THE HOLIER THAN THOU SYNDROME

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that great powers have the legitimate right to project their strength, and to act in their own self-interest. I also believe that nations with a strong democratic tradition have the perfect right to be proud of it and to boast of it around the world. But then, it is all the more deplorable when a great nation would abuse her unquestionable moral authority to promote morally questionable goals. A possession of virtue means an exercise of this virtue at all times. A fallen angel must not keep showing off his former angelic credentials to force the world to accept his authority when his present behavior is demonstrably less than angelic.

In other words, it is quite all right to act in your best self-interest, and everybody who was not born yesterday understands it. But let us not involve morality in it. Let the sun rise and warm all the earth with its life-promoting heat, but when it also scorches and kills, let it not try to convince the desert that it is being done for its own good. Virtue is never self-serving, and when performing self-serving deeds, let us not insult her by claiming to work in her behalf…

Physician, heal thyself!, is an apt prescription for the proverbial faultfinder. As another saying goes, he sees a straw in the other’s eye, yet he is unable to notice a thick log sticking out of his own. But the best nuance is revealed by the peculiar psychological condition bordering on mental illness when a person, or in our case a nation, is obsessed with championing a certain virtue which it believes it possesses, when in fact it doesn’t.

America’s newly rediscovered neo-Wilsonian (I am referring to Woodrow Wilson) morality of freedom, her absolute conviction that she possesses it, and that it is her international mission to impose it upon the world, raises at least two questions: is America indeed free as absolutely as she claims to be (which may not be the case, as I have been pointing in many places already and will further demonstrate in other sections to come); and whether genuine absolute freedom should imply a morality of the higher order (which is by no means a given).

In both cases, America claims to possess these poorly defined, slogan-sounding virtues, neither of which she possesses to the extent alleged. But her insistence on making such a claim at all, may be a symptom of that rather sorry mental condition which I have called here the Holier Than Thou Syndrome.

The following passage from Nietzsche’s On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life Section 6, provides us with a fascinating insight into the depths of human psychology that can just as well be applied to the psychology of “an age,” as he puts it, or of a nation, which I intend to do for a very good reason:

“Socrates took it to be a malady, approaching insanity, to imagine that one possesses a virtue, when one does not possess it, and certainly such an imagination is much more dangerous than the opposite delusion of suffering from a shortcoming. For, through this delusion, it is possible to become better, but the former imagination will daily make a man or an age worse, that is, more unjust.”

This observation, quite significant for human psychology, becomes politically and socially priceless, when applied to nations. There are two reasons for such imagination: one pathological, when those who possess it and spread it around actually believe in it; the other, not at all abnormal, representing the product of a cold-hearted manipulation of the public psyche, in order to touch some subconscious layer in that psyche, where sufficient receptivity can be found to support a certain policy, or a specific action on the part of the political leadership, which otherwise would surely prove unsupportable. I am making a pointed reference here to the latest American wars in Iraq and elsewhere, where the initial public support had been the direct product of such manipulation.

Another important question is how such political manipulation, when it is administered in large doses, affects the society itself: whether it builds up a contemptuously cynical reaction to all kinds of propaganda, as was the case within Soviet society, or otherwise, a society which has none of the adequate protective mechanisms against indoctrination falls victim to the sudden onslaught of propaganda offensive, and becomes sick, in the sense that it starts to believe that it indeed possesses those virtues which it is alleged to possess (in the case of modern American society, it is the belief in some special moral virtues which the society has exchanged for its social freedoms. All said, I am still confident that some kind of antidote to cynicism may be produced in sufficient quantities within the body of society, to avert insanity. The question, however, is whether excessive cynicism could cause some kind of social breakdown, and what kind of harm, even temporary, it can then do to the society in question.