Baron Hieronymus Karl Friedrich Freiherr von Munchausen (1720–1797) was a German nobleman whose adventurous life was later fictionalised in literature and film. Munchausen was a man whose extensive and vivid imagination surpassed even the grandeur of his title and many names. One of the most famous of Baron Munchausen’s exploits references an occasion he once found himself drowning in a swamp but managed to save himself by pulling himself out by his own hair. Of course he had many other tall tales, riding across a battlefield on a canon ball, flying to the moon, being swallowed by a giant fish but somehow its this capacity to rescue himself from the most dire of situations that captures the imagination, an image of heroic and magical self-sufficiency which will constitute the focus of our attention today.
It would be an unfortunate act of preemptive foreclosure to dismiss Munchausen as a mere liar. He was more of a master raconteur with a gift for poker faced embellishment, a kind of oral magician with a mesmeric capacity to beguile and blur the lines between fantasy and reality. His ‘lies’ were compelling confabulations which riveted his audiences, inspired imagination, enticed and enchanted. The great and the good fought for a seat at his myth-making dinner parties, competing for the privilege of being seduced into fantastical narrative told with performative exaggeration.
Munchausen’s ‘stories’ are important because they underscore how much we like to be deceived by the improbable and the impossible, why we ourselves are often moved to fib, prevaricate and dissemble, why it is that cheaters do in fact prosper. We may feel offended by the mendacious fudging of a barefaced lie, but our moral high ground runs the risk of getting in the way of exploring the purposes it might serve. Why it is that we collectively tolerate and even delight in pejorative cozenage? The story of Munchausen pulling himself from the swamp by his hair needs to be analysed both for its symbolic content and for its capacity to capture the imagination.
We normally associate lying with the attempt to avoid consequences and tend to regard the lie with opprobrium because it expresses the wish to simply get oneself out of trouble, or to remain at the centre of attention. Whilst Munchausen’s “lies” are exuberant, mythic fabrications expressing omnipotence and imaginative freedom, Munchausen Syndrome describes a psychiatric condition in which similar fabrications are focused on illness rather than adventure, a form of possession by the Trickster archetype, organised around a wounded child seeking care and recognition. In its most extreme form it involves deliberate falsification of symptoms and elaborate pathological storytelling motivated by the desire for attention, care, and psychological containment in order to avoid the rigours and demands of life.
Dig a little deeper and there is the lie which expresses the anxious need to stay congruent with a particular view of oneself, the lie which seeks to avoid not only consequence but also cognitive dissonance. Such a lie serves not only to avoid retribution but also to augment internal cohesion, congruence designed to avoid getting into trouble with yourself by minimising internal conflict or contradiction. This shifts the focus from the lies we tell others to those we tell ourselves.
Then there’s a deeper level still, a descent from naughty to nasty, in which the lie is designed not just to avoid censure or to help you feel better about yourself but when it is yoked to the kind of desire for power over others which tolerates and even requires collateral damage and the suffering of third parties. Such lies are meant to fuck with your head and destroy relatedness, the kind of lie designed not to get yourself out of shit but to put others in it. At this juncture the lie is synonymous with sadistic cruelty. Its purpose is deeper than intra-psychic consistency and becomes more a question of preserving a sense of self via the persecution of others. The shift here is Copernican because the lie is being actively employed to depersonalise and project inferiority. Its maintenance requires jackboots and active victimisation.
The most pernicious lie however, encapsulating all of the above but not limited to them, is the one symbolised by Munchausen pulling himself out of the swamp by his hair. I am sufficient to myself. I don’t need you. The other is not simply victimised but eradicated.
Whilst Munchausen syndrome is a pathological possession by the Trickster archetype, in which the ego constructs grandiose illness narratives to secure maternal containment and narcissistic mirroring while defending against fragmentation and dependency, the story of him pulling himself out of the swamp by his hair serves the same purpose, but by identifying with the opposite, absolute invulnerability. Trickster is now augmented with Magician.
Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard refers to such a condition as a ‘sickness unto death.’ Kierkegaard defines the self as essentially relational. It relates to itself and is grounded in a power beyond itself. When this relation is misaligned despair threatens, requiring further efforts to secure oneself by even greater efforts to be one’s own ground. The individual refuses to experience themselves as dependent. Instead, they attempt to author and sustain an identity by sheer will and imagination. The Baron pulling himself out of a swamp by his own hair is the symbolic representation of Kierkegaard’s defiant self. This is not healthy autonomy, no self can provide its own ultimate foundation. The attempt to do so leads to increasingly elaborate performances of self-sufficiency, ultimately a magnificent but impossible effort to become one’s own creator.
Where Søren Kierkegaard diagnoses the spiritual structure of defiant selfhood, and Carl Jung interprets the archetypal symbolism, Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers asks a distinct question, what kind of human possibility is disclosed when a person lives within stories that are factually impossible yet existentially meaningful? What does the fabricated narrative accomplish for that person?
A return to Kierkegaard provides the answer, behind defiant self-assertion often lies the opposite despair, an inability to tolerate one’s ordinary, vulnerable identity. The grandiose storyteller implicitly says, ‘The self I have been given is intolerable, therefore I will invent another.’ The impossible adventure covers a more painful reality of utter dependency and disastrous insufficiency.
According to The Washington Post Fact Checker, President Trump told 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first presidency. They all fall, with chillingly precision, into the different categories detailed above. From the attempts to garner sympathy and avoid consequence with his factitious bone spurs, to the lies he tells himself about crowd sizes and how popular he is, to the lies about migrants involving the justification of putting children in cages, to the lies about being exonerated from responsibility for having appeared on every other page of the Epstein files, to the bombing of Iran based on the lie that they are developing a nuclear weapon. But the scariest lie by far is the image posted on Truth Social of him as Jesus. In that image, Trickster and Magician are now bolstered by Saviour, come together to form a truly unholy trinity.
Perhaps the only thing that should concern us more is that Trump is not the problem. He is a symptom of the problem. The anti-christ is neither the devilish opposite of Jesus nor even the poor fool with nuclear codes who mistakes himself for Jesus, but the pervasive collective sentiment which no longer cares whether the most powerful man in the world lies, rapes, steals, cheats and kills… or not.
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