Fatal Distraction: Empire In Decline

"Since narcissists deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil, on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others." --  M Scott Peck

Call it narcissism or navel-gazing or self-absorption, but the pervasive attitude throughout the nation that today far outstrips the rest of the world in a growing multitude of conflicts with no abatement in sight is the kind of self-centered righteousness fully characteristic of the terminal stages of decline. It alone assumes the mantle of deciding right from wrong and either solo or with co-opted allies plays the role of global enforcer. But as the article shows quite clearly, such misplaced self-righteousness amounts to little more than delusional behavior - geared to distracting the masses during the final, fatal plunge into oblivion. Meanwhile, as the increasingly isolated state wraps itself in the rhetoric of a long-past golden era, the rest of the world leaves them in their wake, largely unseen and unnoticed.

A Fatal Self-Absorption

by Fred Reed

Recently by Fred Reed: Helping the DEA

If I were to speechify to a conclave of Tea Partyers, “America is the free-est...the most democratic...the best educated and most dynamic country the world has ever known, an example to all mankind,” the assembled would hoot and hooroar and applaud in dizzy exaltation. Here is the soul of the American approach to existence, bottomless self-admiration devoid of knowledge or curiosity, wrapped like a psychic burrito in the patriotism of overwrought middle-schoolers. And there are many, many of them.

We face rule by pajama party. Saints preserve us, someone with the foregoing understanding may become the president of the (for a few moments more) most powerful, erratic, and ignorant country on the planet. Among presidential possibilities we now have Rick Perry, Michele Bachman, Sarah Palin and, in the Great Double-Wide on Pennsylvania Avenue, Precedent Obama – political epiphytes all, fantasists, tent-revival Christians, provincial governors, inward-looking certitudinous naifs. The difference between Americans and Mohammed Ali is that when he said, “I am the greatest!” he was.

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