I’ve already written on Dr. Ben Carson, but this latest from Kevin Drum is so good I have to pass it on. It requires no further comment from me–just read it if you’re at all interested in the Carson phenomenon.
2 comments
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Jeffrey Herrmann November 8, 2015 at 1:41 pm
It’s always risky to play the mentalist, but I don’t think Carson is lying. I think instead he suffers from the mental disorder of confabulation. His stories are accurate tellings of false memories. The false memories all contribute to a vainglorious self-image of the incomparable Ben Carson whose excellence entitles him to be our president, and savior.
I also think he suffers from cognitive disorders, which result in his believing the absurd fairy tales of Seventh Day Adventism that require him to assert that Darwinian evolution and the Big Bang theory of cosmology are self-evidently risible.
A man whose thought processes are so evidently disordered can not be trusted with important policy decisions.
It is marvellous that he once functioned well as a surgeon. Fortunately, he no longer wields a scalpel.
tonygreco November 9, 2015 at 2:35 pm
You may well be right about confabulation, but it seems also to be the case that Carson is perfectly capable of making things up that have nothing to do with his memory. For example, he has cited a sinister-sounding quote of Saul Alinsky that is a sheer fabrication: Alinsky never said what Carson attributes to him. Of course, it’s possible that Carson got the false Alinsky attribution from someone else, in which case, he would merely be guilty of intellectual irresponsibility for failing to cheek out his information source–also not a particularly admirable quality in a potential president.