The following is written by a nonclinician.
Analogies between individuals and groups can be overdone but can sometimes be very illuminating. A strong case can be made, for example, that the American public has developed a split personality.
Our recent foreign policy — culminating in the Afghanistan fiasco — suggests that we have also been suffering from a collective case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
PTSD is "a disorder in which a person has difficulty recovering after experiencing or witnessing a terrifying event." It can last for many years.
According to the Mayo Clinic, symptoms can include being easily startled or frightened, always being on guard for danger, and aggressive behavior. Many American soldiers have been diagnosed with this troubling condition after returning from our recent wars.
Our recent wars themselves, however, may be symptoms that our whole country — as reflected by the political system — has been suffering for half a century from a group form of PTSD.
The "terrifying events" which produced our national PTSD are not difficult to identify, if we bother to look for them. They include Pearl Harbor (1941), our involvement in World War II (1941-1945), development of atomic bombs (1945), the orbiting by the Soviet Union of Sputnik (1957), and the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
Nearly 420,000 American soldiers died in World War II, out of a total U.S. population of about 134 million in 1941. Everybody, soldiers and civilians, found themselves yanked out of normal life to contend with an emergency for which we were poorly prepared.
World War II, although a great unifying experience for the country, is probably what kicked us into PTSD, a political malady that was only reinforced by later shocks like Sputnik and 9/11. Having under-reacted to the buildup to World War II, since then we have tended to overreact to any conceivable military threat to the U.S.
We are spending as much for military forces as the next eight or more biggest spenders combined.
The unsuccessful wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and our inept meddling in countries like Syria and Libya, can be seen as consequences of our national PTSD.
Thanks to Donald Trump and Joe Biden, we are extricating ourselves from the mess we created in Afghanistan. But the sharp bi-partisan criticism of our withdrawal indicates how hard it will be to cure our national PTSD.
Critics claim — not totally implausibly — that allowing the Taliban to resume control in Afghanistan will mean that new attacks like 9/11, plotted from there, will again be possible.
But the critics are ignoring President Biden's correct assessment that such attacks could also be launched from many other countries. Since there is no way we could occupy all of them, why such special concern about Afghanistan?
The critics also fail to understand that 9/11 was not intended to destroy the U.S. It likely was intended to bamboozle us into invading countries we do not understand, destabilizing them so the plotters could grab power there. If this was the intent, it succeeded brilliantly!
We need to demonstrate that we have learned from this experience and will not allow ourselves to be suckered into doing the radicals' dirty work for them. Then nobody will have much motive to repeat the 9/11 attacks.
In any event, those attacks capitalized on a technique — ramming skyscrapers with hijacked passenger jets — that is no longer available, since there are effective preventives (locked cockpit doors, careful screening of boarding passengers, etc.) now that we understand the danger.
A side effect of our exaggerated fear of foreign aggression has been our failure to devote more resources to nonmilitary dangers, like pandemics and climate degradation, that are far more real.
PTSD can be fatal for individuals. We need to work to assure that it will not be fatal for the United States of America.
Paul F. deLespinasse is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Computer Science at Adrian College. Read Professor Paul F. deLespinasse's Reports — More Here.
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