The Tacit Muse: Aswim in Denial

We use Hitler to stand for monumental evil, but he fascinates us because hero-worship is so dangerous. Everybody knows the footage of Hitler at the podium in Nürnberg lecturing the sweating worshipful crowd of supporters in military formation below him. Likewise, Trump gave his acceptance speech at the White House—also a grandiose setting—to guaranteed followers.

It’s naughty to compare the Donald to Adolf. Yet it’s hard to avoid.

Both Adolf and Donald are famous narcissists, but narcissism is a system. Both flatter their followers. As Trump has said, “I want every child in America to know that . . . ANYONE CAN RISE.” The slogan is also a euphemism. “Make America great again” means “I can make YOU great again.”  He’s talking about self-esteem. YOURS and HIS.

The hatred of “enemies,” whether Jews or liberals, reinforces the conviction of supremacy.  There is a direct connection between fantasies of Aryan and white superiority. You stroke my self-esteem and I’ll help you “RISE.” To rise means not just an elevation in status, but to grow up as a hero.

If you rise far enough, you become a god, the messiah. In Trump’s words, “I am the chosen one.” As Donald has told us many times,  he is infallible—supremely right—and like Adolf, he has no plans ever to step down.

But remember: it’s a system. We’re all tempted. Everyone wants to be rescued from something. The messiah saves you, but without somebody to save, the messiah is nothing.  Adolf and Donald both need the base. “I’m with you. I am your voice.” And the fantasy of rescue requires the hero to profess, as the Donald does, “they are coming after ME, because I am fighting for YOU.” 

The base worships the super-parent  to feel, as they say, on top of the world.

Adolf’s followers had lost a “world” war and suffered the Great Depression. Donald keeps trashing his predecessor Obama in order to have something to rescue us from.  Meanwhile, Donald promises magical  rescue from the pandemic as Adolf associated Jews with disease. Identify with the hero and you RISE above social death or, in a pandemic, real death. In a lockdown you feel helpless: you’re surrounded by an invisible viral enemy.  If you give in and wear a mask,  you risk realizing that the hero can’t reliably defeat of virus and therefore can’t save you.

As in sports, one of the best remedies for fear is winning. In combat the winner controls the loser, enslaving or killing them. Both Adolf and Donald promise victory.  

This sounds like populism. But it is a parental promise to sacrifice for the kids, although the Hitler kids would die as martyrs in combat, and Trump’s militarism (so far) is his defense of gun rights, the Armed Forces, and white militias. Hence his taunt to Democrats. “We’re here and they’re not”—meaning we’re in the White House and they are not; but also, we are alive and immortal, and they are not.

Personality is organized around self-esteem. We want to feel good about ourselves. We want to feel right. This is a social behavior, since being right is competitive and like winning in sports or victory in warfare.  But being right is also a survival behavior. Being right about the world and its dangers means that you are likely to live longer.

You can see why protest attracts us. Whether it’s solitary or a crowd behavior, in thought or in action, protest intensifies the feeling of being right.  As Canetti says in Crowds and Power, joining a crowd expands yourself.  There is more of you. The crowd amplifies your power.  You don’t have to worry about faults or the fine details of being right: the crowd shares your responsibility even as it confirms your feeling of being right.

This is true whether your protest is right or wrong. Presumably, depending on the circumstances, you can get an ego- boost whether you believe in White Power or Black Lives Matter. Incidentally, this is a good place to repeat that I believe that blacks in this country have been oppressed and subject to social death. Perhaps that needs to be emphasized because I want to write about the psychology of protest—a  distinction that may be misunderstood.

For one thing, protest is attractive, even seductive. Like a drug, it feels good,  whichever side you happen to be on. Fighting against a protest is itself a kind of protest.  In Hong Kong, the authoritarian Chinese communist party demonizes protesters. Cops disparage those they fight in the streets, partly out of guilt for their attacks  on people usually unarmed, partly out of fear that they could be injured too.

Both sides—cops and protesters—illustrate the tragic creaturely motive that there is no natural limit to protest. Both sides in a skirmish are likely to be gripped by idealism.  Both sides feel that they’re acting to improve a threat. But concepts such as “peace,” “goodness,” “purity,” and “order” have no upper limit.  How much is enough? This is one reason why people fight to the death over religion—which after all tends to be cosmic.

In everyday psychology, the danger is hysteria.  Cops  act hysterical when they beat unarmed protesters;  lynching is a  sadistic form of protest. And some protesters act hysterically when they try to  burn down government buildings. The appetite for self-esteem can be voracious.

This doesn’t mean protest is never justified, but that it needs to be grounded.

For implications, have a look at The Psychology of Abandon (Leveller’s Press).

Ambivalence and the Decision Tree

If you’re ambivalent, you have conflicting or even opposite feelings. It sounds simple enough, but it’s not so easy to appreciate how thoroughly it shapes your life. Ambivalence can be paralyzing, exasperating, intimidating—or inspiring–when you have to admit that we’re of two minds (at least) about everything.

As Ernest Becker reminds us, we’re animals like all the other animals: and we’re built to be both predators and prey. Among other things, we are self-aware.  But conflict often escapes us.  We can’t wait to grow up, for example, yet we hate to grow up because it means narrowing choices and inescapable death.

Ambivalence began to intrigue me when I found to my amazement that most (smart) college students I asked were unable to define the term. They confuse it with ambiguity and equivocation. The concept that we have conflicted feelings and attitudes about everything seemed strange to them, or only hazily familiar. Students know they have complicated inner life, but they’re fuzzy about the concept that would give them some control over it.  What’s going on here?

 A generation or two ago most college students knew Freudian lingo. Thinking about inner life, they used terms such as repression and ambivalence—sometimes clumsily, but that’s another story.

Freud, you recall, saw personality beset by conflicting forces. The challenge was to face up to the storm of reality and keep your balance. For Freud, you were a detective of inner life trying to identify the often invisible pressures pushing you off the sidewalk. It was all about keeping an eye on the shadows and continual problem-solving. It was all process, with no trophy answers and lifetime guarantees. And it was a moral drama too. It prodded you to admire courage and honesty and the ability to harmonize tensions—what the Victorians used to call character.

The Freudian heyday was the hair-raising twentieth century with its insane industrial killing, sickening economic Depressions, and social revolutions smoked down to a roach that burned your fingers.

Lately, I’ve been told, Freud is old-fashioned. What’s changed?

A generation has grown up in the post-Vietnam age of computer technology and consumer utopia. Tech boosts productivity and wealth. But now the trope shaping inner life is no longer Freud’s vision of wrestling with ambivalence, but the decision tree. Like a computer program, life is a sequence of choices.  

Technology lays out, even guarantees the choice. The computer assembles a database and guides you to pick the right career, the right spouse, the right neighborhood, the right child, the right pediatrician, the right school. If you choose correctly each branch of the decision tree, you reach utopia as in a board game. Or you kill every enemy in sight and rest your tired thumbs in video-game triumph. The model implies that utopia means success, prestige, perfect contentment, envious eyes on your awesome wardrobe and your McMansion.

Industrialism and robotics seem to make wealth and correct choices for us.  Today’s bling overlaps periods of historical wealth such as the Gilded Age, but the decision tree is different.

Of course we’ve always been ambivalent, so we do and don’t believe in perfect choice. Belief in perfect success may elate you but also depress you. Or make you cynical. Or gullible.

And the bigger picture remains ambivalent. Google promises that omniscience is only a click away. In hopes of escaping the mechanical schema, we try to think “outside the box.” Historically, plague dumped bodies into mass graves, and worshipers blamed themselves and begged a “loving god” for forgiveness. These days nature threatens us with a pandemic virus, but we choose a tech-inspired “warp speed” vaccine to save us, as if such a solution already existed.

Tech is so convincing—so comprehensive—that we easily lose touch with the ambivalence built into us. Science wisecracks that we are thinking meat. Astronomers see terrifying black holes and the media run colorful photos of the heavens. Already we can see the prospect of human extinction, and popular science is fantasizing about exoplanets light years away.

One problem is denial.  Cosmic photos flatter us with technical heroism. At the same time they deny our creaturely motives: fear of our puny helplessness and our compulsion for more life. TV ads sell immortal snake oil or boost your immunity.  Brands idealize romance and sex, which literally make more life in the comfortable families that populate advertising. 

You love intimacy, but you resent its demands too. You enjoy sex but there are times when part of your brain is echoing Lord Chesterfield’s harumpf that “the sensation’s only momentary, and the positions are ridiculous.” When hormones are boogeying, you nearly faint at the sight of a beautiful body. Yet bodies are also hilariously grotesque, with a big toe on one end, a bony pod of thinking meat on the other–and in the middle, thirty feet of plumbing, erratic hair, and assorted orifices. You love your body. It feels sexy and promises to generate more life yet you’re also trapped in it and if you stick around long enough, it will decay and take you with it.

Decision tree behavior is easy to caricature because you and I know that in reality it’s artificial (1).  Dig deeper and you find that decision tree behavior is also insolubly ambivalent. Decision tree culture privileges executive freedom and enforces factory controls. Yet it’s raised living standards by systematizing work in scale  at the same time that it  fosters delusion and injustice.

The paradox is that ambivalence generates anxiety: and anxiety spurs us to create cultures that shelter us from creaturely conflicts. No wonder us bipeds are continually renovating houses, religions, and scientific theories. No wonder we’re tirelessly tinkering with the cultures that  enable us to believe our lives have enduring significance. We love them. We fear and hate them. We try to improve them.

1. The best caricature of decision-tree thinking I know is in one of the most profound American novels, John Barth’s devastatingly tragicomic The End of the Road (1958). Not to be missed. 

One way of coping with ambivalence is to “let it all hang out” or “go for it.” Berserk abandon promises access to extraordinary resources by overthrowing inhibitions. If this dynamic interests you, check out The Psychology of Abandon (Levellers Press):

<<Berserk style has shaped many areas of contemporary American culture, from warfare to politics and intimate life.>>

<<This book amazes me with its audacity, its clarity, and its scope. We usually think of ‘berserk’ behaviors—from apocalyptic rampage killings to ecstatic revels like Burning Man—as extremes of experience, outside ordinary lives. In fascinating detail, Farrell shows how contemporary culture has reframed many varieties of abandon into self-conscious strategies of sense-making and control.>>

A disgusted policeman who has hired many rookies reports that they all say they want to be cops in order “to help people.” He was sick of the formula. When we had too many applicants for the available practice teaching slots, applicants vowed in interviews that they wanted to teach in order “to help students.” Again, a formula.

Wannabe teachers and cops want a steady job that pays well, guarantees retirement, bennies, etc. They lie for practical reasons: they want a job and the respectable identity that comes with it. They don’t see the job as a profession or themselves as professionals. They’re desperate for a slot.

This is partly the way the post-Vietnam economy has developed in the US: the war against the working poor. You see it when the young fight for a livable minimum wage and also in Black Lives Matter protests.

But what’s also missing is recognition that all people fantasize.  While big city and suburban cops may have different motives, they share in American culture’s fantasies of heroism: of rescuing people—or helping them.   

We’re sociable animals, but built around self-esteem. A young cop once told me that there is no feeling like knowing that the sidearm in your holster makes you the most important person on the street. Cops carry guns, logically, because someone may use a gun to kill them. That is, in fantasy and sometimes  in reality,  cops—like soldiers and doctors—command respect when they wrestle with death. They’re not flipping burgers;  they’re special.

Of course we’re ambivalent toward that authority.  We can be envious of cops’ power and morally enraged by their failures—as in killing unarmed Blacks. Rarely do we remember that dozens of cops are killed every year.

Usually we keep our ambivalence in check by fantasies about training.  With perfect training, a cop could handle drug addiction or mental illness— like a doctor. But no such perfect training exists, not even for doctors. What’s more, training is abstract–lists of rules and procedures–whereas the decision to shoot a fleeing suspect in the back is made in a split second for reasons that are often out of conscious control.

One way of taming our ambivalence toward cops is to split it off as sports. After all, athletes wow us by skillfully playing on the edge of control. In football, say, the killing is disguised. Hooligan fans may run amok after the game, but the aggressive players are penalized.

Training can work in sports. In matters of life-and-death policing, training may be  inadequate, but it can be better.

When Martin Luther King was killed in 1968, I was a graduate student living in New Brunswick New Jersey. Fearing looting, the owner of the exhausted furniture store downstairs left his radio on at full volume overnight. Tenants got no sleep but lots of time to think about what that excruciating noise meant.

The city was segregated, and white store owners plastered shop windows with emergency plywood.  Despite nationwide riots, the city remained ironically calm  as if listening to the Rev. King, “I’m absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt.”

More than nonviolence, King’s thought is psychological: he’s convinced that hidden motives are crucial. After all, the plywood and the bellowing radio imply warfare. The plywood functions as a shield to keep an enemy out. The furniture store radio attempts to outshout an enemy.

Warfare here is a tantrum. The bellowing is a demand:  it intimidates as it tries—like the plywood–to block out the enemy.  The protest, as King implies, may also be a tantrum.

Yes, the protesters are moral—they’re protesting murder and racial injustice. But the protesters also have to overcome their fear and guilt in order to rebel against authority.

Both sides inflate themselves to cow the enemy and to make themselves bigger—indestructible. Like other animals, we want to magnify our power.  Even looters’ smash and grab attempts to inflate their power and self-esteem by “making a killing.”

Mr. Trump emphasizes,  even brags about, his ability to “make a killing.” He demands that authorities “dominate”  protesters in the battleground of American streets. Posing with the upside-down Bible, as he did in front of St. John’s Church in DC, Mr. Trump was trying to outshout the protesters’ moral voice.

Partisan media broadcast nonstop about the protests. Their motives were no doubt a mixture of moral passion and money-making. They too were trying to  outshout enemies. 

As the Rev. King might say, we need to uncover motives.

“Lockdown” appears to be a strange term to stop viral contagion. We “lock” things against threats. In panic we hope to lock out coronavirus and death.

“Lockdown” suggests government authority, especially imprisonment. More particularly, the term suggests a reaction to a prison riot in which the prisoners are locked in their cells. The idea is that individual prisoners are unlikely to act out panic or rage, whereas a crowd loosens inhibitions and paradoxically magnifies the illusion of personal power even as identity dissolves in the group. The fear is that the crowd may turn into an out-of-control mob.

Lockdown also suggests that we are prisoners in our everyday lives. We are trapped by habits, for example, which threaten to force us to recognize that though we may daydream of heroic exploits, all lives are ultimately trivial and faulty. And so, like prisoners in denial, we prefer to scapegoat others rather than take responsibility, as global leaders blame one another for the virus.

The term reaches into the central nervous system’s “fight or flight” reactions. Liberals tend to be anxious or even panicky about the viral threat. If you are locked up or invisible, the deadly virus cannot touch you.

By contrast, rightwing thinking combats fear by protesting against the group’s—Government’s—lock up. Rightwingers imagine that aggressive action can defeat the dominance of the group and also the threat of the virus. Hence the call to “open up” or “liberate” society.

The belief in fight shows up when extreme rightwingers invaded the Michigan State house brandishing military weapons. They were handling fear by advertising their ability to kill other people. In effect, they were behaving like the coronavirus, as if the virus was a human enemy that could be defeated by intimidation. The weapons made the protesters seem bigger and more powerful, like threat displays in other animals such as baring teeth.

The ultimate lockdown is death. A pandemic exposes the limits of culture to protect us. Religions, racial superiority, the economy, and science, for example, threaten to turn into fictions. We dream of being rescued by first-responders or super-medicines advertised on TV. Liberation is not merely “going back to work” or to “normalcy,” but our ability to be realistic.

Check this out: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/opinion/coronavirus-trump-authoritarianism.html
The URL above takes you to Thomas Edsall’s op Ed in the New York Times that reminds us that an emergency such as the Covid virus keeping us “locked down” usually generates an authoritarian reaction.

You do see some signs all authoritarianism these days. For example, Mr. Trump proclaims that the virus makes him a “wartime president.” With flimsy evidence, he would blame the threat on the Chinese, as politicians all over the world, including the Chinese, are doing.

What’s missing is the concept of denial.

Edsall’s intelligent argument (above), not to mention his academic sources, never touches on the problem of death-anxiety.  Edsall quotes Eric Kaufmann, author of the book Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities, who takes “a more optimistic take on the likely political consequences of the pandemic, among other reasons, because pandemic “compels faith in experts, making it riskier to entrust ‘burn it all down.’”

As I have argued in the Psychology of Abandon and plenty of evidence supports (alas), the terror of losing oneself to death or social death often creates panic. Panic, in turn, may take the form of flight or fight as the nervous system is overloaded. Humans look to authoritarian hero-worship to be rescued from death.

Is Edsall points out, Nazis came to power in Germany partly because all of the 1919 flu pandemic and the global Great Depression. The “burn it all down” global war 2 expressed the terror of all the participants, especially the megalomaniac fantasy of immortality that Nazi ideology propagated.

The term “lockdown” expresses the authoritarian motivation that lurks in death anxiety. If anybody doubts this, think all of the protest against lockdown in Michigan that involved invasion of the Statehouse by “protesters” armed with military weapons. The threat of guns expressed the need all of the protesters not simply to stand up to Government, but also the need to feel superior to mere mortals. Insofar as the small invasion got global media exposure, the symbolic action resonated with the death-anxiety of viewers around the world.