This is two thoughts posted in one.
First, it occurs to me that with respect to 9/11, the only reliable responses would have been an engagement with Afghanistan, economic trauma, and probably large increases in Federal spending.
As I look at Putin in my mind, I see the one survivor from Company 9. I see the lasting scars the war in Afghanistan left on the Russian psyche. I think Putin thought we would meet a similar fate. I really do. Everyone was telling us on the front end how dangerous it was, and in point of fact the obvious leader of a Taliban-free Afghanistan was assassinated just two days prior to 9/11. It has been blamed on Bin Laden, but I don’t think Bin Laden thought we would go into Afghanistan. Putin would have known better.
And I see potential allies in the United States among our financial elites. Again, the Rockefellers’ name pops up immediately, but it is hard to know how many people out there want to end their own sense of meaninglessness by pursuing a totalitarian agenda.
Moral psychosis is a term I just came up with, to be used as a synomym for moral death, but I think I like it better. The psychiatric condition of psychosis is one of being utterly decontextualized, utterly removed from ordinary reactions to human situations and emotions, and denuded of the capacity, not just to tell right from wrong, but to perceive reality accurately in any fashion.
If you lie to yourself over and over and over for decades, if you involve yourself in deceiving others, there must come a time when for all intents and purposes you are an automaton, devoid of normal human reactions, and utterly without purpose, but filled with energy. This is the condition of the hard core Leftist, who is Satanic in all but name.
This is a fever of insanity. It really is. Sybaritic leftists are not insane: they are just soft. Cultural Sadeists are lunatics.
I read today that 40% of Europeans exhibit signs of mental illness, illnesses their socialized medical systems are not equipped to handle. How is that Socialism, that freedom from responsibility and failure working for them? Not well, I suspect. We would need comparative numbers for Americans, but I have been told by more than one European visiting that it is amazing how normal most people seem. And we are normal, by and large. We don’t have the neurotic ticks and manias that seem common to the Europeans. By and large, most of us are content with our lots, and with life. Yes, rates of depression are going up, but not at European rates, or at least that is my best guess.