The majority of global respondents to the remaining two international Pew enter surveys (in 2002 and 2006) appeared the US because the greatest risk to global peace – some distance greater than the likes of Iraq or China. Thinkers and scholars as numerous as Christopher Lasch in "The Cultural Narcissist" and Theodore Millon in "Personality Disorders of Everyday Life" have singled out the United States because the crucial narcissistic society.
This pathology can be traced returned and attributed to a confluence of historic activities and strategies, the equivalents of trauma and abuse in an character’s early adolescence.
The United States of America started out out as a sequence of loosely linked, remote, savage, and negligible colonial outposts. The denizens of those settlements were former sufferers of non secular persecution, indentured servants, lapsed the Aristocracy, and different refugees. Their Declaration of Independence reads like a maudlin listing of grievances coupled with desperate protestations of love and loyalty to their abuser, the King of Britain.
The population of the colonies defended in opposition to their perceived helplessness and very real inferiority with compensatory, imagined, and feigned superiority and fantasies of omnipotence. Hence the tough, immutable kernel of American narcissism.
The United States was (until the Civil Rights Movement of the Nineteen Sixties) and nevertheless is, in some vital respects, a pre-Enlightenment, white supremacist society. It is rife with superstition, prejudice, conspicuous religiosity, intolerance, philistinism, and absence of social unity. Its religiosity is overt, competitive, virulent and ubiquitous. It is replete with an eschatology, which involves a changing cast of demonized "enemies", each political and cultural.
Americans’ religion is a manifestation in their "Chosen People Syndrome". They are missionary, messianic, zealous, fanatical, and nauseatingly self-righteous, bigoted, and hypocritical. This is in particular discernible inside the double-communicate and double-standard that underlies American overseas coverage.
American altruism is misanthropic and compulsive. They frequently give simply so that you can control, control, and sadistically humiliate the recipients.
Narcissism is regularly comorbid with paranoia. Americans cultivate and nurture a siege mentality which leads to violent acting out and unbridled jingoism. Their persecutory delusions sit down well with their adherence to social Darwinism (herbal selection of the fittest, permit the weaker fall by way of the wayside, would possibly is proper, and so on.).
Consequently, the United states usually finds itself in organisation with the least palatable regimes in the global: collectively with Nazi Germany it had a working eugenics application, collectively with the likes of Saudi Arabia it executes its prisoners, it changed into the ultimate evolved state to abolish slavery, alone with South Africa it had instituted reputable apartheid in a substantial swathe of its territory.
Add to this risky mix an ethos of malignant individualism, racism each latent and overt, a trampling, "no holds barred" ambitiousness, competitiveness, frontier violence-primarily based morality, and proud simple-mindedness – and an ominous portrait of america as a deeply disturbed polity emerges.