Word: symptoms
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...absolutely unable to grasp the fundamental difference between Western and Soviet political thought. To Marxists, socialism and Communism (or Sovietism, for that matter) are not freely chosen or choosable political stances but scientifically established laws of history. Dissenting, like disputing physics or logic, therefore must be a symptom of mental illness. Thus, in good conscience, the Soviets have no other place for dissenters but the nuthouse...
...sure, does not exist in a vacuum; its troubles are a symptom of a wider malaise. The White House shapes the policy in which the CIA plays a vital part. If there is indecision at the top and lack of a coherent strategy, the CIA will not be properly employed...
...concept of political dissent as a symptom of mental illness is hard to imagine except as an obscenity. Bukovsky is properly outraged, both as victim and witness. But he is also bitterly amusing. For unlike most children of the Gulag, the au thor manages to combine the traditions of Dostoyevsky's brooding victims with Gogol's antic farceurs. The more benign psychiatrists, he notes, diagnosed opposition as a mild form of paranoia that did not require special treatment. The hardliners called it "creeping schizophrenia" and prescribed agonizing sulfur injections...
Professor Lasch is not amused by what he calls a "cultural radicalism": the decadence of American individualism. Its chief symptom: "The pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self." The Narcissus of mythology, infatuated by his own reflection, pined away because he could not consummate self-love. Lasch's new narcissist has similar anxieties but feels no guilt. He has drunk the waters of progressive education and popular culture, and has little memory of traditional values and religious beliefs...
...casual observation confirms that many weave through the holidays feeling vaguely like victims-acutely aware of the supposedly malignant pressures that the diagnosticians always talk about. No mystery here. With a consciousness razed by standard holiday pathology, even an intelligent adult may tend to construe the pressure as a symptom of something bad and imminent. In fact, that pressure is primarily only the moving power of a vast communal celebration. This coercive atmosphere is not just an incidental effect of the season, as some suggest, but its very essence...