The Delusional Thinking of GW Bush

As we witness the collapse of the Bush Administration, questions will undoubtedly arise as to the reasons for it unfolding as such a complete disaster.  Rather than discuss its roots politically, I intuit that its roots can be discovered by psychological analysis.  As we learn each day about violations of the civil rights of Americans, breaches of International Conventions, and the general disregard for the US Constitution and the rule of law, many have stated publicly what they have felt privately for some time: George Bush is a sick man.

The psycho-historians will be analyzing GW Bush for decades to come.  How did this man reach this point, and why did the people around him let him go so far?  Historians generally will ask why Americans let it happen; why did not they try to stop the killings and the tortures and the violations of civil rights?

An analysis of the particular aetiology of a historic figure must begin somewhere.  In part one, we begin with an overview of delusions.

A standard definition of delusion is attributed to Mullen (1979: 36):

A delusion is an abnormal belief.  Delusions arise from disturbed judgments in which the experience of reality becomes a source of new and false meanings.  Delusions usually have attributed to them the following characteristics:

(i)   They are held with absolute conviction.
(ii)  They are experienced as self-evident truths usually of great personal significance.
(iii) They are not amenable to reason or modifiable by experience.
(iv)  Their content is often fantastic or at best inherently unlikely.
(v)   The beliefs are not shared by those of a common social or cultural background.

The DSM-IIIR defines it as:

A false personal belief based on incorrect inference about external reality and firmly sustained in spite of what almost everyone else believes and in spite of what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary.  The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's subculture (i.e. it is not an article of religious belief).

As we apply the elements of the condition to what we see and hear coming from Mr Bush, we see evidence that Bush is a delusional thinker.  For example, lets choose We are winning in Iraq as a personal belief of Bush.  Without going through each element, we assume he meets the first four elements of the definition--I leave it to the reader to briefly run the statement through the definition and see it applies.  

But, all five elements must be met, and the fifth is, in this case, the clincher.  For the past several months, an argument that element five was not met could be made.  But, that time has changed.  As people fall away from Bush from his inner-circles, Bush remains.

This fifth element of each definition above--that the beliefs he has are not shared by the other members of his subculture--is coming into focus.  As we know, the general public left him several years ago, and more are leaving him with every poll.  Pro-military politicians, such as Jack Murtha, left him last year.  The Democrats left him and ran successfully against him in November.  As time goes on, all but his ever-shrinking cadre of like-minded delusionals remain.  

It may be argued that until, say, Bill Kristol, Dick Cheney, and Fox News disagree with Bush's thinking, element five is not met.  I suggest that is not possible because this ever-shrinking small group either have planted the delusion or get paid to spread the delusion, or simply shares Bush's delusions and will continue to share them until the end of time.

But, what is essential to our diagnosis is the fact that those similarly-situated to him are leaving him.  When we are discussing, for example, the delusion, We are winning in Iraq, we see that the people in Bush's subculture, e.g., Rumsfeld, Hadley, Powell, Gates, and the Joint Chiefs, are reasonably pessimistic, privately, if not publicly, and lack the profoundly absolute conviction that Bush holds.

Sources and Further Reading:

Garety, P.A. and Hemsley, D. R. (1997) DELUSIONS: INVESTIGATIONS INTO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DELUSIONAL REASONING.

Mullen, P. (1988) 'Phenomonology of disordered mental function' in ESSENTIALS OF POST-GRADUATE PSYCHIATRY.

Oltmanns, T.F. and Maher, B.A. (1988) DELUSIONAL BELIEFS.