Psychology is a nefarious field of study. When I was in college, my Psych 150 class was an introduction into B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism. We worked with rats.

Skinner believed that people, like animals, could be trained with incentives and disincentives. The rats were given water for just one hour and deprived of it for 23 hours. They were then placed in a Skinner Box with a lever that the rat would have to pull down on in order to get the water. Getting the rat to pull down on the lever was the trick.

It took time, but we all conditioned our rats to do what we wanted them to do.

It didn’t take time to realize that people aren’t rats. They work with an entirely different set of incentive factors. People do things to be liked, to prove something, or, in the case of people who have an ax to grind, to do what normal people would consider to be irrational.

President Obama seems to have an ax to grind about American exceptionalism. As a result, conservatives view his actions and attitudes to be irrational. They’re not. He knows exactly what he’s doing. What looks like insanity to us, is pure reason for him. It’s the same for all narcissists.

Unfortunately, such a view of the world in the President of the United States has an effect beyond the personal. It affects all of us.

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Psychologist Dr. Gina Loudon told host Lou Dobbs that she is “very, very concerned” about President Obama’s mental stability on Fox Biz.Here’s the exchange and video via Newsbusters:

DOBBS: The President hasn’t mentioned a word about Sgt. Tahmooressi held in a Mexican prison. Your thoughts on the distinction here between the two, in at least Obama’s mind?

Dr. LOUDON: I am very, very concerned about the mental stability of this President at this point. Some of his behavior seems irrational to me. It seems beyond that of just a typical narcissistic, arrogant, sort of, ‘I’m a leader of a big country and I feel tyrannical at the moment’ kind of attitude. It really seems to me like this President is demonstrating behavior that is not only anti-American, but irrational and erratic and perhaps not exactly what we might want to deem sane.

The thing of it is, Obama is sane given his assumptions about the world. Every dictator is sane within the parameters of the worldview that he creates. How could he not be? It’s everybody else who is insane, otherwise, why would there be a need for a dictator to straighten out everybody else?