The Inward Circle

Every institution captures something of the time and interest of its members and provides something of a world for them; in brief, every institution has encompassing tendencies. When we review the different institutions in our Western society, we find some that are encompassing to a degree discontinuously greater than the ones next in line. Their encompassing or total character is symbolized by the barrier to social intercourse with the outside and to departure that is often built right into the physical plant, such as locked doors, high walls, barbed wire, cliffs, water, forests, or moors. These establishments I am calling total institutions, and it is their general characteristics I want to explore. - Erving Goffman, Asylums

It is difficult to conceive of a group of people with more audacity and fear of the future than Dick Cheney and his inner circle. This “inner circle” would include former president George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and others too numerous to mention. Cheney is now advising that violations of U.S. Law and breaches of the U.S. Constitution that occurred during his term as Vice President were necessary to protect the American people from ANOTHER terrorist attack. This fear mongering is extended to the point where he is predicting that there will be another terrorist event in the United States while the Obama administration is in office.  And the domestic worldview he practiced before he obtained the Republican party's Vice President nomination in 2000, was that of a big time CEO.  Halliburton anyone?

There are things one should keep in mind about Mr. Cheney. No single person other than Dick Cheney - with such a talent at lying - has ever reached such a responsible position in the U.S. Government. His talent for obsessive lying is unprecedented. In any other role, he would be in the care of a psychiatrist for treatment of his obsessive/compulsive paranoid condition.

In an interview published…by the website Politico, the (thankfully) former vice president let loose a stream of disinformation and attacks on Mr. Obama that were breathtaking even by the standards of a man who set new lows for meanness and dissembling.

Yes no one has ever approached Cheney’s capacity for lying. His delusional uttering can be seen as an effort to distort perceptions others may have about the past 8 years. He knows what he has done; he has broken laws of the United States saying it was necessary because of a conveniently omnipresent enemy. There are few specifics about this enemy other than many of them were confined to places like the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, the Abu Ghraib prison and crime scene in Iraq and other sites only he could conceive.

And the interesting thing about Dick Cheney is regardless of what negatives are said about him, he isn’t bothered in the slightest. He lies and distorts reality in a constant dribble and never pauses long enough to sample how his behavior is perceived. As I have discussed elsewhere people like Cheney with a condition this severe seldom know the difference between what they see in dreams and other periods of low-threshold consciousness and what they experience while dealing with real people. The relationships they have with real people are generally highly degraded so it is seldom that the person really knows where they are in space and time or consciousness and diminished consciousness.   He is totally unaware that his career is a gold mine (or oil field) for the study of pathological thinking and behavior.

One might ask whether people like Cheney are dangerous to others. Although people are different from each other, the range of differences is finite so there will always be groups of individuals, large or small, that have certain things in common, such as common problems that require cooperation to find a solution. As a consequence, they will find themselves in similar situations constantly and have similar reactions to those situations.

One seldom views scenes of public behavior as implying intent, but for someone like Cheney, no intent is needed. All that is required are a series of random processes justified on the basis of the way things get done. It is the way he does things; it is the only way he does things. Is there a value system in concert with how events transpire here? Yes. But the presence of a value system makes the process meaningless, what matters is what actually happened and not what label is applied to it is. Thus one must make judgments about pathological behavior based on what an individual does, not on what is said to justify it.

Laws without supporting moral conventions invite crime, but much more importantly, they spur the growth of an expedient, amoral attitude.

As the late sociologist Erving Goffman wrote in one of the most perceptive works of the 20^th Century:

When an individual plays a part he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. They are asked to believe that the character they see actually possesses the attributes he appears to possess, that the task he performs will have the consequences that are implicitly claimed for it, and that, in general, matters are what they appear to be. In line with this, there is the popular view that the individual offers his performance and puts on his show 'for the benefit of other people'. It will be convenient to begin a consideration of performances by turning the question around and looking at the individual's own belief in the impression of reality that he attempts to engender in those among whom he finds himself. At one extreme, one finds that the performer can be fully taken in by his own act; he can be sincerely convinced that the impression of reality which he stages is the real reality.

For Cheney and others like him, the world is not a stage; rather the stage has become a world. It is a world where the delusions of the mind of the actor control the external reality it witnesses. The danger though is that what happens on the stage that has become a world has consequences far beyond its periphery. Here, in non-linear time, there is no way to tell the difference between behavior where people did act together with intent and when they just happened to act in a certain way simply labeled as being a specific kind of behavior, i.e., X is a label with a value system. Without the value system, the labeled behavior doesn't exist. However in linear time, in the world we live in, labeling defines what is real.