[ p. 44 ]
The evidence presented in the preceding chapter clearly demonstrates the paranoid character of the German nation and suggests the general line of “treatment” that must be followed if there is to be anything resembling a “cure.” But before the victors of the war can settle upon the cure, they might profitably undergo a little psychiatric investigation themselves. Perhaps their own national conduct reveals unhealthy trends which will need correction too. To be specific, what of our own national conduct? Has it been at all times sane and rational?
No one acquainted with our history would call us paranoid. We may have our share of paranoid individuals, but they are neither so numerous nor so influential as to affect our national policies. Such symptoms of an abnormal nature as we have shown are of the opposite type. Instead of seeking to dominate, we are as a nation more given to isolation. We ask only to be let alone, and we have shrunk from any course of action resembling world leadership. If we were to apply any psychiatric term to our national character, it would have to be descriptive of our isolationist tendencies — what might be called a “schizoid trend.”
[ p. 45 ]
Schizophrenia, commonly called “dementia praecox,” is a disorder most often appearing among adolescents and younger adults and is characterized by what is popularly known as split personality. It is a “turtle” type of self-defense. When life becomes too difficult, when conflicts are too severe, the individual can withdraw within his own shell, as it were, and create a world of his own imagining.
Schizophrenia represents an effort of the human personality to effect an emergency adaptation to the overload of life. Victims are able to secure some immediate relief by reverting to earlier and simpler techniques of living. Among the characteristics of the schizoid personality may be mentioned :
Shyness. The earliest schizoid characteristic to show itself often appears in the nursery as an inordinate shyness. This is the key trait of schizophrenia, as suspicion is the key trait of paranoia. To be sure, not all shy children become schizoids. But excessive shyness in adolescence should be carefully watched in order early to detect the possible presence of other schizoid characteristics. As might be suspected, the temperamental trend of the schizoid personality is introvert. Very few extraverts become schizophrenic.
Flight from Reality. In a sense, schizophrenics are individuals who refuse to grow up. They do not want to bear the responsibilities of mature life. They shun the burdens of adulthood. They are able to find [ p. 46 ] satisfaction in imagining things instead of in doing them.
Schizoids possess the ability to change the meanings of facts and occurrences. They can retire into a dream world of their own creation and there, amidst their fantasies, supremely enjoy themselves. They seem able to deceive themselves into believing that their imaginary world is real. Their attempt to withdraw from the real world about them is responsible for most of the unhappiness which they encounter.
Frustration and Disappointment. These retiring and sensitive individuals, who suffer from inferiority and insecurity as they grow up, dread competition and shrink from the hard knocks of life. When they become disappointed by their failures in the real world and frustrated in the realization of their dreams and ambitions, they react by plunging still deeper into the unreal world of their imagination.
Isolated Personality. From the nursery on, schizoid individuals represent the isolated type of personality. Some of them drift in gradually, but in many cases a crisis of some sort results in a sudden change in personality. They suffer from deficient socialization. They prefer to bury themselves in books rather than play a part in the social life about them. Athletics and sports have little or no appeal for such individuals, and contact with other people is something to be studiously avoided rather than sought after.
[ p. 47 ]
Retardation. As the schizoid tendency gains strength, there is a slowing down of all mental and motor activity. The victim eats more and more slowly and becomes equally dilatory in all his customary actions. A bright pupil may suddenly lose all interest in school. Fatigue and loss of appetite may be followed by a rapid decline of interest in everything. Extreme listlessness and moodiness are the usual outcome.
Such persons seem to have surrendered to the fear of growing up. Their development becomes arrested. Every drive for self-realization has been so thwarted that the desire to achieve ambition or attain a successful adulthood has been abandoned. As the condition advances, all the symptoms grow more pronounced. Apathy turns into outright stupidity; thought processes deteriorate; memory becomes defective. The entire personality eventually disintegrates into a condition of insanity. About one half of all the inmates of our state institutions for the insane are schizophrenics. The disorder is manifested in four major types.
Appearance of Delusions. The final crack-up comes when the unfortunate victim of split personality begins to “hear voices.” Delusions are rapidly systematized, and sometimes, when the “voices” so direct, schizoids become homicidal, as do paranoids. In some cases schizoids also suffer from hallucinations.
[ p. 48 ]
These are the symptoms of schizophrenia which are most relevant to the purpose of the present discussion. They are not to be thought of as a complete list of schizoid characteristics. To supply such a list would lead us far afield from the subject of war and peace. We are here concerned only with those schizoid traits which seem to find a parallel in the political behavior and the international attitudes of the American people. Schizophrenia is really an end result of the accumulation of defective thinking and faulty emotional reaction habits. Its victims fall into dishonest and unfair techniques for meeting life situations. They dream, dodge, substitute, camouflage, brood, blame others, blame poor health, isolate themselves, and seek in every possible way to escape the responsibilities of growing up. In all these tendencies we may see disturbing similarities to the policy of isolationism which has played so large a role in our national history.
Before turning to an examination of our national schizoid trends, one further word needs to be said regarding the lot of the individual schizophrenic. His case is not hopeless when subjected to early and intelligent treatment. By means of modern therapy many victims of schizophrenia have been restored to normal living. Many others have been sufficiently helped to enable them to lead fairly happy and useful lives in spite of their twisted, distorted, and isolated personalities.
[ p. 49 ]
Various means of treatment have been found effective. One that has had good results (at least temporarily) in a high percentage of cases is the so-called “shock treatment,” which is administered by the use of certain chemicals or by the application of electricity. When successful, the effect of this treatment is to “shock” the patient into a renewed sense of reality and to re-establish his grip upon the outside world.
Nations are like individuals. They are born, pass through infancy and adolescence, and eventually arrive at full adulthood unless prevented by an early death or arrested development. On reaching maturity, nations, like individuals, are expected to assume the responsibilities of national adulthood. Not all of them arrive at this stage of mature responsibility, however. Judged by its record prior to the present war, our own United States is one of those nations that have failed to grow up — to fully attain international adulthood.
Our National Infancy. After passing through a period of colonial gestation, this nation was “born” on July 4, 1776. There was a stormy but normal period of nursery development, with the ordinary infant disorders. The young nation was vital, robust, and promising. We were somewhat shy of “entangling alliances,” suspicious of strange nations [ p. 50 ] and foreign commitments, and disposed to lead a rather exclusive, segregated national existence.
America’s Childhood. The United States had a healthy growth after the adoption of the Constitution. There were the usual childhood political disturbances of course. Rhode Island had to be almost forced into the Union. Then there was the war of 1812, followed by the Mexican War, but the country prospered and soon spread over the continent as a result of the Louisiana Purchase and the expansion following the Mexican War.
This early picture of American history is very satisfactory, but portrays a continued isolationist tendency, except in the one instance where we entered into a virtual alliance with Great Britain for the propagation and maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine.
Our National Adolescence. But we began increasingly to experience stress and strain as adolescence progressed. Internal troubles and conflicts and political disagreements began to threaten a national split as complete as the personality split experienced by schizoids. This split finally occurred between the North and South, right down the Mason-Dixon line, and we became embroiled in the devastating civil war. Many factors entered into this internal conflict, but it largely hinged on the doctrine of self-determination. It was fought out on the theory of “saving the Union.” Abraham Lincoln proved to be a wise [ p. 51 ] political psychiatrist. He fought a bloody war to establish the principle that neighbors must co-operate. Self-determination cannot be carried to such lengths as to grant unqualified sovereignty to every community or state that wants it.
The later adolescence of this nation was occupied with a period of distressful reconstruction, quite comparable to the re-education of the schizophrenic after a threatened crack-up. There was plenty of trouble following the War between the States. The main disturbances of youth continued; they were both social and economic. There was rapid industrial growth. The end of our national adolescence probably came in the Spanish-American War, after which we found ourselves with new political problems and new national conflicts due to our responsibilities in the Caribbean. We had unexpectedly become a sort of empire, for the chances of war had left the Philippine Islands on our hands.
Our Major National Crisis — The First World War. And then without any choice on our part, just as we were emerging into young national maturity, we were faced with the first serious challenge of our early adulthood. The United States became involved in the first World War. Everything that happened during that struggle and everything attendant upon the ill-fated peace that followed, constituted a challenge to the American people to forsake isolationism; the chance to be a full-grown [ p. 52 ] nation, to be a nation among the world nations, had definitely come. We were presented with the opportunity of world leadership.
We had successfully met the first crisis of adolescence at the time of the Civil War, but failed in the first major challenge of our early national adulthood. We repudiated the League of Nations — returning to our continental isolation, crawling right back into our shell — indulged our dreams of peace and prosperity, and refused to share the responsibilities of a full-grown nation among nations.
And so the American people, that is, the large majority of them, dreamed their foolish dreams of peace, but only for a short twenty years; and even during this time we had plenty of internal trouble — financial difficulties, unemployment, and depressions. But we went on in the smug satisfaction of isolationism. We were determined to become self-sufficient and to hold ourselves aloof from the turmoil and struggles of the world, to live a national life apart, to pursue our course of international isolation.
Our Second Major Crisis. Yes, we refused to have anything to do with world peace plans following the first World War, but our isolation was not to be left undisturbed for very long. Next came the Hitler crisis. For the second time we were challenged, and for the second time we started to hide behind neutrality, isolation, and the refusal to assume adult national responsibility.
[ p. 53 ]
(What would you think of a uniformed member of a municipal police force who, some dark night, chancing upon a fellow officer engaged in “shooting it out” with some bandits, proceeded calmly to declare his neutrality, standing back on his sovereign dignity and refusing actively to intervene on the side of the forces of law and order? But it was just such a strange and inhuman performance that we Americans indulged in when the other civilized world powers were engaged in a life and death struggle with a gang of unscrupulous adventurers bent on conquering the world.)
We hated war. We were determined to maintain our continental seclusion. We still lived in the delusion that the Pacific on the west and the Atlantic on the east were a safe protection against foreign invasion. The country was truly “split” between the isolationists and the interventionists.
But in the midst of this serious dilemma. Providence acts, for “the Most High rules in the Kingdoms of men.”
The Pearl Harbor “Shock.” As the schizoid, by electric-shock treatment, is often brought back to the world of reality from his psychotic flight into a dream world of his own creation, so in our case, on December 7, 1941, the “god of nations” intervened. We were subjected to a mighty and humiliating national shock. The day before the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor we were a split nation, half isolationist and [ p. 54 ] half interventionist, but the day after Pearl Harbor we were unified. A miracle had been wrought. This “shock treatment” did overnight for our United States what the electric-shock treatment does for split personalities. This nation became unified as never before for the prosecution of the global war, and we once and for all saw that neither the Atlantic nor the Pacific were in any sense protection against foreign invasion.
To label a nation schizophrenic on the basis of the foregoing evidence would, of course, be’ absurd. It is not offered as a serious diagnosis, but rather as an interesting and useful analogy. As such, it calls attention to what is beyond question the principal defect of United States foreign policy — our unreasoning reluctance to face the realities of our world situation. We have cherished illusions of security long after the grounds for security ceased to exist. We have clung to our vanishing past out of irrational fear of our present. These happen to be characteristic of schizophrenia — whence the choice of the analogy by way of contrast with the preceding serious diagnosis of German paranoia.
As this is being written, it is too early to prophesy what the future will hold. The voices of pacifism, isolationism, and defeatism are again being heard in our midst. The capacity of some people for selfdeception and idle dreaming seems beyond even the tragedy of war to satisfy. The America First Committee [ p. 55 ] had barely been laid in its well-earned grave when its reincarnation came to life in the Peace Now movement. The words may be different, but the tune is the same. Isolationism is dead, so we are told. But “nationalism” is still very much alive. And what is nationalism but another name for the old dream of American isolation!
Already this war has lasted longer and cost many times as much as the first World War. That war ended in a state of weariness and disillusionment so great that the realities of peace were completely forgotten in the general endeavor to wash our hands of world affairs and dream our pretty dreams in imaginary isolation. Will the far heavier burdens of this war plunge us into proportionately greater depths of national irresponsibility for the peace that is to follow?
If we are to be spared such a fate, it will be because the great majority of Americans hold fast to reality and steadfastly resist the temptation to “take things easy” in the fool’s paradise offered by the latest version of isolationism. For that is what isolationism — or nationalism — really is: a fool’s paradise in which peace and happiness are to be enjoyed merely for the wishing.
If Germany is paranoid in its national trends, America tends toward opposite attitudes, toward isolation, [ p. 56 ] which might be looked upon as a “schizoid trend.”
Schizophrenia is a disorder of adolescents and younger adults, commonly called “dementia praecox.” It is a “turtle” type of self-defense, a form of split personality.
Shyness is the key characteristic of the schizoid personality, and the vast majority are introverts.
Schizoids are in flight from reality. They are burden dodgers. They refuse to grow up. They believe their dream world is real.
Schizoids are much frustrated — they feel inferior and insecure. They dread competition and shun disappointment.
Schizophrenics are isolated personalities ; they are poorly socialized. They prefer books to athletics.
As schizophrenia progresses, there appears retardation of all common activities. A bright pupil suddenly becomes listless, and every drive for self-realization is thwarted.
The final “crack-up” is characterized by delusions. The schizoid begins to “hear voices” and becomes increasingly dangerous to himself and a serious menace to society.
Schizophrenia is the end result of the accumulation of defective thinking and faulty emotional reactions. Schizoids dream, dodge, camouflage, brood, and blame others for the consequences of their isolation tendencies.
[ p. 57 ]
Many schizoids are helped by proper treatment, and one of the most successful measures is some form of “shock” treatment.
Like individuals nations are born, grow-up through adolescence, and attain adulthood. Nations, like individuals, can become schizoid — succumb to isolation tendencies.
Uncle Sam was born July 4, 1776. Our national infancy was uneventful except that we were inordinately shy of “entangling alliances.”
The early childhood of America was indicative of robust health and rapid development, notwithstanding a few minor wars.
But American adolescence was characterized by a real crisis. The national unity was split by the Civil War, which was precipitated by the political doctrine of “self-determination.”
Our later adolescence, after we recovered from the threat of disruption, was eventful and was terminated by the Spanish-American War and our acquisition of the Philippine Islands.
But the first major crisis of adult America was presented by the first World War. We refused world leadership, we returned to our continental isolation, we declined to accept the responsibilities of a fullgrown nation among nations.
And then our second major crisis came with World War II. We hid behind neutrality, and the country was split between isolationists and internationalists.
[ p. 58 ]
We were thus in this political “schizoid” state when the Pearl Harbor “shock” aroused us much as the electric shock awakens a stuporous schizophrenic.
And now what of the future? Will Uncle Sam go back to the pre-Pearl Harbor isolationism, or will he continue as a united nation, bravely facing the problems of peace as he now so effectively fights the war?