A double-minded nation

“… a nation’s health and efficiency depends on a close relation
between social practice and religious belief. Any contradiction between
them can only help to breed mental stress and impair judgment.” Dr.
William Sargant, Battle for the Mind (Harper & Row, 1957)

“A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” The Bible, from
the Epistle of James

And a double-minded nation, as well, James might have added in
his epistle. The modern term for this age-old condition is dissociation,
or in the vernacular, neurotic denial. Perhaps we
should give neurotic denial a fancy name and make it our national mental
illness — it’s certainly prevalent enough.

On a personal level, dissociation is a mental coping mechanism, where
it “effects temporary but drastic modification of one’s personality or
sense of personal identity. These modification can include fugues,
hysterical conversion reactions, short-term denial of responsibility for
one’s acts or feelings, trance states, chance-taking, and pharmacologic
intoxication to numb unhappiness” (Merck Manual, 16th ed.).

The term “fugue” is particularly interesting:

Typically, in a fugue state the individual suddenly loses all
recollection of his past life and any awareness of who he is. He
disappears from his usual haunts, leaving family and job, and traveling
far from home, begins new work with a new identity, quite unaware of any
change in his existence or life. Suddenly after a matter of days to
weeks, he “comes to.” Totally amnesic for the period of the fugue, he
recaptures his former identity and, greatly distressed, wonders how he
came to be in such strange surroundings. (Merck)

There can be little question of our national fondness for drug
and alcohol addiction, as a self-administered prescription to numb the
meaningless pain of our shallow, shop-till-you-drop
disconnected lives. Risk-taking is exemplified by taxicab drivers who
have become stock market gurus and are advising an army of high-tech
“day traders” on how to shift their mortgage equity
among Internet vaporware firms. And who can deny that our own inbred
Washington, D.C., royalty have raised to a new level the art form of
avoiding responsibility for one’s acts or feelings?

When applied on a national, rather than individual level, I wonder if
perhaps the fugue state doesn’t describe America at the end of the 20th
century? Our educational system has wiped away the nation’s collective
memory of who it is and where it came from. Old alliances with trusted
friends are being abandoned for new relationships with enemies who
despise our freedom, as indicated by the communists who crushed China’s
democracy movement in Tiananmen Square. They are now salivating over
Taiwan, while armed with American military technology that can do the
dirty work of “reunification.” Treason and the profits generated thereby
have become an accepted form of market expansion for “defense” firms
that owe their existence to the U.S. military, and campaign funding for
the Democratic Party to elect the president of the United States. To
many of us, these acts and attitudes are simply incomprehensible.

Will America suddenly “come to” from its newly assumed identity,
forgetful of how we as a nation arrived in this strange place, but
greatly distressed by our condition? If so, what event might bring about
such a great awakening? The timing and implications for today’s
political royalty make for interesting speculation.