This essay says that many persons are simultaneously evil and mentally ill. It says that mental health lies in being loving. Complete mental health, however, is not possible while people live in bodies; it is only possible in bodiless spirit; in body and ego people can approximate mental health by loving themselves and each other but would never be completely mentally healthy. The piece uses the behavior of an Igbo scam, con artist to illustrate its thesis.

On July 26, 2011, I opened my email and there was this letter from an Igbo Nigerian man who claims to be an attorney. He said that he had read one of my articles and that the ideas in it are like those he wrote in a book and that I must have stolen the ideas from him! He proceeded to say that unless certain things are done that he would sue me and the owner of the Internet space at which the said article was published. He asked that his book be advertised for forty eight weeks and made other outrageous demands. I was stunned by this man’s claims since I had never heard of him or his book and there is no way that I could know about his ideas. At any rate, the ideas are what I have written tons of articles on and even books on.  So where did this man get the impression that I, of all people, would steal his ideas?  I could not figure it out.

Initially, I responded to him from an egoistic point of view. I saw him as damaging my credibility by saying that I took his ideas. In writing it is bad etiquette to plagiarize other people’s ideas. So it would seem that the man consciously set out to damage my reputation. Since he told lies I was furious and wanted to go after him and do everything I could to punish him. I do not like people who consciously tell lies about other persons, especially lies that damage other people’s reputations.

There were a few things that I could do to destroy this nincompoop of a person, such as sue him for libel and defamation of character. If he has money I could easily get him to pay up since I had no idea of what he was talking about. A simple lie detector test would prove that I had no idea of him and his book. Moreover, each person has a unique pattern of writing, constructing his sentences; any one could see that my writing is my writing and not his writing (judging from the grammatically jumbled and syntactically meaningless letter he wrote to me, he certainly does not express himself as I do and no one with any sense in his head could confuse our writings).

The ideas  that he said he wrote about I have written on in numerous articles and books and therefore could prove that if anyone is stealing from any one he is probably the one doing so; I give away my writings for free. The Nigerian Internet world and Nigerian newspapers are filled with my writings (on Africans sin of slavery). This chipmunk had to be living in a cave not to have seen my writings!

Empirically, there are few new ideas in the social world. There is no non-scientific idea that a human being can come up with that has not crossed another human being’s mind. When Charles Darwin came up with the idea of evolution he learned that Wallace had published a similar idea on the same subject and had to rush to publish his book, Origin of Species, so as to not have the boat leave him. The point is that human minds are structured in such a manner that many people think about the same subject at any point in time and going about accusing other people of stealing your idea got to be the height of arrogance, and making demands that they must meet otherwise you sue them got to be cheeky or lunatic.

Upon further reflection (I do not see how an attorney could have written this man’s accusatory letter aware of the fact that he could be sued for assassination of character and have this his license to practice law pulled…it would be a simple matter to get this clown debarred if in fact he is an attorney) it finally dawned on me that this man is a thief, a terrorist, a Nigerian 419 scam artist.

He is in business to shake people down, especially to shakedown the Internet space owner. This man had found a unique way to steal and wanted to intimidate those he wants to steal from. He calculated that they are fearful persons and that if he threatened to sue them (being an attorney, as he claimed to be, that folks would be intimidated; poor idiot; apparently, he does not know that attorneys are at the lowest step in folks totem pole for intellectual integrity…I called the City he claims to live at to see if, in fact, he is a licensed attorney and no one has heard of the clown) that they would cow in and allow him to shake them down.

The awareness that I was dealing with a common criminal made me decide to go after his cowardly, stealing African ass and do what I could to destroy him.  But on more reflection I wondered how a man who is rational could get up and accuse strangers of doing what they did not do. If he was rational I can see him writing to me saying: Dr. Osuji, I just read your piece and the ideas you expressed in it seem similar to the ones I wrote of in a recent book; it seems we have a meeting of minds; can we talk? Instead, he assumed that my ideas could only have come from his chicken brain and leaped to an unfounded conclusion that I took them from his book, probably a self-published book or published by one of the vanity presses that help wannabe writers pretend to have published books.

Thinking about this man’s outrageous accusation harkened to my clinical training and my mind searched diagnoses that entail folks making accusations that are not true. Bingo, I got it.

In paranoia, aka delusion disorder, the individual accuses other people of doing what they did not do and actually believes in his accusation (accusations based on paranoid suspicions and insecurity) as true. Those he accuses know that his accusations are false and try to deny them but the paranoid character who has lost touch with reality (he does not test reality well; he does not know the difference between his suspicions and reality; he takes the product of his overheated imagination as truth) would not listen to reason. Those he accuses feel attacked and attack him in self-defense.

When folks feel angry at the paranoid person and go after him he often panics and runs (paranoid persons are very fearful persons though they present bravado public faces) and say that people are dangerous, that they are after his life, to destroy him. He sees himself as the innocent victim that other persons want to harm and does not see the role his false accusation played in peoples attack on him. This is called the self-fulfilling prophecy in paranoia. (When I am done dealing with the Igbo clown there is no doubt that he would be seeing himself as innocent and seeing me as dangerous and after his useless life; he would like a chicken with its head cutoff be running helter skater.)

The paranoid person has a presupposition that the world is a hostile place, that people are unfriendly to him and does not trust them. He is suspicious and guarded and scans his environment looking for danger and defending against real and imaginary dangers. When he falsely accuses people and they feel angry and attack him, since he does not realize that it is his false accusation that led people to attack him, he feels unfairly treated and fancies himself a  victim of bad other people.

Igbo paranoids do this a lot. They accuse Hausas of doing what they did not do; furthermore, in their paranoid grandiosity, arrogance, they put Hausas down, call them derogatory names; they assume that they are superior to Hausas…that assumption is part of their paranoid grandiosity, in truth all human beings are the same and equal. Feeling insulted, Hausas feel angry and attack and kill them. When some of them are killed they turn around and tell the world that they are innocent victims of Hausas and want Hausas to be seen as monsters while they, Igbos, are seen as good people. They forget what they did to elicit Hausas attacks on them, insult them (they are not good people; generally, they are pragmatic and unprincipled and would rip you off in a jiffy if you give them the opportunity to do so).

The Igbo so-called attorney who accused me of doing what I did not do is a paranoid character. At that point I felt pity for him and all the things that had crossed my mind to do to clobber him (including suing him, and or getting him into jail etc.) went out of the window.

Yet, a part of my mind knows that he is a dangerous thief; he is a criminal for he wanted to distort my reputation, extort money from me and stiff the Internet space owner for free publicity for his supposed book (which very few persons would buy and read for it is probably written in paranoid rant, grandiosity and assumption that he has the solution to all the problems of the world…paranoid persons see themselves as the only ones with the solutions to the world’s problems and do not believe that other people can come up with useful solutions to social issues; if they are religious they believe that God selected them to save the world…we call this paranoid prophet, the conviction that one is selected to save other people).

This man used his small mind to devise a way to rip people off. In effect, he is like Igbo kidnappers; he kidnaps people and demands ransom money before he releases them. He is a thief and criminal in addition to being mentally ill.

Therefore, one must not forgive him and have misguided compassion for him. He is mentally sick and he is a thief. A mentally ill person has to be treated; a thief has to be sent to jail for stealing (and the fact that this is high stakes stealing, using threat of law suit to cow people and make them publish his claptrap of a book for free for him is tantamount to committing crime with violence hence the need for long jail time for this scam artist).

mental disorderI wondered how to get this criminally insane man mental health treatment. It crossed my mind to call the mental health department of the city he claimed to live at and ask them to go pay him a visit and perform mental status examination on him and if they find him psychotic and as a result of which he is a danger to other people or to himself or is unable to care for his self-place him in a psychiatric hospital.

A closer observation, however, shows that he is a common thief and not a physical threat to other people (he is a lily livered African coward; Africans are cowards who sold their people into slavery instead of nurture them; they are cowards because they tolerated slavery instead of fighting and dying for their liberty rather than living as freaking slaves; at present, as cowards they tolerate their thieving rulers oppression instead of fighting them and, if needs be, dying for their freedom); if you raise the heat on the self-claimed Igbo lion, a piece of shit, a coward of the first order, he would pee in his pants and run to the African jungle from which he crawled out. He is probably not committable at this time; he seems a well-organized paranoid character. Therefore, I have to find other ways of calling attention to his mental illness (I am still working on that…I have a bull dog mentality and no dog barks at me without been whacked at so that it does not harass innocent strangers).