The Problem Of Recognizing The Emotional Plague

The emotional plague’s existence depends on its remaining hidden from everyone’s awareness.  But why is this so?  Why can’t people see this universal sickness of armored humans?  The difficulty that prevents this understanding lies primarily in the defensive ways of people’s thinking.

Comparing infectious medical diseases such as tuberculosis, polio or cholera to the infectious bio-social disease, the emotional plague, it is clear that in the case of the medical diseases the bacterial pathogen that causes the infection is not viewed morally as being “good” or “bad,” “right” or “wrong.”  Nor is there a moral concern whether the pathogen “meant” or “had the intention” to cause the illness.  These moralistic ideas about infectious disease were part and parcel of the thinking of past centuries.  If people looked at infectious diseases morally today, the sciences of bacteriology and virology would not exist, and  knowledge about infectious diseases would still be where it was 300 years ago.

But this is exactly where people are today when judging destructive human ideas and behavior.  They view them morally as being either right or wrong, the product either of a virtuous versus villainous individual or the result of a person’s good or bad intentions.  These ideas are examples of defensive, armored thinking and the moralistic attitudes behind the thinking of almost everyone including the political left and the right.

Because scientists looked at the function of the medical pathogens in its relation to the life of the host organism, whether or not they were destructive to it, these medical sciences thrived.  Regarding social problems, the questions that need to be asked are:  What is the effect or function on others of a person’s behavior or thought?  Are these consequences harmful to the core functions of  people’s lives?  Asking these  questions immediately brings the emotional plague as an infectious bio-social disease into sharper focus and takes the problem of the destructiveness of sick humans out of people’s moral ways of thinking and out of the strait jacket of politics.

February 27, 2013
Categories: emotional plague, Medical Sciences, Politics, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 11 Comments

The Attraction Of The Plague From The Left And The Right

On Tuesday Feb. 5, 2013 an unsuccessful assassination attempt was made on the life of  journalist Lars Hedegaard,   president of  Denmark’s Free Press Society and  an outspoken critic of Islamic supremacism and of attempts to impose Islamic Shariah law in the West. He has recently launched a Swedish-language weekly newspaper that is critical of mass immigration to Sweden and Denmark from third world countries and takes a dim view of Islam.

As a consequence of his defending freedom, democracy, the rule of law and individual and sexual equality, Mr. Hedegaard has been reviled by the leftist-dominated Swedish media as a “racist,” accused of having invented the incident in order to set himself up as a martyr and told that it was unfortunate that the  delivery man was not a better marksman.

It is characteristic of the emotional plague that when it happens to be in the common interest of the left and the right, the plague  will  combine forces and act together to destroy their victim.  In this example, the Swedish mainstream media on the left which, according to Mr. Hedegaard, are probably the most politically correct in the Western world  and the Islamic Fundamentalist fanatics on the right are of one mind.

The forces of the emotional plague’s tendency to associate   when it is in their mutual interest happens entirely spontaneously and occurs without any  conscious or malicious intent.  It is a pathological function originating  from the biological realm, the destructive middle layer of sick human beings.  It can only be satisfactorily understood when one steps outside the morality-tainted framework of conventional thinking and looks at what is happening from a functional perspective.

February 23, 2013
Categories: Biological Sciences, emotional plague, Politics, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: , , , , , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 7 Comments

The American People’s Exposure To The Communist Plague

From an epidemiological perspective, communism is a highly infectious and invasive bio-social disease.  It functions like a virus (antigen) to destroy the population of a nation from within by attacking people’s emotional lives and their ability to work freely without external constraints.   Americans today are at great risk of having their country destroyed by the communist threat organized by the ideologues of the Obama Administration, primarily because they are unaware that any real threat exists.  The situation is comparable to an infectious medical condition in which the organism is unable to respond by forming a defense (antibodies) through its  immune system to the threat to its life.  For this reaction to occur in the social realm there has to be a state of underlying public alarm and anxiety.  From a biophysical standpoint this would correspond to a general state of emotional contraction in the population.

But no such condition exists!  To the contrary, the general population in America today is in a chronic state of over expansion.  People are self-complacent, self-indulgent and, in varying degrees they are distracted by every kind of substitute interest at the expense of seeing the real danger to America happening right in front of their eyes. These distractions are exploited for profit by the leftist infiltrated media and entertainment industries to give the appearance that everything is status quo so that the communist plague can continue unnoticed by everyone.

This headlong descent into socialism will continue into the foreseeable future.  It will partially reverse only when a major contraction grips the whole of society accompanied by the emotion of fear or terror.  A shock wave of this magnitude is necessary to override the soporific effect of the media on people and to bring the masses to their senses, taking them out of their chronic state of obliviousness.  Hopefully, at that point the immunization process against the communist plague can take hold before America has been completely destroyed.

February 16, 2013
Categories: emotional plague, Medical Sciences, Politics, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: , , , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 11 Comments

Welcome To Democracy In The Middle East

In his article, “A Bleak Anniversary for the Arab Spring” Thane  Rosenbaum writes  in The Wall Street Journal  January 28, 2013 that while the Arab Spring may have ended the regimes of secular strongmen in many Muslim countries throughout the Middle East, North Africa and the Persian Gulf, these changes have not  brought about the desired central features of a democratic society in any of them.

The question that is never asked is how can Muslim people who have lived under extreme authoritarian rule for centuries be expected to function overnight in any way similar to people living in a modern Western style democracy?  This question, which goes to the heart of the emotional sickness of human beings, lies outside the framework of current medical and sociological thinking.  Without recognizing the emotional sickness resulting from individual and social armor that prevents people from being able to regulate their lives and function freely and responsibly in a democratic society it is not possible to understand why all Arab Spring movements must fail.

Without knowing the answer, the author does touch on this inability of people living in Muslim countries to establish a democratic society.  He finds that the only thing that Muslims in the Arab world seem to be capable of achieving is a limited, short term goal,  to free themselves of their current oppressor.  This myopic vision of the world is, in fact, an indication of the severity of the ocular armor of the masses in the Muslim world, the biophysical condition that prevents them from being able to see and find the way out of their current trapped existence.

February 4, 2013
Categories: emotional plague, Medical Sciences, Politics, Social Sciences . Tags: , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 4 Comments

The Thrust Of Obama’s Second Term Political Agenda

With the ongoing disintegration and the breakthrough of the destructive secondary layer on all social levels of today’s anti-authoritarian society from school shootings to business corruptions on Wall Street, President Obama is in an excellent strategic position to continue pushing through his socialistic agenda for America.  He is demonstrating to the world that individual freedom in America does not work and what is required is more government regulation in the form of more laws to tell people what they can and cannot do.

But laws do not keep people from breaking them.  Because of the ever increasing inner push of their destructive secondary drives, people will always find  ways of getting around and breaking the law.  Corruption will always prevail.  All that  happens is that another layer of social armor in the form of more laws will be placed over  those that already exist while constricting what freedoms people still have.

February 2, 2013
Categories: emotional plague, Politics, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 3 Comments

A Prime Example Of The Emotional Plague: The War On Drugs

A sure sign that one is dealing with the emotional plague is that you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.  How this relates to  the drug problem is that you are wrong if you legalize drugs and worse if you don’t.  In the past authoritarian era, children and adolescents were more likely than not to listen to authority figures.  Their rebelliousness was restrained by their muscular and character armor.  Because of the destruction of the authoritarian family, children and adolescents in today’s society are often likely to act out their rebelliousness in a subversive manner with no regard to the destructive consequences on their lives, convinced they “know it all.”  With no respected authority figure to listen to, they are in constant danger of becoming attracted to the drug culture.

Those in the drug culture, users and traffickers alike, are infected with an emotional disease, a socio-economically based medical condition that is in no way different from any other highly infectious and communicable disease.  The drug problem cannot be viewed simply as a war against an external enemy.  The tendency to use and profit from drugs, the “enemy,” resides and can erupt from within anyone, particularly young people.  They are at risk because of their strong tendency to be rebellious, their need to “fit in” and for financial gain. Therefore, their problems must be addressed non-judgementally from the perspective of the medical epidemiologist as an endemic, emotionally based medical disease of sick human beings.

The drug problem is as much a problem of the families of addicts and the social institutions that are dealing with it as it is of the users and the traffickers.  The first step in addressing the drug problem is to educate the public.  The reason that people use street drugs, including marijuana, is to help stop experiencing their painful emotions and feelings and/or to replace them with pleasurable (euphoric) ones.  Users must be treated with the knowledge that they are emotionally sick people that  must rely on drugs for relief.  Those who genuinely want help to face their painful feelings must be treated with this knowledge by skilled mental health professionals who are emotionally healthy themselves so that they do not fall into the trap of being judgmental.  The public must be able to think functionally, not moralistically.

Hardened drug traffickers are highly destructive sick people who profit criminally from the emotional sickness of other sick humans.  They must be sequestered in prison.  From a functional perspective, prisons exist to sequester individuals from society who are unable to contain the expression of their secondary destructive drives from within.  They therefore require external restraint (armor) in the form of incarceration.

Seeing the drug user as suffering from a medically based social illness not from a moral perspective as someone that requires to be punished, will help to remove its stigma.  This view places the magnitude of the drug problem in proper perspective.  It will be a long drawn out process of education and application of new knowledge on all social levels before this destructive manifestation of the emotional plague is reversed. (See “The War on Drugs: America’s Second Civil War” in my book, The Emotional Plague.)  

January 21, 2013
Categories: emotional plague, Medical Sciences, Politics, Social Sciences . Tags: , , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 12 Comments

The Great Myth Of The 21st Century

There is a myth that is currently being passed around that from a political perspective there are two kinds of people in the world, those who are caring and want to help the less fortunate and those who care only for themselves. Today’s “carers” are thought to believe that human beings and social and environmental conditions can be improved through political legislation and programs. In today’s world, these carers are living up to an ideal of what a caring person should be. They see themselves as the “good guys” with good intentions  and the know-how required to bring about world improvement. No longer called  socialists, they are the “progressives” belonging on the political left. Since a large segment of the population, mainly Blacks and Hispanics, are emotionally too sick to care for themselves, they have a strong need to be cared for and  therefore are attracted to these leftist do-gooders. The caring leftist politician and  the cared for public form a powerful highly pathological political alliance. By contrast, in the past authoritarian era people simply cared. They did not wear their caring on their sleeves.

Conversely, people today who are not openly demonstrative of a concern for “the poor ” and showing no overt desire for social improvement are typically seen as uncaring, selfish, cold and only interested in personal benefit by those indoctrinated in the leftist dominated world view.  They do not pretend to have solutions for social improvement except for a return to the ways of the past. This group is automatically categorized as the  “bad guys”, those belonging on the political right. This commonly held myth of the political left is an example of armored (moralistic) thinking, the morality of political correctness. Injecting this idea of right and wrong, of good and bad, based on some personal arbitrary assumptions functions as a powerful ideological force in current mainstream thinking of the political left.

There have always been people who have wanted to be taken care of. Throughout their history, Americans have stood out in their  ability to care for themselves. However, for the first time in American history, leftist politicians have stumbled on a way to successfully tap into the unconscious dependency needs of people from all social levels. These ideologues are promising the masses a material version of heaven on earth through their economic and social programs and, tragically, the mindless public is being taken in by it. Another layer of social armor in the form of  denial is being placed over the social armor that is already there. This will make it more difficult than ever for people to see what is really happening right in front of their eyes.

January 18, 2013
Categories: emotional plague, Politics, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 2 Comments

Evasions And Distractions Contain The Most Superficial Layer Of Social Armor

We know from the treatment of individual patients that people go to enormous lengths to not face the problems that first bring them into therapy.  The same situation exists in our treatment of society’s social problems. The contents of newspapers are full of articles that are considered “newsworthy” as covering important social and political issues.  But from a functional perspective these articles actually are  evasions and distractions.  Analysis of the problems contained in them whether they are economic, social , political or whatever come down to the same source: they are the result of the  emotionally based sickness of the human race.  In fact, the more people seem to be addressing the so-called key issues as, for example, when scientists look for the secrets of life in the genetic code, the more they are actually running away from this central problem.

Why is this so? It is emotionally too painful for individuals both singly and collectively to look and feel what is going on within themselves and so they  focus exclusively on and blame the external manifestations.  This is why whenever there is a massacre such as a school shooting people are up in arms for gun control.  But it’s not guns that kill people.  Murderous impulses in people are responsible for killing people.  Until people are first capable of looking inwardly at what is happening within themselves they are not emotionally healthy enough to be in a position to really understand anything constructive about the world they are living in.  They are unable to recognize that the same murderous impulses that resulted in the massacre are there hidden in everyone.  Looking inwardly (introspectively) indicates a certain capacity to be in contact with what all people have in common, their own personal armored structures.  Therefore, a deep appreciation of the universality and function of armor in people is a prerequisite for any constructive understanding of what is going on in the world.

The therapy of individuals consists in starting on the bio-physical surface before attempting to proceed to deeper layers of their armored structure.  The same principle holds true for the therapy of social groups.  The social orgonomist starts his intervention at the social surface by  addressing people’s resistances which are expressed in their evasiveness and distractibility.  Until this defensive layer of ocular armor is successfully eliminated and people are able to feel the emotions that they they defending against there can be no progress expected in getting at the deeper impulses contained in the social armor.

This formulation is given as a preliminary attempt to begin addressing some of the social problems that society is faced with.

December 28, 2012
Categories: emotional plague, Politics, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: , , , , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 6 Comments

Another School Shooting, Another Political Dialogue

Another school shooting brings to the social surface yet another political attempt to evade the existence of the all pervasive destructive secondary layer  (the realm of the Devil) that exists in all armored people. Human evil can erupt and cause social havoc in any and every person under the right circumstances.  In the latest incident, the Left blames the problem of violence on the existence of guns.  The Right claims that this is not so but does not offer any effective alternative explanation.  The function of the Left’s viewpoint is that it soothes their guilt-ridden conscience into believing that they are actually doing something about the problem of human violence.  The Right has no emotional need to resort to such a viewpoint but still refuses to recognize the biophysical reality of human evil that is rooted in every armored person.

The evasion will continue until people begin thinking functionally. This entails realizing the existence of the three fundamental biophysical layers of the armored human structure, the superficial layer, the destructive secondary layer and the biological core.  Hunan evil, the realm of the Devil,  is endemic in all armored  people. Unfortunately, it is only when a massacre of such a magnitude as this one occurs that people get disturbed by it for a brief time. During  other times they ignore it’s existence.

People will also have to understand that evil originates from the fact that they are armored and that the only real way to eliminate evil is to prevent armoring of children and adolescents. People’s evasion of the existence of evil is a defense.  It’s people’s evasion of the existence and origin of evil on all social levels and degrees from the man on the street to political leaders in public office that is the most immediate problem that must first be faced before future massacres like this can be avoided. The existence of human evil and  the emotional sickness resulting from human armor are long standing problems. They cannot be solved overnight.

December 17, 2012
Categories: emotional plague, Politics, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 9 Comments

Why The Left Almost Always Wins In Politics

In todays anti-athoritarian society the left has almost no chance of losing in politics.  This is partly because leftists are primarily herd animals and they behave collectively in times of crisis as when they have to make political decisions.  Making collective decisions is comfortable for leftists in today’s  anti-authoritarian society because as long as they are being taken care of by their government there is little effort involved in going along with the tide of the political left’s mainstream thinking.  For many, becoming politically mindless is a way of not looking at what is objectively happening around them.

By contrast, those on the right are individualists.  They tend to stick by their principles which are governed more by their personal feelings than by group thinking.  As a result,  they often stand apart from others when confronted with social decisions and this is the reason they have more difficulty coming together as a political force when it comes down to winning political battles.

Furthermore, there are many elements in liberal ideology that conservatives are in favor of.  From a functional perspective, these are the counter truths contained in liberal ideology.  On the other hand, because of their greater degree of ocular armor, liberals are blinded and are driven by their ideology.  The ability of conservatives to recognize and be influenced by the counter truth in liberal ideology is the reason that  there are many varieties of conservatives but few of liberals.  This ability of conservatives to see the aspects of liberalism that they politically favor prevents them from mindlessly coming together as a stronger political force to oppose liberal programs.  Conversely, it is precisely their inability to see the counter truth contained in conservative ideology that makes liberals the politically stronger force.  The presence or absence of ocular armor determines much of what goes on in politics.

December 15, 2012
Categories: character structure, Politics, Social Sciences, socio-political character . Tags: , , . Author: Charles Konia, M.D. . Comments: 3 Comments

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