I watched MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show this past Monday, and I was frustrated. She’s brilliant and patriotic, but like journalists everywhere she tends to see people and world events somewhat superficially. I’ll explain why.
Ms. Maddow was bemoaning the fact that so many people are tolerating Donald Trump’s recent eruption of particularly incendiary language. Despite his fascist terminology, they’re not prepared to abandon him.
She asked repeatedly why it is that Trump is using the terminology Hitler employed during the 1930s, especially in references to immigrants and bloodlines. Trump resorts to such language because it works, she kept saying. People are susceptible to it.
As I watched her show, I asked myself, “Okay, right, but why does it work? Tell us why it works!” Rachel, bless her, didn’t even begin to address my question. She didn’t do so because, unfortunately, the knowledge of depth psychology is considered too esoteric. We are also unconsciously resistant to the knowledge.
In large measure, political and social dysfunction originates through inner conflict in our psyche. Trump appeals to neurotic people who are weakened by their inner conflict. He can appear charismatic to those who have a weak connection to their better self. They are deeply and emotionally impressed that, despite his compromised character, he has what appears to them a powerful sense of self. They see Trump steamroll over personal self-doubt and any sense of inadequacy or failure. They experience this brazenness as a form of power, and when they align emotionally with it through allegiance to Trump, they’re able to absolve themselves temporarily of the self-punishment their own inner conflict generates.
Before saying more about this deep concept, let’s consider the nature of inner conflict. This conflict involves a tendency to experience doubt concerning one’s essential worthiness. Often, inner conflict involves not just self-criticism, but also self-mockery, self-condemnation, and even self-hatred. Inner conflict is the cauldron of agitation in our emotional tussle between wanting to be strong versus feeling weak.
Of course, this flaw in human nature is not solely a problem on the Right. Liberals and progressives can also experience troublesome inner conflict, as I describe further on.
Here’s a one-paragraph clinical synopsis of the heart of the problem, after which this essay is easier to understand. The main expression of inner conflict occurs in our psyche between the passive, unconscious ego and the superego or inner critic. The superego is primitive and authoritarian. It tends to function as the unconscious master of the personality, while our inner passivity functions as its enabler. The superego directs aggression toward our unconscious ego which strives with mixed success, through a variety of defenses, to keep this aggression at bay.
The superego can lay a heavy trip on us. We become desperate to defend ourselves from the superego’s attacks on our weaknesses and foibles. One defense is to claim we are innocent of wrongdoing. Our failures in life, we consciously and unconsciously contend, are largely due to the malice of unsavory people, the world’s injustices, or adverse circumstances beyond our control.
So, we are desperate to blame others for our disappointing circumstances or for why we feel so bad about ourselves. Almost any target can serve this purpose. Absurd irrationalities are employed, if necessary, in the process. In righteously or aggressively blaming others, we can get our punishing superego to pause temporarily from blaming us. Often we adopt crude aggressive behaviors toward others to convince our superego that the fault lies with them.
Trump intuitively uses this weakness against us. He becomes for his followers a psychological “savior.” He “saves” them from having to take responsibility for their life circumstances. He paints his followers as righteous victims. Trump, the great denier of objectivity, weaponizes the psychological ignorance of his followers. He exhorts them to fight, but the fight is really to protect their idealized sense of self. Their fight is to falsify reality, mainly for the purpose of denying inner conflict as well as all awareness of how they generate negative perceptions and emotions. Their fight is to deny their deep, unconscious willingness to remain entangled in the dark side of life.
When they identify with Trump, they also have powerful ammunition to get the superego off their back. Their unconscious defense makes this desperate claim: “I am powerful, I identify with power. I’m not an inner weakling.” Any risks to democracy in supporting Trump are secondary to neutralizing the self-recrimination that accompanies this inner weakness. Trump uses them and they unwittingly use him in their escapism from personal responsibility for their negativity and in their resistance to inner growth.
Hence, Trump loyalists are largely covering up inner weakness. Their fealty to the “strongman” figure serves as “proof” (in their battle of the unconscious) that they are not emotionally aligned (identified with) a deep sense of weakness. In this way, their fealty feels like an expression of strength. An aggressive hostility toward liberals or Democrats is mustered for the purpose of feeling an intoxicating pseudo-aggression that denies inner weakness. Through Trump, they can “appreciate their enormity” versus agonizing in a sense of smallness.
Such people are enthralled by the prospect or possession of political power. The sense of power overrides inner identification with weakness. This makes them more willing to circumvent civility and decency in their pursuit of political power and in their use of it. Because their psychological weakness and dysfunction produce a lack of inner freedom, they instinctively resist granting expressions of freedom to others.
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Trump is the poster boy for the refusal to look inward to see oneself objectively. His people are “inspired” to follow his example. Trump apparently has no connection to a better self. He connects to a pompous, idealized, vacuous self through money, fame, power, and attention. These worldly “blessings” are the malignant narcissist’s backbone. His followers are loyal not so much to Trump as to their own infantile, self-preoccupied, egotistic perspective, the opposite of how one’s better self sees the world. The more they validate Trump, the more loyal they are to their own ego.
The most neurotic, the most conflicted, of Trump’s followers are compelled to express their inner chaos into the world around them. Those who are most angry, bitter, cynical, and fatalistic are tempted to support Trump because he’s most likely to fulfill their malign spirit of revenge and retribution. This reactive, hostile aggression is a psychological defense, a coverup, for one’s inner passivity and emotional willingness to identify with a lesser self.
Despite this, people have, in a psychological sense, a claim to innocence in acting out their folly. The world is uninformed and ignorant of these inner dynamics, even the elites in politics, business, and science. Everyone would have access to this knowledge if it were taught in schools and universities. People would have the chance to test or know its benefits for themselves if the psychological establishment hadn’t naively, foolishly abandoned depth psychology in favor of superficial cognitive-behavioral approaches to treating mental health.
Not all neurotic people support Trump, of course. Many liberals and progressives are neurotic. They are susceptible to worry, anxiety, guilt, and shame–all needless suffering. Among their many psychological blind spots, people on the Left are prone to identify compulsively with victims. This is not pure compassion but instead an unconscious readiness, induced by their unrecognized inner passivity, to identify with—or resonate emotionally with—a victim’s real or alleged weakness. This passivity lingers from the extended experience of infantile and childhood helplessness. Keep in mind that we replay and recycle whatever is unresolved within us, even when doing so is painful and self-defeating.
The Left and Right battle mainly across a psychological divide, and that divide is played out socially, economically, and politically. We’re in this mess because we’re so resistant to escaping the myopia of our ego. Our ego blinds us to the humbling realization of inner conflict’s influence upon us. In this context, we lack free will. Our mind is passive to our psyche, and we become passive to our mind and ego. We might be technical wizards but we’re psychological dummies. Yet all this inner conflict (a prime instigator of disunity, violence, and wars) can be overcome as our intelligence penetrates the vital inner frontier.
Neurosis exists on a spectrum, and almost everyone is somewhere on that spectrum. As classical psychoanalysis claimed, inner conflict is a primary disturbance contributing to neurosis. A few basic examples of inner conflict include: the wish to feel loved versus the expectation of being rejected; the wish to be strong versus the susceptibility to feeling and acting weak; the wish to get versus the expectation of being deprived or refused; the wish to be seen as special and competent versus the anticipation of being seen as a loser. (Read this 2022 post of mine for a fuller sense of how inner conflict contaminates our mind.)
People go back and forth in painful inner disputation trying to ease the agony of this conflicted mental-emotional system. It’s time now to liberate ourselves from this glitch in human nature. We can do so with our consciousness rather than, as in neuroscience, with our technology.
What could be a greater tragedy than Trump getting back into the White House through our needless ignorance. What would be more foolish than bringing artificial intelligence into the world when our own intelligence is stripped of vital self-knowledge.
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