Recognizing Delusion

I have had reason over the past year to ponder the inability or unwillingness of people involved in religious or spiritual organizations to recognize delusional thinking among their fellow members.

I was for a time a member of the Board of Directors for am interfaith church. All names will be redacted to protect the innocent, especially me. When I was elected as President of the Board, I inherited a largely new Board, which included 4 new board members who promptly executed a hostile takeover. Since they had the numbers, I was relatively powerless to do anything about this.

The leader of the cabal had announced to the Church that she was running for the Board in order to clean out the old members who had been engaging in backroom deals. Needless to say, this was a false accusation, as there had been no deals of any kind, backroom or other. As I watched the attack, I realized that she was actually doing herself everything that she was accusing the previous Board of doing. A very nasty reversal of truth.

For simplicity, let me refer to her as SWMNBN, or She Who Must Not Be Named. Her first act was to try to get the Office Manager fired, ostensibly because of poor job performance but actually because she had Wiccan friends. Imagine, prejudice against Wicca in an interfaith church??? None of the charges were completely accurate or truthful, but it became apparent that SWMNBN did not care about factuality or truth.

In our second Board meeting, SWMNBN engineered an improptu trial, which was actually more of a witch hunt or star chamber. She violated every known concept of fair play and due process, refusing to allow the accused to know the charges in advance or to provide witnesses. The witnesses that SWMNBN herself called all engaged in what I could, in a charitable moment, assess as "delusional". One reported made-up stories; another claimed not to be a gossip, when everyone in the church knew she was the biggest gossip in the place. I realized that the entire proceeding was based entirely on malicious gossip and lies. But I came to the conclusion that they did not actually know that they were lying because they were delusional. Delusional people don't know they are delusional, so they think they have every reason to believe the nonsense they are dishing out.

To make a long story short, this situation was a blessing in disguise, in that I got an incredibly valuable lesson in discernment: how to recognize delusion and narcissism within a spiritual environment. This became even more of a blessing when Sarah Palin showed up on the national political scene, and I immediately saw in her the same sort of delusional and narcissistic behaviors that I had seen in SWMNBN!

So, I commend to everyone the benefit and necessity of learning how to recognize delusional thinking and related types of personality disorders, such as narcissism. Without this knowledge, you are all too easily victimized by people who are inhabiting a fantasy world but who don't know it. They can make a mess of your lives and leave nothing but wreckage in their wakes. If you can recognize this cluster of behaviors in time, you may have a chance to come up with a strategy to counter the nonsense. Otherwise...