Decades ago, Anne Wilson Shaef wrote a book called, "When Society Becomes an Addict. Last year, Alva Noe wrote, "Out of Our Heads," a book on the phenomenon of consciousness in which he argues that there is no basis for believing that an individual's consciousness exists solely within the cranium. Consciousness, he argues, is enacted between the person and the environment, including other beings. So, when we say "society is addicted to oil," or "war traumatizes and dehumanizes society," we are not being metaphorical. The longer this all continues, the sicker we get. All those "normal" people out there? They are the ones in denial.

"The killers among them are empowered." so we are talking about "An ever-growing population of far-off strangers"??? what??!! --them, never us...really too bad about all that ptsd,..can i have another piece of apple pie, please?

It's not just war that's eating at us. It's the constant bombardment of things going wrong, going south, from the BP oil gusher to the local news which is always about trauma and atrocities.

It's like being sand-blasted by the gradual awareness of what we have wrought in the world politically and environmentally in merely 125 years. The awareness that all of our now-standard comforts--from cars to computers, to the food choices we're now accustomed to--may well destroy all life as we know it--if not in our lifetimes, in those of our children or grandchildren.

Oil, nuclear weapons and waste or another Chernobyl, depleted uranium, shale oil extraction, the amount of garbage, especially plastic dumped in the oceans, draining aquifers to bottle water, negation of the US Constitution, homelessness, job loss, health care premiums bigger than mortgage payments.

On top of this, we are planting the sterile seeds of the future with the soullessness of education (Race to the Top and even more standardization--with a side effect of creating a "loser" class) and the status-seeking values of the entertainment-consumer culture.

And then there is all the anger and hatred spewed from every direction. Where is the idea that we have some power in our own lives not to be too busy to notice-- to do as best we can to be happy or unhappy, helpful or self-centered?

However, in terms of governance, what can we do about it? Even our city council doesn't listen or respond never mind the juggernaut in Washington DC.

The most common response seems to be to pout, grumble, curse and blame and keep on doing what we're doing...

In the end there is only one choice but it is not a miracle cure. It is what we do with our own minds and hearts and whether we contribute to the "pollution" or the solutions.

PTSD is an ugly thing, lets watch t.v. instead, okay? I've have had PTSD for almost 50 years now, since the age of 9. And to this very day I am shunned, stigmatized, marginalized and ridiculed. A leper among all you "pretty" and "normal" folks. What is written here is being under-stated at best. Grab onto the nearest hand-rail folks, your going for a ride you'll never forget.

we no longer have any meaningful psychological connection to the land upon which we live...

under our current system, we have no right to such land without payment to those that hold the land hostage...

without right to land, we have nothing but dependency...

this would answer much, psychologically, and suggest resolution..

take your life back, take the land back...

Global Start Date: September 22, 2012...

The trauma of the videotape I saw of the attack on a group of unarmed men in Baghdad continues banging around in my head. The trauma of the gusher in the Gulf of Mexico is ongoing. We may be headed for some sort of post-traumatic disorder, but right at the moment we're still undergoing the trauma.

In describing what he calls “PTSD and the ruins of character,’’ psychiatrist Jonathan Shay cites an official definition of the disorder as it affects individuals. The characteristics include “a hostile or mistrustful attitude toward the world; social withdrawal; feelings of emptiness or hopelessness; a chronic feeling of being ‘on the edge,’ as if constantly threatened; estrangement.’’

In the film noir I WAKE UP SCREAMING, one character says, "It must be terrible to live without hope." And another character replies, "It can be done." You do not have to have experienced war and combat to know PTSD as defined by Shay. That's life in the United States today.

Some call it karma.....

So JC is saying We are not 'all in this together' anymore?

Guess that's why it's called a 'dog eat dog' world and not a 'dog make nice with dog' world.

I posted these 8 points a few days ago as a comment and feel inclined to do so again today, sorry.

1. We humans are the walking wounded and always have been. Our inventions and actions spell that out most clearly. Our collective history is one steeped in blood and hardship.

2. We are born small, extremely vulnerable, powerless and dependent. And, to our detriment, spend a lifetime attempting to compensate for that.

3. We get hurt and traumatized easily, yet heal very slowly, if at all.

4. We fear death and deny its reality most of the time. We create religions and numerous other delusions in order not to see it as punishment for something we must have done.

5. We use words like love and compassion, yet dedicate our lives to pursue power in the name of survival.

6. As long as our lives are kept on the survival level, greed, war, plunder and bloodshed will be with us.

7. We fear ourselves, for here and there, our innate humanity makes its way through all the denial and conditioning. It shows us, how damaged we really are, how far we have removed ourselves from our core nature.

8. At our core we all tick the same. We prefer pleasure to pain, a full belly to hunger and thirst, companionship to isolation, freedom to imprisonment and warmth to freezing.

Coming together is important, yet it is not a substitute for the work that each one of us has to do on our own. Psychology is truly the final frontier and as unchartered as the bottoms of our oceans. Look deeply within, and you'll never be without.

It all depends on not only how many suffer but also on how badly enough they suffer to have not only learned the lessons of the wars they fought in but how well they can pass those lessons to future generations. I am sorry to say this but America did not learn from Vietnam. Instead, the war hawks found ways to slowly see to it that America would learn the wrong lessons of Vietnam to prepare for future wars such as in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other nations that didn't go along with our imperialistic ways. Even for those of us who suffered the most, we have been conditioned and brainwashed into ignoring our injuries, physical and mental, as much as possible that we try to cover up our defeat in denial mode until any of our best friends and/or loved ones work hard to cure us out of our PTSDs as best as possible. Given that people are conditioned into ignoring the true costs of war, this nation's PTSD will only get worse until it can no longer be ignored and then it might be too late.

The third paragraph of James Carroll's latest offering is a brilliant piece of insightful prose. From the Civil War to the genocide of western native Americans, the angst of WWI's lost generation morphing into the mass atrocities of WWII's greatest generation, from Cold War through Vietnam to the endless, mindless global war on terror of today - the saga of militarism as a recurrent dehumanizing, socially divisive force in US history is a big thought, well written.

Strangely left unmentioned in Carroll's chronology was Uncle Sam's foray into imperialism - the Spanish American War. It marked several significant firsts: a war openly launched in the name of regime change in Cuba (ostensibly to spread the blessings of democracy); the Christianizing white man's burden voiced as justification for a brutal, long-slog counterinsurgency campaign in the Phillippines; America the innocent victim responding manfully to sneak attack - Remember the Maine, like the Luisitania, Pearl Harbor, the Tonkin Gulf, and 9/11; and the key role played by orchestrated, inflammatory propaganda in the major media of that era (the Hearst newspaper chain in particular), cheerleading and beating the drums for war abroad while partisan politicians danced domestically - a few, notably Teddy Roosevelt, later riding that grand wave of patriotic fervor to stardom.

The voices of dissent against the Spanish-American War were also marginalized in the run up, even though prominent public figures like Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, and the Anti-Imperialist League did speak out. With the War Between the States barely thirty years' ended, the race card was played and the bloody shirt stopped waving. Former Confederate Army field officers amicably held top command positions in the federal army that liberated Cuba from the evil Spanish despots. The actual US fighting force was all-Caucasian. The presence of African-American troops even in segregated units, even in a support role, caused serious racial tensions in the Florida staging areas prior to the invasion.

Carroll has the big picture right about how warfare can breed mass neurosis, collective group psychosis, and poison underlying social cohesion that is already strained by other tensions. Much like World War II, the Spanish-American War fed the popular illusion that militarism - good, righteous, American militarism - can work to achieve good and righteous ends. The line between illusion and delusion is dangerously easy to blur.

Bill from Saginaw

You have to wonder if Americans are even slightly affected by the millions of deaths, maimings and refugees our government has created in Iraq, is creating in Afghanistan, and is planning to create in Iran. You have to wonder what effect these unjust wars against women and children are having on Americans who are paying for it all. Our government is full of war criminals, our businesses are full of thieves, and our military is full of bullies just itching to shoot and kill. Given the outcome, this country was really not worth creating.

The media is under control of the MCM who do not want the public to be aware of the misery and death our policies cause, especially when these manifestos are carried out by our ham-fisted military.

Just note comments from a soldier from Ft Drum deploying to Afghanistan. Something definitely stinks when this is the norm reflection of our 'ambassadors'

"'''a 24-year-old, single infantryman from Tennessee on his first deployment, offered one perspective.

“I think it’s safe to say that most people would want to see some action — they don’t want to be there and just be sitting around,” he said before the deployment. “If it’s my time to die or get injured, whatnot, I think then, God’s going to allow that. I’m at peace with that.”

Think about it

Clovis, I agree with you about the wake up call of the'60s. I'm not speaking as someone new to the idea (I'm 70) only seeing that more people get it --and we still find it very difficult to get off the bandwagon. Also it has grown so much worse since the 60s.

My late father served in WWII, 82nd Airborne, in Germany.

He never spoke about it, at all. The closest he ever spoke about it, was to chatter in general terms, about how he picked up some German words over time, like "brot" (bread).

I remember still a kid, asking mother "Did father ever have to kill anyone?" Her answer was an emphatic "No." Initially, in retrospect, I thought her naive. Over time, I felt her response was too quick, with a faint bit of panic in it. I think she must have known better, but decided, either with, or without him, that they would tell me "no" if it ever came up.

My father spent his entire life waking up with a start, jumping, startled, with a alarmed muffled cry out. I asked mother why, early on, after seeing this many times when she would say "Go wake up your father for me, and tell him dinner is ready." She said she didn't know why, and I think she didn't know, but he knew.

He didn't have words for it. We're talking the 1960s and 1970s, as I was born in 1957. By the time "PTSD" came out as a diagnosis, I doubt he made the connection.

My father was not a bad man. He didn't beat us, drink, and was a good provider, but that's where he stopped. He was disengaged from us. Distant. Sometimes snide, derisive. Mother used to say that he thought child rearing was the woman's job, but I think it was more - an inability to connect secondary to undiagnosed and untreated PTDS.

Yet, he married, provided for a wife and two children, and raised a family.

For all of his flaws, and he had many, letting his past stop him from that would have never crossed his mind, ever.

I noticed an old WWII vet friend, in his 80s, had done likewise.

Yes, they mentioned "shell shocked," in extreme cases, but didn't know what to do about it, in those days.

But for the most part, these men were expected to integrate back into society, and to function, and they did so.

What I am having a hard time understanding is what is so different these latter years?

My father served in Germany during WWII, and would tell me stories of the things he'd seen like frozen dead Germans, hands raised in the snow, but never stories of what he'd done.
And I was afraid to ask him.
He suffered from shell shock, my mother said, as if to explain his rages, his mercuric mood swings, his need to isolate himself from us.
My late father's PTSD was no different than everyone in this country's PTSD today.
We are a bleeding wound inside and we are waiting for something to put us out of our misery. The Gulf gusher is only a metaphor for what we've become and the writers of posts here have described it all quite profoundly.
My thanks to them and to James Carroll for this insight.

Carroll expresses concern for what the current wars are doing to the "American character", as if these wars are an anomaly, separate from, and harming, the true American character.

War is the foundation, the life blood, of the American character and has been since it's inception. We like to think of ourselves as a peace loving nation singing the praises of our freedom and fighting only when forced against the wall, and only going into battle, reluctantly, to fight evil forces that want to destroy our freedoms. What BS upon BS.

We're being traumatized by these on going wars? I seem to recall a helluva a lot of people rallying around the war cry after 911. It was everywhere, flags flew on nearly every house, we cried for vengeance, and gathered around our TV's to watch the dazzling sights and sounds of bursting bombs over Afghanistan, then Iraq. "Shock and Awe" and we overtly or secretly reveled in our glorious and magnificent power. Now America occupies foreign countries, terrorizes and tortures it's citizens, bombs whatever it wants, paying no mind to the casualties of children, or women, or elderly, or any innocent person. Fuck em, kill em if we have to.

Poor traumatized America, suffering collective PTSD. I have no sympathy.

The first time that I ever heard the term, "collateral damage," was in 1995 from Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City.

I was freaked out, and it seemed like much of America was too with his casual use of such an awful term. Then, just 6 years later, "Shock and Awe' appeared, and I thought it was worse than hearing "collateral damage."

Even though those phrases were military terms, they seemed to morph right into peoples' minds and speech. Wall St.="collateral damage," and "shock and awe" = the destruction of the Gulf and all of the life in it and around it.

Military terms coming into popular language are scary to me; sort of like the first time I saw a Hummer coming towards me on a dark city street, or seeing the National Guard at the airport walking around with their weapons.

These are not normal words to me, and I have to constantly remind myself that language choice can be a very creepy thing. I can't fall asleep , or the SWITCH could be fatal.

Grammar, my dear Carroll! You guys don't have proofreaders over there at the Boston Globe?

You wrote: "Boy could care less because he has his Coors."

I believe you meant to say "Boy couldn't care less because he has his Coors," for if boy could indeed care even less, that would mean he's still caring.

I was born in 1948, and as far back as I can remember, my country, the U.S., has been at war all my life.

The Cold War and nuclear fear began before I was born, and though the USSR no longer exists, nuclear fear still does.

There was Korea, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Cambodia, Central America-Iran/Contra, Panama, the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan...

We are the pre-eminent military/warfighting nation on earth. In our 234 years, the U.S. has perpetrated more than 245 military interventions. Carl Boggs, in The Crimes of Empire, estimates that, since 1945 alone, U.S. overt and covert wars and war crimes have killed between 8 and 10 million people worldwide.

Though I now believe the religious "original sin" doctrine is a too-convenient authoritarian control myth to rationalize so many kinds of oppression (external as well as internal), perhaps the true "original sins" of the U.S. - the genocide of the Native Peoples and African slavery - both of which were used to build the U.S. nation and its economy - will haunt us until we squarely face these blood-drenched foundational events.

Facing all the destruction we have done to less-developed countries and their usually darker-skinned inhabitants as we exploited them and stole their natural resources to build the lifestyle we call "The American Dream" could also help us heal our deep psychic wounds. Reparations should be made, starting with descendents of the Native Peoples and the enslaved Africans. But we won't and can't. It's more important to bail out Wall Street Banks and fund endless wars and 800+ global military bases for Empire.

We are a nation in much denial and distraction, avoiding the well-deserved PTSD from our hundreds of military interventions as well as all our rapacious economic policies (the U.S.-run WTO, IMF, and World Bank specialize in "Structural Adjustment Programs" which are forms of economic terrorism more accurately described by Naomi Klein as Disaster Capitalism/The Shock Doctrine and detailed by John Perkins during his years as an Economic Hit Man).

Buying new electronic gadgets (more apps, please!) and overeating as we zone out in front of various kinds and sizes of video screens is our way of anesthetizing what's left of our consciences. Meanwhile, the Ruling Class, made up more and more of sociopaths, have no consciences to worry them anyway, as they go about in their neat, stylish business suits arranging for the raping and pillaging of everyone else as well as the planet.

In a culture of such rampant and cruel pyschopathology, only the "insane" (those still inspired by compassion and justice) can keep what is left of their humanity.

The application to entire societies of psychiatric diagnoses intended for individuals is always a dubious undertaking, and in the process many details are fudged over. In this case:

"The US Civil War did not end in 1865. Its unleashed spirit of total destruction went west, and over subsequent decades Blue and Gray veterans savaged the remnant native peoples. The Indian Wars built upon Antietam and Shiloh."

As it happens, I am reading a book about the war on the Nez Perce Indians.* The author calls it "the last Indian war" because in his opinion none of the subsequent raids, skirmishes, and suppressions qualified for that term. That was in 1877. By the time of Antietam and Shiloh, most of the Indian wars were over. They resulted not from some kind of post-Civil-War moral hangover, but from the determination of the European settlers to seize every square meter of North America. The Pilgrim Fathers set the tone when they made war on the Indians who had kept them alive during their first winter. (Cotton Mather gloated, “It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day.”) The subsequent betrayals, genocides, and removals are too numerous to list here. Look at the land boundaries of the continental United States. They were established according to Josef Stalin's dictum: Where my armies stop, that is where the border is.

"World War I was only the beginning of industrialized nihilism, with the decadence of the 1920s and the global collapse of order during the 1930s Depression coming in train with the civilizational suicides of the Somme and Verdun."

This is a wonderfully inane commentary on the Germano-Anglic War of 1904-1948. As soothing newspeak, "civilizational suicide" ranks with "mistakes were made": a way of alluding to an event while completely avoiding the issue of who did what to whom. It's true that in the phase of 1914-1918 many long-established European institutions suffered a disastrous loss of legitimacy, and that in the following decade the Americans suffered a disastrous loss of financial prudence. So what? The War was not a manifestation of some collective psychopathology, but rather a project to destroy Germany as an economic and (even more importantly) philosophical competitor. (I have written more on this subject in other comments.)

*West, Elliott. "The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story." New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

...i so enjoy our group therapy sessions....but i see by the big clock on the wall we've run out of time...permit me to close by quoting an historian of some note: "the history of mankind is a history of crime"...good night, see you all tomorrow....peace

I agree with "Angry Kraut" that it's usually a mistake to apply psychiatric distorders (e.g., PTSD) to societies as a whole. For one thing, Carroll uses a definition of PTSD that is not the best at distinguishing PTSD from other disorders such as depression. He can get a few correspondences out of this particular definition, but too many differences remain between the individual's PTSD and this society's disorder. These differences will tend to be ignored in order to make the two levels fit together. In some ways, generalizing in this way seems to trivialize the disorders, both in the person and the culture.

Still, there are interesting similarities between the individual and societal disorders, and comparisons can help illuminate underlying causes. Cultures and smaller groups are, after all, made up of individuals, and it's clear that the individuals' personalities will contribute to their culture (with causal influences running reciprocally from the culture). For this reason, it only makes sense to study both levels, individual and societal, simultaneously. But we should be careful not to equate the two because they are distinct.

Amerika, bleiche Mutter!
Wie haben deine Söhne dich zugerichtet
Daß du unter den Völkern sitzest
Ein Gespött oder eine Furcht!

Amerika, pale mother!
How have your sons ill-served you
That you are scorned by all people -
A thing of obloquy and terror!

In order for American society at large to suffer from PTSD as a result of the war, they would have to fist notice that a war - or more - are raging. Sorry but putting cutsie yellow ribbons on back of their SUVs proclaming support for the troops doesn't really qualify them as noticing. Then, they would have to care. Last, they would have to be smart enough to figure out what is truly going on. In America today, all that is a tragic laugh.