This is beautifully, powerfully, intelligently written! I’ll have to read it multiple times before I can get my mind entirely around it, let alone embrace the many implications for self and society that come out of it. It seems as if it should be an essay in a stand-alone book on The Anxiety Culture, or something like Totem and Tabloid, just to be tongue-in-cheek about it. Kubrick’s Strangelove might be the perfect film to explore as a corollary to your ideas about paralysis and mental warfare, weakened fathers and compensatory “small” or injured men, self-destruction and irrational flagellation, let alone species cooperation — I believe you are exactly right — as the pure antithesis it is, or was, to Cold War (narcissal) culture.