Chris:

Something else you may wish to think about....


Why isn't "mama's boy syndrome" regarded as a mental illness?

It seems clear to me that is exactly what it is.  The whole arrangement is sick.

It does no-one any good except in terms of false (delusional) solutions to 
serious problems.

It damages everyone else in a family and, also, isn't good in any way for the 
community.


The APA does not classify it as a disorder even though that is exactly what it 
is.

But, then, the APA does not classify homosexuality as  a mental illness either 
(not since

the mid 2000s has any form of homosexuality been regarded as problematic.  As 
late

as ca. 1998 it was still an illness in the DSM, called ego-dystonic 
homosexuality,

when a pervert was personally unhappy with his (or her) condition. Now even

that is gone.)


Look at all the harm this has done to society, plus countless individual lives.

Many psychiatrists back in the later 1970s were alarmed at what could happen

when this stuff began, viz, declassification, and they were right.  Our entire 
culture

is in a worsening mess.


You know, prayer simply isn't sufficient to deal with this issue,with any 
mental health issue.

You  -anyone-  needs to study psychology.  But how many Christians ever do so?


Sure, prayer can be a good thing, but to take the view, "I'm praying about it, 
that is all

I need to do, and besides, what will my friends think if I become informed about

homosexuality?-  is very ill-advised.  Or about mama's boys, or about 
drug-addicted people,

or about sexual abuse victims, or about many other kinds of people.


I am grateful to the Nth degree in knowing Evangeline.  She is a Christian like 
few others.

A sincere follower of Jesus Christ. But her answer to nearly every challenge is 
prayer

and forgiveness-on-principle.  Bless her precious heart, but because this is 
her view

there are things she gets hopelessly wrong and never understands what is going 
on.


This is the problem with Pietism, fixation on a small part of the Bible, not on 
trying

to grasp the meaning of the book in its entirety., which is a whole 'nuther 
matter.  As if,

in reading the Sermon on the Mount, everything else in Matthew consists of 
footnotes

with  little value.  As if all you need is self-referential study when you do 
read the Bible

as if books outside the Bible,  about psychology and faith, are worthless, as 
if historical

research articles about the Bible and its meaning in the context of when it was 
written

have no value, as if you can't possibly derive much good from reading the Bible 
as

a book filled with ideas that reflect a range of kinds of understanding best 
illustrated

by comparing it with great literature of the Roman world, say, or with writings 
of

19th century European authors like Dostoevsky.


But most of all I'd like to stress the intersection of faith and psychology.


Anyway, it is as clear as anything can get that mama's boy syndrome is a 
psychological

disorder, both for the mama's boy and for the warped and dysfunctional mother.

Yet the APA treats it as a non-issue.


Try finding solid information on the subject on the Web. I sure looked, and 
looked hard.

There is a good deal of stuff by people who don't really know what they are

talking about but there is hardly anything written by certified experts.

There needs to be a psychology of motherhood.  Some women do extremely well at 
it.
Others are hopelessly inadequate.  We cannot continue to regard motherhood
as some sort of guarantee that mothers are all good. Some are ridiculously off 
the rails.
If we are going to use the Bible as a guide we had better get the whole story,
not just the parts that serve some preferred narrative that makes us feel good.


Billy



________________________________
From: Billy Rojas
Sent: Sunday, July 22, 2018 9:38 AM
To: radicalcentrism@googlegroups.com
Cc: Billy Rojas
Subject: Re: [RC] Story of a Dysfunctional Family -Part # 1 (of 3 parts) *


Chris:
Thanks for the reply.


As a writer, your comment that it is "rough to read" is important to me.

Could you explain something of what you mean?


Were you referring to the writing itself or the subject matter?


About the subject matter, self disclosure is more-or-less a genre.

All kinds of books have taken this approach. Maybe the best known

was "Mommy, dearest, " about Joan Crawford, written by her daughter.

The famous actress, it seems, was worse than my mother in a lot of ways.

And that is saying  a great deal, indeed.


I also tried to make the story compelling as writing.


The risk is that non-writers may not get the idea.  A writer tells a story.

He does so to the best of his ability, in a way that will hopefully get the

attention of the reader and raise questions, get thought processes flowing,

and maybe inspire self reflection.  So, yes, this is self-disclosure,

but the larger issue is:  As a story, is it good reading?


Sort of like surgery.  Yes, the process is a bloody mess. But I'm more 
interested

in whether the patient survived and is still among the living.


You can also look at it in terms of a psychological case study.

What if you were called in to counsel a family like the one described in the 
story?


Billy



________________________________
From: radicalcentrism@googlegroups.com <radicalcentrism@googlegroups.com> on 
behalf of Chris Hahn <c...@2chahn.com>
Sent: Sunday, July 22, 2018 7:25 AM
To: RadicalCentrism@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: [RC] Story of a Dysfunctional Family -Part # 1 (of 3 parts) *


You are going deep into your family history Billy.  It is kind of tough to 
read, but thanks for sharing.

Chris



From: radicalcentrism@googlegroups.com <radicalcentrism@googlegroups.com> On 
Behalf Of Billy Rojas
Sent: Friday, July 20, 2018 4:31 PM
To: Centroids Discussions <radicalcentrism@googlegroups.com>
Cc: Billy Rojas <1billyro...@buglephilosophy.com>
Subject: [RC] Story of a Dysfunctional Family -Part # 1 (of 3 parts) *







 Part # 1 (of 3 parts)



 Story of a Dysfunctional Family





What happened to Baby Bob?



In December of 2015 I wrote an essay about the dysfunctional family

that I have endured during my life.  The saga ended with a question

about the youngest sibling, Robert, now in his sixties, "what will he do next?"



Not everyone who reads this essay will have read that previous material

so there will be some amount of repetition in this paper in order for new 
readers

to make sense of the story.  But, in brief, the narrative concerned

the family I grew up with, starting in Chicago many years ago.  It ended with

mother's death in Eugene, Oregon, in July of 2015, three years ago.



A number of salient facts were unknown to me in December of 2015; some of my

comments at that time were based on facts that, had they been known to me at 
the time,

would have been treated quite differently in that essay.  I was still under the

impression that my half-brother, Robert, whom I now regard as my former brother,

was capable of somehow making a serious break with his past and starting his 
life

over again, this time trying to be rational about what he was doing.

Unfortunately my supposition could not have been more wrong.



It was based on another supposition that has also proven to be painfully in 
error,

that my sister Rita was as smart and moral as I had given her credit for. In 
fact,

the paper presents Rita as the one "rock" of sanity and truthfulness  in

the family, someone always with good intentions at heart. Which, thinking

about the years before 2015, especially before about 2012, was an altogether

reasonable conclusion to reach. But, again, I had made a mistake. Rita turned 
out

to be almost as dishonest as Robert , lacking a certain kind of integrity that

makes respect possible. For I have lost respect for her, not just for Robert.



Maybe I should have anticipated how things turned out.  In December of 2015

my comments about the parasite she lived with for 30 years, a worthless piece of

s___t (you can fill in the blank easily enough)named Richard,  who had almost 
no talent

of any kind, whose brainpower at maximum could not have  powered a 15 watt 
light bulb,

all of which alienated literally everyone else in the family. Everyone, even 
mother who,

otherwise, gave Rita every possible benefit of doubt.  This should have told me 
to expect

the worst but, alas, it did not. Until 2015 when thinking about Rita I 
habitually remembered

the good things she had done over the years, of which there were many. But that 
era

had come and gone even if, three years ago, I was unaware of the fact.



This paper is written to clarify some statements made in 2015.  I no longer feel

any debt of obligation to Rita.  What she has done,  which took me until well

into 2016 to finally recognize for what it was, which took me until this year

to come to terms with all of the implications,  is inexcusable and quite

literally is criminal in character.  This does not rise to the level of the

criminality perpetrated by Robert, but it was  bad enough.



This is also written to make it as clear as possible that anyone, in the future,

who may think that one way to "get on my good side," might be through

any members of my family, would be mistaken.  With the exception of my niece,

who has no responsibility for anything  discussed here,  I want nothing to do

with any of them  -in perpetuity.  Whatever good things I once wanted to

do for them in the past, should it happen that I might finally become

financially successful,  I no longer have the  least interest in doing.

Each of them, Rita, Robert, and Ramona, can go to hell.





Should it happen that I do not make it to the finish line, so to speak,

I do not want any of them to have any of my belongings, and none have

any valid claim to my estate  -to my art or my writings or game designs

or anything else of  economic value.  That all came to and end no later

than some time in 2017 when I finally figured out the criminality

involved in what Rita did acting on behalf of Robert, starting

in January of 2016.  In the case of Ramona, we are in fundamental

disagreement on all social issues that matter and I am vehemently

opposed to her sick and dysfunctional homosexual 'lifestyle.'

She is a huge embarrassment to me and I wish it  was possible to

completely forget her.  Basically she is a disgrace to the family name.







---------------------------------





About mother, several matters should be made totally clear.  Among them is the 
fact

that she wasn't always the mess she became during the last years of her life,

her late 80s and her 90s  -she died at age 95.  Evangeline, who knew mother

more-or-less well, and who volunteered to help her with a number of basic

life needs like getting her medications and the like, once said that mother

ended up as a demented old woman.  That, is seems to me, is completely

accurate.  The only thing to add is that mother was in denial about all (all)

of her shortcomings and medical woes.  She had close to zero comprehension

of what others thought of her, she had a totally unjustified puffed up opinion

of herself and the value of her worthless ideas, and was unconcerned about

the impression she might make on others through her often horribly

ill-chosen comments.  She was a maze of contradictions as well,  but that

feature of her personality, contradicting herself, was a habit of  long 
standing.

She never gave a hoot about consistency, and that was true when she was still

in her 20s and 30s.  Its just that this became even worse in those final years.



She was always totally oblivious to her self-contradictions.  A handy-man whom

mother employed for a while back in the early 2000s, Jerry, once said that

mother always followed a "logic of the moment."  That was a precise

way to characterize things.



---------------------





Mother had the capacity to be smart as hell. She had been a successful 
businesswoman

in Chicago at one time. But with very little by way of a sense of limits,

that is, with very little that could be called healthy self-criticism in her 
character,

she never questioned her values, how she arrived at them, or whether they

served her well or could be dysfunctional.  She was an establishment Democrat

all the years of her life and never wavered from the "cause."  For her, Richard 
Daley

was pure good, JFK was the Savior, or at least he was until the arrival of

Barack Hussein Obama, whom she came to regard as the return of Christ.



Mother had been an avid Hillary supported in 2008 and felt helpless when Obama

won the nomination.  I talked with her at the time and can report her expression

of deep dismay when Hillary's chances came to an end.



Not that it meant much to me in 2008;  I was not about to vote for Obama and

before that had no interest at all in voting for Hillary.  Not because of any 
passion for

the Republican Party, which I regarded as a nearly hopeless mess after eight 
years

of George W. Bush, but because it seemed essential as far as I was concerned to

stop Obama.  The man was  -and is-  dishonest, has depraved values, and

is basically a phony. Be that as it may. But before too long mother had been

won over to that charlatan and he became the focus of her newfound 'faith.'

All of which made me ill.



It was by this time that the thought became fully formed in my mind that

all of the sicknesses of the Democratic Party were incarnate in mother.

All of the diseased values that Democrats were espousing at that time

were mother's values, and it did not bother her in the least that those values

were the opposite of just about everything the party had once stood for.

Like a committed Pentecostal or fervent Catholic, the party was mother's

real religion.   Formally a Catholic, it had been at least a decade, maybe more

like 20 years, since that Church had meant much of anything to her beyond

some kind of marker for her identity.



She had no use for most Catholic teachings, never studied her own religion,

never read the Bible, never read books by Christian authors of any stripe,

and felt she had no need of any such thing.  She might be a Catholic in terms

of sentimentality, but functionally she was an Atheist. And you don't need to

guess that mother's hypocrisy grated on me considerably, indeed,

thinking back to that period of time,  that was the start of my losing

respect for her although this did not become some sort of absolute judgment

about her until after her death.



There was too much to sort out in 2015, including thinking through

the good things she had done for me in the past, including much appreciated

helpfulness following my heart attack in 1998. Indeed, from mid 1999,

the time I returned to Oregon following bypass surgery in Arizona that April.

my feelings of gratitude overshadowed everything else. That would remain true

until 2006 when truths about her could no longer be overlooked. Instead

of 1999-2000 etc being the start of a new kind of healthy relationship

mother began to lapse into her old ways in which defense of her ego

dominated all other considerations.



Then came 2008, and, late that Summer, my participation in Pacifica Forum

at the University of Oregon.  For those who do not know the story, Pacifica

was a free speech group that met on the U of O campus. As a rough estimate

about a third of its membership consisted of free speech types, like myself,

another third of right-wingers of various persuasions who were frustrated

at being shut out of all other groups because, not a big surprise,  the 
university

and the town of Eugene are Leftist in orientation and regard all other views

as anathema deserving opprobrium and attack.  The other third of Pacifica

consisted of onlookers, the curious, people attracted by interesting lectures

by educated people with unconventional views.



Eventually I gave 13 lectures at Pacifica on the university campus, ending

in early 2010.  All proceedings were telecast via CTV, community television,

including my talks.  There was increasing controversy in the local press

because, by late 2009, several Rightist speakers had held the podium

and for whatever reason, since this had been true in the past without

much commotion, by that time a major controversy had erupted.



The way the story was covered  was not that Pacifica's speakers

were about evenly divided between Right-wingers and  "independents"

like myself,  but that everyone associated with the group was a Fascist.

This is how the political Left in modern-day America looks at all of

its opposition, of course,  and even though I was able to publish a

lengthy article in the Eugene Register-Guard in defense of the free speech

dimension of the Forum, mother soaked up every word of the local Leftists.

My essay did not count, what did count was being called a Fascist by

"respected" members of the community.  After all,  the establishment

is never wrong (as long as the people in it are Democrats) and any

opposition to that establishment is a mortal sin.



It did not matter that I was anti-Fascist, what mattered was being called a 
Fascist.



This was also true generally in this city. To give one example of how this 
works,

in early 2010 I was scheduled to take part in a debate with Jimmy Marr

an outspoken neo-Nazi.  There was a large crowd present in the auditorium,

maybe 500 people.  Marr walked out before the debate even began, just as it

was about to commence.  I was supposed to be his opponent, and I was fully

prepared to discuss the evils of Nazism and related matters like Nazi distortion

of the historical meaning of the swastika symbol.  I am, to repeat the point,

anti-Nazi.  I had made this clear by openly challenging Marr back in

December not long after he had  he first appeared on campus spouting

Nazi propaganda. This was reported on by a local journalist with the name

(this is not made up) Joe Lieberman.  He reported on my public opposition

to Marr in a story he wrote for the local alternative newspaper,

the Eugene Weekly.



But none of that mattered when the debate came to a crashing halt, leaving me

at the front of the stage, prepared to dispute everything Marr might have said.

This did not matter, the crowd treated me as if I surely approved of Marr

and was in his political camp.  There was much yelling and various obnoxious

goings-on in he crowd. Nothing I tried to say changed anyone's mind.

I was part of Pacifica and therefore everything the Right-wingers in the group

believed in  necessarily rubbed off on everyone else. Including me.



I did not realize at the time the impact this had on mother.  And I'm still 
unsure

of how she "processed" all the information, but it should also be reported

that one of my lectures was highly critical of homosexuality.  Mother was

mortified, not so much at the actual contents of most of what I said in my

various lectures, although she must have been aghast at my comments

about sodomy, but by the fact that I was in the middle of a public controversy.

For her there never should be social controversy, after all, the Democratic 
Party

promulgates all truth and is the voice of God. What is there to be 
controversial about?

Besides,  and this is, I think, the crux if things, what will everyone think of 
her

as a result of a controversy?



Actually most people did not care at all, but that was not how mother

saw the world  -which she necessarily was the center of.



About homosexuality, I can tell you that until some time in the late 1980s,

possibly the early 1990s, she was opposed to sodomy.  In the early 1970s,

while I was never any kind of supporter of homosexual causes,  I nonetheless

was in favor of toleration. This remained true until 1975, when  I first became

highly skeptical and then in 1976-1977 when a tipping point was reached

and I became adamantly opposed. The "last straw" took place when,

in Arizona at the time, I was the editor of a small magazine called "Sex Guide,"

which was a strictly heterosexual publication about normal relationships,

and the publisher asked me to look over a sexual encyclopedia as preparation

for the assignment. But in it were photographs of homosexuals in action and

what I saw made me sick.  Finally understanding sodomy for what it is,

not a civil rights issue wrapped up in appeals to 'liberty,' my view of

the matter has become more and more antagonistic.



At any rate, mother was opposed to homosexuality for as  long as I can remember.

This started some time in the mid 1950s when we were watching an interview

on television featuring a member of the Mattachine society and a psychoanalyst.

Mother made her views quite clear that homosexuality was a grave moral wrong.



We seldom discussed the topic but at one point in about 1983 she offered the

opinion that homosexuality is isn't normal and that homosexuals, her actual 
words,

"all look like they came out of the oven too soon."



You know the type. I'm sure you do, even if political correctness does not 
allow you

to say so openly.



The next time the subject came up was some time after my return to Oregon,

either in late 1999 or early 2000. Now mother was a big supporter of homosexual

causes and spewed forth the Democratic Party line on the issue.



What had happened to change her mind?  It was some time in the 1980s that

Ramona told mother about her sexual preferences. Still, even then Ramona and

mother were anything but on the best of terms, and things got much worse.

The problem was that, to her credit, Ramona had no use at all for how mother

treated Robert, virtually as a serf commanded to obey her every whim.



What Ramona never fully grasped was how complicit Robert was in his own 
humiliation.

He was a classic masochist, wanting to be put down, belittled, and treated like 
garbage.

Yet Ramona was right in insisting that mother had the greatest responsibility 
for

the arrangement she had with Robert.  What the hell is a grown man (or 
substitute

for an actual man) doing living with  his mother?  Mother should have sent him

packing years before, so that he might finally live in the real world and grow 
up.



That was not about to happen. Mother was addicted to Robert's unpaid labor 
around

the house, she didn't care if she humiliated him in the process, and, besides,

long before 1999 she was way out of shape and becoming more and more

out of shape. Her excessive weight was part of the problem   -and her

unwillingness to take any kind of exercise led to an inevitable outcome,

inability to walk normally, deteriorating muscle tone, and the start of

a series of falls, which became more frequent each year such that,

before the end,  she might fall down every day, or nearly every day;

sometimes  she was unable to get back up by herself, her arms

were just as atrophied as her legs.



Through it all mother became increasing abusive   -toward whomever might

be around at the time, but especially toward Robert, her loyal flunky,

always ready to pick her up, always willing to endure extreme verbal

abuse, because, you see, mother was the, uhhh, 'love of his life.'



Ramona thought this situation was totally sick and as a result she walked out

of mother's life, as much as she could, anyway.



Not that I had a "good" opinion of the arrangement but, at least until 2006 or 
even 2007

I still felt a debt of gratitude toward mother and toward Robert.  But some 
time after

2009 I began to walk out on her myself. Ramona lived in the San Francisco bay 
area

and was not on the scene at all, while  I continued to reside  in Eugene. But 
there were

several episodes where mother and I  did not speak to each other for months at 
a time,

on one occasion most of a year.  Each time I initiated the break because of 
conduct

by mother that I regarded as totally unjustifiable and usually something she

did to Robert, like the time she gave his expensive roll top desk to Goodwill

charities while Robert was at work.  Mother had decided that the desk did not

suit her image as a high status woman of leisure, and, besides, Rita might move

to Eugene from San Francisco, where she also lived, and there needed to be

plenty of room for Rita's things and Bobby's furniture could easily be 
sacrificed for

the greater good.  Besides, mother had no real respect for Robert and if he 
objected,

so what?  As it was, when Robert went home that day his reaction wasn't to walk 
out

but to swallow his pride and sulk. His demeanor began its final erosion 
starting  from

that time, about which more, anon.....



Not that Rita ever had the intention to move to Oregon, not after her favorite 
worthless

parasite said that he would not relocate.  But for mother this was always her 
great hope,

Hence, or so I take it, her decision to clean out everything from the basement 
that

was in storage there and moving it to a large storage locker that cost about 
$120 per month,

Despite, it should be added, how tough financially life became for her after 
2009,

with the economy in shreds and Rita no longer able to pay mother about $1,000

per month to maintain her lifestyle.



How long Rita had been subsidizing mother is unknown to me, but it may have been

for approximately 10 years.



The story is quite complicated, and there is even more...



You could create a terrific Alfred Hitchcock horror movie from the story

of my family, it was that bad. Not that I take any pleasure in writing this 
story.

Quite the opposite, until a few days ago I was undecided whether or not to

put it all into words. then Alan Alda intervened.  In a television interview

he admitted that his mother had her own problems and probably was

a clinical schizophrenic.  The fact is that some families are unfit for

human habitation and it would do much good to make matters public so

that other people who live in dysfunctional families realize that they are

not alone and that when a situation has deteriorated beyond a certain point

the only sane thing to do is to institutionalize a mentally incapacitated 
parent.



Actually it had dawned on me no later than 2010 or 2011 that mother

needed to be placed in an intensive care home for the elderly. Robert could

not always be at home when mother fell down, he worked as a medical assistant

at a senior home which gave old people intensive care,  and he knew better than 
anyone

else in the family just how far gone mother was as she reached her 90s, but he 
would

not hear of it.  You tell me why, I do not have an answer,



In that period of time mother was becoming more and more demanding as her 
condition

worsened. Already by 2012, certainly by 2013, Robert was being run ragged by

mother's incessant demands for assistance and because of her accumulating

medical problems.  But it was impossible to talk with him about such things,

Or anything personal.



I have never known anyone as insecure about himself as Robert in my entire life.

He was defensive about virtually everything and any kind of candor was

out of the question.  His reaction to mother's increasing demands was to

take all the abuse she dished out and become more sullen and quick to anger

as time progressed. He got less and less sleep and that added to his misery.

You would think that mama's boy would finally have had enough and rebel

move out but that was not what he did, he doubled down on his

dysfunctional behavior.



There were exceptions. Most notably when Rita visited Eugene, which was about

once per year. Then Robert behaved at his best, for him, and if you didn't know 
better

you might have thought that he was more-or-less 'normal."  Within a day of two

of Rita's visits, however, the real "normal" reasserted itself.  Mother's 
demands would

resume, worse than before, and Robert would act as her houseboy as his sour

disposition returned and grew worse.



The other notable exception concerned Evangeline, who lived across the street 
and who

was as good a Christian as anyone can get, and who took it upon herself

to try and help mother. At least 4 or 5 days a week Evangeline visited mother

and did what she could to be useful.  This was also the period when, for most 
of a year,

I gave her granddaughter, Grace, free art lessons; I also paid for as many  of 
Grace's

art supplies as I could afford.   These lessons were held in mother's home.



About once per month I was at the house and Evangeline would be there

along with Grace. Robert was on the scene most of these occasions.



One afternoon,  Robert decided for reasons of his own, that he was going to show

Evangeline what a "man" he was.  I could not believe my eyes.  The best way to 
put it

is to say that if  Evangeline had pigtails he would have been pulling them as

a way to have "fun."  Robert's humor was immature and, I thought, a major

embarrassment.  His actions, which might be described as horseplay, were 
childish,

the kind of stunts that you would expect from a kid still in grammar school.



Evangeline was expected to reciprocate, which she did in a clearly half-hearted 
manner,

just enough to not cause a scene in someone else's family home.



This has led me to speculate that Robert might best be explained as  a case of

arrested development, as if, when he was in 8th grade long ago, he fell for

a girl who then humiliated him in some way which traumatized him.

Something very painful.



Instead of picking himself up off the floor he internalized the pain and

decided that the only safe relationship with a female would be with his mother.

Which fits the profile of causation for a good percentage of mama's boys.

Which is also pathetic.



How many men can relate stories about getting dumped by a female along life's

highway?  Just about all of them, myself included. Women can be quite cruel to

a man, hardly a news flash, and virtually all men learn to live with this 
reality..

Besides, when a woman returns a man's affections it is all worth while;

life takes on new meaning and becomes worth every effort and

any sacrifices that must be made.



But this was not how Robert saw things.  Instead, to carry my diagnosis one 
step further,

he decided that the best thing to do was not to study psychology in order to 
better

understand the opposite sex and one's own feelings and options,  he decided to

take an interest in the military.  After all, what better way to build 
defensive walls

around one's self?  His entire military experience consisted of a stint with

the National Guard but he became obsessed with the Army and with combat

from early on in his life and that has always been his default frame of 
reference

for nearly all situations involving human interaction.  Its always some aspect

of war. And no-one had better get close to him because that would be a sign

of weakness and vulnerability.  Try and get close, even if this is only to talk

about honesty about mother, and expect a heated reaction, snarling, in

other words, and obvious indications of barely controlled anger.



Many men are somewhat like this, to be sure, possibly 10% of the male population

as a guess.  But no man that I have ever met has been nearly as defensive and,

in a word, crappy about it.



Hence his social skills, to call them that, are almost non-existent, and his 
understanding

of the female sex is close to zero.



He did this all to himself, is how I look at it. Why?  Ultimately because, 
while he isn't

stupid about everything, something important within him is a psychological 
disaster

which generates stupidity in abundance on a frequent basis.  He should be 
all-too-aware

of exactly this, but instead of doing something useful like reading books about

overcoming feelings of inferiority, or about  inability to be honest with 
anyone at all,

he always turned inward, taking refuge behind the thick walls of Fort Robert.



He certainly has never read the Bible and its wisdom literature, which could 
also

be a great help.  If he has cracked the covers of the "holy book," or so I 
think is the case,

it has only been to reinforce his belief in a few myths of tradition, or to 
read about

the wars of ancient Israel.



And it does not help that his religion, that form of Catholicism that went out 
of style

with the end of the Spanish Inquisition,  is about as dysfunctional as any 
religion can get.

Forget about  St Francis of Assisi, forget St. Augustine, forget Clement of 
Alexandria,

forget Thomas Aquinas, for that matter, forget Andrew Greeley or

John Dominic Crossan.  For Robert the one exemplar of Catholic faith

who really matters in his life is Torquemada.  That is what it amounts to.



He also is horrible at lying. Not that it is some kind of "good" to be a 
believable liar,

but it is necessary to admit that this skill is rather common in the world and 
few people

don't lie, at least when they need to,  with a certain aplomb.  Not Robert.



In the years that I knew him he lied about as adroitly as an he did as a child.

He never studied psychology (psych is for sissies, is his opinion), he never 
became aware

of what a simpleton he was, hopelessly naive about so many things.



Mother once related an incident from Robert's early life to me.  It seems that 
Robert

had developed a taste for butter. How to have more butter than mother might 
approve?
Easy. There was an open stick of butter in the refrigerator. So he nibbled all 
the edges

of it and put it back where he found it, Who would notice?



That is about how well he lied to me in 2015 even if at the time I was unaware 
of

why he was saying a number of  foolish things  that made no sense to me.

























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