Politics as Mental Illness
Posted February 2, 2009, 08:02 ET
An (as always) thoughtful piece by Peter Berkowitz in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal (1/31/09) sees Bush hatred and Obama euporia as two sides of the same coin. In both cases they signify lives too heavily invested in politics. To say that such people make a religion of politics is unfair to religion, which teaches that it is idolatry to invest too heavily in things of this world. Yeats understood this too, “for arrogance and hatred are the wares / peddled in the thorougfares.”
Quite so, but the problem is deeper than that. Those so heavily invested in politics are shallow and banal, and an entire range of human experience, the joys and laughter of the transcendent, is foreclosed to them. They are like the people who build their lives around their matchbook collection. They avoid the horrible burden of time, which weighs on them when they do not live their lives vicariously, through their political hatreds and euphoria. They shut off their lives from joy, except of the most debased kinds, and for that reason the pathology should be listed in the DSM.
_2005-11-10.JPG){kind=link}
