Britney Spears and George Bush

How do you explain why one teenager goes out and stabs someone, while another teenager gets involved in charity work?

Maybe they are both trying to achieve status?

Maybe the teenage stabber has been made to feel inferior by both parents and school. Stabbing can make the teenager famous.

How do you explain Britney Spears, Mother Teresa and George Bush?

Psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, having read Nietzsche, wrote about "the will for power". People want to feel appreciated. They may sometimes feel inferior but they are deperate for status.

Britney Spears was born in McComb, Mississippi, and raised a Southern Baptist in Kentwood, Louisiana. Not a perfect beginning. But we suspect that Britney's succes was due as much to her amazing talents as to any desire for status.

Mother Teresa remembered her childhood as being 'exceptionally happy.' Her mother was very caring. Mother Teresa may have been motivated by genuine compassion.

George Bush had a difficult upbringing and wanted to be appreciated by his mom and dad. That might explain his bombing of Afghanistan and Iraq.

From Psychologist Oliver James in The Guardian:
Guardian Unlimited Special reports So George, how do you feel ...

As he grew older, the fury towards his father was increasingly directed against himself in depressive drinking. But it was not all his father's fault. There was also his insensitive and domineering mother.

Barbara Bush is described by her closest intimates as prone to "withering stares" and "sharply crystalline" retorts...

Bush's deep hatred, as well as love, for both his parents explains how he became a reckless rebel with a death wish. He hated his father for putting his whole life in the shade and for emotionally blackmailing him. He hated his mother for physically and mentally badgering him to fulfil her wishes. But the hatred also explains his radical transformation into an authoritarian

According to Adler, people who fail to obtain the required status may end up making themselves ill.

"Under such circumstances, individuals take refuge in their disease."

Was Bush an alcoholic?

According to Adler, the neurotic person gets ill as a way of forcing the world to care.

Neurotic people can also become fundamentalist dictators as a way of impressing their mothers.

David Frum, Bush's speechwriter, wrote: "Sigmund Freud imported the Latin pronoun id to describe the impulsive, carnal, unruly elements of the human personality. [In his youth] Bush's id seems to have been every bit as powerful and destructive as Clinton's id. But sometime in Bush's middle years, his id was captured, shackled and manacled, and locked away."

Freud said that the personality has three parts: the id, the ego and the superego.

The id has the inherited things like the sex drive and aggression. The id wants pleasure.

The ego realises that in this world you sometimes have to control your sex drive. You sometimes have to go to school and do homework. Or at least you have to pretend to do homework. Bush's id has appeared to be controlled by his ego.

The superego has something to do with conscience and compassion.

Bush, like most of us, wants to satisfy the desires of the id. He does not want to be too bothered by compassion.

Bush wants to satisfy the id while at the same time getting the approval of society.

Bush can become rich while pretending to be fighting terror.

Freud's daughter, Anna, has written about defence mechanisms.

Bush's defence mechanism involves believing that the children in Afghanistan and Iraq, tortured and killed by his troops, do not matter.

Bush may be kind to dogs but cruel to foreigners. The concentration camp guard may be a caring father. There is a split in the personality.

Bush can do bad things while pretending to be a good Christian president.

But what if he gets found out?

Jesus obtained status by apparently not seeking status. He suggested we should wash each others' feet.

The real way to obtain status is not to care about it.

Consider the lilies...

Luke 12:27 Consider the lilies, how they grow. They don't toil
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