Given Judaism’s natural promotion for ethical and moral arguing and the “speaking of truth to power”, why would an Israeli president court the favor of the world’s most emergent autocratic leaders?
Here’s one approach to an answer.
I would not blame Netanyahu for Putin’s development of centrality in the adjacent conflict zones. Neither Israel, the more general “west” nor the Palestinians (and now the Syrians) will ever escape the effects of Soviet meddling in the middle east on the heels of the cessation of WWII. While it may be to Putin’s credit (and Lavrov’s) that the Kremlin has shifted some policies concerning the Jews, it is certainly to the west’s discredit that so little interference (to none) has forestalled the depths of the agony experienced in Syria by Syrians of all backgrounds.
The above noted, I liked the article. For my purposes, it underscores the powerful drift backward in the world toward feudal absolute power. Modern liberal Israel may not itself have the power to express pique or impose sanctions with effect: it is the smallest of states as regards that kind of financial or military power. The best it may do — and appears to be doing — is to walk the MaligNarcs (“malignant narcissists”) through a little bit of history from the Jewish perspective and to encourage the autocratic to reconsider what each budding or established dictator appears to be missing in conscience.
Setting aside the Israeli story a moment, points of leverage may have involved the “Turkish Stream” energy project, a piece of “realpolitik”, and an appeal to the narcissistic concept of cultural leadership and state in which the “Great Leader” is the embodiment of the living state concept _and entitled_ to aggrandizement and glory without limit (or, clinically, “unlimited narcissistic supply). Putin’s vision appears to me to be that of the medieval world sustained with raw power put in place of democracy.
The look of the mode — big palaces, nepotism on a royal scale, confusion in relation to the boundaries of person and state (and the state’s treasury) — marks the medieval mind and related revanche.
Men like Putin, Assad, Khamenei, Erdogan, Orban may consider true popular democratic government as impeding their own authority, sovereignty, and will. While the term “autocrat” sounds quite bureaucratic, similar concepts — caliph, emperor, king, sultan — fit these guys.
Because we know of the “Moscow Apartment Bombings” and that Russia has been arming the Taliban in Afghanistan — and there’s more back there with Zawahiri and others — it may not be too far fetched to suggest that Moscow has manipulated terrorism to induce in struck targets a predictable patriotic new nationalism and that “the terrorists” — ISIS or PKK — now provide a platform for conflict, all against all, and without end. Where Putin has held sway, he has turned back history’s clock.
Our President Trump has had no issues bearing and wearing the mantle of authority, but it would be facile to say he hasn’t had some issues with the “Estates” of a matured democracy. In that regard, he may fit the world to which Putin has wished to return the world.
Institutional competition and the want of supremacy inducing wealth by subscription has brought to the world an immense grief. A system devised and parlayed as perfect for one both expresses and guarantees “all against all” where what we all need and must have is “all for all”.
Hillel around 0-CE may have inspired early Christianity — just my thought but his outlook fits that new religion — but while striving to explore the law — Torah — to produce a more embracing and inclusive Judaism, he could not have foreseen the development of General Constantine (272-306-CE) or General Muhammad (570-632-CE). The resulting supersessionary warfare, broad at times as with the Crusades, narrow as on the Iberian Peninsula, sometimes on the surface (perhaps Turkey and the Armenian population suit that description), sometimes burning underground and erupting like volcano (about where we are today) has been ugly in every century. This is where to stop it.
One cannot blame scripture — Jewish, Christian, or Muslim (or other) — for this state of affairs but rather perhaps the ascent to power of men whose ambitions combine venality with grandiose aspirations.
The Colossus of Constantine lays on the ground in Rome, a ruin, and the Brotherhood affiliates (is their another umbrella?) purport to be building new civilizations wherever they have their adventure, hold themselves together, and get away with their crimes. The secular dictators are no better — in fact, I suggest they are mirror images in personality and that whether language promotes a secular ideology or a religion, in the hands of such men, the results are the same. WE need to get them off the stage.
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I will distill all of that down to 140 characters.
It’s all about axis in power – dictators, dictatorships, and despotism vs listeners, open conversations, mutual constituent-leadership risk.
Those who remember, know the band well and true name of the music: Yes and “I’ve Seen All Good People”.
Theirs was a part of the ethos of the English-borne 1970s.
And here, 2012, far from those halcyon days, their art for the ears continues to resonate.
“Don’t surround yourself with yourself” — I should take the advice and perhaps others should take it for themselves as well.
My interest in the narcissistic dimension of political psychology started off with the direct and real space experience of personalities exhibiting mild to severe bipolar disorder and narcissistic personality disorder while in cyberspace I happened to be surfing conflicts and discovering for myself any number of autocratic regimes and the mess and misery they were able to bring to their hapless constituents.
(For this blog, the “Conflict – Culture – Language – Psychology” category should suffice, as I hope the whole production will not be so all over the place as the other, which I had created to showcase some other things I could do).
(In science, it is generally taken as a good thing to arrive at similar observations and insights by way of separate tracks — remember: theories stand until disproved, always, but they may be strengthened too by the arrival of new data — and that appears to be what has happened).
To move on: politics draw a variety of social competitors — advisers, leaders, warriors — and among the same, some may carry within themselves the over-the-top, unconstrained, boundary-confused, and often sadistic egotism of the malignant narcissist, and these too full of themselves no one needs.
As I type this, the intelligence of the world moves quickly in tens upon tens of thousands of communications per hour, and so it is I happen to participate in the Facebook presence of the Rationalist Society of Pakistan (the organizational site has been listed to the left). One of my Facebook buddies, Lakhkar Khan Hoti, posted there a statement by President Obama extolling the contributions made by Islam to humanity, which I interpret as part of the President’s promise to “extend the hand of peace” to Islam, and requested comment.
As professionals in a social-networking community may do, the original poster was asked to cite his source.
“To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.
To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict or blame their society’s ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy.”
There are some things humans — individually, in aggregate, without regard to legacy — may wish to entertain as twined language, technology, and trade capacities continue to contract and integrate lives and lifestyles across our ever gregarious species. Start with the meaning and significance of self-concept in relation to others and whether certain degrees of glorious narcissistic self-aggrandizement have a place in anyone’s better future, not least of all Pakistan’s.
My interest in political psychology and the dimension referred to as “narcissism” was inspired by encountering in my web-borne travels so many tawdry dictatorships — the junta in Burma; Robert Mugabe (thank him for reintroducing cholera to his people) in Zimbabwe; Paul Biya whose French connections and chateau keep him comfy while his people starve in Cameroon; etc. Copy and paste “African Dictator” into your browser, and you should come up with a blog titled and devoted to just that subject, quite colorful. And awful.
One might suggest there’s some difference too between overt religiosity and deep and rightly cherished spirituality.
There may be a good track in humanity enforced by our natural and overwhelming propensity to enjoy one another despite whatever hardships we may be enduring.
Where conditions have become untenable, whether by the hand of Pharaoh or through the failure of ambition as represented by the will to war — other ideas and policies proving bankrupt beneath the hands of lost autocrats and warmongers both — most people resign themselves to suffering or leave for what they hope will prove a healthier situation.
A bully anywhere — schoolyard, saloon, state, tribe, region — drives humanity away, and one may suggest that even God’s love goes with those who leave.
Time and again, and without understanding the sources of their own ruin, time reduces the malignant and all they have done to rags and relics, not to mention the diminishing of their reputation down into the class of assorted “bad examples” in lessons to new generations.
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