Our much loved tale begins with a charming domestic scene in which the diligent tailor is going about his legitimate business in his fine work shop with a song in his heart and a trill upon his lips. Passing school boys think how grand it must be to be a tailor and wish they could become like him when they grow up.
It seems too good to be true and sure enough the underlying situation is soon revealed. ‘Oh how Hungry I am to be sure ,’ cried out the little man eventually, ‘but I must finish his Lordship’s coat before I eat a morsel.’ and he broke into song once more..
His song is not an expression of joy at all. Its fake news, a forced distraction from his emotional hungering for something more profound than momentary identification with authority. His song is camouflage, compensation for inner misery.
Out in the street an old lady is plying her wares, ‘jam for sale!’ It’s a moment pregnant with the possibility for some redemption, an opportunity for honest transaction and being gratefully fed. Instead he makes her climb his steps with her heavy load and rifles through her entire stock, only buying a small pot whose good measure he then calls into question and for which he pays grudgingly. The old lady goes off grumbling and humiliated.
Back indoors, his delight at having beaten the old lady down and pinched every penny, fuels the already inflated identification he has with his lordship. Having landed her with all his own feelings of worthlessness he is exultant, announcing proudly to the empty room that this special jam shall be blessed by God to give him health and strength. His inner emptiness which compels him to triumph over everyone in order to feel alive, easily spills over into messianic inflation.
At the same time, his slavish devotion to authority will not let him eat the jam. He must finish the coat first and only. His hunger destroys the quality of his work. The stitching becomes clumsy. Eventually the conflict between obligation and need becomes so great he blows up, enviously lashing out at the flies who feast where he will not.
This torture of emotional starvation rationalized by masochistic devotion to a supposedly higher cause in collision with his own instincts for survival and nurture makes the desperate tailor explode, destroying that which he wants most and accentuating his delusional state.
Seven flies lay dead. He is so impressed by his great new powers that he makes a belt advertising the fact, ‘seven with one blow.’ Then he set out to show the whole town, to let every one know what a fine fellow he is. In order to minimize his devaluation of the old lady and his inability to take in Her good things, he has to spoil the delicious morsel and cut the experience off. That which was a very fine work shop is now a shithole, too small for his valor.
”Nay, the entire world shall know of my bravery!’ His grandiosity is doubled down so as not to mourn the self destructive loss of his divine condiment. With a song in his heart and a trill upon his lips, he steps confidently into the world.
The tailor represents what Melanie Klien calls the paranoid/schizoid position. It is a very early stage of development in which the value of the other has not yet been learned and where the trauma of discovering that good things come from outside of me is dealt with by splitting, projection and envious attacks upon the self.
On his way out the door the tailor pockets a piece of cheese and a bird caught in a thicket. At the top of a mountain, he comes across a giant looking peacefully about. Interrupting the giant’s meditation, the tailor shows him the belt saying, ‘look there and read so you may see what manner of man I am.’ The giant was quite impressed. Then the giant picked up a stone and squeezed it till water ran out. ‘Can you do that?’ he asked.
The tailor took the cheese from his napsack and squeezed till liquid ran out. ‘There.’ The giant was doubly impressed. He picked up another stone and threw it so far it hit him on the back of his own head but the tailor scoffed and said he could throw a stone so high it would never come down and released the bird who duly flew off never to return.
‘Well, you sure can throw,’ said the giant, ‘let’s see you lift. Here, help me carry this mighty oak out of the forest.
‘Delighted,’ said the tailor, and leapt up into the branches whilst the giant had to carry the whole thing. When they got there he jumped down and laughed at the giant, ‘the idea of a man of your size not being able to carry a tree…’ Why are the people of Ohio so stupid?
The story of the valiant tailor, also called the lucky or brave tailor is a cautionary message about the beguiling power of projection so understated that even the most discerning reader can be left with the impression that he is indeed a most clever and charismatic person who deserves to do well in life.
Yet if you look closely he is not at all brave. He succeeds by trickery, deceit and emotional bullying. His courage is simply the lack of critical self reflection to question his own PR and his delight in the projections of others as to his greatness soon become his narcissistic supply.
The tailor arrives in the grounds of a royal palace and falls asleep on the grass. His inflation has now swallowed up any functioning ego left. People come from all sides and read the girdle. They run to tell the king who invites him to be his counselor entirely on the strength of the boast. The castle guard are afraid of the tailor lest they all be killed by such a mighty warrior and ask to be released from service. By now the king is scared as well and sends the tailor to deal with two unruly giants hoping he won’t return but promising his daughter in marriage and half his kingdom if he does.
The tailor creeps up on the giants while they sleep, alternately pelting them with stones until they get in such a rage that they tear up trees and beat one another to death. The tailor has a head for diversion and division.
The king renages on his promise. The new Queen has overheard her mysterious husband talking in his sleep as if he were back in his tailor shop and the secret is out. So the king sets the tailor another great task, to catch a Unicorn who was ravaging the countryside. No problem for our hero who tricks the Unicorn into goring a tree and chops off his mighty horn with an axe.
Again the king prevaricates and sends him off to battle a great boar who’s making great havoc in the forest. The tailor traps the beast in a chapel and adamantly claims his reward.
which is grudgingly given.
The old king then decides just to arrest him anyway but the crafty tailor is forewarned and when the guard comes to his door shouts out saying, ‘I have killed seven with one blow, two giants, a unicorn and a boar. Why should I fear the king’s guard….?’ they all ran away. So the little tailor remained king for the rest of his life and the Queen just had to get used to it. Though he had no experience, real skill or acumen and had lied and cheated his way into power, the people just had to suck it up. The fact that he eventually gains a kingdom and a crown shouldn’t distract us from the fact of his ineptitude, vanity or psychopathic disregard for reality.
The problem is that by the time the story closes after the first telling everyone is cheering for the clever tailor. He has managed to seduce the reader as well as everyone in the story. All of which goes to show how easily otherwise intelligent folk are dazzled by slogans and punchy bravado.
Unfortunately, the tailor’s delusional belief in his own greatness, emblazoned like a political slogan across his belly, can only be maintained by lurching from one crisis to another. If such a hero had his hands on the tiller of the nation, they may cheer less loudly.
In the meantime we might ask how it is that everyone seems to be so taken in by this charlatan with zero qualifications or experience. The answer is that the rest of us secretly subscribe to be like him and harbor more omnipotent fantasies of similarly being able to sweep aside life’s frustrations than we’d like to admit.
”The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.”
Carl Jung – Aion
Trump is more than a man at least as much as his failure to be one. Like the valiant tailor he is someone else’s man but, confusingly, also a brand, a telemarketing clusterfuck of primordial conflicts of interest condensed out of an entire culture’s psychic runoff. He is the amalgamation of all the denied arrogance and aggression of an epoch’s pious pilgrims whose combined efforts become the train wreck you can’t look away from.
When Rep (R) Peter Jolly said the problem was not Trump but the hundred million who voted for him he did not go far enough. He was not put there by a dumb bunch of blue collar hicks. He was put there by a system so convinced in its own righteousness that a Trump could never happen, until it did. He was put there by a system which has been preening its superiority since the battle of Acre. He is the manifestation of denied collective shadow which has been accumulating in the western psyche for as long as we have been exporting belief systems and invading people for their own good.
The valiant tailor is an archetype. He is the trickster-like narcissistic underbelly of an otherwise idealized culture which has denied and projected its shadow to the point of actually manifesting it in office.
”It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses- and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost.” CG Jung
What’s to be done? The clue lies in the beginning of the story, in the tailor’s contorted efforts to palm off his feelings of inferiority onto the old lady who becomes embittered by his measly purchase after much comment and inspection. He uses the interaction over the jam to feed his ego rather than his soul which will not then permit him to feast. Despite the invocation of the gods to bless his jam he never gets to taste it.
Had he treated the old lady decently, bought a fair sized pot of jam and simply tucked into his good fortune, his involvement in life would have obviated the compensatory lust for power and the dangerous blurring of fantasy and reality required along the way. Being a jammy tailor would have seemed just the right kind of thing to be. The problem with being so fortunate is that ..
‘such a man knows whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.’ Jung.
Political change, like charity, begins at home. We have to begin with the tailor within, that aspect of ourselves which is grandiose, paranoid and babyish. Moreover, if I can gratefully give the old lady the time of day, feel nourished by her jam, let the world in, then life is already good despite the world’s dictailors.