Power grabs are ransacking America’s best traditions and virtues, and psychological forces are driving this behavior. Those in power grab for more power to compensate for how overwhelmed they feel as the world’s growing dangers and complexity worsen. Everyday people are also feeling overwhelmed, and this hidden weakness can be our downfall.
This emotional weakness sparks reactive anger, as well as apathy, fatalism, and the pursuit of idle distractions and self-centered interests. We’re not seeing how national and world dysfunction and chaos arise from our lack of psychological insight.
Our political and business leaders are overwhelmed, and their self-serving frenzy is a psychological reaction to this weakness. Technology companies are jockeying to become richer and more dominant. Aggressive land grabs and water grabs are underway to provide for the demands of data processing. The stock market’s recent exuberance is a Wall Street power-and-money grab. Computing power chasing wealth and political power surges from sea to sea, gearing up to disempower labor, violate privacy, and undermine freedom.
Congress fails to regulate this because so many of its members are themselves egotistic power-seekers. They identify with the power- grabbers, not with the people.
Self-serving people can defeat us if our hidden weakness, the unseen passivity that’s baked into our inner conflict, goes unnoticed and unaddressed. The chaos and dysfunction reflect the degree to which neurosis, in the form of inner conflict, is the great plague upon the nation and the world.
While neurotics suffer with much needless misery and self-defeat, they still can manage to wend their way through life and have decent lives. But over past decades, our struggle to manage our emotional temperament has been challenged in new ways. Technology has produced weapons of mass destruction and deadly climate hazards. The internet has laid the world at our doorstep, which for many overextends their mind and leaves them feeling helpless to process it all. Television and social media have shoved hot-tempered, clashing ideologies in our face, upending our cultural and religious norms. Wealthy celebrities, athletes, and business leaders are paraded before us, leaving us gasping for a sense of our own value. We’re having to contend emotionally with terrorism, superbugs, overwhelming debt, and inflation. Change has been happening too quickly for many of us to assimilate emotionally. People feel more overwhelmed, even as we’re doomscrolling, and the underlying passivity involved here goes unnoticed.
Feeling overwhelmed arises from inner conflict, a psychological disharmony that often operates unconsciously. In large part, the conflict pits inner self-doubt and unconscious passivity against our harsh inner critic. Because of this conflict, we’re more susceptible to negative emotions and self-defeating behaviors. Anger and resentment, for instance, are now more readily triggered. Our aggressive inner critic can now attack us with allegations such as, “What’s the matter with you, you fool! Everyone is doing better than you!” Inner conflict is activated, and we become engaged in defensive-aggressive inner dialogue that can operate unconsciously.
Once self-aggression is activated, it can quickly direct itself outward as projections—as aggressive, angry thoughts and impulses toward others. We start to blame others, often with increasing hostility, in our passive readiness to feel like victims. The intensity of our hostility mirrors the degree to which we have abandoned our better self. The outwardly directed aggression now feels like power, which serves as a consolation for the underlying passivity associated with emotional weakness and self-abandonment. The more people feel helpless, the more they can be desperate to feel power, even illusions of it. They’re more likely to be abusive with their reactive expressions of power or forcefulness. They’re also more likely to be fearful, run off and buy guns, or be swayed by TV “news” that tells them they’re justified in their fear and anger.
People go back and forth in anxious inner dialogue trying to make sense of life and their growing distress. They descend into self-pity, acrimony, and increasing irrationality. Now they are more easily overwhelmed by the pace of change and by their own sense of helplessness.
The psyche of the elites is not necessarily any different than that of regular folk, so these elites, in their own emotional, passive reactions to the world’s growing dangers and complexity, rush off in a frenzy to activate power grabs and consolidate them. Imagine the damage to us all as they increasingly use the power of artificial intelligence to enhance and consolidate this unconsciously driven misbehavior.
The power-grabbers lack a sense of goodness and decency, and they would readily bring us down to their level. They are likely to succeed if we don’t understand our own deeper nature. We all have a certain passive identification within us that lingers from the many years we spent in the passive, relatively helpless experience of childhood. Even as teenagers, we’re still dependent on parental oversight. We don’t magically become fully autonomous and mature when we turn twenty-one. Our struggles as adults—our issues with self-doubt, fear, depression, anxiety, guilt, shame, addictions—all originate from emotional, childish weakness. Again, this weakness is held in place by our inner conflict. The weakness can be recognized and overcome through a deeper appreciation of how our psyche operates through patterns of conflict that can seriously degrade our potential.
Mental health services, themselves overwhelmed with a deluge of competing theories of treatment, are not sufficiently effective. Sadly, the psychological establishment has not been recognizing and teaching the deeper dynamics of inner conflict. There’s no consensus on the essential nature of our dysfunction. No truth has been widely established. All we have are theories and competing methodologies. We are engaged in a global war for truth, even as, through psychological resistance, we keep vital inner truths from ourselves.
The power grab now happening is a reaction to an underlying sense of helplessness, a weakness generated by inner conflict, that leaves us feeling overwhelmed in these especially challenging times. The elite’s power grab is largely reactive aggression—an unconscious, desperate behavior—that tries to override the deep, underlying sense of feeling overwhelmed by the world’s growing complexity. Through depth psychology, we can expose the inner dynamics that produce this weakness.
Momentous changes are happening, and we can manage this emotionally and mentally if we empower ourselves with more psychological insight. We must awaken to our personal power, integrity, and goodness.
—
For a clear and detailed explanation of inner conflict, consider buying a copy of my latest book, Exposed: The Psychological Source of Misery and Folly (2025). It’s inexpensive, highly rated at Amazon, and free of AI. It’s the scoop on why we’re at a life-or-death tipping point in human history.
