Roger L. Simon has written a piece that offers powerful explanatory power on what is going on in this country. He titles his piece 'I'm Just a Soul Whose Intentions are Good': Obama, Bergdahl and Moral Narcissism He writes:
In 1979, Christopher Lasch published The Culture of Narcissism warning of the normalizing of pathological narcissismin our society. Considering events since then, he was evidently on to something. Now, some 35 years later in the Obama era, with the Bergdahl incident only the latest in a parade of endless scandals, we have arrived at a full blown era of what has lately been called Moral Narcissism.
Moral Narcissism is an evocative term for the almost schizophrenic divide between intentions and results now common in our culture. It doesn’t matter how anything turns out as long as your intentions are good. And, just as importantly, the only determinant of those intentions, the only one who defines them, is you.
In other words, if you propose or do something, it only matters that you feel good or righteous about what you did or are proposing, that it makes you feel better personally. The results are irrelevant, as are how the actual activity affects others. . . [more. . .]
Me: It might be pointed out that nations as a whole often exhibit moral narcissism. As Hans Kundnani points out, nations as a whole unconsciously project subjective historical prisms (and moral narcissism) on to world hot spots. He writes:
The Middle East tends to be what the Germans call a Projektionsfläche, or projection screen, onto which we project our own collective memories. Thus, I would argue, Germans tend to look at the Israeli-Palestinian issue through the prism of the Nazi past (e.g. comparisons between Israelis and Nazis); Britons, on the other hand, tend to look at it through the prism of our own colonial history (e.g. comparisons between Israel and apartheid in South Africa, which it seems to me are particularly prevalent in Britain). Unsurprisingly, Germans’ attitudes to the Middle East can be particularly narcissistic. For example, according to an attitude survey published last week, 57 per cent of Germans think “Israel is conducting a war of extermination [Vernichtungskrieg] against the Palestinians” – surely a classic example of what Dan Diner has called “exonerating projection”.