"Perhaps nothing so accurately characterizes dysfunctional families as denial. The denial forces members to keep believing the myths and vital lies in spite of the facts, or to keep expecting that the same behaviors will have different outcomes." 

—John Bradshaw

As everyone knows, there are thousands of books, memoirs, and fiction, about dysfunctional families.  To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy families are generally the same, but unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way.

But to peruse the plethora of such books, it might be truer that unhappy families are unhappy in much the same ways, their differences a matter of degrees.  Young children know only what they know, how their own family functions.  Memoirs like Educated and The Glass Castle, for example, are shocking to those fortunate enough to have had loving, peaceful, and essentially normal childhoods if there is such a thing.

While dysfunctional homes can produce and have produced successful children who, as gradually exposed to the homes of other families and the outside world, saved themselves by sheer will and talent.  But most children of dysfunctional families are forever damaged, condemned to a life of misery and distorted reality.  They remain resistant to the facts of life that govern the world around them.  They are perpetually angry and unhappy.

Remember “politics stops at the water’s edge”?

In the Trump era, that patriotic phrase isn’t only dead, it’s decomposed.

And ironically so, since the latest manifestation of this decomposition is over the termination of Qassem Soleimani, the terror mastermind who was, on analysis, even more dangerous to the United States and the world than Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, monumentally evil as they were.

Neither bin Laden nor al-Baghdadi ever had remotely the power at their disposals—even when the latter controlled his caliphate—that Soleimani did as the military leader of by far the greatest state sponsor of terrorism. They weren’t even close to the man who was head of Iran’s Quds force and the second most powerful person in that country of 80-plus million, with all its attendant weaponry and technology and ties to China and Russia.

[Note by JW:  TTP is pleased to follow the advice of Joe Katzman and Skye in requesting Yasuhiko Kimura’s Forum post as a TTP article.  As Joe comments: “This is, by far, the best and most consequential thing you [Yasuhiko] have ever posted here. TTPers need to read this over a couple of times, and consider how absolutely pervasive its implications are. It destroys the standard conservative notion of politics, and replaces it with a truthful construct that is of actual use in navigating modern politics.]

Looking at the human nature and the political games the humans play, we can observe the following:

Human beings are status-seeking beings. Ergo, most humans seek to achieve as high a social status as possible.

In order to achieve and maintain the highest social status possible for themselves, most humans would willingly sacrifice personal comfort, happiness, enjoyment—that is, they would willingly endure suffering.

Correlatively, human beings are power-seeking beings. Power is centripetal. Power tends to become concentric and concentrated. Ergo, power holders seek to concentrate power unto themselves.

Power holders seek to attract and then keep subordinates not on the basis of competency but on the basis of (blind) loyalty in order to maintain and concentrate power.  They do this by promulgating nonsense rather than reason.  Here is why.

[Note by JW:  This is an astounding essay strongly recommended by TTPers Joe Katzman and Yasuhiko Kimura.  It is definitely worth your reflecting deeply upon it.]

It’s 100 years now since the Russian Revolution. The Soviet Union. Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Leninism. It’s been 100 years already, but you realize how present the whole thing remains when you look at the press these days.

I’m not very interested in Lenin, the man; but I’m very interested in Leninism. Lenin is very dead (if not yet buried, I wonder what Putin is waiting for); but Leninism is quite alive. And the Western press has just realized that China, the second power in the world, in place to become the first in a few years, is a Leninist state.

The West is scared because Leninism is effective. Yes, sure, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991; but lasting 74 years is no mean feat. And at any rate, the very establishment of the Soviet Union was a superhuman feat. It was something amazing, and amazed was the whole intelligentsia of the Western world for many decades.

Marxism completely captured the intellectual classes of the whole world for over a century. In China it’s still the official orthodoxy, taught in schools. In the West it’s still with us, if in the morphed form of Cultural Marxism.  Which is why now we have gay marriage and black transexuals running for office.