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Child-abuser eyes (12 December 2008)

quarry bay:

If Harper destroys everything of value, then he is doing exactly what the populace who voted for him, wants. Accumulated wealth makes people who received insufficient love from, who were treated sadistically by, their parents (with the nature of their relationship to the mother being of primary importance), feel extremely anxious: the reason for this is that unloved parents (mothers) need their children to give them the love they themselves did not receive from their own parents (mothers), and communicate in unforgettable ways to their children (through threats of violence, abandonment) that they are being very very bad children when they turn from their parents and start focusing on their own particular needs and wants (which begins to happen in a big way with adolescence, which is why there is often so much strain in child/parent relationships during this period). Accumulated societal wealth, for a society with a large number of insufficiently unloved constituents, makes people fear the visitation of some kind of horrific, catastrophic visitation, and this fear is in part abated when a leader arrives who helps find ways to get rid of all that anxiety-producing wealth. Spending on the military is usually the way immature societies do this; other ways include piling up bunches of blankets, and burning them (though this isn't done as much, these days).

Other ways of dealing with growth panic is to cling to a strong, patriarchal leader (it is the arousal of maternal anger, we fear, since differentiation is always from the mother, not the father) and support him as he sacrifices representatives of our growing, needing, "bad" selves, through wars -- economic or military.

If the coalition wins the day; if it proves relatively popular; it Canadians decide they really would prefer to not have an autocratic government and can handle a more anonymous and complex one; then what we know is that childhoods have been improving, and we have really been maturing, emotionally, as a nation.

But in my judgment, such a nation would never have voted in Harper -- with his child abuser eyes -- in the first place.

patrickmh

Link: The Tyee

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