In Dr. Loius Tartaglia's excellent book Flawless!: The Ten Most Common Character Flaws and What You Can Do About Them, he saves the worst for last. #10 -- chronic dishonesty -- is called The Trap, because it stands in the way of its own resolution.
That's true to some extent of all character flaws; by definition, they're dysfunctional ways of satisfying a real need for ego self-defense, but they do satisfy those needs in the short run (while making things worse overall, natch). The Trap is the worst because the person most gullible to your lies is yourself, and possession of a character flaw is a threat to the ego, so the fact of chronically lying is the first thing that a chronic liar will lie to themself about.
All you can do with someone in The Trap is try to avoid them and minimize your exposure to their life drama, because they're not likely to change anytime soon, no matter what you do. And, that is why the conservative movement in America is doomed to not learn from its present and future defeats.
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I have applied systems theory to my philosophy of organizations and I believe that the external view is best treated as a metaperson. To be clear, every system also has an internal view, where it can be considered as a collection of relationships between components instead of as a whole.
One of the characteristics of complex dynamic systems is that the whole is different from the sum of its parts, unlike simple linear systems. Our own personhood is a product of that fact: no lesser systems level (such as molecules, cells or organs) shows any personhood at all; it is an emergent property, appearing suddenly at the level of the whole human.
Organizations are ideally more than the sum of their parts; else they would not exist, as there are overhead costs involved in getting people to work together for a common purpose. What is a system whose components are people and which transcends them, if not a metaperson?
As an aside, this is my philosophical opposition to treating corporations as people: they're not. They're metapeople, and unless we human people start properly regarding them as different from us, we will be unable to take measures to protect ourselves from their thoughtlessness, as they often care as little for a mere human as you do for an individual cell of your body.
Anyway. As we know, the metaperson American Conservatism (A.C. for short) has a problem: it's a chronic liar. Each individual human in A.C. is like one of its brain cells, metaphorically speaking, and many of A.C.'s brain cells are constantly bombarded with disingenuous, self-serving memes served up by hate radio, News Corp. and the like. That's a problem.
For example, I believe that it's why A.C. has made such poor use of the Web 2.0, which is all about many-to-many communication. I think of it like how a mic picking up its own speakers develops feedback, so that any signal is totally overwhelmed by a single, synchronized noise. The authentic voices in A.C.'s brain are being drowned out by the synchronized noise of the conservative media's talking points.
Russ Douthat at The Atlantic gets it, at least at some level. I don't know if his proposed solution of "elites who can step outside this cocoon and see national politics more clearly" will be enough. I don't think so, but I hope so. Even though I'm no longer part of A.C. myself, I'm convinced that A.L. (American Liberalism) and the U.S.A. as a whole are better off dealing with a wiser, calmer, less messed up, better self-actualized A.C., just as I'd rather my neighbor not be a psycho even if it means that he's a tougher business competitor.
So, where do we go from here? There is no magic bullet. We can't fix them. All we can do is recognize that A.C. is in The Trap, and work at protecting ourselves, our country and our world from its inevitable excesses. That will take work -- a chronic liar is a very high-maintenance associate -- but that's life and we can do it. Yes we can!