I don't like what the Clintons stand for. I couldn't bring myself to vote for Bill in his second term, but I did feel that he was unfairly treated by the Republicans and the press in the runup to his impeachment, which was bad political farce from beginning to end. That's when it first became lucidly clear that the GOP was run by people who had lost touch with reality. They were living in something other than the real world, but their mutual reinforcement of it made it seem real to everyone within their world even though it seemed over the top to every one who stood outside of it. They were in the grip of what I think of as a collective complex I call Moby Dick Syndrome. Bill Clinton was their Moby Dick, and what made Republicans truly crazy in the nineties was their obsession to destroy him.
I find this idea of a complex or syndrome helpful to understand the way we organize, think about, and operate within a world that is fundamentally out of touch with reality, but nevertheless seems to be intensely real. We all experience complexes on a personal level, but sooner or later we recover and return to our senses. Think about infatuations you have experienced or times you were in the grip of a reality-distorting anxiety. The sanest of us experience such episodes, but if we are truly sane we come to our senses sooner rather than later, and when we do, it's like waking up from a dream. You wonder what all the fuss was about and feel foolish, especially if your public behavior was influenced by the syndrome.
When we wake from an intense nocturnal dream we recognize that what had a few minutes before seemed so real was not. But complexes are like waking dreams; they take hold of us and organize our conscious perceptions of the world around us. They are bad enough when we experience them individually, but they are truly pernicious when they take hold of a group because they create self-reinforcing bubbles.
The feeding frenzy we saw during the Clinton impeachment was a dramatic example. Normal people watching from outside the complex were disgusted by Clinton's adolescent idiocy, but they were more disgusted by the Republican response to it. Clinton was an idiot, but the Republicans seemed truly obsessed and borderline insane. They in the grip of Moby Dick Syndrome.
Moby Dick Syndrome is particularly strong in America. We see people in the grip of it when they become obsessed with eliminating or crushing Evil. It involves projecting Evil onto some thing or some group, and the projection makes it impossible to see the way a sober person would. The Pequod crew at first had no reason to look at Moby Dick the way Ahab did, but they got caught up in it, especially after the gold coin was nailed to the mast, and they were dragged along to their destruction, which is what happens to anyone who is seduced by demagoguery.
It's not that whatever plays the role of Moby Dick is a complete figment of the imagination. Every Moby Dick does pose something of a threat; this whale bites back. Moby Dick Syndrome kicks in when one becomes obsessed with eliminating the threat by obliterating or completely destroying it. Bill Clinton was the American Right's Moby Dick in the 90s. The Right was not interested in just censuring Clinton; they wanted to destroy him. The American Indian was Moby Dick for 19th Century Americans, Soviet Communism was a Moby Dick during the Cold War, Fidel Castro is the Moby Dick for older Cubans in Florida, and now Muslims are the Moby Dick for right-leaning Americans after 9/11.
That's why it didn't matter that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/ll. Moby Dick Syndrome is non-discriminating. If it looks like a white whale, it must be one. There was a natural instinct to flail out in revenge that should have been checked by sane leadership; instead American leaders fed the bloodlust and framed it in MDS terms. This in turn has led to all the brutality Americans are responsible for in Iraq. When you frame the enemy as an absolute evil to be destroyed, there are no moral bounds on the means one takes to destroy it. People possessed by MDS want to destroy the beast when it's still possible to contain or tame it. Knowing when taming is possible and when violence as a last resort is necessary is the difference between sanity and insanity.
And this points to the other element that is very typical of Moby Dick Syndrome: blowback. Ahab's obsession was self-destructive and destructive of the lives of those around him. He didn't care about anything except the destruction of his nemesis. And so it is with Moby Dicks in general. They are either indifference or at most harbor a medium-grade malevolence until they are attacked, but once attacked they are incited to high-octane rage, and they bite back with an even greater ferocity. If they were not a serious threat before, they become one now. How else should they be expected to react? The difference between the American Indian in the 19th century and the Muslim now lies in that there are a lot more of the latter; they are well armed, well funded, and they cannot and will not be destroyed by force of arms. They will not be put on an American-controlled reservation.
People in the grip of Moby Dick Syndrome are incapable of believing they are themselves responsible for the blowback that now threatens them. I'm not going to defend Jeremiah Wright, but I think he's not far off in his basic blowback logic. His "goddam America vs. godbless America" was a trope meant simply to point out the obvious: what goes around comes around. Iraq, it could be argued, is blowback for the way we treated the American Indian. It doesn't seem such a stretch to say so. We took from that experience the wrong lesson that if we could put them on a reservation, we can do it to everyone who resists American interests.
We should have learned it doesn't work from the Vietnam experience, but when MDS has those in power in its grip, their obsession trumps any lessons the whale having bit back might have taught them in the past. Our current Muslim terrorist Moby Dick is not the American Indian nor is it the Vietnamese nationalist–and this one might get hold of nuclear tipped arrows, and it will sink our ship if we don't start dealing with this enemy more sanely and less obsessively. Dick Cheney should be put under house arrest until the end of the term. He's got MDS in a bad way, and you know he stilll want to go after Iran before he leaves.
While Democrats have other problems, there is something about the psychology of Republicans that makes them more vulnerable to Moby Dick Syndrome. We were lucky the Democrats were in the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Ahabs like Curtis Lemay would have had a far more receptive audience in a Republican president than they did with Kennedy, who was able to resist their MDS. That was Kennedy's shining moment–his refusal to give in to the Ahab hard liners. We were not so lucky when the Republicans took over the Vietnam war in '68; nor were we lucky that 9/11 occurred on the Republican watch. It increased by tenfold the chances that we would deal with serious and complex issues insanely, and we did.
Reagan often acted and spoke like Ahab, but I will give credit to him for not giving in to his inner Ahab or listening to the Ahabs around him who were incapable of seeing Gorbachev as anything other than a Moby Dick. Gorbachev was able to snap Reagan out of the Moby Dick Syndrome bubble that he lived within most of his career, and his time with Gorbachev was his finest moment. But let's be clear: Reagan did not win the Cold War. He was sane enough to see that Gorbachev was serious about ending it, and so followed his initiative.
I think this idea of the complex is really at the heart of all forms of toxic groupthink. I want to explore more the different kinds of syndromes that shape the more toxic forms of groupthink that possess both people on the right and left in American society. We are all, me included, vulnerable to them. It's easier to see how they operate in others than it is to see how they operate in ourselves. But we cannot free ourselves from their influence if we are not aware of how they work and what our vulnerabilities are.
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