OZODI OSUJI - MANY IGBOS ARE DEPRESSED AND MASK IT WITH PARANOID GRANDIOSITY!

In his books, The Paranoid Process (1978) and Psychotherapy for the Paranoid process (1986), William W. Meissner noted the correlation of depression and paranoia. Paranoia or sense of false
importance and power, he said, is a mask over underlying sense of inferiority and inadequacy.

The paranoid person feels excruciatingly inadequate and fears death; he refused to accept that reality, for if he did he would be depressed.

Instead, he denied his depression, at least, at the conscious mind level and places his spurious sense of superiority over other people in his conscious mind.

In this light, many Igbos feel totally inferior and inadequate and deny it at the level and instead place in their conscious minds their false sense of superiority to other African tribes. They are always comparing themselves to other tribes and to the extent that they think that they approximate white man’s indices of civilization (such as go to school, obtain degrees etc.) they boast about it. They constantly tell people that they are a superior people.

The white man sees Africans as inferior people and instead of fighting him Igbos tells their fellow Africans that the white man sees them as the smartest Africans! Why? It is because the white man admits a few of them to his top universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, MIT, Berkeley, UCLA, Oxford and Cambridge.

 If you are interested in the IQ controversy see Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1996), New York: Free Press. In it the authors point out that black folks average IQ is 85, white folks average IQ is 100, and Jews average IQ is 110 and Asians average IQ is 115.

IQ level is reflected in scores on Standardized examinations; for example, Asians score highest on the SAT (and dominate America’s top schools) and black folks score the lowest. Asians generally do best at American universities whereas black students generally do poorly. The two authors are trying to tell us that the races can be ranked with Asians the brightest and Africans the dullest. We are talking about average IQs here.

Generally, a handful of Africans have superior IQ, anything above 132, the few admitted by the schools mentioned above.

For our present purpose, statistically a few Igbos are intelligent enough to attend good universities whereas the average Igbo is not; and the same holds true for other races and groups.

I personally do not give credence to IQ issues, for I know that other factors play roles in people’s success or lack of it.

Evidence shows that those who are really superior in intelligence and accomplishments generally do not talk about it; if a person has IQ of over 140, that is, is a genius, and does extraordinarily well in physics and mathematics, as Albert Einstein did, he does not have to tell you that he is good at physics and mathematics for you would know it from his works.

It is empty vessels that boast about their accomplishments as a means of putting their fellow human beings down.

We are all the same and equal regardless of our intelligence and accomplishments.

DISCUSSION

Many Igbos are depressed and are fighting off their depression with their childish sense of superiority, their paranoid grandiosity.

What this means is that they felt attacked by me when I pointed out their issues. They saw me as attacking their false sense of superiority (which they had believed is real).

If they were to accept their underlying sense of inadequacy they would become depressed and kill themselves. They could potentially commit mass suicide if their depression sips into their conscious minds.

Therefore, for them not to be depressed and commit mass suicide I must leave them to keep on masquerading as lords of the jungle and not ask them to give up their boastful behaviors, for the alternative is unbearable, self-inflicted death.

Only return to real spirituality, God, can give them real sense of worth, not the present false worth they derive from delusional thinking and beliefs.

Simply put, I must leave Igbos alone. I have learned all I need to learn from them, about their paranoia as masked depression.

NOTES

Yesterday, Wednesday, April 13, 2016, I did not have classes to teach. I decided to stay home instead of go to the campus. Occasionally, I took a look at my email. I read what some Igbos were
writing about me.

They did what they generally do. I write on a totally different subject, in this case, the self-doubt found in my father and me, and they extrapolated from it to attack me. Apparently, they expect me to be like them, persons in denial, persons who live lies and pretend to be who they are not, perfect. I write about issues I see in me and my father and have no need to hide them.

Generally, I understand that they are confused children and do not respond to them but yesterday I wrote two responses to them. I knew that what I said would be devastating and it did not disappoint. They literally decompensated and become transitorily psychotic and went ballistic in their senseless attacks on me.

I read some of their silly write ups and thereafter deleted all their mails. I do not have to read what mad men wrote. I cherish my peace of mind and do not have to disturb it by introducing into my
mind what folks who need to be on psychotropic medications wrote.

If you take a disturbed Igbo on, he suddenly sees himself as your victim and tells the world that you are persecuting him. He forgets going on and on making derogatory remarks about you. You leave him to keep verbally abusing you until you decide to take him on and when you do he now sees himself as persecuted by you. This is what paranoid persons do: they attack folks but when folks react with self-defensive attack on them they forget their prior attacks on them and talk only about the attacks that come their way.

It began when one of them, a member of the group I call Biafran Internet electronic warriors, one Daniel, went on and on talking about my supposed ill treatment of my parents.

First of all, everything he wrote is false. But that is not the issue. The issue is this: why is it his business how I related to my parents.

The man actually called me parent abuser, wife abuser, child abuser and self-abuser (he forgot to add Dan abuser and Igbos abuser).

I do not know where he got his information from since my parents are dead; certainly he did not talk to them in their graves. The man went on talking as if he was stating the truth (he cited information from another Igbo chap, Nebu, that is clearly deluded and writes fictions and takes his fantasy as truth).

Generally, I do not talk about other people’s personal issues; I certainly have never talked about other people’s parents and do not understand why these busybodies feel it necessary to talk about my personal business.

I kept asking me: why don’t these people concentrate on abstract subjects and talk about them instead of always wanting to talk about other people’s parents? If you look at what they write it is almost always about this or that person's personal issues or parents.

There is a brilliant chap at Nigerian Internet forums called Professor Bolaji Aluko. A week hardly goes by that the Biafra electronic warriors are not talking about his business; they talk about him screwing his students, or how he wasted his parents’ investment on him. And all these talks are lies, mind you!

I ask: why is it their business what a chap does with his sex life; why don’t they just talk about the Nigerian politics they came to talk at the forums instead of personalizing it?

Generally, other people talk about abstract subjects and do not talk about these Igbos parents or their personal issues, so where in the world did they get the idea that it is okay for them to be talking
about other people’s personal issues, telling lies about them?

Their lies are meant to put down the folks they talked about. It is part of their cultural practice called Njakiri; here, they get together and put folks down; they make up stories about folks and say the most nasty things about them.

This Daniel guy went on and on talking about my business. At some point I decided to take him on and let him have it. I wrote just one piece on him and now the man is crying uncle; he now sees me as
persecuting him!

His cohorts, his Nwannas, came supporting him! They, too, feel persecuted by me and are defending themselves from me. They, like him, forget their constant attacks on me.

These weird folks attacked me over and over and I ignored them and when in self-defense I attacked them they cry persecution.

This is what they do to Hausas and Yorubas; they call Hausas and Yorubas unprintable derogatory names and those largely ignore them. But, occasionally, those folks patience breaks down and they return the attack, sadly, often violently.

Many Igbos have been killed in Northern Nigeria; generally, it is because they insult Hausas and when Hausas have had enough they bring out their sharp machetes and start slashing at every Igbo in sight! The sins of fathers are visited on their children!

When this happens, Igbos cry persecution; they forget their precursory behavior of persistently insulting Hausas! (See Shapiro, 1978; 1984.)

They have so alienated most Nigerians by insulting them that it is doubtful that Nigerians would vote for an Igbo into high political office to rule them. I do not see an Igbo becoming the president of Nigeria in the next decades.

In effect, Igbos have been shut out of wielding real political power in Nigeria. Aware that they are now essentially powerless in Nigeria, instead of trying to understand why, they now want to separate from Nigeria.

They have no history of governing themselves well; in fact, before the British came to their world and gave them large scale government, they had only village governance; they did not develop to a point where they had Igbo wide political institutions; they had no centralized legislature, judiciary and president or premier or king.

Anthropologists call them a stateless people; this is a polite way of saying that they are a primitive people who did not develop advanced social structures for self-governance, who did not develop writing and the wheel, prerequisites for civilization.

Just about the only thing they excelled at was roaming around their world, capturing their people and selling them to Romans, Arabs and Europeans as slaves. No wonder that Frederick Lugard (1965) called them the savages of the lower Niger; the man had total contempt for them! In some passages of his book Lugard actually said that Igbos are narcissistic and only seek titles that make them seem important but do not work for collective social good. The man said that he doubts that they can mount a large scale social political organization. He saw them as children, no kidding! (My observation independently tallies with Lugard's!)

Objectively speaking, Igbos have no history of modern self-governance and if they separated from Nigeria would probably degenerate to the status of Somalia.

In Somalia, even though all Somalis speak the same language, the people separated themselves into clans and each clan fights with others and the country now has Hobbesian war of all against all and life is nasty, brutish and short.

I can see the various Igbo clans: Owerri, Onitsha, Nkwerri, Okigwe, Wawa, Umuahioa, Ikwerri , Ika Igbo (Agbo and Asaba) etc. fighting each other for political leadership of their football field sized empire; the place would be a perpetual war zone and life would be insecure for all.

I hope that this does not happen!

DISCUSSION

If you observe Igbos you will see that many of them are paranoid; they have a sense of persecution and grandeur. Paranoid sense of grandeur, aka superiority and persecution tend to go hand in hand.

(I should have known this fact; I slap myself for not knowing it; it would have saved me a lot of headache in dealing with these people.)

The other traits of delusion disorder also go hand in hand in the paranoid: jealousy, erotomania and somaticism (See DSM, 2013).

The typical Igbo paranoid has all five traits of delusion disorder: grandiosity, persecution, jealousy, erotomania and somaticism. This is evinced by their high rate of paranoid jealousy that leads them to kill their spouses. Some Paranoid Igbos actually claim to be married to Jesus (this is erotomania). Of course they claim to be superior to other people (paranoid grandiosity) and feel persecuted by those they feel superior to and attack (paranoid persecutory belief).

I believe that the best thing for me to do is to leave these people alone. I must move on and forget that they exist. I have done my best to help them and will do no more.

Whereas I have thick skin and I am not bothered by verbal abuses, however, I do not need to deal with these peoples verbal abuses on a daily basis. They distract me from doing my work. I have important work to do and do not need to be responding to folks who consistently misinterpret my writing; they project their paranoid interpretations, their preconceptions and presuppositions to me. I am often flabbergasted when they tell me what they think that I said in my writing that I did not say!

Herrnstein and Murray said that they have chicken brains! Oops, that is a put down! Let them go fight with their racist detractors instead of a man trying to raise their low IQ by a notch by giving them free information, the type of information that is not found in their low information world.

CONCLUSION

Building on my tumultuous relationship with some Internet Igbos, I came to the conclusion that many of them have delusion disorder.

In this piece I pointed out that their annoying braggadocio and sense of superiority masks their underlying depression (and its low self-esteem). They are a depressed people hiding their depression with their infantile grandiosity (as shown by their boastfulness and lack of humility).

Depression is generally characterized by loss of interests in the activities of daily living, such as lack of desire to go to school, or go to work; lack of desire to participate in sports and socialize with other persons; the clinically depressed person often does not have the energy to even get up from his bed and leave his home and does not groom his body; some of them see life as meaningless and commit suicide.

I do not want to remove Igbos mask of superiority and expose them to their underlying depression; to do so when they are not yet ready to confront their real issues could stimulate clinical depression in them and they commit mass suicide.

Therefore, I must leave them to keep on pretending to be masters of the universe; masters that have not contributed anything to science and technology or politics.

I move on and leave them to drown in their sordid world; I do not belong in their world; in my world if you see issues in you, your parents and people you state them with the goal of helping all to improve.

On the other hand, in their paranoid world, folks hide their issues hence live in darkness; paranoid persons (Swanson, 1970) pretend to be giants with feet of clay!

REFERENCES

American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual. 5thEdition. Washington, DC. The American Psychiatric Press.
Please read sections on narcissistic personality disorder, delusion
disorder, paranoid personality disorder, schizophrenia, paranoid type;
also read the sections on depression.

Herrnstein, Richard & Murray, Charles (1996). The Bell Curve. New
York: The Free Press.

Lugard, Frederick (1965). The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa.
5thEdition. London: Frank Cass & Co.

William W. Meissner (1978). The Paranoid Process. New York: Aronson.

William W. Meissner (1986). Psychotherapy and the Paranoid Process.
New York: Aronson.

Shapiro, David (1973). Neurotic Styles. New York: Basic Books.

Shapiro, David (1984) Autonomy and the Rigid Character. New York: Basic Books.

Swanson, David et al (1970). The Paranoid. New York: Little Brown and Company.


Ozodi Osuji
April 14, 2016
www.centerformindscience.org
(907) 310-8176