National Schizophrenia & The Id

In an interview concerning, among other things, his new book Our Choice, Al Gore pointed out an interesting contrast:

They [China] will soon be number one in wind, number one in solar; they are building an eight-hundred-kilovolt super-grid that promises to be the most advanced in the world in less than a decade. And yet they are still opening a new, inefficient, dirty, coal-fired generating plant every eight or nine days.

(New Yorker). If an individual did that we would probably apply this to that individual:

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that makes it difficult to tell the difference between real and unreal experiences, to think logically, to have normal emotional responses, and to behave normally in social situations ... Schizophrenia may have a variety of symptoms ... [a sufferer] can become isolated and withdrawn, and have trouble making or keeping friends.

(Google Health). The U.S. became withdrawn and isolated by choice over the last 8 years of Bush II.

Nations have had trouble making friends over the past century, witnessed by three world wars and a plethora of smaller wars.

Nations are heading for catastrophe if they try to cling onto the very things that are steering us toward those catastrophes.

Thus, I am inclined to be sceptical of Al Gore's premise that it is "our" choice, because the essence of mental illness is that the infected one can no longer make the proper choices.

For example, in the U.S. the people can not make the correct choices any more, not because the people do not know what is proper, but because the government will not do what was promised during the election cycle; they will not do what they were elected to do.

Nations Id what they Id, and once the corruption reaches a certain point the land of reality is so long gone that the land of catastrophe seems to be the more certain destination.