The deeper the insight, the more we resist it. Like wild animals reacting to their reflection in a mirror, we are shocked to see an unknown self. Why are we shocked? In the mirror of self-knowledge, we see the extent of our self-deception—plus our unconscious pursuit of suffering.
That’s a shocking thing to say. Instinctively, we deny being so foolish. But hear me out. Consider the perilous state of the world. It’s no coincidence that a supreme narcissist is U.S. president. Our psychological blindness—on the political right, left, and center—precipitated this peril. Yet we go on blaming each other.
Bear with me here as I show how our psychological ignorance is tied directly to political turmoil and social disharmony. Civilization and democracy are being undermined from within, and we’re not seeing clearly enough how we each contribute to this dysfunction. In this post, I first discuss this inner dysfunction before addressing the political fallout.
When burdened with emotional and behavioral issues, we are often told that our brain is having trouble sorting things out and that pharmaceuticals can handle the problem. But our emotional troubles are usually more psychological than biological. Stubbornly, many of us cling to emotional suffering and take that suffering to the grave. We can find consoling dignity and self-righteousness in suffering. Good psychotherapy strips away that false dignity as it exposes the folly of needless suffering.
Most of us experience some degree of inner conflict. This inner conflict, when persistent and unrecognized, produces a widespread mental-health dysfunction known as neurosis. This neurosis, whether mild or severe, infringes on our freedom. We’re restricted by what our neurosis imposes on us. When especially oppressive, neurosis subjects us to inner tyranny. We’re locked into acting against our best interests. Many apparently successful people can be neurotic or have troublesome pockets of neurosis. This dysfunction radiates outward into the family, community, and nation.
We can see the wiles and dynamics of outer tyranny—but inner tyranny’s dynamics elude us. Here is my understanding of this inner world: At any given moment, we can be thinking and acting under the influence of five centers of mental and emotional processing. They are the conscious ego, followed by (2), the passive, defensive, unconscious ego (inner passivity); (3), the aggressive, harsh, punishing superego (inner critic); (4), the covetous, crude id; and (5), our redeeming better or best self. Throughout the day, our consciousness can shift in and out of identifications with all five centers. These centers are experienced as thoughts, impulses, drives, passions, and even voices. Clashes and struggles for dominance, justification, and validation persist among these centers, producing the inner conflict that causes moodiness, misery, depression, and self-defeat.
The first of these centers, our conscious ego, has a certain frailty, and it’s anxious about its place and standing in the world. We tend to be aware of identifying with this conscious ego, but we’re likely unaware of how we can also identify with the next three centers—unconscious ego, superego, and id. We don’t recognize their adverse influence upon us. Through the conscious ego (usually our primary sense of self), we scramble around trying to protect or enhance our self-image. This conscious ego has, at best, only consolations (advice, tips, pats on the back) for emotional discord churning inside. When we’re suffering, our conscious ego and unconscious ego typically feel injured, humiliated, or defeated.
The unconscious ego is a major player, along with the superego, in the inner conflict that plagues humanity. When we identify with the weak, unconscious ego, we have only its fearful and passive defensiveness to protect us from the self-aggressive superego. In this clash of raw aggression versus abject passivity, we can see what is primitive, perverse, and malicious in human nature. As we acquire more awareness of this major inner conflict, our insight enables our better self to emerge and bring peace and wisdom to our psyche and to humanity.
Inner conflict needs content in the form of memories, speculations, and emotional reactions to daily life. This content merges with lingering, unresolved hurts from the past. We carry into adulthood a tendency, even a compulsion, to recycle eight first hurts experienced in childhood (feelings of refusal, deprivation, control, helplessness, criticism, rejection, betrayal, and abandonment). Children are biologically limited in their ability to be objective, and they assume their hurts have genuinely been inflicted upon them. For instance, a boy might feel rejected because he falsely believes that “mommy loves little sister more than me.” As an adult, he can be neurotically invested in feeling rejected.
Inner conflict, as mentioned, is processed through the conscious ego, unconscious ego, superego, and id. Churning up the eight first hurts from childhood, inner conflict produces guilt, shame, self-doubt, anxiety, self-justifications, regrets, indecision, procrastination, worst-case speculations, and scores more symptoms. Entangled in this emotional mess, we tend to blame the supposed malice of people and the hardships of life for the misery and self-defeat we largely self-generate. Often, we blame ourselves but for wrong reasons, for instance claiming we’re lazy when the deeper problem is inner conflict’s cultivation of self-doubt, self-abandonment, and helplessness.
Initially, it’s shocking to see that we’ve been blundering blindly in this chaos, activating and enduring (recycling and replaying) inner conflict with its consequential suffering. We recycle repeatedly, as inner conflict, the eight unresolved hurts from our past, largely because our conscious and unconscious egos are too weak, too insubstantial, to overcome inner conflict. To overcome it, we need the strength of our better self. (To get a sense of this dysfunction and our unawareness of it, read my 2022 post, “The Emotional Conflict Behind 50 Mental-Health Symptoms.”)
An example of compulsive suffering is the irrational fear—the worry and anxiety—that arises through the unconscious willingness of many of us to feel helplessly and passively at the mercy of life. Here’s the conflict: Consciously, we want to feel strong, but unconsciously we gravitate emotionally to weakness, helplessness, and passivity. Blind to our entanglement in this standoff, our mind churns up dubious rationalizations (such as claiming that others are bad or malicious) to “justify” our fear.
With deep insight into our compulsion to “go negative,” we can move beyond our cherished, “precious” egocentricity, that illusory sense of self that feels so authentic. Instead of identifying with our conscious ego (and unconsciously with our unconscious ego), we begin to identify with our “core self” or “essential self,” where our goodness and value become a felt reality.
When the Psyche Poisons Politics
We all have unconscious identifications. Everyday people tend to identify largely with the unconscious subordinate ego. Yet evil lurks here in this center through the harm we do to ourselves. As we identify with this passive ego, we weaken self-regulation and harm ourselves with addictions, indecision, procrastination, self-pity, and anxiety. The subordinate ego harbors a bittersweet, consoling attachment to cultlike submissiveness, which undermines the powers of citizenship. The loss of democracy through this passivity would be a great evil that we would have inflicted upon ourselves and our descendants.
In a pronounced disconnect from their better self, tyrants, psychopaths, criminals, and bullies capitulate to the superego and identify with its inhuman character. Like the superego, they become ruthless and fraternize with evil. They instinctively spot weakness in others and take advantage of it. The current U.S. president and his lieutenants are governed largely by the values and impulses of this primitive aggressive side of the psyche. They want to control, dominate, and overwhelm, and unconsciously they take their cue from the superego’s ethos of cruelty, aggression, dominance, and irrationality.
Everyday people who are receptive (and thereby passive) to this mentality are allowing the evil of cruel, aggressive irrationality to tear down what is good and wise and to supplant civility with hate. They have libidinized (rendered sweet and bittersweet) their passivity to primitive, self-aggrandizing power, as do cult members whose servility to their leader becomes intoxicating.
We “act out” what is unresolved within us. If American politicians, bewitched by the superego’s ruthlessness, were to establish an authoritarian government, citizens would intensely feel two of the first hurts of childhood—control and helplessness. Should an authoritarian government arise, we would be controlled and weakened. We tend to create (or act out) what our conflicted psyche would have us experience. Two other first hurts, betrayal and abandonment, would also be acted out through self-betrayal and self-abandonment. Were autocrats to prevail, we would be their passive enablers. Our emotional resonance with the first hurts of childhood would be acted out.
Leading the charge for political authoritarianism and exorbitant wealth is the rampant narcissism now flooding the modern psyche. Narcissism, which cozies up to the id, is especially resistant to depth psychology’s revelations. Narcissism is not just vanity—it’s a protective shield against the humiliating realization of one’s collusion in suffering. Narcissism breeds evil because it sacrifices people on the altar of militant denial and vainglorious pretensions. We do evil to ourselves when, in unwitting cowardice, we allow narcissism to censor our collusion in self-defeat.
Narcissism is a desperate compensation for denial of one’s better self. Narcissists seek a consoling, misleading “special status” to cope with their inner poverty, their psychological disconnect from their better self. This disconnect is apparent in the ultra-rich who, craving the “special status” of obscene wealth, are driven by the primitive id to acquire it. These neurotics are emotionally overwhelmed by their narcissism, making them prone to evil self-aggrandization, Epstein-style wickedness, and autocratic yearnings.
We all harbor the dynamics that produce evil. It starts with how we betray our better self by passively allowing the superego to rule our inner life and inflict punishing self-aggression upon us. As we get past the shock of seeing our passive participation in suffering, we acquire a radical honesty about our plight. As we see the folly in narcissism, we are, when sincerely seeking growth, ready to reorganize our perceptions around reality rather than fantasy. We acquire the power to bring inner conflict into focus and be responsible emotionally for how we fare in life.
The mentality now running the U.S. government is a tsunami of resistance to psychological awakening. It’s the “need” to blame others and to use anger and aggression to cover up one’s bittersweet emotional resonance with feeling victimized and defeated. Reactive anger and aggression are illusions of strength erected to protect the ego’s pretensions. Like narcissism, this reactionary behavior serves as unconscious compensation for underlying passivity and fear. Reactive anger and aggression exhibit phony power—as do passive-aggressive behaviors, self-righteous indignation, and militant ignorance. The “power” is employed unconsciously to cover up one’s emotional attachment to feeling passively victimized, painfully unworthy, unjustly disrespected, or abjectly powerless. This misery is the sum of inner conflict and the extent of emotional or psychological disconnection from one’s better self.
The Left can also display reactive aggression (and psychological blind spots) through political correctness, righteous certitude, injustice collecting, identification with victimhood’s passivity, and the pose of intellectual superiority. Real power or healthy aggression solves legitimate problems and fosters harmony, while reactive pseudo-aggression stirs up opposition and arouses bitterness.
Once we see the subversive forces at play in our psyche, it’s much easier to stop indulging in self-pity, unworthiness, and victimhood—or to remain stuck in boredom, apathy, or fatalism. All such suffering is beneath us, we realize, as we escape inner conflict and connect with our better self.
We all have a certain innocence here because our folly operates so unconsciously. But like medieval populations wiped out by plagues or children killed in war, innocence doesn’t protect us from reality. Self-knowledge is not rocket science. We’re plenty smart, but our stubborn, self-defeating resistance and psychological defenses fend off inner truth. Let’s be inspired now to find our better self and enthrone inner democracy.
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Further understanding of these dynamics is available in my latest book, Exposed: The Psychological Source of Misery and Folly (2025), available here at Amazon.
