grab them by the pussy). What else, hmm, as far as I can tell, that’s about it. His whole existence can be viewed through ‘that’ tough window. The things that get under his skin, the things to poke if you want a 3am tweet about you, is anything covered by toughness. He isn’t a complex personality.
‘L’ete, c’est moi’ (Louis XIV) To insult him is now to insult America and is unforgivable, but the only insults that he takes to heart are to his virility and his toughness. To allow an insult to go unchallenged is weakness, so he needs to write 3 am Tweets to answer to them. He is Caesar in the Colosseum showing thumbs up or thumbs down, and doesn’t understand why some other people don’t understand that.
The OOWSNN title I use totally plays into that. He’d be proud of that if it ever came to his attention. Some of my writings might get me in thrown prison, but he’d be good with the OOWSNN part. All powerful and scary…once someone explained it to him, he’s clearly not a big reader.
On that note, it very much looks he has serious dyslexia, or a similar problem, and has a very difficult time reading. He is reported to have underlings read briefings a give him oral summaries, because his time is important don’t you know – he has tweets to send. He was reported to be upset that Ghost President Bannon was raised to the National Security Council. OOSNN signed the executive order that put him there and those orders aren’t long. He isn’t even reading what he’s signing.
He can’t tell people he can’t read, or read well, because that would be a weakness and he can’t admit that without reworking his SIT. Since strength and toughness is who he is, he really can’t…not won’t, can’t. He can work through Tweet’s but they’re short, and he does them at 3am, with horrible spelling and grammar and a wee little vocabulary, out of the view of others who might see him struggling.
It also plugs into his small vocabulary and lack of interest in truth. If he doesn’t remember an event, or has shifted that event in his memory, his memory is truth. Because of the narcissistic world view and historically sycophantic surrounding, he isn’t accustomed to be challenged about his memory. More than that, he has never relied on written notes or records so they only truth that has mattered in his life is the one he’s constructed in his memory. Everything that goes into his memory is filtered through toughness.
If anyone challenges him on a topic, he will state firmly that he acted tough in the context of that topic. If the challenger doesn’t back down and say something while reading off a page “but that isn’t true, you didn’t win the electoral vote by more than Obama, He had 360, you had 320, that’s just wrong” he’ll say “well somebody told me that, I don’t remember who told me that”. He wasn’t wrong, somebody else was wrong (or weak).
He’s repeated that (or similar) on several occasions, on several subjects already, and it’s his first month. Even the strange wording “it’s a landslide in the electoral college vote”. I would love to have someone ask him how the electoral college works. He probably doesn’t have a clue, but he can’t say he won the popular vote without a conspiracy theory-esk story about bussing people from Massachusetts – a conspiracy theory on talk radio and internet streamed video that isn’t accepted by even his inner circle. To keep him from carrying on about that, they fed him the electoral college thing – it was too keep him from pushing an obvious falsehood. He keeps bringing it up anyway of course.
There isn’t anything particularly wrong with sociopathy, I know some fine sociopaths. They struggle with people and their reactions sometimes, but they can accomplish great things. I mostly feel sorry for them, because they can’t get Fulfillment the way I do. They can’t see how they made someone’s life better by putting themselves in the other person’s shoes. They need active outside feedback to feel the impact they make, they can’t recognise it unless it’s expressed. Tends to make them highly motivated and often very successful (in the monetary and/or titled position senses).
There is even less wrong with dyslexia. With technology, it’s effects can be mitigated easily. I know some truly fine people who are dyslexic. People usually aren’t too quick to admit it, as with all mental health stuff, it shows weakness, don’t ya know, so must be hidden. Our individualistic ‘strength’ society is the problem here, not a perfectly human weaknesses.
Psychopathic stuff you have to start being careful with, but in and of itself and with treatment and support doesn’t mean you can’t live a mostly full life. Psychopaths differ from Sociopaths, in that Sociopaths still incorporate the societal norms of a given culture. And they can still feel guilty if it’s shown to them how they hurt someone else – the have conscience.
Psychopaths can’t get there. They tend to develop protective colouring and learn what is acceptable and not, even though they might not totally get it. They will try to fit in, “my social group all says they’re boycotting insect spray, so I can’t let them know I use it”, but they can’t get the why of it, so what if it kills the people on in the sweatshop that makes it. They are capable of horrific acts if they go off the rails, but it’s estimated 7% or so of the population are psychopathic, and they mostly do alright.
Not really interacting with the world outside his own bubble of sycophants and the resulting profoundly narcissistic worldview could even be ok, if they can isolate him from reality and watch out for his best interests. His family may even do that to some degree, as they could have his best interests at heart. This is how the OOWSNN has lived most of his life.
Take that package and place him in a spot of authority and 24hr news coverage and guaranteed criticism with no way to insulate him from it – and with some of that criticism sure to touch on toughness in some respect – and you have a bomb ready to go off. And an easily manipulatable bomb. Ghost President Bannon totally gets this, and happens to be a believer that the Judaic/Christian West is in a war of existential importance with Islamists. It won’t be boring…
What encouragement and threat can OOWSNN’s inner circle use to motivate him to jump in a given direction? Toughness. “This is the tough option”. “These guys said you’re weak”. “You’ll look weak if you do that”. Some cynical operator with strong views about global dominance, like, say, just pulling a name out of a hat, Bannon, can string him along all he likes as long as no one else gets to him with a different, tough view before he signs the executive order.
The short term hope for the world rests on Saturday Night Live and the Cable News broadcasts continually hitting him on toughness until he has a breakdown and is removed from office. Even Fox in switching back to the studio following that gong show of a news conference yesterday had Gretchen what’s her name look at the screen and go “Wow…, Alrighty Then”. That SNL skit with Bannon as the Grim Reaper and OOWSNN as a little boy has to drive him mad. Keep on with that one, and at least Bannon will get the bump.
And I’m serious. He is that easy to play. If Saturday Night Live continues to pound on the theme of Bannon being tough and OOWSNN being manipulated, Bannon will be fired. I’d think about 4 episodes should be enough. The skit mocking Spicer for two consecutive weeks played by a WOMAN of all things, has him at the end of the plank. If the next Press Secretary is a woman (a tough woman, mind), that would be fine, but a guy played by a woman is totally un-tough in OOWSNN’s world. I didn’t watch last night, so who knows what will get him going. I’m just glad I’m not Swedish
His farcical press conference last week, had a big piece on not telling the enemy what he’s up to, with “attacking Mosul” as the example. There was a major offensive announced today to “attack Mosul”. I’ll bet he had a briefing on it that morning, so it was the example he used, because it was the attack that was fresh on his mind.
Yes a person with possession of the nuclear codes will do anything that is presented to him as a tough option. I’ve never hoped for someone to have an obvious, live on tv, mental breakdown before, but this situation leads to a lot of firsts. President Pence would lead to widespread human suffering, but OOWSNN being lead around by Bannon will kill millions. How’s that for tough…It won’t be boring…