The term I’ve coined and kicked around to characterize this area of interest in faith and politics as “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy“, and it derives from Bipolar Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder by way of common features having to do with grandiose delusion, messianic motivation, and resistance to criticism and clinical insight.  

For such a term to find favor, it has to work across many divisions.  Unfortunately, I think it does and flows into two parts: leaders and followers.  In politics, I think leaders — the “malignant narcissists” — have gotten more academic and analytic attention than those enthralled by them.  

In relation to “realpolitik”, blasphemy and similar laws are like the walls of a box — they’re there to keep a herd penned in, i.e., with humans, forbidden from speaking as may be genuinely felt — and dogma provides the leash of an attractive, convenient thought, a catechism, a few words by which to live and, repeated sufficiently, to block out other signal, including discomforting signal.

Inspired by The Awesome Conversation but posted only here, January 2, 2013.

I’ve played with the FBPS concept in my old blog but may take it up here, as it may contribute to grasping a part of the social psychology of conflict heavily dependent on unconstrained and perhaps unbounded self-aggrandizement.