bogie asks

Which leads me to ask … what is it about academia (and Hollywood, for that matter) that draws these psychopathic personalities to collect there? What institutional ways of doing things allow the unbalanced not just to converge but to entrench themselves in these places?

Add DC and you’ve asked the question of the age.

one thought is that all three involve true performance –not the everyday quotidian means-to-an-end performance AKA one’s ‘public face’, but the work product itself being the performance in public.

Ergo, ‘rehearsal’ is needed, and as always done out of sight. So from insular inner circle out onto the stage and then back into the bunker and then back into the spotlight and then back into the cloak room –as a way of life, as ‘normal’.

Turning self inside-out for an anonymous crowd, all the while “I vant to be left alone”.

I’m tellin’ ya, Elmer, it just ain’t holistic!