Friday Extra: We Call It “Solipsism”

It’s a tough game when you apply individual psychological assessments to whole nations. But if I offered you a government document and asked you to read the tone via standard psychological assessments, you’d get the idea. It’s not as if we suggest the whole government — everyone involved in this particular function — suffers the exact same mass malady. Rather, the bizarre tone of some documents so typical of some government policy statements demand that we stop and think about what it says at least about the folks who composed them.

You can look up the term “solipsism” on the Net and get pretty much the same standard definition all over the place: extreme egotism. That is, measuring all reality against one’s internal wishes at that moment. It’s a sort of, “This is what I want in this situation. How could anyone possibly want something different? That’s evil!” They project their wishes as some objective standard that is manifestly obvious to any sensible person. You get that when a single individual, the only one who seems to be the least concerned about something, keeps using “we” to discuss their personal discomfort with something you do or say.

You can easily see solipsism in the policy papers of some governments by how the problems are stated as threats to national security:

The document announces a shift in focus from terrorists to “state actors” that “are challenging international norms.” It is important to understand what these words mean. Governments that challenge international norms are sovereign countries that pursue policies independently of Washington’s policies. These “revisionist states” are threats, not because they plan to attack the US, which the Pentagon admits neither Russia nor China intend, but because they are independent.

Be sure to grasp the point: The threat is the existence of sovereign states, whose independence of action makes them “revisionist states.” In other words, their independence is out of step with the neoconservative Uni-Power doctrine that declares independent action to be the right of Washington alone. Washington’s History-given hegemony precludes any other country being independent in its actions. By definition, a country with a foreign policy independent of Washington is a threat.

This is from an article that discusses the latest US national military strategy statement. How could anyone dare to imagine that there might be another set of standards? Why, no government in their right minds could justly desire something different than what the US wants!

Do you get the meaning of that weird picture of some soldier praying to the US flag? We see in history where various leaders demanded they be treated as divine, or even as deities themselves. In an age when most humans believed in multiple deities, it wasn’t too hard for most of them to accommodate — with the notable except of Christians persecuted for rejecting Caesar’s demand. It’s a big leap to decide that a state is god without any particular human focal point and no allowance for any other deity, at least none that matter.