Pol-Psych | Borders mean boundaries

We encourage people to maintain boundaries, so why not nation states?

Tom X Hart
Jul 10, 2017 · 5 min read

Don’t take in no strangers while I’m gone.

She sighed deeply. They ain’t a soul in this world but what is a stranger to me, she said.

Cormac McCarthy (1968) Outer Dark

Psychology is a work horse in an age that is finished with horses.

We expect psychology to do what religion, ethics, politics, and our grandmother used to do.

That is to say we expect psychology to give us a morality, a meaning in life, an explanation of power relations, and also to be a store of practical knowledge when life disintegrates.

Psychology is not to blame for the intellectual developments that bled religion to a fish-white corpse, nor is it responsible for the economic and political reforms that have sundered families.

Whether through divorce or an ‘important career move’ our access to those grandmothers — their wisdom — grows more impaired with each decade.

Psychology has much to offer, I do not mean to suggest the subject is useless — but rather that we have come to expect too much from the discipline.

However advanced the pill, however competent the therapist, psychology cannot make a life meaningful, nor provide moral guidance.

And too many people end in psychological care because they are encouraged to pursue objectives that were never worth a damn, anyway.

Psychology can go anywhere and do no wrong. It is secular and therefore safe.

Politicians would rather their citizens saw a psychologist than read the Qur’an or the Bible. Wisdom is considered rather dangerous in today’s world.

We cannot talk about despair, but we can talk about ‘mental health’. And our mental health is in our music about sex, too — especially the songs of those singers whose outlook most accords to the liberal hegemony.

When Lily Allen sings about her unfaithful lover, she describes the aftermath as follows:

I couldn’t stop laughing
No, I just couldn’t help myself
See, you messed up my mental health
I was quite unwell —

Lily Allen — Smile, Alright Still (2006)

Intimacy, empathy, happiness, and good interpersonal boundaries are required if we are to avoid eating disorders, depression, and abuse — if we are to have good mental health.

This is a map of the modern soul.

The advice to maintain interpersonal boundaries is not foolish; it is a necessary and not sufficient condition for sustaining oneself in the world, though it is one that is sometimes presented as panacea.

When boundaries are neglected a person is open to abuse, mistreatment, and catastrophe.

What are boundaries?

Imagine that consciousness is not embodied in one individual mind, but is a property created between human beings when they interact.

I come to know my self not only by listening to what you say, but by watching whether you smile; the way you hold your head; your tone of voice; and the direction of your eyes.

These interactions give me a sense of ‘my self’, and in a sense my ‘self’ exists only in the dialectic between ‘I’ and ‘you’.

When I am alone, I am self-conscious in a way I am not when absorbed in work or in conversation with another person. But this self-consciousness takes the form of a dialogue, and so my ‘self’ alone is a replication of my self with others.

In order to maintain my functional autonomy when interacting with other people, I need to maintain the useful fiction that my consciousness is fully contained. We achieve this by withholding information and emotional states from other people.

If we visit a doctor and ask him, ‘How are you today, doc?’

We expect to receive a reply along the lines, ‘I’m fine, thank you.’

We don’t expect him to say, ‘Well, my wife has run off with my next door neighbour. My children refuse to go to school, and the dog has swallowed rat poison and is going to die in yelping, hideous agony.’

Our expectation that this will be withheld is an example of a boundary, if a very extreme one.

The maintenance of boundaries allows people to avoid so-called emotional contagion, a state where we ‘catch’ feelings from other people.

And it allows us to do our everyday business in society.

This is not to say that interpersonal boundaries mean that we are cold, but merely that an individual can adjust the flexibility of their boundaries according to the setting.

We will be more open with a close relative than with a stranger we met an hour ago, for example.

Boundaries protect people from abuse and exploitation. The person who has good boundaries knows when to raise their defences to protect themselves from a dangerous situation, and when to lower their defences to allow a closer relation. And also how to protect other people from their emotional states.

A parent of a small child, for example, will need to protect their child from emotional states provoked by that child’s behaviour — or lack of disciplined behaviour.

A nation state is similar to a person on a larger scale.

When Daniel Dennett explains consciousness he likens our consciousness to a process deriving from multiple smaller sub-units that, while insignificant and idiosyncratic in their function alone, act in concert so as to create consciousness.

A nation is like this.

There is a political movement that would break down all borders completely. This amount to the breakdown of all ‘interpersonal’ boundaries between states and peoples — an invitation to abuse.

We have already seen the consequences of poor boundaries between states and peoples at the Bataclan Theatre and Manchester Arena.

A person with poor boundaries cannot defend themselves from others, and this is the state many nations are in today — a state that would grow worse if borders were opened completely.

This does not mean that nations should throw up rigid boundaries and allow no one through their borders. North Korea is an example of a state where the boundaries are too rigid rather than too relaxed.

The point is to know when to raise boundaries and when to lower them.

At the moment, the European nations need to raise their boundaries — raising their borders — if they are to avoid being victims of abuse.

Good boundaries also mean protecting other people from one’s tumultuous internal state. The European nations need to do this by stopping ill-considered military adventures abroad.

These steps will restore equilibrium and respect between the peoples and nations of the world.

There is a reluctance to draw a comparison between boundaries and borders because psychologised politics is implicitly leftist in its current formation, and so is amenable to the idea that completely open borders are a positive good — an example of empathy in action.

The language of psychology has been hi-jacked to promote leftist causes.

I’ve counter-jacked it in this article to provide an alternative perspective.

Open borders are actually abuse in action. If the psychologised left thought about this carefully, they would realise that the best way to protect all parties is to adopt more defensive boundaries and borders.

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