 Psychoanalyzing Obama June 2, 2010 ● Ron Arnold CDFE Executive Vice President  The way to cope with the big BP oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico is to stop all offshore oil drilling – no matter that it provides an irreplaceable part of America’s energy lifeblood.Why would anyone be so stupid as to amputate healthy limbs, the offshore rigs that have a good safety record, to cure the sickness of one disastrous well run by a foreign corporation?
That’s not a rhetorical question for those who know a little psychological history.
The late psychologist Abraham Maslow said that people who are too well-off forget what keeps them that way — and people closer to the nitty-gritty don't.
It’s a fair bet that nobody in Obama’s ruling class got dirty hands from anything other than counting hundred-dollar bills and Daddy’s trust fund.
But what did Abe Maslow have to say about such people?
Maslow attempted to understand how otherwise mentally healthy people could act to harm their own security and material support structure, like people who belittle the extraction industries that keep their bellies full and their bodies healthy.
Maslow had studied human motivation his entire career and found evidence that the things that motivate people can also get in their way.
Needs, perceived needs, make all the difference.
Everybody has needs, and Maslow found that these needs arise in a more or less predictable order in successful people, resulting in what he called a “Hierarchy of Needs.” As you'd expect, this "hierarchy" progresses from basic to high-level.
Here's a chart of how it works, according to Maslow. Ranked from primary material needs at the lowest rung, each need motivates powerfully until it is gratified, then a new higher level non-material need arises, which in turn fades when gratified, and so on up the hierarchy, which Maslow arranged thus at the end of his career:
 This might remain a mere theoretical curiosity except for Maslow’s discovery that
Then
Maslow identified this process as pathological and the most important feature of modern culture.
He gave it a clinical name:
Post-gratification forgetting and devaluation.
It is the most important feature of modern culture.
“Post-gratification forgetting and devaluation” helps us understand people who have the learned inability to see or appreciate the material needs and who mock, devalue and act to destroy them. When whole segments of a culture are so well-off they can move all the way up the Needs Hierarchy, you get movements totally involved with the two highest-level needs, knowledge and beauty, and totally forgetful and destructive of the material needs.
Post-Industrial America has forgotten its foundations.
Industrial America lives close to its foundations.
Obama is destroying Industrial America. Piece by piece.
People who are stuck in post-gratification forgetting and devaluation don't seem willing or able to learn from experience. Maslow said it was an irrational pathology curable only by destroying all production of material goods.
It’s beauty or nothing. With the Obama crowd, it looks like it’ll be nothing. Destroying the world to save the Earth – they think.
Stop all drilling offshore. Stop all drilling onshore. Get rid of fossil fuels and nuclear and hydroelectric dams. Replace it all with windmill and solar panels, which will never happen. They will ruin us all.
They’ll really destroy America’s industrial might and save nothing.
But don’t bother trying to get them to understand that. They’re convinced they’re pursuing the highest and the best and you’re pursuing the dirtiest and the worst.
Maslow found that nothing will change them except the total collapse of the material producers, and even then they won’t realize it was their own hatred for the lower needs that killed the producers – Post-Industrial America will blame industrial producers as they die in wreckage of their own making.
All I can hope is that Maslow was wrong.
But I don’t think so.
Ron Arnold
Executive Vice President Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise |
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