The Madness of George W. Bush:

George W. Bush is ill. He has a psycho-spiritual dis-ease of the soul, a sickness that is endemic to our culture and symptomatic of the times in which we live. It is an illness that has been with us since time immemorial. Because it is an illness in the soul of all of humanity, it pervades the field and is in all of us in potential at any moment, which makes it especially hard to diagnose.

Bush''s malady is quite different from schizophrenia, for example, in which different parts of the personality are fragmented and not connected to each other, resulting in a state of internal chaos. As compared to the dis-order of the schizophrenic, Bush can sound quite coherent and appear like a "regular" guy, which makes the syndrome he is suffering from very hard to recognize. This is because the healthy parts of his personality have been co-opted by the pathological aspect, which drafts them into its service. Because of the way the personality self-organizes an outer display of coherence around a pathogenic core, I would like to name Bush''s illness "Malignant Egophrenia" (as compared to schizophrenia), or "ME disease," for short. If ME disease goes unrecognized and is not contained, it can be very destructive, particularly if the person afflicted is in a position of power.

In much the same way that a child''s psychology cannot be understood without looking at the family system of which he or she is a part, George Bush does not exist in isolation. We can view Bush-and his entire administration: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc., as well as the corporate, military industrial complex they are co-dependently enmeshed with, the media they control, the voters supporting them, and ourselves as well-as interconnected parts of a whole system, or a "field." Instead of relating to any part of this field as an isolated entity, it's important to contemplate the entire interdependent field as the "medium" through which malignant egophrenia manifests and propagates itself. ME disease is a field phenomenon and needs to be contemplated as such. Bush''s sickness is our own.

THE DISEASE IS NON-LOCAL

Being a field phenomenon, malignant egophrenia is non-local in nature, which means that it is not bound by the limitations of time or space. Being non-local, this disease pervades and underlies the entire field and can therefore manifest anywhere, through anyone, and at any moment. The disease''s non-local nature makes the question of who has the disease irrelevant, as we all have it in potential. It is more a question of whether or not we are aware of our susceptibility to fall prey to the disease. This awareness itself serves as an immunization protecting us from the pernicious effects of the illness, thereby allowing us to be of genuine help to others.

Bush, like all of us, is both a manifestation of this deeper field and simultaneously an agent affecting the field. He's become so fully taken over by the disease, all the while not suspecting a thing, that he's become a "carrier" for this death-creating disease, thus infecting the field around him. He's become a portal through which the field around him "warps" in such a way as to feed and support his pathogenic process. A non-local, reciprocally co-arising and interdependent field of unconscious denial and cover-up constellates around Bush to enable and protect his pathology. People who support Bush are actually complicit with and enabling Bush's madness in a co-dependent, self-reinforcing feedback loop that is "closed," which is to say it is insular and not open to any feedback from the "real" world.

Bush supporters are not merely disinterested in seeing that they are in denial of reality; on the contrary, they actively don't want to look at this-they resist self-reflection at all costs. Bush and his supporters perversely interpret any feedback from the real world reflecting back their unconsciousness as evidence proving the rightness of their viewpoint. All of Bush's supporters mutually reinforce each others' unconscious resistance to such a degree that a collective, interdependent field of impenetrability is collectively conjured up by them that literally resists consciousness.

People who don''t recognize Bush''s illness and support him are unconsciously colluding with and enabling the co-creation of the pathological field incarnating itself into the human family. People who support Bush become unwitting agents through which this non-local disease feeds and replicates itself. By supporting Bush, they collaborate with and become parts of the greater, interconnected, and self-organizing field of the disease.

The situation is analogous to when seemingly good, normal, loving Germans supported Hitler, believing he was a good leader trying to help them. The German people didn''t realize that the virulent malignant egophrenia pathogen had taken possession of Hitler and was incarnating itself through him. By not seeing this and supporting Hitler, they became agents used by this non-local, deadly disease to propagate itself. This is why Jung says, "evil needs masses for its genesis and continued existence."[i] What happened in Germany was a collective psychosis, and this is what is taking place in our country right now.