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Ozodi Thomas Osuji
Where a problem exists, it must be studied and described, as it is. We must explore the problem’s cause, understanding that most causal explanations do not have all the facts and often end up been more speculative than factual. Having grappled with understanding the problem, we must seek ways to solve it, where it is possible to do so, and live with what cannot be changed and have the wisdom to know the difference.
The term paranoia derives from Greek; it means belief in what is not true as true, in this case belief in an idea of the self that is not true as true. The paranoid person believes himself superior to other people, a belief that is not true.
Another word for paranoia is delusion disorder; the deluded person believes in what is not true as true and acts on the basis of his faulty belief. Generally, those around the paranoid/deluded person do not share his beliefs yet he believes them as real and acts on them.
We do not know what ultimate reality is, but in the here and now world reality is a social construct; realty is what all of us agree is real and what there is social consensus for. An individual is normal to the extent that his idea of reality is generally the same as most peoples idea of reality. Where an individual thinks that something is real and the rest of humanity thinks otherwise he is generally deluded (unless he is god and knows what the rest of us do not know).
In paranoia, the individual believes that he is superior to other people and wants other people to see him, as he wants to be seen, as a superior person. Other people do not see him, as he wants to be seen, as superior to them; they see him as an ordinary human being, like themselves. But the paranoid person does not like to be seen as an ordinary human being; he does not want to accept that he is the same and equal with other people; he would rather believe that he is superior and better than other people.
There is conflict between how the paranoid person wants to be seen by other people and how they see him. Because there is a conflict in how he wants to be seen and how he is seen the paranoid person experiences social, interpersonal problems. He is forever accusing other people of demeaning him, of seeing him as unimportant, and as not superior to them. In so doing, he generates a lot of social conflict for himself and for those around him.
If the individual insists on being seen as a superior person, and since normal humanity is not going to see him as superior to them, he is going to have a problem in his hands. Other people resent being told to elevate the paranoid person above them and often attack him in an effort to remind him that he is just an ordinary person like the rest of them.
Generally, the paranoid person ends up being persecuted by other people. He is persecuted because people persecute whoever elevates himself above other people. Yet the paranoid person does not see the role he plays in his persecution. Generally, he fancies himself an innocent victim being persecuted by evil other people. He does not see the fact that it is his wish for superiority over other people that dispose them to hate and attack him and, therefore, that he is the primary cause of his persecution. If he gives up his desire for superiority and relates to other people as one with him, as the same and equal with him, they would feel at peace with him and not persecute him.
To relate to other people as equal with one is to be normal and the paranoid person does not want to be normal; he wants to be abnormal by wanting to seem superior to other people.
DEGREES OF PARANOIA
There are different degrees of paranoia. There is paranoid personality. Here, the individual feels inordinately inadequate and compensates with desire for superiority and wants other people to see him as a superior person, which, of course, they would not do (no healthy human being ever accepts another human being as his superior; their creator created them equal). He then feels humiliated, belittled, disgraced, degraded, slighted and criticized by other people. The paranoid person has constant sense of been belittled and humiliated and demeaned by other people (from them seeing him as ordinary, not as he wants to be seen, a great person).
The paranoid person does not trust other people’s intentions and believes that people would exploit him if given the opportunity. He is suspicious of other people’s motives, and is always wondering what they are up to; whether they are out to take advantage of him, harm him etc.
The paranoid person is rigid and stiff and seldom spontaneous and humorous. As it were, the paranoid person’s life is a protracted effort to seem important and dignified and the dignified cannot be ordinary to laugh and enjoy good jokes.
The individual can be a paranoid personality and still manage most jobs in society, such as be a medical doctor, attorney, engineer and head of state. (Many heads of states are paranoid, such as Nixon, Hitler, and Stalin etc.) Paranoia does not affect intellectual reasoning but affects emotional intelligence. The paranoid person can exhibit the best technical expertise in his field of training, say mathematics, physics, but is unable to get along with the people around him. There is a school of thought that believes that paranoia tends to be found in very intelligent persons and seldom in those with low IQ?
Delusion disorder is characterized by more bizarre paranoid beliefs and behaviors. The paranoid personality has his suspicions but suspects that they may not be true hence may not acts on them, whereas the deluded person believes that his suspicions are true and act on them.
There are five types of delusion disorder: grandiose, persecutory, jealous, somatic and erotomanic. In grandiose type the individual believes himself the most important person on earth, sees himself as superior to other people, and sees himself as having the best intelligence in the world and is selected by providence to solve the problems of the world. (Some feel called upon to solve their society’s political problems and believe that only they can do so; others feel that God selected them to establish a new religious order and that only they can do so…this is called the paranoid prophet.)
The grandiosely deluded person wants to be the most powerful person on earth and wants other people to collude with his delusion and see him as the most powerful person on earth. Other people, of course, do not see him as better than themselves and he feels annoyed at them for not seeing him, as he wants to be seen.
He is always accusing other people of demeaning him, of making life difficult for him and since they do not believe that they did so they feel offended by him. Thus, generally, other people quarrel with the paranoid person and in doing so reinforce his belief that other people do not like him and that the world is a hostile place and that he ought to defend himself least other people take advantage of him. This situation is called paranoid self fulfilling prophecy; the paranoid person accuses people of doing what they did not do: hate him, and in doing so make them to hate him and that reinforces his earlier false belief that people hate him. The paranoid person does not see what role he plays in getting people to hate him by his accusatory nature; he lacks insight into the correlation of cause and effect in his life, the fact that his desire for power and accusatory behavior alienates people and makes them to not like him. The paranoid person is caught in a vicious circle where he generates the negative things that happen to him and does not know that he did so hence cannot get out of the circle.
In persecutory delusion the individual feels persecuted by other people; he believes that other people are trying to pull him down from his imaginary superior status, and feels angry with them. Since he wants to seem superior to other people, some people do, in fact, attack him, in an effort to bring him down to reality. This trend metastasizes into all sorts of places, such as the man who believes that his wife wants to poison him and would not eat food she cooked.
In jealous type the individual is so insecure that he wants to control his or her partner’s every behavior; when the partner leaves home he wonders if she is having sexual affairs with other people and may go out trying to catch her in such acts and generally accuses her of cheating on him; he often beats his girl friend and or wife because he believes that she is cheating on him.
In somatic type the individual believes that there is something wrong with a part of her body (I use the feminine pronoun for this disorder is primarily found in women) and medical doctors do not corroborate her conviction that she has an illness. Apparently, believing that she is physically sick makes her feel important and gratifies the grandiose aspect of paranoia.
In erotomanic type the individual believes that another person, usually a person society deems as important and famous, is in love with her when that is not true. (A certain Igbo woman believes that Jesus Christ is her husband; another believes that a certain famous professor is her husband.) Some erotomanics stalk those they believe are in love with them and may, indeed, attack them or their spouses for they believe that they are the legitimate spouses of such persons. Apparently, the belief that a famous person is in love with one or is ones husband makes one feel important hence mask ones underlying sense of inadequacy.
In the most severe form of paranoia, schizophrenia, paranoid type, the individual, in addition to having delusions, also has hallucinations (in one or more of the five senses…auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory etc). Schizophrenia is a psychosis; psychosis is characterized by the presence of delusions and hallucinations. Schizophrenia is rare, it occurs in less than one percent of the population, and not all schizophrenics are paranoid (there are disorganized types, undifferentiated types, residual types, as well as paranoid types). Invariably the various types of schizophrenia are treated with neuroleptic/psychotropic medications, such as Zyprexa, Resperdal, Haldol, and Thorazine etc. These medications reduce the gross symptoms of schizophrenia by acting on dopamine receptors and reducing the level of that neurotransmitter in the brain (and, incidentally, generate the symptoms of Parkinson disease, since that disease results from low level dopamine in the brain; this in turn requires administering anti-Parkinson medications, such as Artaine and Cogentine). So far, no one has figured out a way to heal schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is not our present interest. If you can read this paper the chances are that you are not schizophrenic. At present, I am talking about non-psychotic paranoia, the so-called neurotic paranoia; this aspect of the disease can be healed.
Whereas the paranoid personality may have a profession and the deluded person may also have a profession albeit problematic, the schizophrenic, paranoid type, cannot handle the stress of professional life; he is the prototypal mentally ill person in psychiatric hospitals, and in the case of Nigeria, wandering the streets.
(Persons with Bipolar Affective Disorder, and Depression are also found in psychiatric hospitals. In mania the individual is euphoric, has excited affect, has poor judgment and often is deluded, such a guy may believe that he is John Lennon and such a woman may believe that she is Cleopatra…famous figures that make them feel famous and important. In depression the individual loses the desire for the activities of daily living, such as food, sports, work, friendship, school and generally feels that life is not worth living and wants to die; she may lay on her bed moping, not motivated to get up and do what life requires of us; and has no interest in personal hygiene and grooming; often she has suicidal thoughts and may attempt self mutilation. Bipolar and depression are treated with medications: anti mania …Lithium, Depakote… and anti depressant medications…Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft etc.)
THE CAUSE OF PARANOIA
People have speculated on what causes paranoia to no end. Let me quickly say that nobody knows what causes paranoia.
Generally, we reason from effect to cause in talking about paranoia. We know that paranoid persons desire superiority, so we reason that they feel inferior. This is not good logical reasoning, is it?
Nevertheless, it seems that paranoid persons feel intolerably worthless, valueless, and see life as meaningless and purposeless and compensate with their opposites: pursue imaginary over adequacy, extreme worth and value and make belief sense of meaning and purpose.
Empirical evidence suggests that many paranoid persons inherited medical disorders that make them feel physically inadequate and they then want to seem adequate. Social factors can also make a person feel inadequate. Consider America. Here, black persons are seen as unintelligent and inferior and are generally discriminated against by white persons. Many black persons tend to develop aspects of paranoia.
What is self-evident is that the paranoid person feels small and wants to seem big. What is big is conceptual, is a mental construct and therefore not real. The paranoid person uses his thinking and imagination to construct ideas of what a very important person is like and tries to become him; he now pretends to be the imaginary important person he made up; he presents himself as his wished for important self to other people to relate to; when other people validate his fictional important self he feels okay but if they do not collude with him and affirm his imaginary important self he feels angry at them.
No one has figured out the real cause of paranoia. However, I am inclined to believe that it has many causal factors. I believe that there is always some biological aspect to the etiology of paranoia; I believe that the individual inherited a biological disorder that makes him feel not physically healthy; that he probably experienced social situations where other people saw him as not good enough (children with problematic bodies are often made fun of by healthy children; if you are no good at sports kids who are good at sports make fun of you), and at the larger societal level people do look down on some persons (in America whites look down on blacks).
In Nigeria Igbos were considered primitive by their neighbors because, of all the Nigerian tribes, they did not develop beyond village governance. Hausas had Hausa wide political structures; Yoruba and Edo had tribe wide political structures, even the Efiks had relatively sophisticated governance structures. The Igbo, until recently, had only rudimentary governing structure. Being considered backward could generate poor self- esteem and restitutory false important self, hence paranoia.
Igbos did not develop urban living until recently. Immigrants to urban areas tend to develop paranoia than those living in their natural environments, in this case, Igbo villages. Perhaps, Igbo newness to city living contributes to their paranoia?
Another possible causal factor in the etiology of paranoia is existential. Paranoid persons tend to be exquisitely sensitive; they correctly perceive human existence as an exercise in futility. Our bodies are worthless and valueless (if you melted down the human body it is worth about a dollar). Paranoid persons accurately evaluate the human body as worthless and valueless and accurately evaluate human existence as meaningless and purposeless. We are born and dance our dances of worth and then die and rot and smell to high heaven.
An objective assessment of human beings shows that they are not special and are nothing; they are humongous nothingness making a great deal of noise about being something special.
Appraising the human condition correctly, the paranoid child despairs; he feels depressed and countermands his depression by attempting to make his body worthwhile and his life meaningful. He uses his mind to construct imaginary importance for himself and imaginary meaning and purpose for his life.
Paranoia is the imaginary worth and meaning the individual who knows that he has no worth and meaning gives to himself. This is one reason why it is very difficult to heal paranoia: if the individual gives up his imaginary worth he experiences his underlying existential worthlessness and meaninglessness. He does not want to accept his existential worthlessness and meaninglessness hence clings to the fictional importance and meaning and purpose paranoia gives to him.
The paranoid person, if he wants to heal, must, of course, give up his beliefs in imaginary worth and meaning and accept that he has no existential worth and meaning. Life in body has no worth; life on earth has no meaning and one has to accept those facts and live with them without fleeing into imaginary worth and meaning.
If the individual accepts that he has no worth and nevertheless recognizes that love is the only thing that seems to give our earthly lives some semblance of worth and meaning and dedicates his life to working for love, to loving himself, as he is, ordinary, not as he wants to become, important, and loving other people, as they are, ordinary, not as he wants them to become, ideal, the individual feels peaceful and happy.
Accommodating reality, as it is, is the best solution to mental disorders. We cannot replace reality with our desired fantasy reality.
UNDERSTANDING AND HEALING PARANOIA
We have to understand the nature of paranoia and do whatever we can to ameliorate it. If we see paranoid persons we cannot just forgive, that is, overlook their often socially hurtful behaviors. Forgiveness is not good enough. We know that in pursuit of their imaginary important selves and perception that other people do not recognize their fictional special selves that paranoid persons do damage to other people. Consider Adolf Hitler: he had paranoid personality disorder (plus narcissistic and antisocial personality and delusions of grandeur). The man probably felt inordinately inferior and compensated with desire for absolute superiority. He wanted to be the most important person on earth. He wanted his extended self, his group, the Germans, to be the most important group on earth. To realize his deluded goals he embarked on senseless wars and killing people. He judged his neighbors (Jews, blacks, Slavs etc) as inferior and wanted to kill them all off. If this man was forgiven and overlooked he would kill more than the fifty million persons he managed to kill before the Allies stopped him.
Those who reject their real selves and are pursuing false grandiose self-concepts can kill other people to make themselves seem important. Was Hitler important, were his Germans superior to any other people? Of course, they were as ordinary as all of us. They are all going to die and rot. Hitter shot himself and his body was burned and dumped in a shallow grave; in a flower garden thus he became manure for the flower plants around the Fuhrer bunker. So much for the most important man (manure) on earth!
At the every day level, many paranoid men make life hellish for those around them, their wives and children, by insisting on been treated as if they are important persons.
Paranoid persons do produce a lot of social suffering for people and we cannot just forgive and overlook their mental disorder. We have to do something about it. We have to teach these people that paranoia is a mask, a false self that they have to give up.
It is true that if you overlook the mask of paranoia that you would see the real self in the paranoid person. As noted elsewhere, it is true that at root we are all spiritual beings having physical experiences. Our true self is Christ, the Son of God who is as his father created him: holy and unified with his father. But in the here and now world we are not Christ, we are egos in bodies.
As egos we do evil things to one another. Egos seek their self-interests and want to seem superior to each other. We have to understand our separated self-concepts, our egos and heal them. We cannot just overlook our egos to see our masked Christ. True, Christ is masked by the ego but in the temporary universe we are egos in bodies and in pursuit of our ego goals do harm one another.
In pursuit of the imaginary big self the paranoid person does harm other people and himself. His imaginary big self is meant to enable him cope with a world that seems intractable and powerful. The physical and social world seems vast and overwhelming and the child believed that if he were a very important self that he could deal with that all-powerful world. But he is wrong; he does not have to wear the mask of importance to deal with the impersonal exigencies of this world.
A human being must accept his existential reality, his little self and not pretend to be who he is not, a very powerful self (narcissistic, paranoid self).
If we overlook the mentally ill person’s mental illness we are colluding with him in the harm he does to other people. This is not what religion and psychotherapy should be teaching and to teach that is madness. We need to understand the human ego, normal and abnormal, and heal it.
We heal the ego by insisting that people drop their ego masks of importance and live as the underlying loving self they are. The ego must be given up and the individual live as the loving Christ in him. (Christ is the individual’s real self, his authentic self.)
We cannot encourage people to pursue grandiose selves. Rationality disposes us to understand and heal the mentally ill rather than accept their illness and what they do out of that illness.
IGBO PARANOIA
Paranoia is found in all human groups; indeed, aspects of it are found in all human beings. On September 11, 2001 after Arab Muslim terrorists attacked America, most Americans were in paranoid mood. They felt attacked and were itching to get back at those who attacked them, to go kill those who killed some of their people. They were ready to descend on the Arab world and kill as many Arabs as they could get away with.
If people feel attacked they feel insecure and react with defensive measures. This is what paranoia is all about. The paranoid feels attacked, made inadequate, and is defensive; he wants to seem adequate and fight back, defeat whatever made him seem inadequate.
All human beings, as long as they identify with their separated self-concepts, their egos and bodies, do feel attacked and defensive. We are all prone to paranoia, to delusional disorder, to even schizophrenia. The distinction between the clinically paranoid person and the normal person is degrees in their level of paranoia, not absence of paranoia in the normal person.
The nature of existence makes all human beings, particularly the supersensitive ones, to appreciate that our bodies are nothing and that our lives have no intrinsic meaning and purpose. If you like, you can pump a bullet into my head and kill me and I can do the same to you. Thus, our lives are not special.
Nature destroys us at will: earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, tsunamis, floods, hurricanes, draughts, plagues of diseases, virus, bacteria, fungi etc destroy us at will. To nature we are nothing special.
We are all aware of this existential reality. As it were, our natural desire for importance is attacked by earthly reality; we feel damage to our narcissistic wishes and react with narcissistic rage.
Paranoia is the construction of imaginary ideal self to mask our self-perception of nothingness. Paranoia is found in all human beings.
Clinically, perhaps, ten percent of the population everywhere suffers from aspects of the different paranoia (paranoid personality, delusion disorder, schizophrenia, paranoid type).
In my observation, Igbos, on the other hand, seem to deviate from the general human norm. In my relationship with Igbos, at least, one out of every five of them shows aspects of paranoia (that is, 20% of the Igbo population has some paranoia and or narcissism).
My observation is, of course, not based on rigorous scientific study. I have not randomly taken a sample of Igbos, say 1000, and examined them for paranoia. If you are inclined to disagree with my thesis, please do a more rigorous study to refute it.
WHY IS THE INCIDENCE OF PARANOIA HIGH IN IGBOS?
In other papers I speculated on why there is high incidence of paranoia in the Igbos. I talked about their culture been individualistic and competitive. In the Igbo world each person is supposed to work and make of himself what he could; Igbo society accepts people conditionally; only those who seem successful are accepted and those who seem failures are ridiculed and rejected. Failing persons may feel inadequate and compelled to seem successful hence pretend to be successful and important. (Igbos are the most pretentious human beings I have seen; they are always pretending social importance and are the most boastful people on earth; they are always boasting about their success; their bravadoes border on the infantile.)
A society that does not accept its people unconditionally, as Carl Rogers pointed out, contributes to their self-rejection and pursuit of idealized important selves.
I talked about the Igbos recent history of slavery as a possible causal factor. During slave times people were kidnapped and sold to slavery. It is conceivable that Igbos, therefore, lived in intense fear of been kidnapped and sold into slavery hence their paranoid fears and lack of trust in other people.
Since those who seemed weak were captured at inter town wars and sold into slavery, Igbos feared been weak and acted tough to avoid been deemed weak persons to be sold into slavery.
I wondered whether Igbos suffered from unknown physical sicknesses that made them feel inferior hence react with seeking psychological superiority.
I wondered whether Igbos apparent political underdevelopment, the fact that they did not develop superior political structures made them feel inferior. A branch of Igbos, the Onitsha, developed Edo level kingship patterns and, as a result, tended to look down on other Igbos, those who did not develop such supposed advanced political structures. Until recently the Onitsha Igbo called other Igbos Nwa Onyibo, which was meant to describe them as primitive and dissociated from Igbos; they claimed to be Edo, a supposedly civilized bunch. The implication is that Igbos mere rudimentary political structures made them feel primitive and they attempted psychological restitution by seeming superior to their neighbors, neighbors who see them as primitive.
I explored many putative causal factors contributing to the high incidence of paranoia in the Igbos. But all the probable causal factors would also operate in some non-Igbos, so how come these other groups did not develop high incidence of paranoia as the Igbos?
Let me then simply say that I do not know why there is high incidence of paranoia in the Igbos. Perhaps, you can tell us.
In the meantime, what is self-evident to me, an Igbo person, is that many Igbos tend to show paranoid symptoms and pay a terrible price for them.
NARCISSISM
Narcissism is found in most human beings; it is where it is in excess that it becomes a clinical issue. Essentially, narcissism is self-centeredness. It is the human tendency to be preoccupied with ones interests often at the expense of other people’s interests.
The narcissistic personality would like to believe that the world revolves around him, and that he is the center of the universe. He imagines that other people are beneath him, and are inferior to him and, as such, ought to exist to serve his interests, but not him their interests. He wants all the people around him to pay attention to him, and admire him. It is as if he in a fishbowl and all persons pay attention to him, but never him to them.
Because he fancies himself as superior to other people, the narcissistic character justifies using other people to achieve his own goals and discarding them when they are no longer useful to him.
The narcissistic personality enjoys being a person of high social status with accompanying titles. Igbos and other Nigerians are title crazy; these people are so narcissistic that they want to be called Dr Professor, Chief, Alhaji and other honorific titles. Their ancestors used to sell their people to obtain money with which to buy Ozo titles to make them seem very important persons.
The Igbos are narcissistic through and through; getting other people’s attention and seeming like they are very important persons is practically all that they live for. They do not seem to live to do things for other people, to serve other people; instead, they seem to live to use other people to gratify their infantile narcissistic cravings…if they manage to go to school and become, say, an engineer they want you to call them engineer Njoku etc.
These people are so narcissistic that even their illiterates fancy themselves better than well-educated Nigerians. They quickly tell you that Hausas go to universities on affirmative action programs, not because they could get in through the competitive door. The assumption is that Igbos are smarter than Hausas. You ask these fools to show you the proof for their belief that their ethnic group is smarter than others. In Intelligence testing all Nigerian tribes score the same. But these arrogant Igbos do not deal with facts but delusions of superiority. They are so supercilious in their conviction of their superiority that they would not pay attention to what well educated members of Nigeria’s other ethnic groups say; they take their own silly conceptions of reality as reality. If you are perceived as not in their bandwagon, they extend to you the same negative treatment they extend to other Nigerians: see you as not worthy of being listened to. Thus, one such creature, perhaps, operating at marginal secondary school level, felt qualified to be dismissive towards me (even as he seems intellectually incapable of understanding what I am trying to teach him).
Igbo narcissism and delusion probably motivated Nzeogwu and his fellow army officers to believe that they should overthrow a duly elected Nigerian government in 1966. Those school-boys (they were in their twenties) who attempted to take over the government had no idea of what to do with the government they wanted to seize. These people have to learn to respect authority figures rather than go about thinking that they know it all; it is obvious that they know very little. Arrogance is not a substitute for real knowledge.
Narcissism shares a lot in common with antisocial personality disorder; both seek attention and feel entitled to getting things from other people and do not want to give anything to other people; both are prone to stealing and not feeling guilty or remorse. If you are naive and entrust some Igbos with public money to do something for their people, such money wounds up in their pockets.
These people’s narcissism has made them incapable of leadership unless you accept narcissistic leaders, as opposed servant leaders, as good leaders. They seek public offices for the prestige such offices gives them, not for what they want to do for their people. Did I say their people? These people do not seem to have identification with their people. They use their people for their personal glory. Having redirected the public money they ought to have used to improve their people’s lot they blame other Nigerians for the lack of development in their Igbo world. They have developed the bad habit of always blaming Hausa and Yoruba for Igbo problems. Indeed, the more machiavellian politicians among them manipulate their people’s resentment of other Nigerian tribes and always point blaming fingers at other Nigerians for their problems when, in fact, they are the problem. If they spent their people’s money developing their economy, such as paving their city streets rather than banking their public monies overseas they would make a dint on their apparent economic backwardness.
In Alaigbo nobody cares for other people; it is a land where each person cares for himself, not for other persons; a dog eat dog world; you either make it on your own or no other person helps you. Obafemi Awolowo gave his Yoruba people free public education. In Alaigbo, who cares if the children went to school or not? If your parents have the money to pay for your education, they do so, if not Igbo narcissistic leaders, from Azikiwe to the present, do not give a hoot. These people are so narcissistic that I do not believe that they are capable of being leaders of Nigeria, not until they replace pursuit of crass egoism with social service.
(I can just see some of these people saying that I hate the Igbos or hate my self. It appears that the only psychological concept they understand is hate. I do not hate the Igbos or myself. I am just stating the obvious truth. As these people currently are, they seem totally dedicated to serving their personal interests, not public interests. Leaders are persons who rise above their personal interests and serve public interests. I do not see servant leaders in Alaigbo; I see narcissistic leaders in Alaigbo. This is my perception, take it or leave it or prove me wrong, not by appealing to my tribal sentiments but by actually showing me servant leaders in Alaigbo. These people have become so debased that upon seeing the sign of money they can sell their mothers. If you are involved in a business scheme with them and proffer money, you can count on their attempting to abscond with your money. The level of amorality in this people makes you wonder if they are human beings?)
Leadership comprises of positing visions, dreams and goals for your group’s upliftment and using human resources and material in accomplishing them. Leaders think of their group’s interests and work 24/7 towards attaining them. Contemporary Igbos are mostly motivated by self-interests and not social interests. They would pocket whatever money is given to them to serve their people and like amoral criminals would show no remorse from such dastardly action. It would take a few more generations before these almost sub-human persons are transformed into true human beings and true leaders: those who dedicate their lives to seeking ways to give to society, not just to get from society. The people are so corrupt that they would know full well that a guy stole to get his money and yet make him their village chief. It s amazing how low these people have become.
Igbo persons are boastful. If you are with them all you hear is how well they are doing in life Vis a Vis other people. If you seem disinterested in material wealth and political power they have no respect for you.
These people are narcissistic beyond belief. Their whole life is dedicated to talking about how achieving they are, how important they are and how superior persons they are. Like narcissists everywhere, they feel superior to other people and, therefore, feel justified using those they deem inferior to achieve their narcissistic goals.
Make no mistake about it, many Igbos would use you to get what they want out of life and discard you when you are no longer useful to them. And they would blame you for making yourself usable, for being a mugu, a mumu. They do not take responsibility for their antisocial behaviors; they always blame other people, including their victims. The 419 advance fee criminals among them blame the westerners they rip off, for being easy prey, for trusting them with their money. It seems that these people have become indistinct from animals, for that which makes human beings different from animals, caring for each other, is totally absent in them. I have never seen a more callous and brutal set of people in my life. These people are totally lacking in compassion and sympathy for their fellow human beings; they only understand pragmatic behavior, using other people for their personal good, but not serving other people, as Christians should. When they claim to be Christians, they are actually on the prowl for ways to use that ruse to cheat the gullible that trust them with their money.
These people are foreign to the concept of love and do not love any one, use you, yes, but help you, no. They are amoral to the T; they even boast that they do not feel guilty and remorse when they engage in antisocial behaviors and do not care for the good opinion of mankind; they constitute the preponderance of Nigeria’s 419 advance fee criminals ripping off people all over the world.
These peoples entire existence is dedicated to making money and becoming rich; money is their god, not love. Like savages they took pride in selling their people, but not in helping them.
These people are so amoral that they tell lies, as if lies is in their genes. They will tell you whatever they think that you want to hear; they will boldly tell lies about other people if in doing so they get their way. It is seldom that you find an Igbo person who sticks to the truth and is principled in his behaviors. These people are morally bankrupt.
They seek your attention and admiration; they want you to see them as very important persons and if you play along with this neurosis of theirs they get along with you, but if you ignore them they feel angry at you and may even attack you. They insist that people collude with them and see them as they want to be seen; as very impotent and superior persons.
These people’s behaviors are pathetic, contemptible and despicable. Their childishness knows no bounds, yet have serious consequences. They are always comparing themselves to other Nigerian ethnic groups and bragging how they are more achieving than them.
IGBO PERSECUTION COMPLEX
Many Igbos take special joy in saying derogatory things about other Nigerian ethnic groups. They have put down names for every Nigerian ethnic group (Awusa for Hausa, Ngbati for Yoruba etc).
Those they insult, of course, do not like been insulted. But like paranoid characters they have no insight into the fact that all people feel inferior and want to seem superior and that if you put people down that you have psychologically attacked them and reduced them to feeling existential depression, a state that people are trying to avoid. (See Eric Fromm’s writings.)
Indeed, Igbos seem to think that just because they put other Nigerians down that other Nigerians should accept been put down! They, in fact, think that Hausas, Yorubas etc should accept the inferiority status they made for them. This is the height of delusional disorder.
If you put some one down he resents you and, if he could, would attack you. Thus, every once in a while other Nigerians attack and kill insulting Igbos.
Igbos are generally persecuted by other Nigerians but like paranoid persons they are unable to see the cause of their persecution; they refuse to see that it is their childish arrogance and tendency to insult other Nigerians that makes other Nigerians to hate them. Instead, like paranoid persons they see themselves as innocent victims and blame those who persecute them. They have persecution complex; they believe that other Nigerians persecute them but refuse to see what they did to generate such persecution These people are truly childish and lacking insight to cause and effect relationships in human behavior.
If you call a person a derogatory name he has every right to attack and, if necessary kill you. Human beings are already feeling down, are existentially depressed, and do not need you to make them feel more depressed than they are by putting them down.
Given the realities of the human condition, you ought to do whatever you could to make people feel good about themselves and develop positive self esteems rather than contribute to their poor opinion of themselves, as Igbos do to other Nigerians.
(There is an Igbo moron at an Internet forum called naijapolitics; this man is middle aged, he is, at least, 55 years old. Do you know what this gorilla, this shifty eyed criminal…he looks as you would expect a 419 criminal to look… does? He writes put down letters about other Nigerians! In a multiethnic country, to avoid generating inter ethnic conflict, it is critical to be respectful of all ethnic groups. But, no, this ape does not seem to know that those he is desecrating could put a bullet into his primitive head and shut him up forever and teach his kind what is meant by civilization: caring for people, not abusing them. This man actually believes that it is fun to insult other Nigerians. I am really surprised that no one has put him out of his misery by silencing him forever; he is a disgrace to humanity. The baboon actually believes that he and his Igbo group are superior to other Nigerian groups. We, black folks, resent it when some racist whites claim to be superior to us, but here is a man, a man with low IQ, under100, claims to be superior to other Nigerians! If this old fool was a real human being he would know that all people, Igbo and Hausa, black and white, men and women, are equal and stopped his idiotic and annoying noises.)
The wonder is that other Nigerians do not attack and kill more Igbos than they did; I would attack and kill them if they called me the derogatory names they call other Nigerians.
I am not suggesting that it is only Igbo arrogance that leads to the various pogroms they have experienced in Northern Nigeria; I am saying that their arrogance is a contributory factor. I am not so simplistic as to not appreciate that Nigeria is like any other polity and that the various groups in the country are fighting for power and control of the polity. Each ethnic group in Nigeria wants to dominate others; that is the nature of politics. In their efforts to dominate others, other groups see Igbos as obstacles and attack them.
Political realism not withstanding, Igbo haughtiness plays a role in their intermittent history of genocide in the hands of other Nigerians.
(From Igbo self-pitying perspective one can say that I am blaming the victim of persecution. That is wrong; no human being has a right to persecute others; all that I am trying to do is understand why certain people are persecuted, I am trying to appreciate their role in other persons persecution of them; I am not excusing their persecutors; for if you kill people, no matter what they did to you, you must account for your wrongful action. I do not want to get enticed into Igbo folie a deau. Here, Igbos see themselves as persecuted by other Nigerians and socialize other Igbos to believe that other Nigerians persecute them. To the extent that you see yourself as persecuted by other Nigerians and blame them for the plight of the Igbos, Igbos see you as one of them. In folie a deau, group paranoia, if a significant person or person’s feel(s) persecuted he gets those who seek his attention and acceptance to feel persecuted hence paranoid. A paranoid parent, for example, can get his family members to feel persecuted by constantly telling them that other people are out to get them and that they should be afraid of them. A religious sect can socialize its members into internalizing the idea that non-group members persecute them, hence group paranoia. The fact is that I, an Igbo, do not feel persecuted by other Nigerians and am not about to buy into the Igbo folie a deau that tells me that other Nigerians hate me or persecute me when that is not true. I would sooner trust a Hausa or Yoruba than an Igbo person.)
ACCEPTANCE OF HUMAN EXISTENTIAL NOTHINGESS
Human beings are self-conscious animals and observe their existential status in the universe. They would like to be important and special. But, in fact, they are not important and special. Their bodies are essentially food being cooked for other organism’s (such as worms). They are born, grow up, struggle to live and must die. Give or take, 120 years and every human being dies.
An objective appraisal of the human condition makes man realize that his body is worthless and valueless. Yet he devotes his entire life to slaving for food, medications, clothes, shelter etc to maintain his body.
From the perspective of pure reason, human life has no known meaning and purpose. Of course, people do give themselves imaginary meaning and purpose, such as is found in the various religions of mankind, but those are make belief and not real. It does not take particularly high intelligence to realize that the various religions of mankind are fairytales.
Existentialists like Sartre, Camus, Heideggar, Jasper, Keirkergaard, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer etc correctly tell us that our lives have no known meaning to them; however, that each of us can give himself personal meaning by doing what he likes doing that serves social interests.
Appreciating the worthlessness and meaninglessness of being, human beings do not like what they see. If they accepted their existential nothingness they would be depressed and may even commit suicide and cease existing on planet earth (they may yet commit mass suicide with their nuclear weapons). Instead of accepting the obvious, they mask it with pursuit of imaginary important selves.
Everywhere human beings deny their existential reality (nothingness) and seek its opposite (imaginary significance). It is this pursuit of importance and power that is largely responsible for the incidence of paranoia, delusional disorder, mania, schizophrenia and most mental disorders.
If a human being can look at himself in the mirror and accept that he is existentially not different from animals and trees, that he is part of nature and has no more worth than a dog, and is comfortable with that reality he tends to be calm, peaceful and happy.
Let me personalize; I see myself as the same as my dog and as the same as a mosquito. I do not consider myself superior to any animal or tree. I see my body as worthless; I see my life as meaningless. I accept this existential reality. As a result I am almost always calm and peaceful; nothing disturbs my equanimity. From my calm repose I appreciate peoples dance for worth and meaning and laugh at what they are doing.
As Shakespeare’s Macbeth observed: life on earth is like a tale told by a fool, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing; we are like poor actors strutting on life’s stage, and later are heard from no more. Hamlet does the kudos: we are food for worms. I accept this reality and have no delusion of worth or meaning.
I believe that, sooner or later, all people recognize their existential worthlessness and meaningless but instead of accepting it flee from it by constructing false worth and meaning, hence develop mental disorders. They must eventually accept their existentially reality, if they are to become sane.
Accepting reality does not mean seeing ones self as inferior to other people. I see Igbos doing their song and dance of importance; do I see them as superior people? Not at all, I see them as children to be pitied for causing themselves unnecessary pain and suffering. I had similarly seen Hitler and his Germans as no more than ten-year old children pretending superiority over other people.
Human beings are not superior to ants and leaves; we are part of nature and ought to accept that reality and quit pretending to be who we are not: important and special selves.
I believe that paranoia is healed only when the individual and or group of individuals accept their existential realities.
Igbo paranoia would be healed when Igbos accept our shared existential reality and quit seeking its opposite: make belief importance; Igbos will, sooner or later, accept that they are like animals and trees and give up their silly arrogance; and when they do so no one would persecute them and they would live in peace. But until they accept reality, as it is, they would generate conflict for themselves.
At the present Igbos are in the grip of paranoia and its quest for impotence, and as a result alienate other people and would be attacked and killed; they brought their fate to themselves. What they gave to themselves they can give differently; they can give themselves peace and joy if they let go their egoism.
METAPHYSICS
In other writing, I explored what seemed to me a rational metaphysics. I refer you to such writings. But since I believe that we cannot heal paranoia with pure reason, science, but must factor in some non-rational metaphysics, let me summarize my metaphysics and how it applies to the healing of paranoia. My approach is secular and spiritual psychology; I accept the finding of scientific psychology, as well as what is rational in spirituality; I combine science and spirituality. I accept that human beings are animals and that they can be explained through biology (evolution etc), but I also accept that they are more than animals. There seems a part of them that defies mere materialism. What that part is I do not pretend to know.
I am compelled to speculate on the unknown aspect of people and do study the various religions of mankind such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Gnosticism, and philosophy.
I believe that there is only one life force in the universe. If it makes you feel fine call it God, I simply call it life.
One life is itself and simultaneously infinite in number. (One God is himself and all living things). One life force extended itself into all of us and is itself and at the same time is all of us. We are part of one life; we are unified and indivisible, we are one shared life.
Somehow, each of the parts of life wanted to seem separated from the rest and imagines itself as separated from other parts of life and from life itself.
I believe that our earth is a place where that which is unified now seems differentiated into the many of us. Each of us, human beings, animals, trees etc sees himself as different from other forms of life. This is an illusion, for in truth all of life is always unified as one life.
Life on earth is the illusion of unified life-pretending to be separated lives. The pursuit of separation is an illusion, for none of us is an individual and separated from other selves. Much as one likes to believe in independence, the fact is that what other people do affect one and what one does affects them. If you love me I thrive, and if you choose to hate or kill me you can do so and vice versa. We are not separated from each other; we merely live as if we are separated from each other.
The separated ones struggle to seem special (important) and do those things that optimize their seeming separated interests.
Paranoia and other forms of mental disorders are products of our efforts to seem special and separated from each other. The schizophrenic imagines himself superior to other people and separated from them, the manic imagines that his manic ego is superior to other people and that he is separated from them, the deluded person imagines himself superior to other people and separated from them, the depressed person, in a negative kind of thinking, imagines himself superior to other persons (feeling guilty makes him feel superior to those who do not feel guilty); the anxious person is seeking neurotic importance hence separated from other people.
All mental illness emanates from human beings pursuit of separated, special selves, from our pursuit of the impossible; we are not special and are not separated from each other.
Mental health lies in the recognition and acceptance of the fact that we are eternally unified. Union is truth, separation is lies; sameness and equality is our true nature, superiority is lies.
If you see yourself as one with all living things, love them all, see yourself as the same and equal with all people and work for our common interests, dedicate your life to serving the public good, you tend to be peaceful and happy.
Conversely, if you seek personal or group superiority and do not serve our common interests, you tend to live in conflict. Simply stated, union is reality and mental health whereas separation is false and is mental disorder.
If I where to give you advice it is to tell you to see yourself as one with all people, to see you as the same and coequal with all people and for you to dedicate your life to doing what serves our mutual interest (through your own special skill…my skill is understanding human nature and I am giving you free information hence serving your interest).
If you accept our oneness and serve our common interest you would be relatively peaceful and happy. But I know that free advice is not valued, so I will leave you to your devices.
My sole duty is to state the truth, as I see it, as I have done in this paper, and leave it to the reader to do with as he wishes. All things being constant, I expect some Igbos to be annoyed that I see them as insane, crazy and mad, for, ordinarily, they tend to see their pursuit of power and wealth as admirable. Indeed, like most neurotics they are very proud persons (what is neurosis but pride in the false self…see Karen Horne, Neurosis and Human Growth, Alfred Adler, The Neurotic Constitution). I am a big boy and can take opposition. As Albert Ellis said, it is not what others say that makes one angry or sad or anxious but how one interprets it. I could care less what other people say about me provided that I believe that I am stating the truth. Like most people Igbos want other people to sing their praises; I do not sing any ones praises, I live to articulate the truth, painful as it may be, not to please other people.
I am a truth sayer and cannot collude with any one and tell them lies and perpetuate their unhappiness. They can hate me if they want to; I am here to perform my function, which is to call it as I see it irrespective of whose goat is gored. Call me derogatory names; be angry at me, but sooner or later, you will think about my observations. Truth may be denied but not destroyed.
The truth is that we are all one unified life and are eternally the same and equal and must love one another. The lie is any effort to seem individually separated and different from other people.
There is light at the end of the tunnel. Those who tend to become mentally ill tend to be very sensitive persons. In a manner of speaking, they are more advanced human beings. They are able to appraise the human condition, find it not good enough and, unfortunately, flee into a fantasy world they made to replace our ordinary painful reality.
The normal person appears to be incapable of even understanding that our world is absurd. As it were, he appears fast asleep and in his sleep takes his dreams as real and as beautiful. Normal persons live in a world where, as Joseph Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, series) pointed out we must kill to eat. We must kill animals and trees to eat and survive.
How can a world where our survival depends on the death of other living things be considered a beautiful world? Only a sleeping person can consider this world as beautiful. At best, one reconciles ones self to the brutalities of this world but to see it as good is stupid.
The mentally ill are, as R. D. Laing (Politics of Experience) observed, able to see the absurdity of our life. They are too sensitive to accept the evils of this world. They then use their thinking and imagination to construct a self and world that seems to them better than our world and world and check out of our world and check into their imaginary ideal world. They live in fantasyland, in insanity.
Paranoid persons saw our weak, vulnerable and powerless bodies and used their minds to construct ideal alternatives to them; they imagined ideal, perfect and powerful bodies and identify with them. Alas, their ideal world is not going to come into being. Nevertheless, they keep defending their fantasy selves and world. Their imaginary important selves are defended and defense seems to make them real in their awareness. They are wasting their times and energies and must give up their imaginary perfect selves and fictional powers and accept reality as it is; the fact that we are nothing.
My experience working with the mentally ill shows me that the mentally ill, as it were, are close to what Orientals call enlightenment. They have seen through the world of the ego, tinsel town, and rejected it and replaced it with their own imaginary ideal world. What they now need to do is realize that the ideal world they imagined is also of the ego and let it go.
Relinquish the ego and its world, normal or ideal, and sink into the world of undifferentiated oneness, where all life is unified and are the same and equal.
In this light, paranoid Igbos are advanced human beings; they are advanced enough to appreciate the ugliness of the ego self and its world but they are not sufficiently advanced to let go of that ego and its world and accept what Buddhists call no ego self, a life lived from our undifferentiated one self, which the various religions call God.
The paranoid person is near to enlightenment to his real self, which is unified self, a self that is correlated with peace and happiness, but, unfortunately, constructed an ideal ego and its world and fled to it. My job is to persuade such persons to give up their false ideal egos and accept our shared self, an equal self, and in doing so know the peace of life that the ego cannot understand.
CONCLUSION
In this paper I endeavored to describe the phenomenon of paranoia and narcissism in every day language; I eschewed employing clinical terms for I wanted the paper to be read by any one who wants to do so. My goal is to enable those human beings who read the paper to diagnose themselves. If they self assess to have any of the paranoid and or narcissistic symptoms, hopefully, they can seek professional help.
Alas, the Igbos, like many macho traditional persons find it difficult to acknowledge their psychological issues. They tend to see psychotherapy as for women, children and weak men. In the meantime their psychological problems cry out for intervention. Ones heart cries out for them wishing that they could get the help they desperately needed.
In addition to scientific or secular psychological intervention in healing paranoia and other mental disorders, I believe that in as much as man is a creature that asks: who am I, where did I come from and where do I go to when I die, some attempt must be made to provide the mentally ill person with some metaphysical or spiritual therapy. In other papers, I explored spiritual psychology (see www.spiritualpsychologytoday.com).
My goal is to conjoin the insights of spiritual psychology with the insights of secular psychology in helping human beings come to terms with their interesting existence on planet earth. Some of those on so-called spiritual path tend to eschew secular psychology and merely deal with their issues with what seems to me mumbo jumbo new age concepts. Whereas, the insights of religion should be factored into therapy they do not replace the insights of secular therapy.
An American clinical psychologist, Helen Schucman (A course in miracles), built her whole psychotherapy on spiritual grounds; she employed secular psychological terms like delusion, hallucination etc to make her case for spiritual psychotherapy yet gave the impression that it is a waste of time seeking scientific psychotherapy. That is a mistake; on earth we are both body and spirit and must intervene at both levels in our efforts to help us live successfully.
The Igbos, for whatever reasons, exhibit high incidence of paranoia and narcissism; I would like them to get a handle on those psychopathologies, rather than deny their presence.
Denial, an ego defense mechanism, does not eradicate what is denied; what is denied is merely repressed into the ego unconscious and from which it still exercises influence in the individual’s behavior. It is time people understood their psychological make-ups and dealt with whatever psychological problems they have, rather than pretend that they are healthy. Those with training on the human psyche can see that many persons are not functioning at optimal psychological level.
The main problem human beings have is their belief that they have special, separated ego selves; those selves are false self-concepts and do not exist in reality. As long as people identify with separated ego selves they do the absurd things they do on earth. They have to learn that the separated ego self is an illusion and gradually learn that our true self is one self, life itself.
When people give up pursuit of separated, special selves and seek unified self and work for our common interests they are mentally healthy. Mental health lies in union with all selves; mental illness lies in separation from other selves.
Hopefully, this paper would help Igbos begin detaching themselves from their current swollen selves, neurotic selves that they think are healthy selves.
To have no ego separated self; to behave from a part of the self that thinks in terms of what is good for all people, not just the individual, to do things that serve public interests rather than self interests only is mental health. (See my writings on Living from the Real Self, the Unified Self.)
*A mental health professional asked me whether I am sure that I am not projecting what I see in me to Igbos? Good question. All human beings have aspects of paranoia, thus if one talks about other people’s paranoia one is invariably talking about ones own paranoia. I think that I understand my interior psychological economy and not displacing myself more than is inevitable in all psychological analysis. Consciously, my motivation is to help Igbos become better persons. Nevertheless, I said seeming negative things about them. It is understandable if some of them resent my bringing the skeletons in their closets out. Few persons like washing their dirty linen in the public. In the short run some Igbos may hate what I said but in the long run they would appreciate it. It takes courage to say seeming bad things about ones own people; the easiest thing in the world is to seek group approval and say what ones group members would approve. Every coward can say what he thinks that his group would accept; it takes courage to risk one’s group’s rejection by stating the truth, as one sees it. Generally, a prophet is not accepted in his home country and such is the price bringers of light to a world of darkness must pay. Finally, I apologize for seeming to make broad, general, indeed stereotyping statements about Igbos. The problem is so serious that there was no other way to call attention to it than to make sweeping statements.
Ozodi Thomas Osuji
June 26, 2007
ozodiosuji@gmail.com
FURTHER READING
Adler, Alfred, (1999)) The Neurotic Constitution. New York: International Library of Psychology, Routledge.
American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition. (1994) Washington DC: American Psychiatric Press.
Beck, Aaron. (1990) Cognitive Therapy for Personality Disorders. New York: Guilford Press.
Ellis, Albert. (2004) Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. New York: Prometheus Book Publishers.
Fromm, Eric. (1947) Escape from Freedom. New York: Routledge.
Horney, Karen. (1991) Neurosis and Human Growth. New York: W.W. Norton.
Kelly, George. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: W. W. Norton.
Laing, R.D. (1964) The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. New York: Penguin.
Maslow, Abraham. (1970) Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper.
Meissner, William. (1980) The Paranoid Process. New York: Aronson, Jason Publishers.
Meissner, William. (1984) Psychotherapy for the Paranoid Process New York: Aronson, Jason Publishers.
Rogers, Carl (1951) Client Centered Therapy. London: Constable.
Sartre, Jean Paul. (2003) The Philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre. New York: Knopf Publishing Group.
Schucman, Helen. (1976) A Course in miracles. Tiburon, CA.: Foundation for Inner Peace.
Shapiro, David, (1999) Autonomy and the Rigid Character. New York: Basic Books.
Shapiro, David. (1999) Neurotic Styles. New York: Basic Books.
Swanson, David. et al (1070) The Paranoid. Boston: Houghlin, Mifflin.
Uchendu, Victor. (1970) The Igbos of Southeastern Nigeria.
Vaihinger, H. (1935) The Philosophy of As If. London: Kegan Paul Publishers.
www.spiritualpsychologytoday.com
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Posted by Robot| 27.06.2007 11:04