I would like to illustrate what I say in ‘The bondage of groupthink’ with the Mexican case. If there is anything of this country that irritates me exceedingly, it is that even for the pure Creoles—those Iberian whites who have no drop of Amerindian blood in their veins—, the Amerind blood weighs more than the European blood!
Why? Precisely because of what William James says: that the deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated by others. And if the vast majority of the Others are brown, it is far more practical to be loyal to the brown mestizos than to the few whites left in Mexico.
The very word ‘Mexico’ explains everything. If these Iberian whites, or descendants of Iberians, were loyal to their ethnic group they would dislike a word referring to the Aztec city that the Spaniards destroyed: Mexico-Tenochtitlan. The Creoles would use the old name of New Spain and they would understand themselves not as ‘Mexicans’, but as ‘New Spaniards’. But the dementia of groupthink and of James’s principle is such that in this country not only the Creoles call themselves ‘Mexicans’, but even some pure Germans who have emigrated here!
I speak of this surrealism in ¿Me Ayudarás?, finally available from Lulu at a lower price than the prohibitive price that it was in Amazon. Yesterday a commenter suggested that if I am reproducing anti-psychiatric articles for this site, it should be a projection that I was unjustly committed in a psychiatric ward.
But I’ve never been committed. At this point, no one who has commented here has read any of my two autobiographical volumes (presumably because they were written in the language of Cervantes).