This is my final Larry Summers post, and I wish him the best:
Grievance-collecting, as we shrinks term it, is a personality trait which commonly serves the purpose of self-interest or self-aggrandizement. It is rarely, in normal life, a rational or justifiable mode of operating.
While it is typically associated with paranoid personality traits, our society has taught people that it can be useful as a ploy or manipulation, and that people can actually benefit from having grievances, rather than being pitied and getting plain old-fashioned attention.
In our topsy-turvy, politically-correct, hypersensitive world, having grievances becomes a badge of honor. This is psychologically perverse.
And it is perverse to claim "offense", in my opinion. Who said YOU shouldn't be offended, anyway? Surely we all deserve to be offended, and all will be whether we deserve to be, or not. But those who seek offense and collect it will surely find the most - and will invent or imagine it when they cannot find it.
Every psychiatrist has seen a woman who had a notebook, or a mental notebook, of every insenstive act or word of their husband since the day they met. What those women (yes, it's always women) never realize is that, if he wanted to, the husband could have the same notebook, but he doesn't focus on it.
What's that problem? That problem is imagining, or wishing, that the world would pander to our every little neurotic hypersensitive feeling. There is the infantile narcissism, which tends to be much more concealed or disguised where it appears in men. And in the political and academic worlds, this seeming-weakness is exploited, converted into power to control and manipulate through guilt, and to gain a free pass for one's own aggression or destructiveness.
In America today, that conscious and deliberate exploitation of this format is a dominant force, which few are brave enough to confront. Yet it must be confronted, not only because it is nuts, but because it damages the person who does it, in the long run.
In psychiatric practice, we confront victimization daily, and refuse to permit patients to use it as a cop-out and an excuse for avoiding performance, achievement, earned, positive attention, and building good relationships. There is no human dignity, and no self-respect, and no future, in a career of bitching.
Every human has tough things to deal with, whatever color, religion, nationality, sexual interest, etc. they are stuck with. Get over it, as the Eagles say, and grow up. And growing up means giving up the baby methods of power and attention...and accepting our best, small, humble contributions to life.
I have felt that those sniveling gals at Harvard who sunk Larry Summers really took the cake in this game, and I am ashamed of my association because of that ridiculous episode. But they showed their power, didn't they? The power of sniveling bitching. That does women no good whatsoever - they need to be the best in their class in Physical Chem II, Linear Algebra, and Discrete Probability, if they even want to do graduate work. Tears and hystrionic self-pity won't do it in the big world, where performance and mastery count.
Make a rocket land on Mars or circle Saturn - that means something. Some women can do that - most cannot. But neither can most men. But we can all do something useful in this world, and destroying others isn't it.
