Check out this very interesting article on the madness enveloping America and the Western world today; it’s called “The Cluster B Society.”
An excerpt:
There is a creeping sense that our society has turned upside-down. Healthy debate is replaced by activist hysterics. Speech is declared violence; violence is excused as speech. Masculinity is condemned as “toxic,” while men in dresses are celebrated in the public square. It feels as if we are in the midst of a society-wide mental breakdown.
One might be tempted to laugh at these manifestations as the outbursts of small but vocal minority, but the compromised health of our body politic is no trivial concern. A strange new pattern of psychological dysfunction has infiltrated all our institutions, from humdrum bureaucracies to the highest offices. Wherever we turn, that creeping feeling sets in: our society is sick; our institutions are out of balance; our public life has been consumed by a cluster of disorders that appeal to our worst instincts and derange our most vital social functions.
What happened? Why have old standards suddenly vanished in favor of narcissism, psychodrama, and moral theatrics—all in the name of “care”?
You can read the article for yourself and see the author’s answer.
“Cluster B” refers to a category of psychiatric disorders known as personality disorder. Personality disorders refer to entrenched, extremely neurotic if not psychotic disturbances of emotion, cognition and partial (even total) breaks with reality. The author’s point is that these syndromes are no longer a minority; they have overtaken the entire culture and much of the population.
My own take:
I believe these pathologies — narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy, borderline personality (as described in the article) — have been percolating and festering for a long time; probably since at least the 1970s.
What brought them to the surface was a combination of left-wing orthodoxy from universities and secondary schools; plus the self-consciousness fostered by social media. Social media was the trigger.
That’s when everything went haywire, not because social media was the cause; it was the consequence.
People who lack a strong sense of individuality will use social media for obsessive validation from others. On top of it, the field of psychology preached for decades that people need self-esteem; but the field led people to believe self-esteem is all based on feelings, when in fact it has to include integrity, virtue, productivity and self-responsibility.
Earlier generations of Americans possessed some of this, but since the 1970s or so the focus switched to feelings. That was a disaster. It made people much more fragile and hypersensitive than they would have been.
The fragility includes a sense of gullibility and compliance that the left seeks to exploit with its socialism and green fascism. A perfect storm that the left has made work brilliantly for them.
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