Many wealthy people acquire their wealth through honest enterprise, and all credit to them. Some have generously distributed it to good causes and the needy. But others have amassed their wealth through unfair advantage in money markets, where they gleefully and frantically accumulate it and use it to set themselves above others. If psychiatrists had their wits about them, they would expose this mentality as a mental-health disorder.
The super rich and people gunning to join them risk cheapening their life in pursuit of an infantile dream. The accumulation of boodles of money can be driven by a self-damaging, unconscious compulsion to regress to a consoling, infantile mentality.
Child psychology explains the nature of this infantilism, and I discuss its connection to money further along. But first let’s look at the mind of infants and their delusional experience of the world. Their mind is obviously undeveloped, and it experiences life subjectively, chaotically, and irrationally. They register their circumstances through mystifying sensations and impressions, even as they are actively trying to make sense of it all. Irrationality persists for years. Babies and young children engage in magical thinking, and they believe the world revolves around them.
This fledgling mentality is all innocent and normal, though normality can collapse later when older children or adults cling stubbornly to egotism and narcissism, to the remnants of their primitive sense of reality.
What feels most real to infants and babies is the sense of being at the center of everything. Even parents are felt to be just extensions of the baby’s existence. This is infantile megalomania, and biologically it makes sense that infants and babies would be susceptible to it. Their mind hasn’t had time to gather knowledge and experience to become objective.
This extreme self-centeredness can be observed in young children when they say and believe, “I’m going to be the president when I grow up,” or “I’m going to be the best actor.” It’s great to dream big, of course. But here the children are expressing delusions of grandeur that derive from their subjective, self-centered sense of reality.
Infants and babies are also under the influence of omnipotence, which is their sense that whatever happens around them occurs through their own wishes or agency. When Mom hands Tommy a rattle, it feels to him that he wished for this to happen, as if in charge of the action. Later, when children go through the “terrible twos,” they are protesting vigorously, with tantrums and defiance, the shattering of their illusion of megalomania and omnipotence as parents introduce them to social behaviors.
Fascism derives from this primitive consciousness, and we have seen historically how easily people can be lured into a resonance with this primitive mentality. By adolescence, most of us are leaving it behind. But others cling stubbornly and mostly unconsciously to the old hurt of having been dethroned. The illusion of being an all-powerful center of existence is reassuring, and it may serve biologically to boost a child’s will to live. Remnants of this mentality remain in the psyche of us all. But we’ll be neurotic and suffer if we don’t make enough progress outgrowing this sense of exclusiveness.
Back on the subject of money, we can see that it becomes a means to “enjoy” once again the illusion of supreme power (omnipotence) and self-importance (megalomania). With money, people try to buy the sense of being above others, of being intrinsically superior. This mentality consoles those who haven’t matured psychologically and have failed to connect with their better self. Their egotistic identity becomes weaponized as an entitlement, a kind of emotional salvation that is used (usually unconsciously) to shield them from their greatest fear, namely the prospect of being a nobody, someone of no significance who is helplessly at the mercy of fate.
Money becomes inordinately important when, in extravagant (and even modest) amounts, it serves as “evidence” of one’s significance, worthiness, and exclusivity. It feels as if extravagant wealth can buy off emotional insecurity, while verifying one’s presumed exceptionalism.
Try to sense what it feels like to own a thousand million dollars or more. The mind is overwhelmed by a multitude of considerations involving shifting configurations of power, superiority, privilege, entitlement, choices, and relationships. Emotional coldness is adopted to keep “money marauders” at bay. Anger and scorn are employed to rationalize miserliness. The humanity of a neurotic person can be swept aside by financial preoccupations and schemes.
Of course, no one’s bank account, however huge, can fill the inner void of self-doubt. Yet the super rich, on their one-way track, strive frantically to grow their wealth, often to flaunt it, and to protect it savagely, for instance from those who seek fair taxation of it.
The super rich want consciously to feel connected to an intrinsic sense of value, but unconsciously they can be, like the rest of us, compelled to recycle and replay unresolved doubts concerning one’s worthiness, significance, and place in the world. Like all of us, the super rich want consciously to feel strong emotionally. Yet they also can feel (as do we all) self-doubt, cravings, risky impulses, resentments, anger, insults, and yearnings for revenge. If they’re too conflicted emotionally to seek the high road or too cowardly to face their inner conflict, their “solution” can be to scurry back to their childish past to seek consolation in grandiosity.
Still, the super rich are just one facet of worldwide dysfunction arising from this lingering infantile mentality. White supremacy is a racially based variation of this. And our headlong plunge into climate catastrophe and dangerous technologies is an unconsciously sanctioned mass movement driven in part by the illusion that our exceptionalism will protect us from grave danger or extinction.
What drives this self-sabotage? Are we a species plowing through life on the coattails of the megalomaniacal-omnipotent illusion? It’s as if we’re trying to reset, on our terms, the laws of nature, the limits of shamelessness, and who lives, who suffers, and who dies. Much of this revolt against the spirit is driven by the infantile mentality, and we, in the passivity of childishness, have gone along with it.
Is our primitive baby mind, the childish ego, saying the world must accept us on our terms—or we will destroy it?
Infantilism is on exhibit at the White House. There it displays Big Ego (seeker of attention, entitlement, power, and revenge) in a ghastly cage fight of brute aggressiveness, all a coverup for inner weakness. Meanwhile, the heroes among us struggle to hold on to their best self and keep the world sane.
The super rich are indifferent if not hostile to democracy because they don’t want their “royalty” sullied by the masses. They feel demoted when their exclusivity is “invaded” by everyday people. Infantilism rules when one’s highest reverence is money, ego gratification, and power over others.
