If your country’s leadership, or even your whole society, is showing signs of insanity, especially when that insanity threatens you with sudden death or eventual destruction, how do you keep from going crazy? Beyond various therapies and spiritual practices, Internet confabs and snarkfests, the crap shoot of self-medication, etc., what are some useful attitudes and conceptual tools?
That was where I left off in my last diary about Doctor Strangelove and the insanity of the nuclear age. I concluded that the film’s message could be summed up in a line from a Marx Brothers movie: there is no sanity clause.
This time I’d like to offer a few conceptual tools for understand the ruling insanity of our age. Then hints of an attitude to help us cope, and especially to keep on working for a better future.
(For those who read my most recent Daily Kos diary, this is an extended version of its last section. And a warning: I am not a trained psychologist. Just your average space cadet.)
In 1957, an aged Carl Jung was interviewed extensively for an educational film made by a Texas scholar. Probably the most quoted lines from those interviews are these:
“Nowadays particularly, the world hangs on a thin thread. Assume that certain fellow in Moscow lose their nerve or their common sense for a bit; then the whole world is in violent flames.” After pointing out that there is no such thing in nature as an H-bomb, he continues: “…that is all man’s doing. We are the great danger. The psyche is the great danger. What if something goes wrong with the psyche?”
But Jung didn’t mean just about the psyche of leaders (talking to a U.S. interviewer, he was gracious enough not to mention certain fellows in Washington as well as Moscow.) He meant everyone.
“And so it is demonstrated to us in our days what the power of psyche is, how important it is to know something about it. But we know nothing about it. Nobody would give credit to the idea that the psychical processes of the ordinary man have any importance whatever.”
This is just as true today. We know relatively nothing about the human psyche, and trends in psychology that emphasize manipulation by drugs and tricks don’t help much. We talk on the level of politics, policy, government, business, society as if the human psyche doesn’t exist or is of no importance–as if the field of politics is governed by its own rules only, and is entirely rational and conscious.
But when something like the prospect of nuclear war or the Climate Crisis awakens fears and anxieties in us that are hard to consciously control, or when we plunge into depression because Karl Rove is getting away with it, the psyche asserts itself in a way that we can see.
But let’s be clear: people like Bush and Cheny are acting in large measure to further political and economic goals, and analysis of political and class interests, for instance, are valid. But they don’t tell the whole story. Especially when politicians gather power by “pushing buttons” of the American public, who don’t really share their goals (and certainly not their profits.)
Also, though psychological analysis of these individuals (like Bush as a “dry drunk”) may be useful as well, they are speculative, and not the subject I want to address here.
My argument for including psychological insight in the mix, along with other kinds of analysis, is based largely on my conviction that certain broad psychological concepts, mostly derived from Jung (though not all originate with him) can be applied to understanding why we react as we do, in the political as well as personal realm. And these reactions have political, economic and social consequences. People die, get medical care or don’t, are homeless, are hopeless, partly or even largely because of these reactions.
As Jung implies, knowledge of the how psyche works can help us see the world more clearly, reduce unnecessary conflicts, and help resolve conflicts when they arise. They are among the skills of peace.
They can help us see more clearly what’s really going on, partly by reducing the interference of erroneously based reactions. Even the simplest conceptual tools developed by Jung and others would be immensely useful in both analyzing our situation and in dealing with our own responses.
Simply admitting that a phenomenon called the unconscious exists, and learning how powerful it is, how its manifestations mask themselves as rational products of consciousness, would be a tremendous start.
One key feature of thoughts and emotions that come from the unconscious is that they convince us they are based on conscious reasoning or observation. They come equipped with their own rationale.
How do we know then, whether something comes from the unconscious or not? By testing it against concepts that identify the form that unconscious expressions often take.
We’re pretty familiar with at least one, mostly from the recovery movement: The concept of denial has entered the lexicon. Denial is a powerful and persistent response that colors what we observe and how we interpret it. It may arise when it hurts a lot more to accept a fact or possibility than to reject it–when to accept something shakes the very foundations of our sense of self, or picture of a relationship, or even our sense of reality.
When we react strongly to something, it’s worth asking: am I in denial about this? In the political realm, we’d ask some Republicans if they are in denial about Iraq and the Climate Crisis, and some Democrats if they are in denial about evidence that the 2004 presidential election was stolen. It might help sort out the real issues and real disagreements.
But in the political realm, Jung was much more concerned with another concept: projection. One form of projection is seeing in others the qualities and behavior you fear in yourself.
The simplest form of it is to observe how enemies are typically demonized in wars and other conflicts, but when they become peacetime allies, those terrible qualities of evil suddenly disappear. Jung saw it in the attitudes of Americans and Soviets towards each other. Projection could have led to world destruction, and it still could.
Projection can be very complicated in political discourse, as when both sides call each other Nazis, or accuse each other of corruption. Neither may be right, or one of them is right, or both may be right in terms of their specific charge. But it is always worth asking, how much of this is justified, and how much is projection? If that question isn’t asked, we risk overestimating or underestimated the real danger.
Projection can be used intentionally, and often is. Bush and Cheney push the projection button with their demonizing of every opponent. Rabid rightwing talk radio wallows in projection. Karl Rove has raised projection to a dark art with his strategy of projecting onto opponents one’s own weakness.
Anticipating possibilities is one of our species’ survival skills. But like other good things, such as antibodies, it can go wrong. Fear and projection seem particularly to go hand in hand.
We know nothing about it, was Jung’s cry of pain at the end of a long career. Basic psychological concepts are essential tools of peace, globally and personally. Some of the understanding that eludes us when we don’t use them is possible when we do.
That’s a general strategy. There is a more specific one that applies to many other issues and our general situation. It has to do with dealing with fear, despair and the sense of futility.
Embracing Paradox
One reason we feel so vulnerable is inherent in our “either/or” way of thinking, an essential element in the 5,000 year history of what we call civilization. It may come as quite a shock to us that so-called primitive humans as far back as the Pleistocene had a more complex response to their reality.
For example, as they felt very close to animals, consciously learned from them, and considered them the embodiment of essential spirits. Yet they hunted and killed them. Scholars of the period such as Paul Shepard believe this deeply troubled them, but they developed a more complex way of seeing reality, which to our thinking would be paradoxical, though to theirs was a kind of natural spirituality. Some surviving indigenous cultures retain some of this. Finding a way to deal with the opposites of life and death are central to all belief systems, philosophies and most art.
So how do we cope with the insanity around us? How do we deal with suffering that could be averted, and a future that could be better but probably won’t be?
Dealing with the contradictions in our own lives has been a challenge for a long time, and going on living when great catastrophe can strike at any time is a challenge of our time.
In his novel, “The Time Machine”, H.G. Wells created a time Traveller who sees humanity as we know it end in the future, and he sees the earth eventually become lifeless. How can anyone avoid despair with such knowledge?
“I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been,” the Traveller recalled. ” It had committed suicide.” In an epilogue, the Traveller’s best friend acknowledges that the Traveller “thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.”
The friend’s conclusion is a single sentence that also sums up Wells’ lifelong faith: “If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.”
This is not acceptance of evil in our time, or complacency or denial, but acceptance of the rightness of our struggles and our lives regardless of the ultimate outcome. We live as best we can in the moment, and understand that hope for the future is a quality of the present, and commitment to fostering a better future is an activity of the present. It’s summarized also in a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who mentions Wells several time in his first novel.
“…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
That’s the part of his statement most often quoted, usually with reference to Keats’ theory of `negative capability.” But Fitzgerald went on, in a more Wellsian vein, and in a way that speaks most directly to us today:
“One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
Further Reading: In “Modern Man in Search of A Soul,” Jung wrote for the general public. In such works as “Projection and Re-Collection,” Marie-Louise von Franz explores the complexity of projection, but this is fairly technical. Probably the most accessible writer on Jungian concepts is Robert A. Johnson. His “Owning Your Own Shadow” is a short and clear introduction to concepts like the shadow and projection. Extending and applying these concepts specifically to war and other political matters of our time are two recent books, James Hillman’s “A Terrible Love of War” and Anthony Stevens’ “The Roots of War and Terror.”