Being in the Crowd, Pt. II - The Reality
The global situation through the lens of psychoanalytic theory
The Two Worlds
First I’ll go over the two major ideological blocks into which the world seems to be split today. Of course, there are lots of shades and variations in between, as well as scant, niche alternatives in some countries or parts of some countries, so it’s important for the reader to keep in mind that I’m not trying to make any generalizations, but give a description of the typical conditions produced by the two most dominant ideologies.
The Lesser Evil
I can start off by describing the part called “The Free World”, a popular phrase that the West likes to use to designate its domain since the Cold War. This world consists of countries that are to a greater or lesser extent ruled by democracy and law, where liberal values are accepted and free speech and human rights are valued, and which are characterized by a significant technological progress. But the devil is in the details. Democracy is representative, and if you live in this part of the world you usually get to vote for a (politically exposed) member of the elite, which one cannot become without assuming a suitable worldview which these circles nurture as a minimum prerequisite for membership. The elites consist of super-rich people who own most of the wealth, politicians who are a sort of a mediator between them and the public, and the promoters coming from academic circles. An important part of representative democracy is being able to arrive at a well informed decision, and that depends on how well the mass media serve the public and the general education level, media literacy and the psychological makeup of the population. The mainstream media are controlled by the elites in a very smart, subtle way. There are no outright lies, there are rarely even half-truths, but some topics are taboo, and are covered in a controlled and limited way. Some inconvenient topics are covered by the media or even by the products of popular culture just for the purpose of making an impression that they are being talked about, but the real debate is missing. There is a main narrative that makes an undercurrent of every stance on each actual topic, and the journalists who are not in line with it are naturally pushed out to the margins. Mainstream politicians are centrist, meaning pragmatic, meaning unprincipled, meaning they go a bit left or a bit right according to circumstances and what the polls say, but do not allow themselves to deviate from the main narrative and ideology. They use the services of political marketing companies who employ cutting edge cognitive-behavioral psychology research to deliver a sort of a political product to be sold to the voters.
The population is taught that everything should be regulated by the market and that everything is a product to be sold, including themselves—their work and knowledge. The education is heavily decimated by the market and utilitarian doctrines, as it is centered around what makes most profit (often the education itself is a profitable enterprise), and those are fields related to STEM and not Humanities. So if you want to be able to find well payed work more easily you’ll want to opt for the former, unless you are already rich (or don’t mind being poor) and really curious about how people and the world work. With this arrangement, the education produces fachidiots who fuel the tech industries and are typically infantilized consumers, completely in tune with the system. These people are typically characterized by the need for comfort and immediate need fulfillment, they are narcissistic or detached, they easily get swayed by well rehearsed talk and body language of their narcissistic leaders and other system promoters, who have an easy job to reassure them of continuation of stability and progress. Lacking genuine, solid identity, the people fill in the holes by what they find on the markets (be it technology, food, political, or entertainment market): shallow hobbies, expensive orthorexia, cheap fun, external identities. Their emptiness compels them to ingest so much substitute content that it starts breaking out on their skins, each tattoo a small act of self-destruction as they somatize their fake identity.
Some of the people want social justice, equality and inclusivity, which is great, because those are very important to have in a healthy society. Their leaders promise them all that, but what they mostly deliver is that they all get to be indiscriminately included into the workforce of their leader’s patrons, the corporations, who don’t care about nationality, gender, sexual orientation or race of those who labor for them (using those instead to advertise equal treatment which should really imply), but only how to optimally exploit them in order to maximize their profit. For example, there have been significant advances when it comes to women’s rights and their representation in various fields, which is a positive development. The politicians’ mouths are full of this and other emancipatory topics, but obviously only to cover up some other topics they aren’t so comfortable with, since they always inevitably flop when it comes to women’s paychecks.
The people live comfortably, but are easily bored. That’s where the bells and whistles come in, and the more money you have the more of those you can get, and to have more money the saying goes that you just need to work more. The entertainment industry has mastered TV shows, which keep you from feeling bored and at the same time explain your situation to you in a way that you say: “yes, this is how the world works” or “I totally identify with this”, and the moment that thought has waned, any further one about the topic is shut down. They help you vent your repressed frustration by allowing you to admire and cheer for fictional psychopathic characters, they help you confirm your stance that the world is a place where everyone is on their own, looking after their own interests—they help you to stay split and not grow as a personality. The sports help you to safely regress and split, when you issue a war cry that will lead your absolutely-good team into victory against undeniably-bad opponent team and thus vent your aggression in a contained way. Because, everything is ok—except aggression. The video games help you immerse yourself in fantasy, keeping you unable to see how interesting and important for your wellbeing the reality is. So all this takes care of another important part of representative democracy, that of keeping the elected politicians under control and accountable. Yes, politicians will resign when they do something bad, and yes, the laws do exist and are enforced. But people are too complacent to see the bigger picture and note that the politician who resigned is replaced by someone from the same pool, nor that the laws are biased toward serving the richer part of the population (who are the ones who effectively run everything), or are simply unable to allow themselves an idea that things could work differently.
From Bad to Worse
The people who got the worst part of the deal in the “free world”, deprived and humiliated, are increasingly following an alternative kind of leaders who are becoming more and more prominent by taking the advantage of the situation and promising them to get them their dignity back. This is the kind that dominates in the other, “non-free” part of the world, the world of authoritarian regimes. In these countries the human rights are non-existent, the only law that is in place is the law of the stronger, with a narcissistic and paranoid leader and his inner circle at the top, having absolute control over the whole society. The people around the leader are also narcissistic, paranoid, antisocial types, and in general the people without any moral standards. The only attribute required of them is loyalty, leading to a sort of an inversion where the worst people are at the top, and the best ones linger on the margins of the society. All the way down the power pyramid, the loyal ones get rewarded and the disloyal ones punished, according to their position in the pyramid. Corruption runs from top to bottom. Usually, there are “elections” which are just a charade for the purpose of giving the leader the legitimacy, but they are never free and fair and the opposition is either nonexistent or very weak. Sometimes the regime creates its own fake opposition parties to water down the real ones.
The narrative in this kind of countries is heavily based on regressive ideologies, but also perverted progressive ideologies, nationalism, “glorious” past and exceptionalism of the nation, and the constant threat by an outside force who wants to destroy it. The leader is seen as a protector from and the first one who leads in fight against the enemy. He is feared, but perceived as just and is idealized. The regime is openly repressive and shuts down any dissenting voices. Anyone who dares to oppose it will be designated as a traitor, an internal enemy or an exponent of the outside enemy and be swiftly dealt with by intimidation, jailing, disappearance, or by marking a person in some way so that the life in the community for her becomes unbearable.
These kind of regimes tend to control, neglect and deliberately weaken the educational system, because they rightly perceive educated people as dangerous. Educated people who think critically and write and talk publicly can indeed be a danger to the system, as their alternative views can fracture the uniformity and indisputability of the dominant narrative. Available spaces for expressing independent opinions are very limited, though. The mass media are under complete control of the regime: the worst kind of propaganda, outright lies and half-truths are put in the service of maintaining the main narrative and creating the leader’s personality cult, but it is interesting that these regimes also use more sophisticated methods of propaganda as their counterparts in the West, in order to target only specific parts of the population, e.g. the middle class with higher education. This happens particularly in the countries with the so called “hybrid regimes” (aka. “illiberal democracies”) which are countries in which the leadership strives toward authoritarianism with an outward veneer of democracy. In any case, the media’s role is to paint a made up picture of reality, in which the leader is infallible, strong, all-knowing and omnipotent, responsible for all good that happens, unfaltering against the constant onslaught of the enemies from the outside or from within who are “destabilizing the country”, who want to subjugate it in some way, or are simply jealous of the country’s progress or want to impose their “degenerate” values.
The values in authoritarian countries are based on discipline, authority, unity, self-sacrifice, common identity, culture and tradition. A large part of the population in such countries lives in very bad conditions, but is unaware of its situation in terms of what produces it. The propaganda and indoctrination take care of that—it’s always others to blame, outside actors or marginalized groups, since some broader context is completely unavailable to these people. In some countries access to the Internet is restricted, but there are usually some parts of the population who do not use it in the first place. The world is perceived as a very dangerous and cynical place where one either needs to be on top or submit to the stronger to survive. The aggression is projected outside in the form of paranoia, and it is then an easy job to keep the population gathered around the leader and the ideology, because more cohesive the group is, more secure the people feel in the atmosphere of persistent danger. Because of the sense of duty, unity and self-sacrifice they are being inculcated, the people feel that they must endure any hardship in order to keep the community going. Bad living conditions and poor education also produce poor mental health within the population, so aggression does not come only from the top, but easily flourishes within the population itself, producing an all-encompassing culture of violence. The groups that are under heaviest attack are the ones that have been historically the most discriminated against—women, LGBTQ people, etc. The young people in the poorest parts of the society easily get attracted to crime and are easy targets for recruitment by violent groups or paramilitaries controlled by the regime. However, no matter how tight the control of the leadership over the society is, their bleak Orwellian vision of “a boot stamping on a human face, forever” fortunately isn’t achievable in reality. Because of the regressive processes triggered by their violence and incompetence, any kind of sensible life is forestalled, people cannot develop normally and realize their potentials, the relations in the society based on power struggle tear its very fabric, and sooner or later everything inevitably breaks down, in one way or another.
Our Situation
Now, let’s see if we can have any deeper understanding of our current situation with the help of the psychoanalytic insights from the first part, and by deeper I mean to go well beyond the superficial conclusions that people are plainly stupid, evil or uncivilized, in relation to both leadership and masses, and try to understand why they do what they do. I believe that understanding is very important, much more than condemnation, no matter how bad someone acts and no matter how much our indignance is justified.
First off, we can immediately note that the psychosocial environment in the two worlds described above match the two basic assumptions: dependency and fight-flight.
There are more similarities in the two types of societies than meets the eye. The first one is dependence of the population on leadership. Both East and West (let’s call them that way even though that’s really not precise) have populations that delegate or give over the public affairs to the elected or otherwise established elites. In the West, even though the people do elect their representatives, feel well informed and in control, and sometimes participate in public life and politics in various ways, the majority are still happy to give the reins over and not think too much about what goes on in the public sphere, but are instead focused exclusively on what goes on in their own private lives. They just expect the system to function, and monitor it’s workings passively, on an intuitive level. The contrast is stark to the situation in the East in regard to the degree of freedom and the quality of life, but the nature of the relationship of the masses to their leadership in both systems is the one of submission and dependency.
In both systems there is a prevailing consent in relation to the dominant narrative and an inability to see an alternative. The people who think independently are few, and their ideas are ignored or met with angry or condescending, dismissive attitude, the purpose of which is to forestall anxiety. These ideas cannot be easily considered because they challenge person’s preconceptions about the external world, and with it, their own identity. This is in a way an attack on the personality itself. The more a person’s identity is unintegrated (diffuse), the more it is supplanted by gut-level internalizations of (simple) ideas that come from the outside, not person’s own genuine ideas and views which she arrived at by reflection on the happenings in a more moderately and realistically perceived world, which happens with a better developed personality. In other words, a person who functions at a lower, borderline personality organization perceives ideas that challenge the black and white view of the world with animosity or denial, which are primitive defenses of splitting, because the split organization is motivated to be maintained so that the persecutory experiences do not overwhelm the idealized ones. What is idealized, must not be tarnished even with a speck of grime. What is devalued, cannot be considered as having at least a trace of shine. If someone presents a moderate, nuanced idea to a person who has such a polarized subjective experience, the latter will experience their view as totally opposite of their own—the point being: there can be no middle ground or a third way. At a higher, neurotic personality organization, the defense mechanism of repression serves to keep unwanted emotionally charged experiences away from consciousness, so these persons try to maintain their position with stubbornness, rationalization or avoidance to cognitively process the conflictual ideas. This is why it is such an exercise in futility to convince some people to change their mind even regarding things that are plainly common sense and for which exists an abundance of evidence that speaks in favor of them, let alone the complex ones—reasoning will just not work, by the nature of unconscious dynamics of their personalities. Here it is important to note that these people are not stupid, actually they can be very intelligent. They are simply compelled by their intrapsychic structure to unconsciously maintain their perception of a polarized world (defenses based on splitting), because they cannot allow the idealized figures and ideas to get smeared in any way and need to maintain their adopted, brittle identity; and to stubbornly hold on to their biases (defenses based on repression), to avoid anxiety around conflictual ideas that are split off from the dominant sense of self. In other words, for them it’s not just a matter of considering a novel/different view; they are up against something that is trying to break their brittle personalities apart.
As much as it is hard for people whose personalities function at borderline level to see the world in a more nuanced way, it is very easy for them to accept simple and polarizing narratives and follow leaders who present them, hence becoming dependent on them. Due to the defense mechanism of splitting, they are even able to hold two completely contradictory opinions or information at the same time, without being able to note the contradiction. This is what makes an easy job for demagogues. Direct rational arguments cannot change this. It can be changed only in a hard roundabout way, by long lasting favorable circumstances which facilitate personality development, that can be either real life circumstances of a healthy psychosocial environment, or the ones created by the isolated facilitating environment of psychotherapy, but always with the person’s openness to change as a requirement. So, it’s really hard, even on an individual level; now think about whole populations…
Another similarity is in the leaderships of East and West themselves. This may sound odd to some people, as the ones in the West seem to be moderate, fairly responsible, and most importantly replaceable, as opposed to their counterparts in the East who are ruthless, dominating and eternally incumbent, but the similarity lays in their relationship with and experience of their subjects: both types of leadership feel deep contempt for the common people and see them as inferior, as someone who needs to be controlled. Namely, elitism. We should also remember that the elected representatives in the West are really only the politically exposed part of the elites. The part of the elites that wield the most power—the banks, the corporations, and the “international institutions”—cannot be replaced, are highly irresponsible and have the most influence on what’s going on in Western societies. These are the moneyed oligarchy which upholds and fully enjoys the neoliberal system which works only for them while the broader population is lulled into passivity and complacency by means of bestowal of distorted versions of liberalism, democracy and meritocracy. They do not use force and violence to keep themselves in power, they use cunning and pretense. They take advantage of people’s natural need for safety and comfort, they propagate individualism, competitiveness and infantile form of aspiration to atomize the population, to split them both socially and psychologically. Instead of using force, they use a soothing and incentivizing narrative, and the people harness themselves willingly. It is a purely narcissistic dynamic that is going on here, where some people are viewed as intrinsically superior and thereby are entitled to authority, the right to rule, and to own much more than others; and some intrinsically inferior, and thus in need to be taken care of, taken advantage of, manipulated and kept in check. This reflects a typical narcissist’s subjective experience of the grandiose self and the devalued other, which on the scale of the whole society produces the social dynamic of a power struggle, not one of relationships based on mutuality, solidarity and respect, which would be characteristic of a healthy society (or individual personality). So this is another overlap with the situation in the East, the only difference being that in the East the narcissism of the leadership has the malignant form, because it functions on a lower, more pathological level and is thus infused with paranoia and antisocial behavior.
Like it was noted in the first, theoretical part, the leaders and their ideologies in a society can oscillate between the narcissistic and the paranoid type, and that is what happens in both the West and the East.
Firstly, the same leadership can shift from one to the other type according to the needs. In the West, the leaders also do work their population up with paranoid stories about the bad others, the East, who are “a bunch of thugs who are a threat to our democracy”, which is partially true, but shifts the focus off their own responsibility for the crisis of democracy, and gives them the excuse to react “preventively” and get the consent for military interventions from their constituency, after which they are free to match their Eastern counterparts in brutality and crimes, just on a foreign soil; and in the East the people are told that those bad others, the West, are really just “a bunch of hypocrites who want to destroy our tradition and culture”, which is again partially true, but really serves to justify their own even more despicable behavior, as it helps them present themselves as the ones who aptly react to the outside threat to protect the people and their values, soothe them that everything is going to be fine as long as they are in charge, and all that in the face of the fact that they themselves have managed to turn violence and submission into culture and tradition. So they too use cunning and pretense, not just violence.
Secondly, alternative contenders for leadership target people who can together with them aim for a shift in the type of the psychosocial environment. Some people and politicians in the West are more lured to the Eastern model, and vice versa. In the West, the people who are let down by the system live in bad conditions, have precarious jobs, feel insecure, feel that they are left on their own, and in the lack of an external psychosocial system which they can identify with and feel a part of, they naturally regress and look for an alternative, which presents itself in the form of a paranoid kind of politicians, who provide simple, emotionally charged explanations for their situation, and promise to lead them in the fight against both the domestic usurpers and the outside foreign threat in the form of immigrants who are “destroying their community and stealing their jobs”. In the East though, it is very hard to be an opposition politician, firstly because your quality of life, your freedom and your life itself can be at stake, secondly because it is really hard to reach out to the people and present them your ideas, and thirdly because elections, if there are any, aren’t free and fair. However, resistance always exists, and as the society’s suffering under injustice and tyranny reaches unbearable levels, the change is more likely to happen. These terrible conditions can sometimes actually stimulate people’s growth and solidarity. Changing the system via revolution is always a bad idea though, as history has confirmed, because it inevitably produces chaos and violence which trigger the regressive processes, and in that chaos even the best intentioned individuals in the revolutionary leadership will be marginalized by the opportunistic ones who will then easily get all the limelight and support by the regressed masses.
After noting these similarities between the two worlds, they may now seem less like two opposite poles and more like two sides of the same coin, which I believe is a more accurate depiction.
Both types of leaders are compelled to function as determined by their personalities (or rather psychopathologies): in narcissistic or malignant narcissistic way. It’s important to note that they act and honestly believe in what they do, by the nature of their character—as behavioral manifestation of their identity. This is due to how they see human relationships, the world and their role in it. The narcissists have a need to put themselves above others, where they feel they rightly belong, and also to be admired. Malignant narcissism in addition to that has a controlling and sadistic qualities to it; there is a need to be feared, and to control, humiliate, abuse and torture others, all of which is experienced as pleasurable. It is particularly important to note the need for omnipotent control. This type of leaders are obsessed with it and it stems from their paranoia. Their inner gut-feeling is that they have to dominate others and control everything, or otherwise others would do the same horrible things to them—this is how their inner representation of the world looks and feels like. This statement prompts for empathic connection with the inner world of these people only for the sake of understanding it, and certainly not for any kind of justification. In both forms of narcissism, the world where human relations are seen as a power struggle, manipulation, lying and backstabbing are ego syntonic. It is then no wonder that politics naturally attracts this sort of people, as they see it as an arena where they can bolster their grandiosity, rather than one where ideas which would do something good for everyone are presented. It is the dynamic of the psychosocial environment in feedback loop with each individual’s psychological state and circumstances that puts one or the other type into prominence, which reflects the real state of a society. Given the current cultural, social, economic and political state of the world, could it mean that we have an indication of an alarming state of mental health of the general population?
I don’t think I am able to give even a remotely conclusive answer to this question. Instead of ‘mental health’, a more appropriate expression might be ‘level of personality maturity’, a concept which is tightly connected to mental health. Let’s first examine the trends of the widespread manifestations of the two important components of personality within the general population: internal ethical system (superego) and identity.
What is certain is that the postmodernist culture in the West has weakened the development of societal and individual moral standards, by relativizing all values and declaring that there is no universal reference point toward which we should all strive, positing instead that whether something’s good or bad depends on an individual viewpoint. Even though it claims the higher moral ground based on liberalization, acceptance of differences and significant advancements in the rights of traditionally discriminated groups, on the other hand with the liberalization of everything, promotion of materialism and acceptance of neoliberal economic dogma, this culture created egoistic individuals with very lax moral standards and infantile values, which are instead perceived as pragmatic, realistic and self-reliant. The moral standards in the East are perceived as strict, but are really a distortion of what is perceived as tradition, righteousness and respect, and in actuality being the culture of violence and submission to authority, a tendency to return to some primal state. Because of the atmosphere of paranoia and the mechanism of projection, a sense of a dangerous world where one must be cunning to get by, moral standards are even more lax than in the West. So in both cases, there is a trend of poor integration of the internal ethical system, the superego, among the population.
Next, the identity, which I wrote about in the theoretical part, our core which determines how we perceive ourselves, others, and relationship with others, nowadays tends to be diffuse and shallow, confused by endless possibilities that are out there, filled in by identifications with popular culture phenomena and various subcultures, or on the other hand significantly constricted and substituted by identifications with nations, religions and figures of authority—rather than solidly developed through real efforts put into realization of spontaneous interests and meaningful interactions with others. This is why we see a lot of people easily accepting simple and polarizing narratives, and reject or ignore any complex reasoning, be they liberals or conservatives. We see people who are confused about who they really are, or thinking of themselves as being simply, say, their religion; or their sexual orientation, for example. So there is a trend of poor integration of identity among the population, too.
Given the fact that we are witnessing the surge of personalities with lax moral standards, infantile value systems and diffuse identity, we might assume that there is a pandemic of borderline level disorders (or immature personalities) among the general population.
Having said all this, I’d have to moderate this prospect by the fact that our psychosocial environment is by our very nature important part of our identity, and when that environment is unstable, contradictory or is breaking apart, we naturally regress and arrive at one of the basic assumptions, no matter how healthy our psyche is. The outliers are rare. Even the most mature and integrated personalities need a meaningful and stable social environment. If we live in an environment that is at least seemingly stable, we can study, work, follow our interests, be with our friends and families and generally focus on our lives which is more or less carefree. In the face of a looming danger, we tend to settle with the lesser evil more easily, so that we don’t loose what we already have; we do not think in such a situation about a possibility of what we might be missing out. Secondly, there are some authors (e.g. Divac-Jovanović, Švrakić, 2017) who propose that the fragmented self doesn’t necessarily have to imply psychopathology, but only a fragmentation in the outer layer of the self which happens as an adaptation to the contemporary fast-moving world of cultural variety and instant communication, while the core of the self can still be well integrated. Finally, narcissistic and paranoid cultures shift individual’s behavior in respective directions, but that does not always have to imply a pathology, which always implies a specific intrapsychic structure. In other words, even when the structure is reasonably healthy, an individual can be nudged by the environment toward behaviors that can be described as narcissistic or paranoid.
In any case, the picture of the contemporary psychosocial environment as well as individual personality trends is clearly indicative of huge problems.
I think it is pretty clear how we got to this point with many burning issues, and also why they are being neglected. Let’s take climate change as an example. This problem has been contested and ignored for a long time. Now that each year brings us more obvious evidence how serious this problem is, there are a lot of people who are urging that something should (finally) be done (though very late). There are leaders who present plans or give signals that they are already doing something about it, but in reality they are way short of doing enough, because it “hurts the economy” (read: their rich patrons). Sure, there needs to be a transition which takes time, but thus far, they haven’t done anything about it even though the scientists were talking about this for decades. The carelessness of the narcissistic leadership has a tendency to postpone solving problems, deferring it to the point when the proverbial cow dung has hit the fan—which preferably happens to a next administration, or even better to a future generation. The masses, now realizing in greater numbers that we indeed have a problem, but seeing that “it is being talked about and worked on”, are calmed down and can now continue going about their daily business (and having fun). There are on the other hand people and leaders who still plainly deny that the climate change is happening and regard it as a hoax, or claim that it is a natural shift, not caused by human activity. These guys won’t change their minds, burnt or flooded, because they do not care about the truth or the future—their focus is on something else: they are stuck in the present moment, asserting their grandiosity and fighting off imaginary enemies.
The decades of imposing neoliberal policies around the globe has produced devastation of the environment and huge inequalities. The ones who are hurt the most by the economic shocks are the poor and the middle class. The chances that they are going to listen to a credible and smart person (or even recognize one) who gives a complex and nuanced explanation about the causes of their situation and/or think and research themselves about it are next to nothing. They are instead going to listen to demagoguery, and then choose another leader who will continue with more of the same (perhaps with a twist) or the one who will make things even worse.
I hope I’ve managed to shed at least some light on the fact of how important our psychological structure is in shaping our way of thinking and perception of the world, and hence our political stances, and how it all fits into our psychosocial environment. This shows us that no matter how smart or educated people might be, they can still say and do despicable, irrational and stupid things. That’s how intelligence and knowledge are used for destruction.
But what about leadership? “Someone has to lead”, many would say. Do they really? I haven’t really said much about the type of leadership from the third basic assumption of pairing, so let’s consider that. The world as a hippie commune? I don’t think so. That’s still a primitive group. I’d say that people need to be an organized group, having only each other as teammates; not a primitive group lead by leaders, the paternal figures who will take care of them and tell them what to do. In other words, humanity needs to grow up.