The Psychodynamics of Losing

I have started reading the Book of Lamentations in the mornings, having spent the last month or so reading the Book of Jeremiah.  The most obvious message of these books is the spiritual - namely that the kingdom of Judah was conquered and overthrown by Babylon because the Jews had chosen to deny the truth of God by worshiping other gods, and they had chosen to deny the truth that humankind is made in the image of God by oppressing each other - including the most powerless in their midst - the alien, the orphan, and the widow.  But my reading this time has opened up for me a fascinating glimpse into the psychology and psychodynamics of the ruling classes of nations that are in decline.

One can see these psychodymanics at work in the conflict between the ruling class (and their propagandists, the false prophets) versus the prophets of God who announced that God was about to destroy the kingdom of Judah.   One might call these rulers and their false prophets the revanchists, the "nationalists" and "patriots" of their day, because they represented the hope that Judah might remain as an independent kingdom subservient to no one, and that Judah might one day regain all the lost glory of the kingdom of Solomon.  Their desire for a return of lost glory could be viewed as an expression of national narcissism, because this desire for lost glory was not accompanied by a willingness to submit to their God. 

On the other hand were the true prophets who accurately prophesied that God was about to destroy Judah.  This sentence, "God is about to destroy Judah", had three implications:

• that the nation in which the rulers and the people had invested their identity was about to be destroyed;
• that God was the One who would do the destroying;
• and that this destruction was God's commentary, His verdict on the nation, its character and practices, as captured in the following quote: "Will you steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense to Baal, and walk after other gods that you have not known, then come and stand before Me in this house, which is called by My name, and say 'We are delivered!' - that you may do all these abominations?" (Jeremiah 7:9-10)

The true prophets did not have access to the political power and concentrated wealth of the ruling classes and their "prophets", so it was easy for the privileged members of society in Judah to label the true prophets as traitors who sought to incite sedition.  Therefore some of these true prophets wound up doing jail time, and a few got assassinated.  But what is so fascinating to me is the way the ruling class and their adherents reacted when the prophecies of the true prophets began to come true, during the twenty-two and a half years between the death of King Josiah and the fall of Jerusalem.  What we see is not just the rejection of true spirituality by the king and the people of Judah, but the refusal to submit to the king of Babylon, even as the military and political realities went increasingly against Judah and Jerusalem.  The darkening regional military and political realities are described well in some of the secular histories of this region during the final days of the kingdom of Judah.  But the Bible itself notes that during these last days, Judah was invaded and humbled three times by foreign powers, and that at the last, those who held Jerusalem resisted until "...the famine was so severe in the city that there was no food for the people of the land.  Then the city was broken into..." (2 Kings 25:3-4).  In other words, there were people in Judah who were willing to fight the inevitable, even if it meant a fight to the death.  That means that there was something they valued so much that the loss of the thing valued was to them a fate worse than death, even though they must have known that they were going to lose.

And this willingness to fight to the death to maintain a cause that is both immoral and losing made me think of other instances in history in which humans have chosen to fight for such causes.  There is the obvious case of the second destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, a destruction which resulted from the rebellion of Jewish ethno-nationalists against the Roman Empire.  But there is also the case of Nazi Germany from 1942 to 1945, in which the Wehrmacht chose to fight to the death rather than lose an identity which had been carefully constructed for them by the rulers of their society and which made sense only within the context of that society.  (Side note: did you know that the motto of the Wehrmacht was "Gott mit uns" - that is, "God with us"?) And there is the example of the last days of both Rome and Byzantium.  The fall of the Byzantine empire is noteworthy, as the decline of Byzantium was a long time in the making.  The Byzantine emperors had focused for so long on infighting to maintain themselves as the top dogs in their empire that they had failed to notice that the world was changing around them while their empire was weakening.  Nearly a century before their final fall, one of their emperors was arrested in Venice for outstanding debts incurred by hiring Crusader mercenaries in an attempt to recapture lost territory.  (You might say that he nearly went broke trying to Make Byzantium Great Again.)  During its last years, the Byzantine empire could only watch helplessly as its enemies obtained the most advanced military technology of the day - namely, devices capable of shooting large projectiles by means of gunpowder.  These devices (cannons, to be precise) were the decisive factor in the fall of Constantinople, in which the last Byzantine emperor fought to the death.

Which brings me to the present day, in which those who cling to the hope of their own supremacy at the expense of everyone else on earth are beginning to fall on hard times.  I am thinking particularly of Donald Trump and the regime he represents and of which he is a chief symptom.  Consider these facts:

• The United States has lost its place among the top ten most innovative countries in the world.  This is due to decades of underinvestment in education at all levels in this country.
• The United States has seriously begun to lose intellectual capital from this country, as smart foreign nationals (and some smart native-born Americans) are choosing either to stay away, or to relocate to other countries.  (See this and this.)  These are the results of a certain American brand of xenophobia/racism combined with longstanding cuts in funding for basic research.  Continued American racism and hostility toward anything Chinese is not helping this trend.
• Speaking of China, by most accounts, Donald Trump has lost the trade war he started.  (As an aside, for those members of the global Far Right who were hoping that Russia could return the world to where it was several decades ago, it appears that Russia has lost its recent oil price war with Saudi Arabia.  In losing that war, it has lost far more in the process.)
• Because of Trump's blunders and malignant stupidity in his response to the coronavirus threat, the office of the Presidency (and with it the entire Executive Branch of the Federal Government) is losing its relevance in shaping American national life, as governors of states team up with each other to provide leadership for the good of their citizens without consulting Trump.  (See this also.)
• Speaking again of coronavirus, the United States has decisively lost its former place as global leader and coordinator of global crisis response, as over twenty nations (including the most powerful nations of Europe) have publicly met via videoconference this past week to begin coordination of a global response to the coronavirus pandemic.  (So much, by the way, for Russian hopes of fracturing the world order for its own benefit!)  The United States was not invited to the call.  (See this also.)  Note also that these nations have thrown their full support behind the World Health Organization - counter to the wishes of Mr. Trump.  This makes it very likely that effective remedies to the coronavirus pandemic will not be produced by the United States.
• According to some reports, the U.S. Dollar is about to lose a significant portion of its value vis-a-vis other currencies over the next several months.  This is partly the result of government-mandated corporate bailouts (pushed by Trump and the Republican establishment) that have helped corporations prop up stock prices without creating any new actual value in the American economy.

Are we here in the "most powerful nation on earth" about to lose much of what we hold near and dear - especially the intangible psychic construct of ourselves?  And how do people react to the loss of an idealized grandiose self and of the belief system that props up that self?   In her book Willful Blindness, Margaret Heffernan explores the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance - the experience of having reality contradict deeply cherished beliefs - and the ways in which the brain of the person being contradicted tries to adapt.  One of the most perverse adaptations is to double down on the belief that has just been contradicted by reality.  Our President is succeeding in making himself and this nation irrelevant.  Will the members of Trump's base respond to the complete moral and intellectual failure of their champion by injecting themselves with bleach?

The Scapegoating of the Named Patient

Those who have followed my blogging for a long time know that I originally began blogging in order to document and reflect on my experiences in an abusive fringe evangelical church in the United States. That church was founded by a dysfunctional husband-and-wife team and their two dysfunctional sons. These four formed the original leadership core of that church (or, to use their terminology, that "Assembly"), and I am convinced that from the very beginning the sons knew fully and accurately just how much of a counterfeit their parents were, and therefore knew fully and accurately just how much of a scam their "Assembly" was. Quite naturally, the dad appointed himself the "head honcho" of that sorry bunch (or as he put it, "the Head Steward of the Work!").

As time passed, the Assemblies grew both in the total number of groups and the total number of members in each group, and this necessitated the promotion of certain ambitious members of each group to places of leadership. Once a person was inducted into a leadership role, he almost always found himself in a select inner circle whose members were allowed to see aspects of our head honcho that were hidden from the rest of us. Those aspects consisted of embezzlement, corruption, hypocrisy, secret malignancy, and exploitation (including sexual sin) - although from time to time, all the rest of us could see the open malignancy, pride, narcissism, and bullying that flashed forth from the leadership and from our head honcho.

The interesting thing that happens to people who exist for a long time in such an environment is that they tend to become like their environment. This means that most of us tended to become jerks (and few things are more annoying than a religious jerk), and because our head honcho was a king-sized jerk, the people closest to him - his deputy leaders - became some of the biggest jerks in our group. Many of us who were not in the inner leadership circle did not recognize the extent to which we were becoming corrupt in our zeal to become like our leaders. When that corruption was pointed out to us by outsiders, we were able to justify it by saying that our gung-ho zeal, and the pushiness of our proselytizing/recruiting of others, and the way we disparaged anyone who had a life outside our group was all actually evidence of our spirituality. (I guess it was! Just not the way we thought.) We also justified our attempts to find people whom we could boss around by claiming that this was an evidence of our desire to "grow in stature." I must say, though, that our inability to recognize the foolishness of the things we were being taught to emulate is no excuse, but rather an evidence of almost criminal stupidity. (And for every finger I point outward, I recognize that there are three pointing back at me.) But the men (and some women) who comprised the inner circle of leadership knew something the rest of us didn't know - that the leading family - the head honcho and his wife and sons - were engaging in criminal behavior, including domestic violence. Yet they became the chief enablers of the head honcho and his family. Not only this, but many of these deputy leaders became petty tyrants and bullies in their own right, causing much distress for the people under their authority.

Although this system was corrupt, it did seem to possess a certain durability, in large part because it had evolved a very efficient means of dealing with any honest, non-corruptible people who were recruited into its midst. Such people usually left soon after being drawn into an Assembly, and when they left, the leaders would tell very convincing lies about how these leavers left because of some hidden "sin." Some of these leavers made the mistake of trying to persuade us "stayers" that they left because they saw holes in the head honcho's doctrine and preaching. Whenever that happened, the leaders would simply say that the leavers left because of "spiritual pride." But the leaders and the head honcho got something more than they could handle when a few of these leavers and some of those in the process of deciding to leave found out about the domestic violence, financial irregularities, and adultery going on with the head honcho and his family. Our "Assemblies" therefore suffered an existential crisis from 2000 to 2003, and it was a crisis which most of our groups did not survive.

Now what is interesting about this crisis is that the vast majority of the members were forced to face the reality that the head honcho we had all been following was a thoroughly corrupt hypocrite. A corollary to this realization was the realization that our deputy leaders had been corrupt enablers of the head honcho. As this additional realization began to be spoken openly among us, the deputy leaders began to try hard to portray themselves as fellow victims with us against the head honcho. Some of them even went as far as trying to say that they tried without success to rein in our head honcho. And all of them condemned the head honcho and tried to wash their hands of him. Based on what I know of some of these leaders, I think their vehement final public rejection of the head honcho was motivated by a desire to pick up the pieces of the small-time religious "empire" which the head honcho had created, so that one or more of these deputy leaders might crown himself the new "head honcho." In other words, by their condemnation of the head honcho, these deputy leaders tried to scapegoat him (as the most obvious target) in order to draw attention away from their own complicity in perpetuating a toxic, abusive system. The thing that thwarted these deputy leaders in their ambition was the fact that the rest of us had by this time awakened to the fact that not only had we all suffered abuse at the hands of the now deposed head honcho, but that we had also suffered abuse from his deputies, and that these men had acted like jerks toward the rest of us. So it was that most of us, me included, walked away completely from that mess.

Years later, I found myself dealing with other dysfunctional systems, and this pushed me to read a large amount of literature on the dynamics of dysfunctional organizational systems, whether on a household level or on the level of something larger. One of the things I learned is that in dysfunctional systems controlled by an obviously sick, evil, or deranged person - the "named patient" (also known as the "identified patient") - the other members of the system frequently bear significant culpability for the continued survival of that system. Yet it is usually convenient for them to blame all the problems of the system on the "named patient."

So we fast forward to April 2020, and I have to say that a few recent essays in popular online news sources have raised my eyebrows. The essays have all been about the coronavirus pandemic and the completely and utterly dysfunctional response of the Trump White House to the pandemic. And while I agree with the fact that Trump botched things "bigly," what strikes me is that some of these essays have called for Mike Pence to take over the Federal coronavirus response because of Trump's malignant incompetence. The author of one such essay pleaded with Pence to "remove Trump and save us from the coronavirus." Another essayist stated that the coronavirus crisis would not have gotten as far out of hand in the United States had someone else been president - "Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Mike Pence, really almost anybody else..." I am not a huge fan of Hillary Clinton, but I will agree that we would not be facing what is likely to become an economy-destroying crisis on account of the coronavirus if she had become President in 2017. But what I see in the mention by these essayists of Republicans who might have done a better job than Trump reminds me uncomfortably of the attempts by the deputy leaders of my former abusive church to rehabilitate themselves by means of loud public denunciations of our former head honcho. Except that this time, it seems to be certain members of the Republican Party and the conservative political establishment who are trying to rehabilitate themselves by condemning Trump.

The only problem is, they can't succeed. Not if they're honest with themselves. Just as the former deputy leaders of my former church condemned themselves by condemning our former head honcho, these must realize that they condemn themselves by condemning Trump. Don't get me wrong - Trump needs to be denounced, like my former abusive church head honcho needed to be denounced. But the voices on the right who are condemning Trump must admit that they themselves are the very people whose desire for moral impossibility combined with their ungodly access to concentrated wealth and power to bring us the regime of Trump in the first place. Trump is therefore a symptom of a wider dysfunction.  Aren't the Republicans the same people whose narcissism refused to acknowledge that their desire for what they want needed to be tempered by the recognition of the rights of the other peoples who live on the earth? Are not many of these people the same people who paid large amounts of money years ago to create the Tea Party movement? Many operatives from this movement are now loudly demanding that the restrictions on gatherings and businesses imposed by state governors in order to halt the spread of COVID-19 be immediately lifted.  And are not many Republican politicians just as insane as Trump? Do you think that a Sarah Palin presidency would look any different by now? Who among these people was protesting during the days of Trump's Muslim travel ban? Which of these people rebuked Trump for stationing U.S. Border Patrol agents and military personnel at the southern border to rip Mexican children out of the arms of their parents and throw them into cages? How many of them approved of the destruction of social safety nets in Wisconsin by former Governor Scott Walker? How many of them have secretly or openly agreed with some of the nutcase statements from Governor Sam Brownback about "God, guts and guns" - especially about his disdain for gun control even after high school students across the nation expressed outrage over the lack of effective gun control in this country? How many of them refuse to acknowledge anthropogenic climate change even to this day? How many of them are trying to disenfranchise voters in states controlled by the Republican Party by refusing to allow mail-in voting during the present pandemic?

These people are infected with the same malignant narcissism which animates Trump. Some of them may not be as far along in their disease as he is, yet they are all moving inexorably in the same direction toward a singularity of moral impossibility in which they demand supremacy at all costs, regardless not only of the rights of others (including both nonwhite and white others), but of physical reality itself (including the actual science of epidemiology and its bearing on the propagation of viruses). Blogger Olga Doroshenko describes this narcissism thus in its effects on Soviet Russia: "During [the Bolsheviks'] 73-year rule, the Russian narcissism reached the final stage: total separation from reality and hence, self-destruction of the nation." (Emphasis added.) As the United States and its leadership are wholly taken in their own narcissism, our own self-destruction looms as a distinct and unpleasant possibility.  We'll see who finally takes the fall for that self-destruction.  But if you are a Trump supporter, and you find yourself one day with a mouth full of gravel, don't just blame him.  Blame yourself also.