The madman theory was Re: [PEN-L] US Presidents acting nuts

[Doyle Saylor <doylesaylor@xxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,
Jim writes what I think a good representative left view of
psychologizing political contexts.  I agree with this statement.  I
want to elaborate here on a left perspective.

On Apr 21, 2006, at 8:23 AM, Jim Devine wrote:
I appreciate the fact that "nuts" or "crazy" are stigmatizing terms.
But in context, I mean those only as the apparent opposite of
"rational." (I _totally_ reject the idea of dismissing anyone's point
of view as "nuts" and that's not what I was doing.) One of the points
of my missive was that "rationality" (as defined by neoclassicals,
game theory) can be "nuts," so that they are dialectically related,
not true opposites.

For me, the world "nuts" is distinct from the legal term "insanity";
it usually means self-destructive. So-called "rationality" can be
self-destructive. (Of course, the meaning of (almost?) all words is
contextual.)

I think that psychoanalyzing Bush is a mug's game (we can't win,
partly because we can't really do it at a distance). More importantly,
there's a Bush League, an organized group (led by Cheney and Rove) and
their rise to power represents more of a sociological/political/economic
phenomenon than a psychological (individual) one.

Doyle,
Groups of people can't perform information work that individuals can
do.  Perhaps as the technology moves forward that may change.  For
example a group of people can't talk to a group of people.  The process
immediately breaks down to a speaker to a speaker.  The cacaphony can't
be distinctly understood.  A group of people can do tasks like suicide
bombing that resembles widespread group elements of depressed people
coordinated to self destruction.  But can we say the group is
depressed?  Is the work process in the group like the brain work
process of depression?

Originally the Mad Man theory was coined by Nixon, but the U.S. long
had a practice called brinkmanship to cover essentially the same ground
of national purpose.  Nixon reverted to prejudice in his
conceptualization of national policy quite a bit, but Nixon had no
serious theory of group information work processing about a mad or sane
version of producing information work, it just 'felt' right to call
brinkmanship 'mad' as far as Nixon was concerned.  That meant the most
far out version of human actions.  The most marginalized.

The socialist tack is to emphasize group solidarity.  Chavez has a neat
term Bolivarian to identify South American states unity to oppose U.S.
overwhelming power.  That's group solidarity.  The term also doesn't
rely upon a mystification about brainwork, but is conceivable in
current practice between nation states.

CB writes,
Jerry posted this on LBO-talk last week concerning U.S. state actors
bluffing (?) madness:

...
Further, it was Nixon who invented the term "Madman Theory,"
when his "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War was to let the North
Vietnamese know that he was crazy enough to drop an atomic bomb.

The "Madman Theory" of U.S. foreign "coercive diplomacy" has been U.S.
policy for many years now, but it was codified, as Chomsky and others
have
pointed out in the 1995 study, "Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence,"
written by the Defense Department's Strategic Command.
...
*"Because of the value that comes from the ambiguity of what the US may
do
to an adversary if the acts we seek to deter are carried out, it hurts
to
portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed. The fact that
some
elements may appear to be potentially "out of control" can be
beneficial to
creating and reinforcing fears and doubts within the minds of an
adversary's
decision makers.
...

Doyle ,
What the U.S. interprets of the Nixonian Madman theory is that states
of feelings which can't be put into the 'rationalistic' framework help
to shape the feelings of leadership in the opposing side.  This is the
opposite of solidarity interests.  So in essence the madman label means
death if you don't obey.  Why the Policy elite feel like brinkmanship
needs to be clarified by saying madman probably is related to WWII
political labels applied to Hitler and German strategy for world
dominance.  I.e. the current U.S. position is Hitlerian.

The word madman mystifies a work process that generates information of
large scale groups.  Groups aren't mad in the sense a person is insane,
rather the connection process of solidarity on the large scale group is
not functional on some level in which the only option is to live or
die, which hardly makes sense as a group at all.  What makes sense as
the U.S. planners indicate is an understanding of emotion structure of
an opposing group to find ways to disrupt that and turn the group as a
whole away from a goal the U.S. strategy forbids.

In so far as socialist are concerned solidarity of the class is what
the U.S. wants to break up.  Opposing groups have not been converted to
a capitalist work environment that satisfies U.S. interests.

Solidarity is information production.  I think Jim is right we tend to
see groups in individual terms (pyschologizing) when the groups can't
perform that sort of brain work.  But groups are held together by
emotion structure and therefore brinksmanship tends to affect the group
as a whole along the lines of emotion structure which tends to be the
first line of how a group expresses itself.  Further emotion structure
varies quite a bit in individuals and lacking a good comprehensive
theory of emotion structure for whole groups in most cases it seems to
me the theory is poorly cast to refer in individual psychological
terms.

Hence, madmen is a place marker about a lacuna (a blank space or
missing part) in group function theory in which solidarity processes
are poorly understood.  These are information work processes.
thanks,
Doyle