I’ve managed to set up like an Oxford don without a field, an institution, or tenure. For narcissism in my own quarter, that’s pretty good and equally awful, but there may be a positive social consequence in having become so loose a cannon: for a while, I’ve had combined academic backgrounds (“English Language and Literature”; “Outdoor Recreation Resources Management” — social psychology related to “discretionary time” and the back-country; “Creative Writing” – AKA “A Life With a Lot of Books”) suited to looking over conflicts with some unique intellectual experiences and tools working in the background as well as an environment that is my own narcissistic bubble, advanced home theater, capacious library, and all.

It gets a little silly (and scary) starving at this, and I / we have encountered in political scribbling the Out-There-With-Tin-Foil-Hats form of scribes on missions, and God forbid whatever I may impart should boot me into that company.  Nonetheless, with “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy” I’ve taken quite a leap, one that latches bipolar and narcissistic personality disorders together, loosely, and hauls that assembly out of psychology, which is concerned with the life of the individual mind, and into politics, which would seem concerned with what some minds manage to do to others.

🙂

The purpose of a “coined term” in language is to help solve a problem, but the intention, in keeping with Heisenberg’s Principle, may also change or manipulate its target environment, so that, say, “People of the Book” or “believers” or “kafir” create characterizing labels to which others, perhaps disorganized previously, may bind their own self-concepts.  Such labels then become social bins and channels as well as discriminators, and if they are attractive or appear to work (those two characteristics are not the same!), the “coins” become a part of the music of the mind that is language.

A cautionary and negative term, “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy” may not only influence how one sees some powerful figures but how the same may see themselves.

If it takes, there’s no going back to a time before its introduction.

From the section “Coins and Terms” (found on this blog’s navigation bar), I’m moving each to its own page, and after this one will not be so verbose in getting to the point.

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Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy

The term 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; it is intended for political and social science application.

Within the phrase, “facsimile” serves to separate the concept from psychology and related interest in individual mind and the experience of it and emphasis instead semblance in a way that serves interest in leaders and their administrative and management methods.

I’ve chosen “bipolar” for the cognitive style signaled by language behavior — in black and white thinking, the too sharp delineation between “winners” and “losers”, “believers” and “evildoers”, and so on — and the atmosphere encouraged by it.  In psychology proper, of course, “bipolar disorder” finds anchorage in observations having to do with individual mood and sleep patterns and difficulties associated with them.  In politics, energetic and erratic “mania” may or may not be present at any given point, but grandiose delusions and intents most certainly are as are most other facets of the disorder: however, the complex weaves into political and social life as “sympathetic feeling” across the political actor’s field of influence.

Would the term do just as well as “Facsimile Narcissistic Political Sociopathy”?

Probably.

For sure, the graduate classes are welcome to kick it around some.

“Political” needs no explication.  It’s simply the application area for the term.

“Sociopathy” would seem a coin within a coin, but I prefer the invention to alternatives, for what we’re addressing amounts to sociopath behavior as encountered in contemporary politics by way of comparatively ruthless personalities.  Cats like Paul Biya and Robert Mugabe — the “low hanging fruit” of fair examples of common dictators — show little evidence of caring about the common suffering of the constituent humanity within their bailiwicks.  These are about their own excessive glorification, and each has found ways, between the command of armies and unbridled access to state treasuries and various income streams, of sustaining themselves in power.

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