A man goes into a bar. At the door he pauses and straps a large potato to his head. He then strides forward purposefully and orders a beer. The regulars look at one another doubtfully. One taps his temple. Another makes la-la noises. A third eventually asks, ‘Dude, why are you wearing a potato on your head? The stranger turns to him like he was sat in his own back yard and says in a lazy drawl, ‘to keep the tigers away, of course.’ The regulars exchange confused looks, ‘but there are no tigers in these parts, stranger.’ ‘Yep,’ says the stranger, oozing confidence, ‘mighty effective ain’t it?
Much of the current confusion about what it means to be a man has contributed to the malignant narcissism of our culture, currently spearheaded and symbolized by the fiasco of entitlement that is Donald Trump who daily does incomprehensible things whilst invoking the feeling in others that they must be the stoopid one.
We get so dazzled by what-Donald-did-next, so caught in the daily gut punch of crudity, corruption and orchestrated chaos that there is barely time to draw breath and wonder quietly how such a man ascended to highest office in the first place. The Kim’s of this world had power handed to them on a plate and so you expect them to be narcissistic babies. But how did the democratic process produce the same phenomenon?
Would you expect to find the Trump Administration at the end of two hundred years of fervent democracy? It is rather like the puzzle of the upstanding citizen who nevertheless harbors a secret and compulsive fetish behind closed doors. At first it all seems ‘mad’ but only because you do not have all the facts. There is an X in the equation for which a value has yet to be found.
I once knew someone who could not bear the sight of a number 6 bus. It turns out she used to ride that route which passed a road whose name was the same as an unmourned lover driven off years before by her foul temper. She could not bear her complicity let alone the loss. The bus route jogged her memory and so the psyche had leapt to her protection, parceling off unwanted life, preserving both her conscience and equilibrium in the process.
Collectively we do something similar. Patriotic self idealization requires the nation to split off it’s genocidal history, it’s greed, aggression and Imperialism. These have to be ejected beyond the borders onto Evil Others which must then be nobly warred against. This idealized group self then has to be rigorously policed and purged of self reflection, empathy, or care, all of which must now be regarded as ‘weakness’. Even this may not be enough. As the group unravels it may also need to demonize subgroups of its own members.
Like the story of the number 6 bus, whole swathes of collective awareness must be parceled off leaving us with the same split reality of competence and strength masquerading over fragility, emptiness and disconnection.
An iconic moment for this particular form of collective terror of ‘weakness’ came when Robert O’Neill, the former Navy Seal who claims to have been the one to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011, tweeted a mask-less photo of himself on a Delta flight, captioned “I’m not a pussy.”
‘In the background of the photo was another, older man, wearing a fatigues-green United States Marine Corps hat — and a mask. When I saw his tweet I almost felt for him. What is it in our culture that has filled so many men with such an anxiety of impotence that even firing a bullet into the face of the most wanted terrorist alive and gaining the glory isn’t enough to reassure you that, yes, you are a man? Anand Giridharadas
From this point of view, the cultural crisis of male identity, the X in the equation, Donald Trump makes perfect sense. It’s much more than how to look rich when you ain’t. This particular deception is subsumed under the umbrella promise of being able to hide from yourself, regularly symbolized in the political tumult by hidden affairs, hidden payments, hidden grades, hidden tax returns, hidden connections and conversations, secret servers, hidden investments, hidden health details… hidden children.
When all else fails and you can no longer hide from horrible others you can take refuge in hiding from yourself and count on your buddy to do the same. The flaws in your personal character, the weakness, doubt and limitation can all be swept away by the warm and comforting tide of collective identity rooted in what RD Laing calls ‘alteration’, playing at being oneself.
‘The ordinary lunatic is generally a harmless, isolated case; since everyone sees that something is wrong with him, he is quickly taken care of. But the unconscious infections of groups of so-called normal people are more subtle and far more dangerous.” ~C.G. Jung.
Our problem is not Trump. Our problem is that he represents a collective idea of a real man who, in turn, continues to feed the deification of persona which allows the rest of us, including many who outwardly oppose him, to hide from ourselves in good conscience.
