Guest View: Raniere may be in a fugue state

By Smith

Gosh, it’s an honor to have a comment promoted like that.

The fugue state is a psychiatric disorder characterized by reversible amnesia for personal identity, including the memories, personality, and other identifying characteristics of individuality. It can last days, months or longer. Is Keith Raniere [above] suffering from it?

The fugue state is a psychiatric disorder characterized by reversible amnesia for personal identity, including the memories, personality, and other identifying characteristics of individuality. It can last days, months or longer. Is Keith Raniere [above] suffering from it?

One thing to add, about that fugue state. That’s the reason prisoners usually don’t want frequent contact with people they knew on the outside. Reminders of how their life was before prison conflict with the life they now live, to the point where focusing on the realities of imprisonment becomes a way of protecting one’s own psychological landscape.

Raniere doesn’t have this right now. In all likelihood, he’s noodling over his defense and the possibility of somehow avoiding a long stretch. He’s working up wild fantasies that hold other people accountable for his actions and thinking about how plausible a jury might find his stories. He might actually believe these charges are someone else’s fault and that person is the one who belongs in jail. But he is doing everything he can, rational and otherwise, to preserve this sense of self where he’s some hero saving the world. That’s just human nature.

The closer Raniere gets to his actual trial date, the more this situation will be working against him, in terms of who he sees himself as being. When he is actually confronted with evidence of his misdeeds in court, regardless of whether or not he’s ultimately convicted, that is going to have a big impact on who he is as a person. There’s a pace to all trials where people are forced to make decisions about whether to save themselves or hang others out to dry. You don’t get a lot of time to think about it, you do what’s in your nature. No one is really innocent, it’s just whether or not you were convicted.

To the NXIVM people that frequent this board, it’s very true to say prison changes the prisoner. Regardless of whether or not he’s sent to jail, Keith Raniere is not coming back. The person who emerges will be very different from the one you revered, disabused of the illusions he had of himself after shanking his fellows on the dock on to diminish responsibility for his own actions.

One does not use tech reboot from that. One simply lives with the horror or what they have done, there’s almost no difference whether or not that life is lived behind bars.