This time, host Spencer Critchley talks about the psychology of sedition, Trumpism as Freudian dream logic, and the apparent belief of Capitol rioters that they were in a movie.
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Text Excerpt: Dream Logic
In dream logic, the Capitol riot was the start of a patriotic revolution led by Trump. And it was an anti-American plot led by Antifa and BLM.
Dream logic not only doesn’t have to make sense, it destroys sense — and thereby destroys all constraints. If you want to live in a world of dream logic, the more flagrant the lie, the better. A lie isn’t a shield, it’s a weapon. When Trump makes everything a lie, he makes everything true.
Video Excerpt: It’s About Permission, not Persuasion
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Transcript
Welcome to Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good, I’m Spencer Critchley. This time: the psychology of Trumpism — how understanding it can help us move past it.
1
First, I’m going talk about the psychology of sedition, by drawing on the thinking of Sigmund Freud. Freud fell out of favor for quite a while, partly because some of his theories are more literary than scientific, and partly because of his thinking about women and homosexuality, which was often stuck within 19th century prejudices.
But I think many of his insights have held up. In particular, I find Freud’s view of the irrational, mysterious, and dark aspects of human nature to be a useful corrective to the overly rationalized and materialistic view that descends to us from Karl Marx, and that we still tend to hang onto. Freud thought Marx was naïve, and I agree.
And I think Freud can help us make sense of the descent of Trump supporters into sedition. People who grew up reciting the Pledge of Allegiance ended up actively betraying “the flag of the United States of America and the republic for which it stands.” People who think of themselves as patriots supported an attempted overthrow of democracy.
In my book Patriots of Two Nations, I describe two very different visions of what our republic is, and how people can sincerely believe themselves to be patriots of two very different nations, both called the United States.
And I describe how unscrupulous leaders can exploit this sincere, horizontal division to elicit something underneath it: the worst instincts in human nature.
That’s what we’re seeing now. At this point, to believe Trump’s outrageous lies is to want to believe them. Even allowing for the right-wing media bubble, the malign effects of social media algorithms, foreign disinformation campaigns, or the sorry state of civics education, the self-contradictory conspiracy theories we’re hearing don’t survive a moment’s reflection — whether that reflection is logical or moral. You don’t need to be brilliant or even particularly well-informed to see that what Trump was doing was just wrong.
But with Trumpism, persuasion had long since stopped mattering.
The point was not persuasion, but permission.
Ironically, a moralistic crusade, like the one Trump claimed to lead, can provide permission for the most immoral behavior — as it did with the actual Crusades. From behind the moralistic shield of “liberating the Holy Land from infidels,” Crusaders were able to indulge in looting and murder while claiming — and often even believing — that they were serving the Prince of Peace. Atrocities throughout history, committed by people of nearly every religion and nearly every political persuasion, have been similarly “justified.”
The justifications are obviously incoherent — unless the point is permission, not persuasion.
So, getting back to Freud. One of the things I think he was right about was what he called the “death drive” in human nature. Alongside the need for love and life — what Freud called “Eros” — is its dark obverse: the urge to destroy, sparked by fear and rage at the loss, frustration, and pain in our lives. We see the death drive acted out by infants, and we try to rear adults who can contain it.
The death drive is present in all people, whether we think of it in Freudian terms or just call it aggression. But currently only one of our political parties is deliberately trying to excite and exploit it, until recently under the leadership of a deeply damaged man who was long since taken over by it, apparently because of neglect and abuse he suffered in childhood.
Trump is probably helpless to control himself. And he is enabled by utterly cynical, anti-patriotic opportunists in the House, Senate, tabloid media, among the greedy wealthy, and in a heretical offshoot of the Christian church that’s essentially a con game rooted in white nationalism.
And he’s enabled by the urge of his followers to smash things. This is the larger meaning of “owning the libs,” which can include actions that are self-defeating, but which feel satisfying. It’s justified by moralistic beliefs like “the system is rigged,” “the radical socialists are taking over,” “they’re coming for our guns,” or “they want to kill babies.”
In less extreme form, any of these can represent sincere concerns about corruption, socialism, and the rest — concerns that can be addressed through democratic means. If you lose one election, you try to win the next.
But in the extreme, even fantastical forms these justifications take now — QAnon insanity from the mouth of the American president — the next step is the overthrow of democracy by autocracy.
It’s a release from the bonds of civilization, which restrain both the death drive and Eros to make society work.
All of us chafe against those bonds at least sometimes. But an autocrat destroys them: one way we can see autocracy is as the triumph of a supremely narcissistic infant over the civilization created by adults. It’s no coincidence that Trump presents as an impulsive, raging baby in an old man’s body.
And the vision of freedom he offers is essentially infantile: just cut loose and do what you want, consequences — and everyone else — be damned.
2
Now here are some thoughts on How You Can Both Love and Hate the Police: Trumpism as Dream Logic.
One of the most confounding things about Trump supporters, never more than now, is their comfort with mutually contradictory beliefs.
They love and hate the police (some will even beat a cop with a Thin Blue Line flag).
They’re committed to moral values and to an immoral leader.
They believe the election was rigged, since Trump lost, and that it wasn’t, since other Republicans won.
And so on.
It’s reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass,” in which the Red Queen tells Alice, “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Of course, Trumpists aren’t alone in being inconsistent. Think of the widespread belief in homeopathic medicine among people who also believe in facts and logic.
But in Trumpism, the self-contradictions are so radical that they seem to be of a different order. And I think they are.
We tend to assume that people with irrational beliefs are simply mistaken, or have been tricked.
But what if irrationality is what they want? What if they want to live in a dream?
In a dream, nothing has to add up. One moment you’re running down a street, the next you’re flying over a forest.
And you’re free: free of any constraints, even those imposed by rationality.
Part of us — a powerful part — wants that.
The absence of any limits whatsoever is more a psychological than a political goal, and it’s very different from the “ordered liberty” on which democracy is based, especially within the conservative worldview that Trump claims to share. But for many of us it seems to have become the American definition of freedom.
Psychology, more than political science, may help us understand it.
Freud realized that dreams provide important clues to how the mind works, especially when it’s ruled by unconscious desires, as it so often is. He described the logic of dreams in the story of a kettle (told in The Interpretation of Dreams and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious):
A man borrowed a kettle from his neighbor and returned it damaged. When the neighbor complained, the man made these arguments:
- The kettle wasn’t damaged.
- The kettle was already damaged when he borrowed it.
- He didn’t borrow the kettle.
No more than one can be true, and maybe none of them is true. It’s dream logic (dubbed “kettle logic” by Jacques Derrida).
Sound familiar?
In dream logic, the Capitol riot was the start of a patriotic revolution led by Trump. And it was an anti-American plot led by Antifa and BLM.
Dream logic not only doesn’t have to make sense, it destroys sense — and thereby destroys all constraints. If you want to live in a world of dream logic, the more flagrant the lie, the better. A lie isn’t a shield, it’s a weapon. When Trump makes everything a lie, he makes everything true.
Similarly unbounded freedom is promised by drugs, ecstatic spiritual practices, anti-rationalist art like that of Rimbaud or the Dadaists, and transgressive subcultures like those of sadomasochists or bikers.
But as seductive as Trumpian dream logic may be psychologically, it’s disastrous politically.
That’s because at the center of the dream of absolute freedom is the lone individual, ruling a dream kingdom of absolute narcissism: “His Majesty the Baby,” in Freud’s phrase. That phrase spookily matches the impulsive, fretful, supremely needy Trump, down to his weirdly pursed lips.
But you can’t make a polity out of millions of tyrants. If you want to be the unchallenged king of the world, your world can only have a population of one.
Hence a major part of the appeal of autocracy: at its core is infantile narcissism. An autocrat is essentially a baby who has been given great power and no constraints. It’s striking how often, including during the Capitol riot, that authoritarian violence involves throwing shit. Even toilet training must be overthrown.
In her brilliant book Learning From the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, philosopher Susan Neiman describes the shocking degree of narcissism among Nazis, even highly educated ones like the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the legal philosopher Carl Schmitt.
Neiman recounts how, after the war, Heidegger bitterly complained that “the Allies’ refusal to allow him to return to teaching was ‘a greater brutality than any of Hitler’s.’” Think about that for a moment.
Meanwhile Schmitt “refused to undergo the denazification process he and his friends called ‘terror’… Schmitt’s rants against the ‘criminalizers in Nuremberg’ and the “constructors of crimes against humanity and genocide” were founded on his critique of the concept of universal value as liberal hype.”
As a Nazi intellectual, Schmitt rejected all Enlightenment claims of universal principles, including human rights and equality. There was only power; all else was a lie. You can call this view radical, as many have, some of them (on the left as well as the right) approvingly. But it’s also infantile.
Neiman notes as well the rampant self-contradiction uttered by postwar Germans in trying to justify their Nazism, whether active or complicit:
How many knots can the psyche tie itself into to defend itself against moral truth? Quite a number of subjects declared themselves free of anti-Semitism, though many of them followed their declarations with anti-Semitic remarks… After 1945, said one participant, we wanted good relations with the Jews, and we reached out our hand—but they didn’t take it, so now we owe them nothing.
The parallels with Trumpism are hard to miss. While hundreds of thousands of Americans needlessly died from COVID due to his self-obsessed negligence, Trump complained about how unfairly he was being treated. He has constantly complained of being treated unfairly, while occupying and exploiting the most powerful position on earth — the closest anyone can come to being the actual king of the world.
And Trumpists are up for it. At a rally in Vladosta, Georgia Dec. 5, they cheered when he told them, “We’re all victims. Everybody here, all these thousands of people here tonight, they’re all victims, every one of you.”
Many of Trump’s supporters feel powerless for good reason. His promise to give them power is hollow, and some may well know it is, but his performance of seizing power for himself is satisfaction enough, since they can live the dream through him.
At the same time, many others are quite powerful — it’s a myth that Trump only succeeds by fooling working class, “low information” voters. Many Trump supporters are well-off and well-educated. They just have a hard time focusing on much beyond their own needs.
The rise of the Baby Boom generation in a thriving postwar economy was accompanied by a dramatic rise in narcissism across the population.
At the same time, academic postmodernism found an eager popular audience, which adopted it in the form of radically subjective definitions of truth and morality: what’s true is what I feel, and what’s good is what I want.
As they’re being arrested, the Capitol rioters seem genuinely shocked to discover that their actions have consequences.
Dream logic.
Babies are nearly pure subjectivists, with little awareness of a boundary between themselves and the world. They live within dream logic all the time.
Growing up is a process of waking up from the dream.
Unless it isn’t.
As a culture, we seem to have embarked on a project of eternal childhood, within a consumer economy devoted to satisfying our desires — while stoking endless new ones. If satisfying our desires comes at the expense of others’ needs, we may just not care — or even notice.
If we never leave the world of dreams, every one of us can be king.
An earlier demagogue, Huey Long, promised to make that dream come true.
Trump tried to make the truth become a dream.
3
And here are some thoughts on the dream logic of entertainment, and how that helped lead people who think they’re patriots to storm the US Capitol: they thought they were in a movie.
The Capitol insurrectionists had to riot one-handed — because they needed the other hand to hold up their smart phones, so they could shoot the movie.
It didn’t occur to them that they were also recording evidence of their crimes, and that this evidence would be used at their trials.
Just like it didn’t occur to their leader in the White House, who has committed so many crimes on-camera, up to and including the crime of inciting the Capitol riot.
Because it’s all a movie.
We’ve never fully appreciated how vulnerable our minds are to images on screens, even after decades of those images shaping our culture and even our beliefs, the way divinities used to.
Rudolf Valentino was the first performer to be called a screen idol — and the term was entirely apt. After Valentino died, millions of devoted fans were not just sad, they were distraught, staging massive demonstrations of their grief. Some reportedly committed suicide.
Valentino was just the first in a long line, culminating in a president with no qualifications, or qualities, apart from being famous. Celebrities replaced the gods and god-anointed aristocrats that had been banished by Enlightenment science, which had also made mass media possible.
Now, in our media-saturated, entertainment-obsessed culture, to become a celebrity is the goal to which our fondest dreams lead. To live onscreen is our definition of the good life. It’s heaven.
Much of our moral philosophy is now a junkyard of catch phrases from movies, TV shows, pop songs, and ads: “Trust your heart,” “If you can dream it, you can be it,” “Don’t let anyone tell you no,” “You deserve this,” etc., etc.
In the idolatrous but much more entertaining version of Christianity that televangelism has given us, Jesus wants you to be rich and famous. The eye of the needle is now a mile wide — especially if you’re armed, which he also wants for you. This is an action movie we’re talking about here.
And if we truly believe, and are very lucky, one day…
We’ll be famous.
Maybe even in a starring role in “The Attack on the Capitol.”
Or one of the sequels, in production now.
I’ll leave it there this time. I’m writing about topics like these at spencercritchley.com, and have been doing a lot of interviews for TV, radio, and print. You can find links to some of them at spencercritchley.com as well. And I’ll be back here on the podcast soon.
If you’d like to share your thoughts, I hope you’ll comment at spencercritchley.com, dastardlycleverness.com, or on social media. On Twitter I’m @scritchley and my Facebook page is at spencer.critchley.page.
Thanks for listening.