Tag: Trump

The Emperor’s New Clothes, or Why Democracy Fails.

Once there was once an Emperor whose entire office was dedicated to his wardrobe. He had no interest in the people or in governance, though around about the time a rumour began to circulate that his grip on power was slipping, two scoundrels calling themselves weavers-by-appointment came to town and let it be known they could weave a cloth so magical and fine only those with the highest IQ, the greatest competence and the very best credentials could see it.

Naturally the Emperor employed them on the spot and so they set up their looms in the west wing of the palace and burned candles day and night to show how busy they were. Eventually they announced the clothes were ready and the Emperor sent around the first minister to have a look and report back to him. Of course he could see nothing but felt it best to keep quiet just in case it cost him his job come the midterms so he went back and told the Emperor that the clothes were just wonderful. The colours! The patterns! The quality of materials! The Emperor then sent his second minister who’d already overheard what the first minister had said. When he discovered he couldn’t see a thing he became deeply troubled, feeling that he must indeed be stupid and unfit for his post, but he too was up for re-election so he kept his mouth shut and told the Emperor what he wanted to hear.

Then the Emperor paid the weavers a visit himself, praising the fine silks, ‘nobody knows quality like me, I have all the best clothes’, he bragged and arranged for a procession through the streets to show off his new finery. My how fine! And job numbers are up. The economy is in such good shape. The straights of Hormuz are open and gas is less expensive than it’s ever been. Suddenly a child piped up, ‘He’s naked! Gas is four and a half dollars a gallon and the Epstein files are still being hidden from us.’ There was a moment’s commotion. The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on! And so the lords of the bed-chamber took even greater pains than ever to appear holding up his train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, the Emperor and his courtiers collude in maintaining a deception that becomes increasingly humiliating and dangerous. Each person has an opportunity to end the charade, yet each helps perpetuate it. The covert purpose of preserving status, avoiding exposure and maintaining belonging overrides the honest responsibility of seeing and speaking the truth.

Having said that, the fact that the procession continues despite being outed by the child who has yet to give his power away and whose integrity is still in place suggests some subtleties to this cautionary tale worth further unpacking.

When Ghandi was released from house arrest in 1947 a reporter at the gate shouted out, ‘What do you think of western democracy?’ Ghandi replied, ‘I think it would be a very good idea.’ Ghandi was pointing to the same thing as the child in the story, an illusion is afoot. The undaunted procession in our story suggests this illusion is extremely persistent. Let’s use the story as a template to think about why it is that we only have the illusion of democracy and how this is perpetuated by the myths we tell ourselves about human aggression. Let’s also hold in mind the possibility that the two tricksters who pull the wool over everyone’s eyes might’ve had their scam put to them by the Emperor in the first place, just so he could walk down fifth avenue naked and get away with it…..

From Elena Gorokhova’s memoir, ‘A Mountain of Crumbs’ (2009) ‘They lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.’ The deception persists not because everyone believes it, but because everyone behaves as though they believe it.

It might reasonably be suggested democracy does not fail simply because people stop wanting it. The rationale might be offered that it also fails when institutions are too weak to withstand powerful interests, when elected leaders undermine constitutional constraints, or when military and external actors prevent political stability from taking root. Though it could also be said such undermining and untoward events unfold in ways which express an unconscious purpose, even when we neither recognise nor desire that outcome. A repeated failure, a seemingly accidental misadventure, or a pattern of self-defeat might therefore be understood as meaningful rather than purely coincidental.

This is not to say everything which happens externally is unconsciously wanted. It’s just that our apparent failures may be organised in ways which help sustain less obvious outcomes. Nor does it imply people unconsciously desire their own suffering, though it does suggest people are prepared to endure unaccountable degrees of suffering if some as yet unidentified metric might be preserved or sustained in the process. What might that be? We’ll turn to this conundrum in a minute but let’s begin with a small sample from the staggering list of human failure to collectively give ourselves what we say we want.

Historically, we have the compelling collapse of the Roman Republic giving way to tyrants like Tiberius, Nero, Commodus and Elegabolus. More recently we have the utter failure of the French Revolution to produce any democratic governance, despite being handed the opportunity on a plate, an opportunity which strangely culminated in Napoleon Bonaparte’s being crowned Emperor within a mere ten years of Louis XVI’s execution. Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. In Russia the revolution replaced Emperor Nicholas II with Lenin, who was arguably worse, and then by Stalin who was definitely worse. The Qing dynasty of China was ultimately replaced by Mao Zedong who made the former imperial leadership look like a Boy Scout jamboree. Fast forward a few decades and in Germany the Weimar Republic was replaced by Hitler, the Spanish Republic by Franco, and King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy by Mussolini. After the war Korean liberation from Japan produced Kim Il Sung, Guatemala’s democracy was overturned by a CIA backed ‘initiatives’ in ’54. In Europe Hungarian efforts were crushed in 1956 and then Czech efforts in ’68.

In our lifetimes the list of failed or undermined democracies is as long as your arm. Chile President Salvador Allende was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet a dictatorship that lasted until 1990. In 1967 Greece suffered a military coup. Pakistan had three (1958, 1977 and 1999) Then, like a murder of crows against dark skies there was Congo (1960), Nigeria (1966), Indonesia (1965–1967), Iran (1953), Dominica (1963), Zimbabwe (1981) Egypt (2011–2013), Libya (2011 onwards), Yemen (2011 onwards),Tunisia (2011–2021 onwards), Myanmar (2011–2021), Belarus (1990s), Haiti (1991), Russia (1991–2000s). Hong Kong (1980s–2020s). Sudan (2019–2021). Afghanistan (2001–2021). I sure I’ve missed a few…

Now, you might say that’s a lot of jolly bad luck. I would prefer to say that despite our pretensions to democracy we humans have a taste for tyrants, amply demonstrated by the perennial shenanigans of the current leader of the free world Donald Themistocles Trump. A man less suited to democratic leadership, more contemptuous of his sacred oath, is hard to consider. And yet 70 million Americans thought that electing a racist bankrupt with a penchant for girls ‘on the younger side’, a man who demands peace prizes whilst threatening entire countries with annihilation, was a good idea. What gives? How did that even happen? It beggars belief… unless, unless we consider that there is more going on in the collective psyche than the wish to be governed with benevolent compassion.

And what might that be?

You might well reason that having someone’s boot on your neck is an unenviable prospect, and yet… to identify with that same powerful other irrespective of their boot or body odour is to belong to a system of shared meaning. Philosopher Martin Heideggar calls it the ‘sweaty warmth of the They’, arguably way more important than the momentary humiliation of being lied to or trodden on. Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm makes the persuasive argument that liberation comes at a price greater than blood, sweat and tears. It may be that party loyalty and a white picket-fence mentality, ‘blocks development as a free self-determining, productive individual; but the identity with clan gives security in which [a person] has an unquestioned place.’ You might well calculate that’s worth any amount of mud on your face. Individuation on the other hand, becoming your own person with the autonomous capacity to think for yourself, ‘means growing isolation, doubts concerning one’s role, the meaning of one’s life, a growing feeling of powerlessness and insignificance.’ ( ‘The Fear of Freedom’ p29)

Fromm paints a compelling picture of the advantages of servitude; unquestioned belonging, certainty of beliefs, internal harmony and self-idealisation. We could add to that the power which servitude provides to project both the inmost self and the unwanted shadow onto third parties. Slavish devotion means the Self can be attributed to the glorious leader, no better example being Trump’s depiction of himself on social media as Jesus healing the sick. There were muted protests about messianic delusions at the time and not a few psychiatrists had something to say, but he got away with it within days because it’s no more than the manifestation of a collective projection already firmly in place. Trump himself commented at a recent rally, ‘I could say the stupidest things and you’d still clap.’ It seems ridiculous and yet, as Jung observed, ‘People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.’ (CW12 p99)

Such collective abdication absolves the voter from the gnarly responsibility of ever having to address the reality of the Self in an interior way. Having the dear leader, albeit Jabba the Hut, embody the Self, the ego is permitted continued pre-eminence in the psyche. You need never grow up or renounce your narcissistic omnipotence. Moreover, as one of ‘The Good’, you are then further enabled to project the less salubrious facets of your character onto some anonymous brown person halfway around the world, or across the street, who can then be used as a repository for all the undifferentiated collective bile you care to spew upon him.

All your insecurities, inferiority, fears and questionable morality can be exported in one grand package. Moreover the bombing and murder of defenceless school girls can be reduced to collateral damage. The warped logic of replacing one mildly irritating regime with another which now actively wants revenge paid in blood, is just one more minor inconvenience for a regime now get entirely comfortable with live streaming public executions whilst condemning other nations that do so as barbaric.

You are then miraculously liberated from both the torment of having to pursue your own destiny and from the noisome trial of keeping down all the indigestible facets of human nature which contest the idea of you being without stain or limitation. The problem of the shadow, with which you are now free to go to war and combat on the outside, rather than come to terms with it on the inside, is laid to rest.

Why is this important? Because it helps us understand why we are so ambivalent about our own freedom, why we’re careless about who is allowed into office, and why the muttering of ‘boots on the ground’ should chime so perfectly with the timing of midterm elections.

At first glance the problematic issue of the shadow doesn’t seem pertinent to our story. There’s no blood on the carpet, no beaten protestors, no ICE agents. Yet the fear is palpable, present in its most insidious, invisible form as the power to coerce and indoctrinate. It’s present in the capacity to tear the other away from the validity of their own perceptions, to make others doubt themselves. It’s present in the self-estrangement of being made to feel your judgment is incompetent. It’s in the mugging of autonomy and self-reflection, the forced consumption of Kkkool-aid, the yoke of herd mentality and all without a bruise or broken bone.

There is however, something even more compelling than the prospect of ridding oneself of both the Self, now attributed to the Glorious Leader, and the shadow, now attributed to the Heinous Enemy. This subtlety is the invisible interruption of conscience which is part and parcel of internalising the rhetoric of autocracy. You get to gaslight yourself. In the story, the most chilling moment is when the ambassadors of the Emperor arrive to view the ‘invisible’ clothes. The first minister begins to doubt his own reality, “Is it possible that I am a simpleton? I have never thought so myself; and no one must know it if I am. Can it be, that I am unfit for my office?’ The second, having been influenced by the first sets the seal on his own self-estrangement,  “It must be, that I am not fit for my good, profitable office! That is very odd; however, no one shall know anything about it.” Not even himself. He has internalised the lessons drummed into him by the state. He can no longer stand by his own perceptions. It’s not that he has convinced himself that he can see what is not there but that he believes himself to be insufficiently zealous for failing to do so.

For the autocrat to continue to rule, the populace must be persuaded that congenital stupidity is their natural station, amply demonstrated by Trump once asking a rally in Iowa, ‘why are the people of Iowa so stupid?’ to rapturous and resounding applause. The people collude with such humiliating insults because it permits them to attribute the troublesome burden of self-determination onto their fomenting frontman. The dear leader will tell us what to do, how to live, when to eat, shit and sleep. What a relief!

Energies rerouted from unrealised ambition, having renounced self determination, can now be used to mobilise the belligerence necessary to attack people with whom you have no personal quarrel so that the architect of it all can be left in peace with his wardrobe and beauty pageants. Fromm says it most clearly, ‘the amount of destructiveness [in a society] is proportional [to the extent] that the expansiveness of life is curtailed.’ Destructiveness is the outcome, (not of any innate predisposition), but of the unlived life. (p158) ‘Unlived life’, says analyst Marie Louise von Franz, ‘does not sit idly on the shelf, it will turn round and bite you.’

The dangers of the idea that if you don’t see what others see you must be an idiot, is that it appeals both by way of a simple explanation, that’s just how things are, and by virtue of its associated benefits. It permits us to wallow in mediocrity having projected both the best and worst of ourselves onto undeserving others for as long as we identify with the ministers’ conviction, ‘I must be stupid’. It normalises what should not be normalised. Our story sounds a warning about the dangerous appeal of such normalisation, the deception of the weavers, the collusion of the ministers, the narcissistically defiant and undaunted procession proceeding regardless. So what if I’m naked? There need be no accountability. Everyone can get away with it. Give me what I want and you too can take what you want. The appeal to the lowest common denominator really can win. The only casualty need be the creative process, which you can’t help but think is then the author of all this unreality.

The Allure of Misery.

Once there was a miserable couple. They hardly spoke and slept in separate rooms. Every day the man would reluctantly chop wood, making sure to splinter it up beyond use and every day the woman would cook biscuits making sure to burn them a little. One day, whilst splintering the logs, the man decided he’d had enough. He dug the axe blade deep into the chopping block and walked out of the garden gate, down the hill, into the town. There he caught a boat and sailed the seven seas for a decade or more. One year his boat moored up in his old home town. He walked through the town, climbed the hill and lifted the rusty latch on the garden gate. He pulled the axe out of the block where it was still wedged, splintered some wood and went into the cottage. His wife was stood in the kitchen. ‘There’s your wood!’ he said aggressively. Without looking up she reached for a plate of something dark and mouldy, thrusting them down onto the table with a crash, ‘And there’s your biscuits’.

Why do people stay in unhappy relationships? Is it because they both believe they can save the other? Or be saved by them? Or ‘make them see’? Is it ‘for the sake of the kids’? Beneath such reasons there is invariably something darker, less available for consideration, more painfully uncomfortable to face. It’s what you are used to. It’s the devil that you know. Beneath the desire to save or rescue, beyond the kick of emotional intensity mistaken for intimacy, or the despairing reluctance to start over, is the compulsive repetition of familiarity’s hard wiring.

But there’s another layer still. It’s so simple it’s easy to miss, yet so obvious that when you say it out loud you wonder how it got evaded for so long. Preoccupation with the other’s issues, remonstrating with their idiosyncrasies and focusing on their problems means you don’t have to confront your own. You can stay with, ‘she let me down’, rather than the more corrosive, ‘I chose badly’. ‘Why does she treat me that way?’, is easier than ‘why do I let myself be treated like that?’ The poor me of, ‘how can she behave like that?’, is more comforting than, ‘why do I tolerate it?’

When the mirror is held up like this something profoundly uncomfortable happens. You realise that what you thought of as projection is way more complex than at first appears. Generally we tend to think of projection as limited to the shadow, the attribution to the other of all one’s own ‘negative’ traits, hate, anger, greed. But projection is about more than ridding oneself of inferior qualities. It is primarily about preserving the status quo. To that end we are just as likely to project our depth, wisdom, and inner gold if it serves the purpose of preserving psychic equilibrium.

So there is actually a twofold process happening with the stuck and unhappy couple. On the one hand, focusing on the speck in the other’s eye means being able to ignore the beam in your own. Alongside this however, and at the other end of the spectrum, we also attribute the other with all kinds of positive qualities they don’t deserve, so as not to have to fulfil our own potential or be challenged by it. This both divests oneself of the responsibility for personal growth and lends ballast to an otherwise rocky situation by affording the other with more credit than they are due. Thus the unhappy relationship both provides a person with the opportunity to rid themselves of, or at least ignore, feelings of inferiority on the one hand and renounce the gauntlet of unlived potential on the other. The unhappy relationship gives a person the chance to idealise themselves without having to grow, to be powerful or at least hard done by without having to be vulnerable. The shining knight always gets to show up in a full suit of armour.

Projection achieves an added twist when a partner is made responsible for your happiness. It’s no longer simply a question of the shadow being projected but of the anima or animus. Anima/us projections are from a deeper layer of the psyche and comprise issues of meaning, potential and fulfilment. Such projections require the other to live up to something they are ill-equipped to shoulder. When this inevitably falls short there is bound to be both disappointment and the plaintive insistence that the now diminished partner ‘recover’ their capacity to make us feel good about ourselves. This can become an embittered project. Couples can co-exist in such an unhappy tryst for a lifetime. It is however the lesser of two evils. The alternative, which is to be the author of one’s own meaningful destiny, is a much greater challenge, devoid of blaming and ‘if only’.

“A marriage is more likely to succeed if the woman follows her own star and remains conscious of her wholeness than if she constantly concerns herself with her husband’s star and his wholeness. When a woman experiences the mystery of creativeness in herself, in her own inner world, she is doing the right thing and then no longer demands it from the outside — from her husband, her son, or anyone else close to her.” (Jung in conversation with Esther Harding)

Jung was just as unequivocal in his thoughts about men, ‘The fact that a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing … He must obey his own law…The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization — absolute and unconditional— of its own particular law … To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being … he has failed to realise his own life’s meaning.’

The combined effect of shadow and anima/us projections, whilst initially relieving tension, ultimately make for a very particular kind of psychic poison. Whilst it rids a person of both inferiority and responsibility, the resulting righteousness hardly compensates the misery and listlessness entailed. Individuation, with all its trials and tribulations, is no longer the discomforting and gristly morsel the Fates would have you chew, but so too does everything else then grind to a halt. Out of the blue you are now the victim of circumstance, all for the privilege of a feigned and unfulfilling innocence, which, for all its protective promise, does not sustain or satisfy.

Now let’s apply these dynamics to political leadership in order to try and understand how the unpopular and tyrannical, likewise, manage to stay in place. Like the unhappy romance which persists despite its miseries, so too the betrayed election promises, the gross revelations, the hidden tax returns, the body odour of the reviled leader, all would seem to be enough to end the affair. Yet the tyrant stays in power way longer than you would think possible despite the protestations of the disaffected electorate.

You wonder about the teflon effect, where every valid grievance magically comes to nothing. From Tiberius to Trump we seem to expect the impunity, perversity and corruption of the powerful. The liberty, equality and fraternity of 1789 gave way to Napoleon crowning himself Emperor of France and its colonies within the space of a single generation. Of course we say out loud how much we wish for benevolent leadership just as the cuckold holds out for true love, yet where would we be without some aberrant lord to revile, rehabilitate, indict or condemn?

The reviled leader does not survive despite his miscreants but because of them. A milder sinner would not last half as long. His incoherence, bigotry and pussy grabbing preserve him in a way no amount of statesmanship could afford. It serves us to think of him as an aberration so as not to be reminded of our collective predilection for corrupt leadership, just as the ardent lover thinks of their current misery as an exception to the rule, forgetting the trail of disappointments which preceded it. Whether individually or collectively, there is this defensive need for the appalling other against whom one may yet measure one’s own upstanding forbearance.

The corrupt leader is also kept in place, like the failing lover, by more than the need for a hook to hang the shadow upon. They too are maintained by the projection of hopes and dreams alongside the stabilising effect of exported contempt. One of the features of kingship is that they are appointed by god, all of which alleviates the rest of us from the burden of having to have our own difficult tussle with the divine. We collectively project the Self onto the leader in order not to have to suffer the vicissitudes of spiritual growth. After all, ‘the experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego’. (Jung 1974)

Part of the process of individuation is that the ego is forced to relinquish its claim to being the centre of everything. It’s a rather unpleasant and disorienting deflation to realise you are not captain of your ship. Its far easier on us to have someone else appointed to do the mediating with the gods on our behalf, especially if it means being able to hold onto the idea that the psyche is what I know of it. So, whilst wannabe kings are scary, immoral and persecutory so too does their divine appointment leave them with the difficult task of having to deal with the gods even if they manifestly fail at the job.

In ancient times a ruler was held responsible if the crops did not grow, because he had clearly failed to propitiate the gods. The ruler was not just a political leader but the mediator between the human world and the divine or cosmic order. If crops failed, floods came, droughts persisted, or epidemics spread, people frequently interpreted this as evidence that the ruler had lost divine favour or failed in ritual duties. The Chinese had a specific name for it, the Mandate of Heaven. Emperors sometimes issued public confessions after crop failures, acknowledging their own moral shortcomings and ordering acts of repentance, whilst the starving peasants were at least comforted, if not by full bellies, then at least by clean conscience.

We collectively tolerate the tyrant’s boot on our neck in the same way the unhappy person goes home to their abusive partner. We can be preoccupied with his ills rather than our own whilst skilfully handing over sovereign responsibility for what happens next at one and the same time. The jesus/tyrant, like the partner in receipt of anima/us projections can be lumbered with the terrifying responsibility of having to intercede/mediate with the gods on our behalf, leaving us free to renounce the dread prospect of having to do the job for ourselves.

The Adventures of Baron von Trumphausen.

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.

The Narcissism of Small Differences.

There was once a Toad who lived near a pond with a Frog. Every evening Frog would sit on a stone and sing. His voice carried across the water—clear and strong—and all the animals would stop to listen.

Toad heard the singing and thought, I wish I could sing like Frog.

So one night Toad climbed onto a rock and tried. He puffed up his throat and pushed out a sound. But it came out rough and croaky. The crickets stopped chirping. The birds tilted their heads. Toad felt embarrassed.

He practiced again the next night, and the next, trying to copy Frog exactly—how he breathed, how he held his throat, how he shaped the sound. But the more he tried to imitate Frog, the worse he felt. Finally Frog came and sat beside him.

“Why are you trying to sing like me?” Frog asked.

“To be like you,” said Toad.

Frog listened to Toad croak again.

“That is not my song,” Frog said gently. “But it might be yours.”

Given Trump’s campaign promise not to involve America in foreign wars and the often stated conviction that his political rivals would bomb Iran as a means to deflect attention from domestic crises, it does seem a bit strange for us to be witnessing this billion dollar a day conflict unfold, the wish to distract our gaze from the Epstein files not withstanding.

Seen through a psychoanalytic lens it makes more sense. This brief essay will draw upon Freud’s idea of ‘the narcissism of small differences’, in order to explain it. I will draw additionally on Klein, Lacan and Jung.

Conflict, both interpersonal and international, is often accounted for by referring to the concept of projection. This is the attribution to the other of one’s own shadow material with which a person or nation then goes to war, rather than containing the tension of opposites in an interior way. So, for instance, a person might attribute to another their own bitchyness and then attack them for it, rather than hold the uncomfortable tension between the ego ideal of being ever so virtuous, on the one hand, whilst also being perfectly capable of back biting on the other.

But something else is going on here. Whilst there is undoubtedly a shadow component to Hegseth’s invokkkation of extremist Christian rhetoric, so too is there a sense that these two regimes are so much alike that dynamics other than projection seem to be at work. These less obvious realities risk perpetuating the war way beyond the need to export domestic devils.

Freud, who knew only too well from personal experience what it was like to be enviously attacked by his peers, coined the phrase, ‘the narcissism of small differences’, in a 1917 essay “Constructions in Analysis”. This concept will help us understand why Trump felt so compelled to commit to a conflict which will almost certainly be instrumental in his own downfall.

The narcissism of small differences refers to the psychological phenomenon where groups or individuals who are very similar to each other exaggerate minor distinctions and then use them as sources of hostility or conflict. In other words, the closer two groups are the more likely they are to fight over tiny differences. Freud observed this in ethnic, cultural, or social contexts, but it also applies to personal relationships. By emphasising tiny differences, people can defend their self-esteem and sense of uniqueness. The phenomenon is paradoxical; the more alike the groups are, the stronger the hostility over small distinctions.

Anthropological accounts of ethnic tribal conflicts abound in such examples but modern ‘civilised’ societies are no less prone to this curious phenomenon. During the renaissance, Italian city-states like Florence, Siena, Pisa, and Lucca, who were all culturally very similar, were often at war with each other over hilariously minor disputes, like who had the right to display a certain heraldic colour on flags, which family had precedence in a local festival procession and which city could collect tolls from a specific bridge or river crossing. Florence and Siena, nearly identical culturally, fought a decades-long war over a disputed valley because both wanted symbolic control of a small hill. Entire armies could be mobilised over turf that was agriculturally insignificant, but prestige, honour, and identity made it a “life-or-death” matter.

In 16th–17th century Europe, during the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation, Communities of Lutherans, Calvinists, or Catholics in the same towns sometimes persecuted each other without mercy, even though they shared most cultural and social practices. A tiny doctrinal difference, say, whether communion bread should be leavened or unleavened, could trigger riots, exiles, or massacres.

Perhaps the most Pythonesque example is ‘The War of the Oaken Bucket’, fought In 1325, between two nearby Italian city‑states, Bologna and Modena. They were both culturally similar and part of the same regional milieu. They fought a war that famously became associated with a wooden bucket captured from a well. The conflict was rooted in ongoing rivalries between the Guelphs (papal supporters) and Ghibellines (imperial supporters), but the immediate pretext that sparked the battle was the seizure (or alleged theft) of a bucket from Bologna by Modenese forces. The two cities met in battle at Zappolino, resulting in significant casualties, and the bucket ended up as a trophy in Modena where it is still historically displayed.

Mao’s China suffered a similarly absurd epidemic of purges for ‘counter-revolutionary crimes’ within the communist party. Minor differences led to massive internal conflict. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were purged for “capitalist road” tendencies despite being lifelong communists.

During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), party members, students, and workers were encouraged to denounce each other for “ideological errors.” The absurdity of this was that people were accusing long-time comrades and friends of being traitors for things like using the “wrong tone” when quoting Mao, not wearing Mao badges at exactly the right angle, or speaking too politely to someone labeled a “class enemy”.

Students in the Red Guards, who were all ideologically devoted to Mao, formed rival groups. Both groups wore the same Mao badges, read the same books, and repeated the same slogans. Yet they fought violently because of minor stylistic or tactical differences. One group marched clockwise around a city square, the other counter-clockwise. One read Mao aloud slightly faster than the other. The fights sometimes escalated resulting in injury and death.

The narcissism of small differences is ‘the means by which cohesion among the members of the community is made easier.’ (Freud) and describes a psychological tendency which helps strengthen internal group identity threatened by excessive sameness with other groups or individuals. Those differences become a basis for rivalry, hostility, or prejudice.

This form of Narcissism is closely related to envy because both arise most strongly between people or groups that are very similar or close to each other. In psychoanalytic thinking, envy intensifies when the other person is almost like oneself but possesses something slightly ‘other’, with the sneaking suspicion that it might be ‘better’.

Freud’s idea is that when two individuals or groups are very similar, tiny distinctions become psychologically important because they protect the ego from feeling inferior. If someone similar to me has something I lack envy arises which threatens my self-image. So I exaggerate small differences, devalue the other person or group and turn unbearable envy into riteous hostility.

Thus the “narcissism of small differences” acts as a defence mechanism against feelings of inferiority. Instead of admitting envy, the mind says, “They are actually worse than us because of this difference.” This allows the person or group to restore narcissistic self-esteem.

Melanie Klein’s contribution is that envy is not just the impulse to want what the other has, but to spoil or attack it because the other possesses it. When someone similar to us seems to have a slightly better quality, success, or recognition, envy may lead us to denigrate, criticise, or symbolically damage that person.

Lacan connects envy to the dynamics of identification and rivalry which originate in what he called the Mirror Stage. When we identify with an image of ourselves (or someone similar to us), the other who resembles us becomes both a model and a rival. Envy arises because the other seems to embody a more complete or successful version of the self. Small differences then become charged with meaning, the rival’s slight advantage threatens one’s identity, so the hostile instinct of self preservation develops around those differences. Narcissistic identification easily flips into rivalry when the other mirrors us too closely. Hitler’s generals discovered this to their cost in the Night of the Long Knives.

Jung’s nuanced contribution takes Lacan a step further insofar as envy involves the projection of the Self, which is bound to add a dangerously numinous quality to events, wayyy more charged than the projection of inferiorities. The Self represents the totality and organising centre of the psyche. This wholeness is often projected onto religious figures, leaders, lovers, or spiritual symbols. In ‘Aion’ Jung explains that individuals may experience another person as uniquely meaningful, almost larger than life, because the psyche has unconsciously invested them with the symbolic significance of the Self.

This kind of projection helps explain powerful experiences such as idealisation, hero-worship, and intense romantic love. The person appears extraordinary because they are carrying an archetypal meaning which actually originates within the collective psyche, representing the image of inner wholeness which seems divine/perfect, the reflection of an inner potential for wholeness within oneself.

What made the Ayatollah different from the other ‘strong men’ Trump so otherwise admires is that he carried a projection of the Self in a way that Putin, Marcos or Xi Jinping do not. For all the laying on of hands and bibles, which can be yours for a mere $99.99, Trump has, for some strange reason, never been able to carry off the image of the spiritual leader. Despite the profound similarities in regime ideology the teensy detail of (not) being head of the church has always eluded Trump. He recently said himself that he is unlikely to even gain admission to the pearly gates. All of which is bound to fuel an envious billion-dollar-a-day habit… of Jihadi proportions.

thanks to Dr Dale Mathers for the inspiration….

Greedylocks and the Three Bears.

Long ago, deep in a cold forest, there lived three bears. One morning, the bears left their home to pick berries and let their porridge cool. Not long after, a cloaked figure slipped from the road. In some versions of the story this figure is a beggar; in others, a thief. Seeing the empty cottage, she tried the door. It was unlocked.

Inside, the smell of food. Without a thought she tasted the largest bowl but it was too hot to eat directly. The next was too cold and who can be bothered….. The smallest she could gulp down straight away and so she ate every last bite. Growing bolder, she tested the chairs. The first held firm. The second sagged. The third shattered beneath her weight.

Upstairs, she tried the beds. The first was hard as wood. The second was soft but stifling. The third was all there was left and so she helped herself and fell asleep.

When the bears returned, they smelled her immediately. Someone had been in their home. They found the empty bowl. The broken chair. And then, following the muddy trail upstairs, they found her sprawled across Baby Bear’s bed still wearing her shoes.

In the oldest tellings of this fairy story Goldilocks does not escape.

Some say the bears dragged her into the forest and she was never seen again. Others say she leapt from the window in terror and broke her neck on the rocks below. In a few less polite versions, the bears killed her outright for violating their home — not out of cruelty, but because in the wild, trespass means danger.

The tale ends not with happy ever after, but with a warning:

Do not enter what is not yours.
Do not take what you did not earn.
Do not assume the world is gentle simply because it looks quiet.

I once dated a woman who was very hard to please. But I was determined and did everything I could to make her happy. Nothing satisfied. Eventually, like Putin at Petrovsk, I poured all my considerable resources into one final push. I thought that if I rolled all her favourite things into one grand gesture I could finally win her heart. So, I made a list of all the things she loved: medieval architecture, summer skies, picnic baskets with green olives, Prosecco and parma ham, sunsets and country vistas. On the appointed day, I drove us out to the site of an ancient chapel atop a hill on Dartmoor in late August with a hamper full of Crisp apple strudels and Schnitzel with noodles. It was perfect.

The sun was setting. The sky was aglow with reds and pinks. The ancient chapel oozed romance and chivalry. The hamper spilled with tasty snacks. We sat down on the soft grass of the churchyard and took in the breathtaking views across golden valleys and bubbling streams. She looked out at it all with childlike wonder and exclaimed,’its beautiful…’

..’but’, and her brow darkened, her eyes narrowed and her jaw set, ‘why haven’t you bought me here before?’

Of course the ingratitude on her part and the despair on mine rode rough shod over being able to see the unutterable poverty of her inner world which nothing could satisfy. Greed is something which so snags our moral sensibilities it is difficult to see past it to the gnawing pit of ravenous hunger it is so furiously unable to fill.

Hunger becomes greed at the point when we give up on the hope of ever receiving what we need. If I cannot receive I have to take. If taking won’t fill, as it rarely does, then the good thing must be spoiled so you can’t have it either. Even if you are willing to share. The agony of greed is not only that the world must be experienced as withholding and impoverished but that good things must quickly be refused even when they are available because the person’s attention has shifted away from hope and sharing to confirmation that the world and everything in it has no value. Sense of self has become coalesced around inner poverty which then requires the emptiness to be maintained for the sake of a stable self structure. Plenty is threatening to a core identity adapted to the absence of love/nurture and so the person finds themselves in the awful bind of having to negate and dismiss what is most needed even when it is at hand.

This is tragic for the individual. It’s catastrophic when it becomes collective, when it begins to determine international policy. Allies must be denigrated, resources plundered, homes invaded, people snatched. Not only is there never enough but whatever is available must be repudiated for the sake of consistency. It is enough to make anyone want to destructively lash out .. and bigly. Greed has a deathly quality. It does not just want something for itself. It wants the good in the other to be destroyed so it doesn’t feel inferior or dependent. Greed wants to annihilate the source of good, not just acquire it.

This leads to the kind of corrosive complacency which takes no thought for consequences or tomorrow. Goldilocks doesn’t concern herself with what might happen if she remains in the home she has invaded. She’s unable to reflect on the result of either her theft of the porridge or the damage done to the chair. She just falls asleep and buries her head until she is overtaken by events.

Greed can’t use what it takes, so good things must be devalued and friends humiliated. Trump’s recent Davos speech confused Greenland with Iceland four times, so little did he care about what was so important only days or hours before. But the kicker was the astonishing denial of the role of America’s allies during WW11 and more particularly the denial of England’s 457 fallen heroes in Afghanistan. He’s not just wrong or misinformed. More importantly, it’s that contempt for others and the need to be hated by them have come to replace the unmourned loss of absent love and nurture. He needs to be controversial. He wants your outrage. Identity must be rooted in at least something and in the absence of love and respect, hate and vilification will do.

If only Trump were an anomaly. Unfortunately he is only the most recent iteration of a long standing tradition, enabled by an emotionally starved collective still telling ourselves that we are the avatars of civilisation, cramming ourselves with stuff we don’t need whilst others starve. Let’s at least not deceive ourselves. The underbelly of our vaunted sophistication is sophistry; the clever use of lies and deception. Nothing will change much until we face the honest shame of our collective responsibility in allowing such a scumbag to succeed, until we face the fact that the long line of despots and tyrants in our culture are the logical conclusion of two thousand years or more of vengeful male Gods with all the emotional intelligence and relatedness of the average tape worm.

In the original story of Goldilocks she doesn’t get tired of winning. The bears have her, not because they are violent but because her waste, destructiveness and insatiability are dangerous to all the other animals in the woods who understand that what befalls one of them becomes the fate of all.

The Rape of America.

One of the most dangerous misconceptions about Narcissism is that it is about the lack of something. Author Bruno Bettleheim uses the metaphor of ‘The Empty Fortress’, to convey this idea, that the Narcissist is just a bunch of defences surrounding a vacuum, forgetting that the fortress is empty because its contents have been projected. Shakespeare seems to concur with Bettleheim in Macbeth, Act V, Scene V.

“It (life) is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

Shakespeare is describing what life looks like from inside a soul that has destroyed its own moral centre. He seems to be saying that when you live as if nothing matters, the world eventually appears to mean nothing. Though this is hardly enough. After all, both Lord Duncan and the Queen lie dead…

In common parlance we speak about the Narcissist, ‘lacking empathy’, as though the problem was simply that they had something missing. Well wishers wonder if they could ‘learn’, as though what was required was simply a matter of corrective instruction.

Yet this is far from the truth and perhaps reflects the desire on behalf of said enablers to bury their heads in the sand whilst the malignant wrecking ball sweeps past their tail feathers.

In fact, the Narcissist is far from empty or beset by ‘lack’. The problem is not so much the absence of something positive, relatedness and connection, but the presence of something which regards such virtues as weakness and aberration.

The prime concern of Narcissism is to rid the fortress of unbearable feelings. It’s empty because its contents have been evacuated. The oft vaunted attributes of Narcissism, pride, arrogance, superiority, can only be had once one’s system is shot of vulnerability and human frailty. These unwanted feelings have to be projected onto some unwitting other which then brings the person into immediate conflict with his neighbour. In the special case of malignant narcissism, projection is not quite enough. Projections don’t always stick.

You might attribute your neighbour with weakness and stupidity but she is always free to disagree. Unless you actually make her feel weak and stupid. The malignant narcissist differs from his more common or garden cousin by the need to make sure that the projection sticks. It’s not enough to simply assert the other is weak and stupid,. You have to get them to agree. It’s called projective identification. I project my shit onto you and get you to claim it as your own, making you feel as though I am not merely insulting you but correctly identifying that you are indeed a piece of crap.

One of the most heinous manifestations of this is rape. Rape is not about sex, Rape is about the need to humiliate in such a way that the raped other is forced to carry and identify with the feelings of worthlessness and inferiority which so interrupt and interfere with narcissistic hauteur.

In May 2023, a New York civil jury found Trump liable in a lawsuit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll for sexual abuse and defamation related to an incident in the mid-1990s. Because this was a civil case (a lawsuit for damages), the jury did not criminally convict him of rape though he was ordered to pay damages. Some legal commentary said the conduct involved ‘non-consensual penetration’. Trump himself confessed, in the Hollywood access tapes, to ‘pussy grabbing’… He qualified his behaviour, ‘when you are a celebrity, they let you do it.’

Even more disturbing are the multiple accusations from underage girls at the time of being raped by Trump and his best mate Jeffrey Epstein over many years, all of which Trump has done his utmost to keep concealed from the public eye, both by DOJ withholding and the various distractions of Venezuela and Greenland. It does seem rather ironic that this deflection from public scrutiny of his sexual ‘indiscretions’ should be the penetration of one sovereign nation and the threat to ‘have’ another, ‘whether they like it or not’, which of course is rapist language.

It’s not simply that the malignant narcissist does not care. Lack of empathy is the least of your worries. What is so dangerous is the ontological need to make others suffer so that he does not. The wish to make others suffer is not just sadistic. The enjoyment of the pain, exulting over the degradation of others is an existential necessity, the glue that holds the fraying threads of mental imbalance in some semblance of order.

Governance, logic, international relations, all play second fiddle to the self preservation of unloading inferiority and humiliation into others. The recent runway interview at Davos was a prime example. When told that French president Macron had declined his 1 billion dollar ‘invitation’ (protection racket) to the ‘Board of Peace’, his response was a shaming, ‘no-one wants him’. Of course, Macron’s refusal was on the back of a written invitation which he would not have been offered unless Trump wanted him. Logic and international relations simply go to the wall in the face of the urgent need to demean, rubbish and humiliate. Say whatever is needed to rid hated feelings of being unloved. Even if it makes you look stupid; those feelings too can be shed in time, as they were only hours later with his demeanment of China’s (successful) wind farm programme.

If only Trump’s pussy grabbing was confined to those he considers enemies or sufficiently unprotected to be inconsequential. Lady America herself is not safe from the ravages of malignant offloading. ‘Going in’, to maiden cities with national guards and the unaccountable and deadly violations of ICE agents, who are really extensions of Uncle Donald’s feverish paws, ensure the continued humiliation of millions so that he doesn’t have to be afflicted by his own painful feelings. Someone else can be made to feel the pain on his behalf, in their countless droves.

Why? Because hatred comes first; the target is constructed afterward. In so doing you get others carry and identify with all the loathsome emotions of worthlessness so urgently in need of disinvestment such that a polished persona based on the fragile ground of self congratulation can be maintained. The world must be shat on or incorporated, the sovereign autonomy of girls and nations violated, all so that the Emperor Baby and his minions can sleep easy at night.

Mammon’s Quiet Ledger

I asked AI to tell me a story about Mammon, the god of gain and greed. I had been wondering about his role in the recent land grab of Venezuela. It gave me this. I was amazed. I hope you are too. I’ll comment afterwards.

Mammon lived in a house with no windows.

It wasn’t that he disliked light; he simply preferred reflections. Polished floors caught the glimmer of chandeliers, mirrors doubled every flame, and gold—ah, the gold—turned even shadows into something worth possessing. Coins lined the walls like scales on a dragon, each stamped with the faces of kings who had begged Mammon for favor and cursed him in the same breath.

People said Mammon was a demon, and perhaps he was. But demons, like virtues, are often made by repetition.

Each morning Mammon opened his great ledger. Its pages were thin as skin and endless as appetite. Names appeared on their own, written by hands that were not his. Beside each name bloomed columns of numbers: debts, profits, losses, interest compounding like a slow spell.

One evening, a girl arrived at his door. No guards stopped her—there never were any. Those who came to Mammon arrived because something inside them had already unlocked the gate.

She carried nothing but a loaf of bread wrapped in cloth.

“I want to make a bargain,” she said.

Mammon gestured, and a chair shaped itself from coins. “Everyone does.”

“I don’t want gold,” she said quickly. “Or jewels. Or land.”

Mammon paused. This was unusual, not unprecedented, but unusual enough to be interesting.

“What do you want, then?” he asked.

She hesitated. “Time. For my father. He’s dying. If he had one more year, he could finish teaching me his trade. One more year and I won’t starve when he’s gone.”

Mammon turned a page in his ledger. Her father’s name was already there, the ink faint, the balance nearly zero.

“One year is expensive,” Mammon said. “What will you pay?”

The girl placed the loaf of bread on the table.

Mammon laughed, a sound like coins poured onto stone. “That wouldn’t buy a second.”

“I know,” she said. “But it’s all I have.”

Mammon studied her. No trembling greed, no wild hope of riches—only fear sharpened into resolve. He had seen emperors offer their souls with less clarity.

“Very well,” Mammon said at last. “I’ll take what you value most.”

She swallowed. “My future earnings? My labor?”

Mammon shook his head. “Too common.”

He leaned forward, eyes reflecting her face back at her. “I will take your ability to want more than enough.”

She frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“You will,” Mammon said gently. “When the year is done.”

The bargain sealed itself with a whisper. The loaf of bread turned to ash. The girl ran home, hope burning bright enough to blind her to the cost.

True to his word, Mammon adjusted the ledger. The father lived. A year passed. He taught his daughter everything he knew, and when he died, it was peacefully, with her hand in his.

The girl worked hard. She earned enough. She never went hungry.

But she never wanted more.

When others chased wealth, she stopped at sufficiency. When offered power, she declined. She gave excess away without ceremony or pride. Mammon watched as fortunes flowed around her like a river around a stone.

And for the first time in centuries, his ledger showed something strange.

A name with no growth.

Mammon found himself returning to that page often. Not in anger, but in curiosity. The numbers did not swell. They did not shrink. They simply were.

It unsettled him.

Mammon thrived on hunger—on the aching reach for more. Without it, gold was just metal. Power, just noise.

One night, Mammon closed his ledger and extinguished every light in his house of reflections. In the dark, surrounded by wealth that suddenly felt heavy and mute, he wondered—briefly, dangerously—what it might be like to be poor in desire.

…………………………….

Mammon got his first major career boost in the New Testament when Jesus says, “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” (Luke 16;13) He doesn’t say, “You cannot serve God and Satan,” which might make you wonder what the difference could be. The answer is that Satan is all about doing bad stuff, acts of wickedness, overt harm; whereas Mammon is a much more clandestine attitude of avarice and desire. Satan tempts people to evil deeds, whereas Mammon enslaves people with promises of security, status, and identity tied to riches.

Prior to his New Testament upgrade, Mammon was not elevated so highly in ancient times and so was far less of a problem. In early Aramaic usage, Mammon is not a deity/devil at all—just a neutral term for money or material possessions. From 500BC onwards, Jewish texts from this period often warn against trusting wealth instead of God. Mammon begins to carry a moral charge, wealth is dangerous when it becomes an object of trust or loyalty, though he is not yet personified as a demon.

In the original Greek text of the New Testament, Mamōnas is left untranslated, suggesting Mammon is more than money, it behaves more like a rival master. Scholars generally agree Jesus is portraying wealth as something that can command allegiance like a lord, yet at this stage Mammon is still not explicitly a demon but rather a spiritual power in the sense of a force which enslaves human loyalty.

By the second century Mammon has become far more substantial. Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, and others speak of Mammon as a false master, an idol and a demonic influence. Augustine emphasises that Mammon rules those who love riches, much as God rules those who love righteousness.

By the medieval period Mammon becomes increasingly personified. Gregory the Great (6th century) treats avarice as a ruling vice that enslaves the soul, though not a named demon as such. By the 12th century, Peter Lombard in Sentences (Book II) discusses Mammon as a dominus avaritiae (“lord of greed”) though Lombard stops short of a full biography. Then, in the work of William Langland (14th century), Mammon finally emerges as a personified power of corruption and greed, closely associated with hellish forces and moral decay, clearly operating as a diabolic power. By the 16thC, Binsfeld’s Classification of Demons. (1589) codifies medieval tradition, affording Mammon formal demonological canonization alongside the other lords of deadly sin, Lucifer, Asmodeus, Leviathan, Beelzebub, Satan and Belphegor.

Mammon’s rise to power has been meteoric. From mere ‘thing or stuff’ to Keeper of Hell’s Treasury in two millennia. Could there be a connection to the equally meteoric and contiguous emergence of what Jung calls the ‘monotheism of consciousness’?

Back in the day you might choose your sacrifices according to which God it might seem most propitious to plea for increase. Mammon is wealth itself. The question ceases to be one of evoking the God’s abundance. It becomes one of amassing God as stuff. All of which means the more you have the more righteous you must be since there is now a direct link to be made between wealth and manna.

So it really shouldn’t surprise us to see all kinds of manifestations of this dotted increasingly through the ages to match Mammon’s trajectory from Bronze Age house elf into Lord of the Seventh Sin. Just before the time Jesus was flagging up Mammon’s cosmic debut, Roman senator Marcus Crassus had invaded Parthia because….. he just needed their gold, like, really badly. Once his ass had been thoroughly whipped at the battle of Carrhae, he was executed by the Parthian’s who killed him by poured molten gold down his throat, a kind of poetic underscoring of his enthralment to Mammon.

Plutarch (Life of Crassus) states explicitly that Crassus was driven by the desire for military glory to rival Caesar’s conquests in Gaul and Pompey’s victories in the East. He was motivated by greed for Parthian wealth. Plutarch writes, in essence, that Crassus sought neither justice nor necessity, but gold and reputation.

Crassus had at least some shame, presented the campaign as a defensive and stabilizing war to protect the Roman province of Syria and to check the wiles of Parthian power. He gave it some spin. Even Hitler, 2 millennia further into Mammon’s rise, claimed to be saving the Austrian people, saying they were being denied their right to self-determination. His invasion was cast as liberation and reunification.

No more. Mammon is now out front and centre. On Air Force One, being interviewed by reporters, US Senator Lindsay Graham interrupted Trump when asked about the invasion of Venezuela by a reporter, interjecting the time honoured ‘casus belli’, ‘there are going to be Americans alive today because he (Trump) shut down a narco-terrorist state..’ but the fakery was no longer necessary, When further prompted as to the possible plight of political prisoners and human rights violations, Trump dispensed with pretence, ‘We haven’t got to that, what we want to do is fix up the oil.’

AI’s story of ‘Mammon’s Quiet Ledger’ is so poignant because it seems to get underneath the gnawing issue of human greed and reframe it in such a way that it can be healed. The girl is free of grasping compulsion because of her love for her father and her proportionate need for and valuing of his wisdom. The Principle of Relatedness saves her from succumbing to Mammon’s influence. He is left not only wondering what it might be like to be free of the hunger which wants more than it needs, but is actively feeling the concomitant loss of power and influence effected by her devotion. This is something all of us can do. Every act of kindness, every gesture of love, leaves Mammon scratching his head, reducing his power in the world and even gaining grudging respect.

Phoenix Aflame.

Love him or hate him the world is glued to Trump’s Phoenix mega church play date with his worshippers. But will this slow train wreck of a Presidency finally burst into flames in Phoenix? It seems rather likely. Somehow the intersection of plague, collective denial, magical immunity fantasies and an age old need for the dying king to sacrifice his finest to the Gods in order to prolong waning power is all too tempting for Fate to leave alone.

The part of Trump who would be king is bound by convention to propitiate the Gods with the lives of his nearest and dearest. It’s a tradition. The victims are either individually chosen, mostly by being foolish enough to get within reach, or they are culled collectively, as in the Aztec Flower Wars, whose sole purpose was the capture and sacrifice of fine specimens to please the divine powers behind the throne. Deprived of the convenience of war, this need for sacrificial victims most find some other expression.

Trump is a deeply religious man but not in the way you might normally think. His is more an identification with God, conferred by much laying on of hands, massive collective Messiah projections, and a narcissistic personality disorder the size of a large house.

It may seem entirely counter-intuitive to host an indoor chanting contest during the peak of air-borne plague, especially given his trajectory after Tulsa. It’s easy to forget that we are not dealing with rational forces here and would do well to remind ourselves that Covid does more than give an opportunity to flaunt your omnipotence. Whether this is on account of being bathed in the blood of Christ or having cleverly invented some high-tech ionization gizmo, guaranteed to kill 99.9% of corona virus or your money back, er, unless you signed a waiver, or unless you were just the unlucky statistic. It also means that you might die a martyr for your cause, which does great things for your adrenal and cortisol responses, bringing you closer to God in ways unspecified by the Good Book.

In his conquest of Central America, Cortez came across captives of the Flower wars, being kept plump for some festive occasion, and set them free. They were most put out and demanded to be sacrificed… Extreme Stockholm Syndrome? Maybe. Yet examples of martyrs offering themselves up for sacrifice abound through different times and cultures.

Perhaps part of the problem is that if life’s rewards are all deferred to some future idyll it might make folk all the keener to embrace it, not to mention the Brownie points in store for those laying down their lives for the Cause, ‘Greater love hath no man, than he who would drown in his own phlegm for his white picket fence and our way of life.’

So sometimes the excoriating ego death of genuine religious experience is acted out in an all too literal fashion, permitting you a pimped eulogy at your funeral without ever having had to change and grow.

The Aztecs also had a way you could be of service without having to be captured in battle. In the spirit of being willing to die for the economy a volunteer would be dressed up like the god Tezcatlipoca. His skin would be painted and he would wear a flower crown, a seashell breastplate, and lots of jewelry.

The man would be given four beautiful wives to do with as he pleased. He was only asked to walk through the town playing a flute and smelling flowers so that the people could honor him.

When 12 months had passed, he would walk up the stairs of a great pyramid, breaking his flutes as he climbed to the top. As an adoring crowd watched, a priest would help him lie down on a long altar made of stone. Then they’d rip his heart out of his body.

Afterward, a new Tezcatlipoca would step forward and start all over again.

We think we are so different from the Aztecs and so lose sight of the way in which the deep running currents of the collective psyche operate. What should frighten us is not that Trump is stupid or uneducated but that he operates from this archetypal layer of the psyche without the trivial garnish of ego functioning, one which might mediate the Old Testament quality of either sacred immunity or risking oneself for the sake of the glorious leader so that the path way to the Gods may be kept open.

It’s not even that he doesn’t care, he needs the martyrs and the martyrs need him. They are all having a religious experience. Unfortunately, it is at the level of ‘participation-mystique’, which is all about undifferentiated mergement, a state of being utterly un-phased by the body count. The gods must be propitiated.

The pundits criticize Trump for his selfishness. Bolton claims he makes all his decisions on the basis of personal interest. More frightening still is the thought that the wish to be above the law leaves a man at the mercy of unconscious processes wherein everyone’s rights and safety are threatened. His greed is the least of our worries. For the man who would be king, everyone else is sacrificial stock. Of course testing must be stopped. People cling to their leader in times of crisis… even if twas he that caused it.. No war time President has ever been deposed….

Giving the Devil his Due.

In the wildly phantasmagoric, ‘Essene Gospel of Peace’, an alchemical coagulatio of Gnostic wisdom and late neolithic enema rituals [great if you are handy with a calabash], there comes a bucolic moment when the Master berates his followers for going on at such great length about their suffering and how much they are tormented by Satan..

‘Satan torments you thus because you have already fasted many days and you do not pay to him his tribute. You do not feed him. You torment him with hunger.’

Psychologically,

‘You are over-identified with being good. You therefor deny, split off and project your shadow and pay for this with a good solid neurosis. The way out of this mess is by repairing the relationship with this disavowed self.’

Nietzsche echoes this a few centuries later, with added flowery bits, when he made the observation in ‘Birth of Tragedy’, that the brothers Apollo and Dionysus have become estranged from one another in our culture. We have come to worship at the altar of only one of them with our sunny dispositions and political correctness and have driven the invaluable other underground, causing a great rent in the collective psyche..

‘Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture, can save the Apollonian dream from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child’s mind.” F. Nietzsche

Any over-identification with a single story/storey, mono-anything, is going to have the effect of enervating the psyche, preventing development and generating schizoid, [indiscriminate rambling] characteristics in the personality. You begin to become unhinged and increasingly reliant on denial and projection to stay behind the picket fence of your preferred ism. Hence much of the paranoia of our age. Monochrome is a little threatened by red, yellow and blue, which it secretly wants to become.

Uncomplicated belief systems, produce split realities. If you won’t be complicated you will develop a complex instead, one that requires carefully choreographed conflicts in order to stay afloat. The cut and dried belief system in which all the questions are answered and there is no internal dissent is… well, cut and dried. It is severed from its roots with all the moisture sucked out of it. The cutting and the drying divides the self against itself, desiccates life, creating schizoid separation from self and world. In lieu of our daemonic guardians standing watch over us, they are suddenly co-opted into the kind of self care necessary to split realities. Preserving ‘our way of life’ becomes a divine mandate.

‘The transpersonal is placed in the service of defense’. D. Kalsched.

Instead of the transcendent function being used to create transitional space between self and other, the opposite happens. The psyche fractures to accommodate its denied multiplicity whilst the transcendent function is bused in to enforce social distancing and prevent the psyche from conferring with itself. I.e. reflecting. It becomes a sacred duty to hive oneself off from what is going on.

“The schizoid experience is split in two main ways: in the first place, there is a rent in his relation with his world and, in the second, there is a disruption of his relation with himself. Such a person is not able to experience himself ‘together with’ others or ‘at home in’ the world.” R.D. Laing.

We pay dearly for any belief in our own exclusive rightness, in ‘first and only’. Despite convictions of privilege, rectitude and self-congratulation, the price is internal division and disconnection from others which is why spending any time with a true believer will always leave your head spinning.

At the schizoid end of narcissism the problem is not simply lack of empathy for others, but more an actual denial of others. Others become statistics and collateral damage. Bad numbers. I’m put in mind of a patient who left, never to return, with the words, ‘I just can’t see you as a human being’.

”To feel potential and share with a beloved other is what the schizoid cannot do because their nascent longings were traumatically disappointed as children.’ Kalsched

Its a bit like saying that the way we collectively address when-Mother-is-missing, is to split off anxiety and bolster sudden fragility with life giving convictions and certitudes, whilst having to dumb down life’s complexities and infinite variety. This then drives the devil in us crazy… and vengeful, wanting his pound of flesh for the ongoing delusion that you are captain of your ship, and that there are no raptors aboard. Or at least if there are raptors, then its quite safe. And if its not safe then its not my responsibility. I wasn’t there. I don’t know nuffing about any raptors. I never met them.

The scary thing about Trump is that he really is a man of the people. Its not just that a hundred million people think this clearly ungodly man is blessed by Jesus. Its that he really does epitomize many of the values we all hold, including the right not to have to grow into long pants or go through life with any critical reflection.

‘‘Something in man is profoundly disinclined to give up his
beginnings, and something else believes it has long since got beyond all
that.” C G Jung CW9.

What else should we expect of a collective which has lost its mother?

The collective loss of the divine feminine produces a cultural response no different to that of an individual toddler who is suddenly forced by neglect or bereavement to adopt a position of absolute certainty in life in order to compensate for chaotic feelings of loss. All Mono’s are likewise full of full of passionate intensity and always know what’s going on. The widespread belief that we somehow cannot help but evolve seems to be undercut by the fact that whatever ism we belong to, it shares with all the others the same blinkered prejudice of an exclusive and ‘right’ way of looking at things consistent with schizoid defense structures.

Mr Trump’s recent assertion that intravenous bleach, a known suicide method, might be the miracle cure for Coronavirus, seems to demonstrate the addling effect, the split realities and the psychic enervation which results from first and only, from failing to give the Devil his due.

The Secret Masochist.


An arrogant young man gets on a train and sits opposite a little old lady. He begins to regal the carriage with his opinions, takes up everyone’s personal space, endless showing off. He gets off at the next stop but as the doors close the old lady opens a window and shouts out, ‘you left something behind!”. By now he’s running next to the carriage with his arms out, perplexity written across his face. ‘what is it, what did I leave?”

” A very poor impression…” she retorts, just as he runs out of platform.

There is really no such thing as a sadist or a masochist. Search and you can’t find one. Sado-masochism is a polarized continuum, like manic-depression, a kind of sliding between extreme states in order to know who you are, necessitated by narcissistic fragility and emptiness.

Narcissists tend to hide their unconscious masochism behind a front of cruel superiority. Sometimes this masochism has covert expression. Like toadying to Russians, or the ‘look what they done to us’ behind MAGA. Sometimes its done inadvertently by creating the conditions for perpetual investigation; and sometimes it just pops right out like the compulsive laying claim to government shut down. ‘I will take the blame, give me the mantle.”

The Sado-masochistic enactment unfolding on Pennsylvania avenue seems to be getting to the short strokes. Aided by the prophylactic restraint of seventeen strapping investigations…

Donald is finally going to cum.

Former US federal prosecutor Paul Butler recently described Trump as being ‘double teamed’ by the Mueller probe and the SDNY investigations. This image, now indelibly lodged in imagination, brought not a single blush to the cheeks of assembled MSNBC pundits whose blithe acceptance of such a metaphor suggests something a lot stranger than Russian collusion or Fraud is going on in the White House…

the unfolding sado-masochistic component of Narcissism.

Trump has the trade mark ‘big ego’ of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The irony is it’s lack of a healthy ego that’s the problem. The ego is full of gaps. There are sections of it you can drive sheep through. Its like having a claim that’s only marked off by corner posts, one of which has been eaten by a bear.

One solution is to identify with the bear. Your personal space is immediately cubed. Nothing can take you down. Bear is untroubled by life’s contradictions. Berries and Elk are all the same. You can just shamble on regardless.

Unfortunately, you might then need the world’s greatest ever shafting to be restored to more appropriately human proportions, a process that initially unfolds as the sado-masochistic tryst of Me and Not-me, the hell of Other People, the horror of realizing you are not the only one in the room.

You’d hope such developmental needs get resolved with incremental frustration of the toddler concerned. If not, the need for containment will find a more problematic expression. Whilst it may be colorful there is a small problem with this arrangement. Someone always has to get shamed.

Even when you are being praised.

Trump couldn’t help himself on his recent visit to troops in Iraq. The only way he could find to honor their service was, ‘you are no longer the suckers of the world.’ You try to be happy about that but somehow can’t quite summon the strength.

Words matter because they create consciousness. Abracadabra. That which I speak, becomes. If you ask an eight year old on Christmas Eve if they still believe in Santa you are sadistically calling her world into doubt.

If you lack the basic internal cohesion required not to blow a Christmas media event for kids by casting aspersions on the existence of the main event, then the sadism is not just gratuitous, it states your values. Its like wearing a ‘blame it on the badger’ t-shirt to an animal rights meet.

Such behavior would not be tolerated round the household dinner table let alone by the leader of the free world and the reason is that kids and impressionable folk take their example from you, Donny.

In fact the bench mark of Democracy is not just that your job is the highest in the land but that every kid that ever there was secretly aspires to be you, to have power and authority..

and to use it for good..

but how the fuck can they when every example they are given entails someone being screwed over? I pummel the Other into the ground therefor I am. WTF?

What on earth must you be compensating for to want to put kids in cages? What ghosts must haunt you to justify it with the paranoid delusion that they ‘harbor’ disease? Not that some are sick and need your help but that they sneak in armed with it, all sheltered and weaponized.

When an innocent child, fleeing for his life from situations others cannot even acknowledge, let alone survive, is then so failed by the hero he hoped would save him that he dies from sadistic neglect, you send a message. It is not a message of deterrence. Numbers are up. But it is a message of How-to-Be, delivered into the living rooms of every family in the Nation and around the world.

And finally, mounted on top of the heinous betrayal of that poor boy’s faith, a faith he held for hundreds of miles of weary trudging towards the fabled arms of safety, is the cowardly insinuation from Nielsen’s report making this not only his own fault but on account of his malign ‘harbouring’, as though he was some kind of gook whose evil plan backfired.

as though their not giving a shit constituted counterintelligence.

When a person in high office stoops to such gaslighting the moral being created is way beyond giving permission to hold office without embodying it in any way shape or form. It’s not simply the absence of something, a lack of care, or the failure of empathy.

Nor should we limit ourselves to Adam Serwer’s excellent u-tube blog that cruelty is something Trump has elevated to political virtue.

This boy’s death sets the bar of what it means to be human at a new low. Suddenly, all our lives are cheaper; contaminated, not by diseased migrants but by the malignant use of an Office to which the Nation looks for guidance, finding at bottom only the secret puerile need to be sent to the naughty corner so that he can get through another day without medication.