After the Future

Ontological Dizziness, Our Collective Madness, and a Possible Path to a Cure

Nature loves to conceal herself. Heraclitus, Frag. 10

Eyes and ears are bad witnesses to men having rude souls. Heraclitus, Frag. 4

Though the Logos is common, yet the many live as if they had an understanding of their own. Heraclitus, Frag 92

Crazy means not being in your right mind. I am interested in understanding how groups and even entire societies may or may not be in their right minds, and how in such groups crazy can be normal. So I'm not talking about clinical crazy, but the way crazy can be normal for many if not most people. But I want to treat this not as a social psychological problem, but as a philosophical/theological one. 

Everything I say here assumes that our contemporary condition as disembedded, late moderns makes us vulnerable to particularly vicious forms of collective craziness because the infrastructure that makes nature Nature--the Logos--is concealed from us in an historically unprecedented way. It always has been concealed, even in Heraclitus's day, but before around the middle of the 19th century the North Atlantic societies were at least open to its disclosing itself. The celebration of the 'sublime' was the last, rickety attempt to hold on to a sense of the mystery our ancestors felt in a cosmos that they took for granted as shot through with the divine. In our current peculiarly extreme buffered condition in which the reality on screens is more vivid than the reality we actually live in, we have become collectively prone to what I call ontological dizziness. In such a state we are likely to grab onto anything that will give us a feeling of stability. 

When people suffer from ontological dizziness, they frequently grab onto a collective delusion that seems real only because everybody else thinks it is. Its delusional character derives from its having nothing to do with the Logos or the deep structure of the Real to which Heraclitus refers. We see how this kind of extreme collective delusion works in cults, but we find it harder to see operating in the mainstream. Most southerners before the 1960s were incapable of seeing that the segregated south was built on such a collective delusion.

Similarly everyone in the 1930s who wasn't already inclined to the authoritarian fantasy promoted by right-wing demagogues saw how Germany was in the grip of such a collective delusion. Both societies--the segregated south and post-Weimar Germany--were supported by many ordinary, decent human beings who were  thrown into ontological dizziness by the humiliation and identity loss after their societies lost devastatingly bloody wars. Disruptions that destroy traditional ways of life, customs, or ideologies force the people in those disrupted societies into a state of dizziness, and they are presented with a choice to either adapt in a healthy way or to double down in an attitude of self-pity, grievance, and resentment toward the agents of disruption. 

Creative adaptation doesn't require simply surrendering to the disrupters. The situation in Japan suggests that there are ways of taking what's valuable from the disrupters, while remaining true to one's traditions while at the same time shedding its more delusional pretensions. But if you are in  a society that adapts in unhealthy ways, it's very hard to know whether the adaptation is healthy or unhealthy because if unhealthy everyone you know shares the disease. And sometimes you don't get to healthy until unhealthy runs its course. A catastrophic collective death shock is sometimes the only thing that can snap a society out of its collective delusion. This is an open question for American society right now as clearly it is in extreme need of a slap upside the head. Apparently 9/11 or the financial crisis of 2008 were not a big enough slap. Does that mean that it will take something bigger? Maybe. 

So is it even possible for a society to establish a standpoint outside of its collective delusions to critique itself for what is healthy or unhealthy in it? Unlike most postmodern intellectuals, I do believe that it's possible for some individuals to do it, but at least for now it doesn't seem possible on the scale of an entire society. And attempts to force things prematurely often generate Calvin's Geneva, Robespierre's France, and Stalin's Russia.

I don't think God is dead, but I understand why so many smart people think so. I'd argue instead that he's gone into hiding. In the meanwhile, his spokespersons on earth, particularly in the churches, have little credibility or authority for shaping a healthy social imaginary. And there are no other credible persons--philosophers, poets, or saints--who are capable of speaking on behalf of the Logos. So it's not just the uneducated who have rude souls who are incapable of recognizing it; it's a culture-wide phenomenon. The educated elite are equally if not more likely to be insensible of the Logos and mistrustful of anybody who tries to call attention to it as a possible path toward collective sanity:

To this Logos which I unfold, although it always exists, men make themselves insensible, both before they have heard it and when they have heard it for the first time. For notwithstanding that all things happen according to this Logos, men act as though they had never had any experience in regard to it when they attempt such words and works as I am now relating, describing each thing according to its nature and explaining how it is ordered. And some men are as ignorant of what they do when awake as they are forgetful of what they do when asleep. Heraclitus, frag. 2.

Heraclitus and the Greek philosophical tradition through to the Roman Stoics thought that the Logos was the deep structure of reality, and the Christian Neoplatonic tradition integrated that line of Greek thinking into its own cosmology. But the condition of being "insensible" or asleep has since the middle of the first millennium BCE been recognized as the problem--and all the great post-axial religious traditions--the Hebraic/Hellenic tradition of the West as well as the Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist traditions of the East, have provided in their different ways regimes for waking up.

While in any society, even those shaped by one of these great traditions, most people remain asleep, there has been among the elite enough wakefulness to acknowledge the importance of the role of the philosophers, poets, or saints who were awake and shared what they have learned about the Deep Real. In contemporary secular society, there is no sense that we are in a collective sleep state or that we have any need to be awakened from it, so anything goes. But a society is sane to the degree that its ethos is shaped by some level of alignment with the Logos, even if most people in it are shaped by it unconsciously and extrinsically. A society spins off into insanity when it loses touch with it. 

And so our being insensible to the Logos is what keeps us out of our collective right minds. We are born alienated and out of touch with that to which Heraclitus points--the Logos or the Deep Real that hides itself from us so long as we sleep--but if we lived in a sane society we would understand that our lives should be oriented toward greater states of wakefulness, and the more awake we are, the more real our cognition of the Logos suffusing all that exists. 

To the degree that we are not oriented toward the Logos, i.e., not sensible of it, we are not in our right minds. To the degree that we are oriented toward it--i.e.,that we hearken to it--we are still not right, but are moving toward a greater level of health. To the degree that we are in our right minds, we owe it to those who have gone before us who were sensible of the Logos in their different ways and have passed on what they learned about it.

But the ancestors can only pass forward the letter; each generation has to discover for itself the spirit, the life-nourishing energy that comes from having a foothold in the Deep Real. Individuals find their way to it in eccentric ways, but a tradition dies when in the collective life of a society only the form--the letter--is passed on and a quorum among the next generation cannot find the spirit in it. It is in this sense that Nietzsche was correct when he said that God was dead. The cultural forms of Western society no longer conveyed the spirit--at least in a way that was cognizable to the culture's elite. Those forms were essentially pushed to the side by a soul-flattening utilitarianism in thrall to a reductive materialism that shaped a social imaginary peculiarly impervious to disclosures of the Logos. And this reductive materialism is what all 'sane', educated people accept as normal reality, even if they think of themselves as religious. 

But individuals are still capable of hearkening to the Logos. What is it in us that hearkens? Anybody who has a rudimentary experience of "conscience" knows what I mean by this hearkening. Hearkening is not something performed by the head. It's not a function of superego. Our common experience of hearkening is more like how we are moved by an encounter with beauty or goodness. I mean really moved, as in moved to tears. Whatever that cognitive faculty in us that orients us toward the Logos, is that in us that in its encounter with anything that is good, true, and beautiful feels an emotional resonance that moves us in a very distinctive way.  

Regardless of one's metaphysics or religious beliefs, all that matters is that one hearkens--that one has some capacity for it. Everybody has the potential for such hearkening, but in some it lies dormant, and so they live lives insensible to it according to the  Oedipal script given them by their cultural conditioning--as for instance Christians living complacently in the segregated South--or they live a life swinging back and forth between a life episodically intoxicated by the lower instincts and then retreat to the order and safety of social convention.

The Eddie Haskell-like characteristics of Brett Kavanagh exemplify this fairly typical split in the human psyche. I'm not sympathetic to those who want to demonize him, but that doesn't mean I think he's fit to be a supreme court judge. Kavanagh thinks he's being treated unfairly because he's like everybody else--Klobuchar and Whitehouse--and he's being singled out by hypocrites who are just as guilty as he. He's probably right, and it's easy to understand why conservatives are so repelled by the sanctimony of the the Dems. In Kavanagh's case, assuming his accusers are telling the truth, and there's little reason to disbelieve them, Kavanagh is a model of Jekyll/Hyde dissociation that typifies the human condition. There's the repressed, predatory belligerence comes out when he's inebriated or stressed, and then there is the Oedipal presentation of Self, including his religiosity, as a model citizen when he's in control. The two parts are clearly not talking to one another, which is not that unusual. 

A spiritually mature human being has found ways to integrate both these aspects of one's psyche in a higher synthesis--i.e., to get them talking to one another. But how many of us are spiritually mature? Do we think that the Dems on the judiciary committee are much better? Or is it just that Kavanagh got caught while the Dems haven't, at least yet. That's where all the animus from Kavanagh's supporters comes from. It's very understandable. The Left is projecting its repressed psyche on the Right, and vice versa. And it's quite an ugly display. To be spiritually immature is to be in a state of dissociation where this kind of projection is the primary symptom.

Such dissociation seems pretty clearly the case for Kavanagh as we saw in his testimony on Thursday. Is this disqualifying for public office? It is when it's so extreme, and when there's so little evidence of his having overcome it. Does that make him worse than his accusers? No, but he got caught, and now he has to take his medicine, and hopefully this will be something beneficial for his soul if not for his career. I hope for the sake of his family he withdraws, leaves the bench to take a plush position with some conservative law firm, and once out of the spotlight takes stock of his life. There's a good chance he'll just stew in aggrieved resentment for the rest of his life, but other possibilities are open to him if there is anything real in the Christian faith he claims he has. 

***

The Christian word for spiritual unhealth is 'sin'. Many, probably most, Christians tend to think of sin as synonymous with what is socially taboo, i.e., as breaking the tribal code by behaving badly in some way in giving rein to socially sanctioned repressed behaviors or attitudes. If you are someone who habitually transgresses traditional taboos, i.e., if you are controlled by the impulses that most people repress, you are thought of and probably think of yourself as sinful, or used to when 'sin' was a thing. Now someone will say when she transgresses that she is a "bad person". And you think of those who don't transgress as good persons defined by their lack of sinfulness or bad personness, in other words by their ability to at least publicly repress taboo impulses. People who are serious about being 'good' think that if they can avoid certain transgressive acts, they will remain pure, sinless, in a state of grace. This idea assumes that such a state of purity is our natural condition and that it's only our bad behavior that removes us from that state of purity. 

This is wrong, but before I explain why I want to ask what determines the standard for good or bad? Is it just the cultural script that we were born into or adopted later in life? For many if not most it is. It's not something that we've thought through; it's something we adopt in order to belong to a group we want to belong to for whatever reason. But if thats all there is, are all scripts therefore culturally relative and morally equal? Is there no real moral difference between the code of a mafioso and that of a Carmelite nun?Isn't it just that they belong to different groups with different codes, both without any real ontological foundation? Aren't such codes just stuff people made up to get along in the world?

So if you cannot say that one is morally superior to the other if there is no foundation that grounds them, all you can say is that you prefer one or the other. Why is your acculturation as a cultural liberal superior to that of a neo-Nazi? Thought experiment: If one of your kids or nieces or nephews announced that he was joining a Neo-nazi cult because it was edgy and cool compared to the clueless conformist conventional kind of people they otherwise feel pressured to be, what argument could you make to dissuade him? Can you do better than--"Well, I'd prefer that you don't. Neo-Nazis are not nice people." Of course they're not nice; that's what makes them so attractive. Nice is just a smiley-face word for being alienated and repressed. Kids with any spirit want to feel intensely, and intensity and passion is far more persuasive than niceness. 

Nevertheless, all such a kid attracted to neo-Nazism is doing is opting to give rein to the repressed side of the Oedipal divide, and the only argument against it is to show that there is another possibility besides repression and conformity. We are never pure: sinfulness/repression constitutes the warp and woof of our everyday experience of being insensible to the Logos, which remains hidden from us until we gradually become sensible to it and inspired by it. And it is only in encounters with others who have awakened to the Logos and been inspired by it that the young neo-Nazi might also be awakened to another possibility. And only then do we develop the capacity to know the good and to do it. Just living out the Oedipal cultural script for being well behaved has nothing to do with being truly good or sane. It's just what we do to get along, and it just reinforced dissociation. Dissociation and ontological dizziness "R us until we find and become inspired by and hearken to an ontological ground on which we can confidently stand. 

Sin--our state of dissociation--is our normal reality, not something we slip into when we act badly. Acting badly is the default. Acting in a way that is genuinely good is the exception. Our motives for doing even the right thing are never pure. They can't be, but it's ok if you understand that all that matters is the part of the motive that is a true hearkening--that part is real even if there are other less noble factors influencing our decision. All that matters is that we 'hearken'. 

Sin is not something into which we fall; we're already immersed in it, as if in a fog. It's important to accept that as the starting point for any moral progress. It's only something we can gradually dissipate as the sun does the fog. Our experience of hearkening is like those disclosive moments when there is a momentary break in the fog and we see the sun, some blue sky, or a tree top and are startled by its beauty. But most of our world remains still shrouded in mist. 

Religion or any philosophy or ideology has utility only as a guide rail might provide some help insofar as it gives us something to hold onto in a fogbound world. But the guide rail is not an end in itself; its value lies in leading us to a clearing where we might see for ourselves what those who left the guide rail behind saw. The goal is not simply to cling to the rail, but to dissipate the fog for ourselves and those around us. 

Religious or philosophical assertions about the nature of what lies beyond the fog have no liberating power if they do not provide the resources that will enable us all to clear the fog for ourselves, and a religious practice can do this only if there are some people in every generation who can credibly speak to the way the world looks unfogged.

Too often religion, rather than dissipating the fog, produces more of it and thicker. It promotes the guide rail as an end in itself, and people in their anxiety clutch to it and refuse to move along it. It becomes a security fetish rather than a guide toward greater freedom and clarity.  And as such, a religion can often be for many people an institution that jails us in our condition of alienation and sin rather than providing for us the means to free ourselves from it.  

***

Our contemporary social imaginary is shaped by two contradictory impulses, a dual heritage that comes to us from the Enlightenment and Romanticism. From the Enlightenment we inherit the need for social control and the managerial liberalism that has created the buffering technocracies that organize the political and economic regimes that most of find so oppressive. From Romanticism we inherit the longing to be free of all  those oppressive social regimes, to be in touch with something alive, natural, densely real, and un-constructed. The first we embrace because it makes us feel safe; the second we embrace because it makes us feel alive.

The oscillation between them is the symptom of our fundamental dissociation I call Missing Middle Syndrome--we are brains seeking control while at the same time contending with an instinctual life unconscious drives that chafe against that control, and the iciness of the brain when contending with the wet heat of instinct creates the fog about which we spoke above. The missing middle is the life of the soul, and the heart is the radiating energy center whose power integrates within itself the energies of the instinctual life with the reflective powers of the mind.

Missing Middle Syndrome is the disease that caused the group insanity that gripped Spain during its inquisitions and religious purges, Protestants and Catholics during the Thirty Years War, the Jacobins during the French Revolution, the Puritans in Salem, the Stalinists after the Russian Revolution, the Fascists in Spain, Italy, and Germany, the Maoists in China, the McCarthyites in the 1950s, and more recently the Tea Party in this country. In each case there is an ideal, a partial truth, at the center of this form of insanity that justifies the insanity. The ideal is fetishized in a way that hardens the heart. Hard-hearted idealism is one of the most destructive forms of collective insanity. 

The cure for Missing Middle Syndrome is found only when the  brain or mind with its undisciplined thinking and unruly instinctual drives submits to the rule of the regent who lives in the heart. Sanity is sanctity. Sanity in this sense is more than just being conventionally normal; it is an achievement. It requires of each person that he become master of his own psychic domain, and this requires that she  become master of the undisciplined, unruly forces within her kingdom. If one's heart is shriveled and hard, the regent is rendered impotent, and so powerless to bring the mind and instinctual life into harmony. If her heart is supple and warm, she recognizes that repression is not a solution and only makes things worse. Repression is not "rule". A wise, warm-hearted regent seeks to recognize and win over--not defeat--the unruly forces in her kingdom and to make them allies in the larger project of building something good and beautiful. 

The idea that if we could just be rational, we'll behaved, non-predators, everything would be fine is as silly as saying that if we were all lobotomized, we would be fine. We are not built to be just rational or bovine. Being rational is only a part of what makes us human, and it's not the most important part. The heart's capacity to respond to goodness and beauty is. 

So what does it mean to be in your right mind?  For me as a Christian it starts with the assumption that original sin--our fundamental condition as dissociated--is our starting point. That means we all start out fundamentally alienated from what is. This condition of alienation is something all humans experience and so seek deliverance from it. But most people, especially in a secular society resort to all kinds of ineffectual methods to effect this delivery, and most of them result in one form or another of craziness--substance abuse, hyper sexuality, wealth accumulation, will to power. These are all ancient forms of craziness, but they are particularly virulent forms of craziness now because there is no check that is deeply grounded in a collective sensibility of the Logos.

So our attempts to save ourselves from our alienation make things worse, but this is ok if it aggravates our felt need for deliverance. I think this is the real point of the Prodigal Son story. The Prodigal was in a better position than his older brother because he at least knew his need of deliverance whereas the older brother was a resentful prig. He was safety-seeking rules follower living in what Kierkegaard calls the despair that does not know it is in despair. The younger brother is a classic example of a moral decision made with mixed motives. That the motives were mixed does not matter; all that matters is the part of his motivation, as inchoate as it might have been, that was a hearkening to the Deep Real manifested through the Father. The younger brother is more 'awake' than the older brother even if his mind is still more fogbound than clear. It's a beginning.

We are born deluded and alienated, and salvation is the process of getting clearer in our heads about what is real and what is delusion, and then doing the work to achieve a deeper communion with what truly is. The Buddhists and Hindus agree with Christians about the essential nature of our delusion, but their ideas about what it means to be saved are somewhat different, although I don't think incompatible. I think of their approaches--and the approaches of any authentic religious practice--as complementary with the Christian approach. Religions become inauthentic when anything about them becomes an end in itself. Inauthentic religion develops when an aspect of religious truth is distorted by a dissociated appropriation of it. Authentic religion, no matter from which tradition it derives, is religion under the liberating and illuminating aspect of the Logos. The Logos is 'what is'.

The goal of philosophy or spiritual practice is to establish a deeper communion with the Logos. This is not a head trip, but rather a reorientation of the entire soul. But as with the satori experience of the Zen Buddhist, this intuition is not ready at hand. Wisdom hides itself; it must be discovered. Or rather it reveals itself through the dissipating fog if we are paying attention.

{This is a slightly revised and updated  reposting of an essay first posted in December 2017.]

 

Nature loves to conceal herself. Heraclitus, Frag. 10

Eyes and ears are bad witnesses to men having rude souls. Heraclitus, Frag. 4

Though the Logos is common, yet the many live as if they had an understanding of their own. Heraclitus, Frag 92

Crazy means not being in your right mind. I am interested in understanding how groups and even entire societies may or may not be in their right minds, and how in such groups crazy can be normal. So I'm not talking about clinical crazy, but the way crazy can be normal for many if not most people. But I want to treat this not as a social psychological problem, but as a philosophical/theological one. 

Everything I say here assumes that our contemporary condition as disembedded, late moderns makes us vulnerable to particularly vicious forms of collective craziness because the infrastructure that makes nature Nature--the Logos--is concealed from us in an historically unprecedented way. It always has been concealed, even in Heraclitus's day, but before around the middle of the 19th century the North Atlantic societies were at least open to its disclosing itself. The celebration of the 'sublime' was the last, rickety attempt to hold on to a sense of the mystery our ancestors felt in a cosmos that they took for granted as shot through with the divine. In our current peculiarly extreme buffered condition in which the reality on screens is more vivid than the reality we actually live in, we have become collectively prone to what I call ontological dizziness. In such a state we are likely to grab onto anything that will give us a feeling of stability. 

When people suffer from ontological dizziness, they frequently grab onto a collective delusion that seems real only because everybody else thinks it is. Its delusional character derives from its having nothing to do with the Logos or the deep structure of the Real to which Heraclitus refers. We see how this kind of extreme collective delusion works in cults, but we find it harder to see operating in the mainstream. Most southerners before the 1960s were incapable of seeing that the segregated south was built on such a collective delusion.

Similarly everyone in the 1930s who wasn't already inclined to the authoritarian fantasy promoted by right-wing demagogues saw how Germany was in the grip of such a collective delusion. Both societies--the segregated south and post-Weimar Germany--were supported by many ordinary, decent human beings who were  thrown into ontological dizziness by the humiliation and identity loss after their societies lost devastatingly bloody wars. Disruptions that destroy traditional ways of life, customs, or ideologies force the people in those disrupted societies into a state of dizziness, and they are presented with a choice to either adapt in a healthy way or to double down in an attitude of self-pity, grievance, and resentment toward the agents of disruption. 

Creative adaptation doesn't require simply surrendering to the disrupters. The situation in Japan suggests that there are ways of taking what's valuable from the disrupters, while remaining true to one's traditions while at the same time shedding its more delusional pretensions. But if you are in  a society that adapts in unhealthy ways, it's very hard to know whether the adaptation is healthy or unhealthy because if unhealthy everyone you know shares the disease. And sometimes you don't get to healthy until unhealthy runs its course. A catastrophic collective death shock is sometimes the only thing that can snap a society out of its collective delusion. This is an open question for American society right now as clearly it is in extreme need of a slap upside the head. Apparently 9/11 or the financial crisis of 2008 were not a big enough slap. Does that mean that it will take something bigger? Maybe. 

So is it even possible for a society to establish a standpoint outside of its collective delusions to critique itself for what is healthy or unhealthy in it? Unlike most postmodern intellectuals, I do believe that it's possible for some individuals to do it, but at least for now it doesn't seem possible on the scale of an entire society. And attempts to force things prematurely often generate Calvin's Geneva, Robespierre's France, and Stalin's Russia.

I don't think God is dead, but I understand why so many smart people think so. I'd argue instead that he's gone into hiding. In the meanwhile, his spokespersons on earth, particularly in the churches, have little credibility or authority for shaping a healthy social imaginary. And there are no other credible persons--philosophers, poets, or saints--who are capable of speaking on behalf of the Logos. So it's not just the uneducated who have rude souls who are incapable of recognizing it; it's a culture-wide phenomenon. The educated elite are equally if not more likely to be insensible of the Logos and mistrustful of anybody who tries to call attention to it as a possible path toward collective sanity:

To this Logos which I unfold, although it always exists, men make themselves insensible, both before they have heard it and when they have heard it for the first time. For notwithstanding that all things happen according to this Logos, men act as though they had never had any experience in regard to it when they attempt such words and works as I am now relating, describing each thing according to its nature and explaining how it is ordered. And some men are as ignorant of what they do when awake as they are forgetful of what they do when asleep. Heraclitus, frag. 2.

Heraclitus and the Greek philosophical tradition through to the Roman Stoics thought that the Logos was the deep structure of reality, and the Christian Neoplatonic tradition integrated that line of Greek thinking into its own cosmology. But the condition of being "insensible" or asleep has since the middle of the first millennium BCE been recognized as the problem--and all the great post-axial religious traditions--the Hebraic/Hellenic tradition of the West as well as the Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist traditions of the East, have provided in their different ways regimes for waking up.

While in any society, even those shaped by one of these great traditions, most people remain asleep, there has been among the elite enough wakefulness to acknowledge the importance of the role of the philosophers, poets, or saints who were awake and shared what they have learned about the Deep Real. In contemporary secular society, there is no sense that we are in a collective sleep state or that we have any need to be awakened from it, so anything goes. But a society is sane to the degree that its ethos is shaped by some level of alignment with the Logos, even if most people in it are shaped by it unconsciously and extrinsically. A society spins off into insanity when it loses touch with it. 

And so our being insensible to the Logos is what keeps us out of our collective right minds. We are born alienated and out of touch with that to which Heraclitus points--the Logos or the Deep Real that hides itself from us so long as we sleep--but if we lived in a sane society we would understand that our lives should be oriented toward greater states of wakefulness, and the more awake we are, the more real our cognition of the Logos suffusing all that exists. 

To the degree that we are not oriented toward the Logos, i.e., not sensible of it, we are not in our right minds. To the degree that we are oriented toward it--i.e.,that we hearken to it--we are still not right, but are moving toward a greater level of health. To the degree that we are in our right minds, we owe it to those who have gone before us who were sensible of the Logos in their different ways and have passed on what they learned about it.

But the ancestors can only pass forward the letter; each generation has to discover for itself the spirit, the life-nourishing energy that comes from having a foothold in the Deep Real. Individuals find their way to it in eccentric ways, but a tradition dies when in the collective life of a society only the form--the letter--is passed on and a quorum among the next generation cannot find the spirit in it. It is in this sense that Nietzsche was correct when he said that God was dead. The cultural forms of Western society no longer conveyed the spirit--at least in a way that was cognizable to the culture's elite. Those forms were essentially pushed to the side by a soul-flattening utilitarianism in thrall to a reductive materialism that shaped a social imaginary peculiarly impervious to disclosures of the Logos. And this reductive materialism is what all 'sane', educated people accept as normal reality, even if they think of themselves as religious. 

But individuals are still capable of hearkening to the Logos. What is it in us that hearkens? Anybody who has a rudimentary experience of "conscience" knows what I mean by this hearkening. Hearkening is not something performed by the head. It's not a function of superego. Our common experience of hearkening is more like how we are moved by an encounter with beauty or goodness. I mean really moved, as in moved to tears. Whatever that cognitive faculty in us that orients us toward the Logos, is that in us that in its encounter with anything that is good, true, and beautiful feels an emotional resonance that moves us in a very distinctive way.  

Regardless of one's metaphysics or religious beliefs, all that matters is that one hearkens--that one has some capacity for it. Everybody has the potential for such hearkening, but in some it lies dormant, and so they live lives insensible to it according to the  Oedipal script given them by their cultural conditioning--as for instance Christians living complacently in the segregated South--or they live a life swinging back and forth between a life episodically intoxicated by the lower instincts and then retreat to the order and safety of social convention.

The Eddie Haskell-like characteristics of Brett Kavanagh exemplify this fairly typical split in the human psyche. I'm not sympathetic to those who want to demonize him, but that doesn't mean I think he's fit to be a supreme court judge. Kavanagh thinks he's being treated unfairly because he's like everybody else--Klobuchar and Whitehouse--and he's being singled out by hypocrites who are just as guilty as he. He's probably right, and it's easy to understand why conservatives are so repelled by the sanctimony of the the Dems. In Kavanagh's case, assuming his accusers are telling the truth, and there's little reason to disbelieve them, Kavanagh is a model of Jekyll/Hyde dissociation that typifies the human condition. There's the repressed, predatory belligerence comes out when he's inebriated or stressed, and then there is the Oedipal presentation of Self, including his religiosity, as a model citizen when he's in control. The two parts are clearly not talking to one another, which is not that unusual. 

A spiritually mature human being has found ways to integrate both these aspects of one's psyche in a higher synthesis--i.e., to get them talking to one another. But how many of us are spiritually mature? Do we think that the Dems on the judiciary committee are much better? Or is it just that Kavanagh got caught while the Dems haven't, at least yet. That's where all the animus from Kavanagh's supporters comes from. It's very understandable. The Left is projecting its repressed psyche on the Right, and vice versa. And it's quite an ugly display. To be spiritually immature is to be in a state of dissociation where this kind of projection is the primary symptom.

Such dissociation seems pretty clearly the case for Kavanagh as we saw in his testimony on Thursday. Is this disqualifying for public office? It is when it's so extreme, and when there's so little evidence of his having overcome it. Does that make him worse than his accusers? No, but he got caught, and now he has to take his medicine, and hopefully this will be something beneficial for his soul if not for his career. I hope for the sake of his family he withdraws, leaves the bench to take a plush position with some conservative law firm, and once out of the spotlight takes stock of his life. There's a good chance he'll just stew in aggrieved resentment for the rest of his life, but other possibilities are open to him if there is anything real in the Christian faith he claims he has. 

***

The Christian word for spiritual unhealth is 'sin'. Many, probably most, Christians tend to think of sin as synonymous with what is socially taboo, i.e., as breaking the tribal code by behaving badly in some way in giving rein to socially sanctioned repressed behaviors or attitudes. If you are someone who habitually transgresses traditional taboos, i.e., if you are controlled by the impulses that most people repress, you are thought of and probably think of yourself as sinful, or used to when 'sin' was a thing. Now someone will say when she transgresses that she is a "bad person". And you think of those who don't transgress as good persons defined by their lack of sinfulness or bad personness, in other words by their ability to at least publicly repress taboo impulses. People who are serious about being 'good' think that if they can avoid certain transgressive acts, they will remain pure, sinless, in a state of grace. This idea assumes that such a state of purity is our natural condition and that it's only our bad behavior that removes us from that state of purity. 

This is wrong, but before I explain why I want to ask what determines the standard for good or bad? Is it just the cultural script that we were born into or adopted later in life? For many if not most it is. It's not something that we've thought through; it's something we adopt in order to belong to a group we want to belong to for whatever reason. But if thats all there is, are all scripts therefore culturally relative and morally equal? Is there no real moral difference between the code of a mafioso and that of a Carmelite nun?Isn't it just that they belong to different groups with different codes, both without any real ontological foundation? Aren't such codes just stuff people made up to get along in the world?

So if you cannot say that one is morally superior to the other if there is no foundation that grounds them, all you can say is that you prefer one or the other. Why is your acculturation as a cultural liberal superior to that of a neo-Nazi? Thought experiment: If one of your kids or nieces or nephews announced that he was joining a Neo-nazi cult because it was edgy and cool compared to the clueless conformist conventional kind of people they otherwise feel pressured to be, what argument could you make to dissuade him? Can you do better than--"Well, I'd prefer that you don't. Neo-Nazis are not nice people." Of course they're not nice; that's what makes them so attractive. Nice is just a smiley-face word for being alienated and repressed. Kids with any spirit want to feel intensely, and intensity and passion is far more persuasive than niceness. 

Nevertheless, all such a kid attracted to neo-Nazism is doing is opting to give rein to the repressed side of the Oedipal divide, and the only argument against it is to show that there is another possibility besides repression and conformity. We are never pure: sinfulness/repression constitutes the warp and woof of our everyday experience of being insensible to the Logos, which remains hidden from us until we gradually become sensible to it and inspired by it. And it is only in encounters with others who have awakened to the Logos and been inspired by it that the young neo-Nazi might also be awakened to another possibility. And only then do we develop the capacity to know the good and to do it. Just living out the Oedipal cultural script for being well behaved has nothing to do with being truly good or sane. It's just what we do to get along, and it just reinforced dissociation. Dissociation and ontological dizziness "R us until we find and become inspired by and hearken to an ontological ground on which we can confidently stand. 

Sin--our state of dissociation--is our normal reality, not something we slip into when we act badly. Acting badly is the default. Acting in a way that is genuinely good is the exception. Our motives for doing even the right thing are never pure. They can't be, but it's ok if you understand that all that matters is the part of the motive that is a true hearkening--that part is real even if there are other less noble factors influencing our decision. All that matters is that we 'hearken'. 

Sin is not something into which we fall; we're already immersed in it, as if in a fog. It's important to accept that as the starting point for any moral progress. It's only something we can gradually dissipate as the sun does the fog. Our experience of hearkening is like those disclosive moments when there is a momentary break in the fog and we see the sun, some blue sky, or a tree top and are startled by its beauty. But most of our world remains still shrouded in mist. 

Religion or any philosophy or ideology has utility only as a guide rail might provide some help insofar as it gives us something to hold onto in a fogbound world. But the guide rail is not an end in itself; its value lies in leading us to a clearing where we might see for ourselves what those who left the guide rail behind saw. The goal is not simply to cling to the rail, but to dissipate the fog for ourselves and those around us. 

Religious or philosophical assertions about the nature of what lies beyond the fog have no liberating power if they do not provide the resources that will enable us all to clear the fog for ourselves, and a religious practice can do this only if there are some people in every generation who can credibly speak to the way the world looks unfogged.

Too often religion, rather than dissipating the fog, produces more of it and thicker. It promotes the guide rail as an end in itself, and people in their anxiety clutch to it and refuse to move along it. It becomes a security fetish rather than a guide toward greater freedom and clarity.  And as such, a religion can often be for many people an institution that jails us in our condition of alienation and sin rather than providing for us the means to free ourselves from it.  

***

Our contemporary social imaginary is shaped by two contradictory impulses, a dual heritage that comes to us from the Enlightenment and Romanticism. From the Enlightenment we inherit the need for social control and the managerial liberalism that has created the buffering technocracies that organize the political and economic regimes that most of find so oppressive. From Romanticism we inherit the longing to be free of all  those oppressive social regimes, to be in touch with something alive, natural, densely real, and un-constructed. The first we embrace because it makes us feel safe; the second we embrace because it makes us feel alive.

The oscillation between them is the symptom of our fundamental dissociation I call Missing Middle Syndrome--we are brains seeking control while at the same time contending with an instinctual life unconscious drives that chafe against that control, and the iciness of the brain when contending with the wet heat of instinct creates the fog about which we spoke above. The missing middle is the life of the soul, and the heart is the radiating energy center whose power integrates within itself the energies of the instinctual life with the reflective powers of the mind.

Missing Middle Syndrome is the disease that caused the group insanity that gripped Spain during its inquisitions and religious purges, Protestants and Catholics during the Thirty Years War, the Jacobins during the French Revolution, the Puritans in Salem, the Stalinists after the Russian Revolution, the Fascists in Spain, Italy, and Germany, the Maoists in China, the McCarthyites in the 1950s, and more recently the Tea Party in this country. In each case there is an ideal, a partial truth, at the center of this form of insanity that justifies the insanity. The ideal is fetishized in a way that hardens the heart. Hard-hearted idealism is one of the most destructive forms of collective insanity. 

The cure for Missing Middle Syndrome is found only when the  brain or mind with its undisciplined thinking and unruly instinctual drives submits to the rule of the regent who lives in the heart. Sanity is sanctity. Sanity in this sense is more than just being conventionally normal; it is an achievement. It requires of each person that he become master of his own psychic domain, and this requires that she  become master of the undisciplined, unruly forces within her kingdom. If one's heart is shriveled and hard, the regent is rendered impotent, and so powerless to bring the mind and instinctual life into harmony. If her heart is supple and warm, she recognizes that repression is not a solution and only makes things worse. Repression is not "rule". A wise, warm-hearted regent seeks to recognize and win over--not defeat--the unruly forces in her kingdom and to make them allies in the larger project of building something good and beautiful. 

The idea that if we could just be rational, we'll behaved, non-predators, everything would be fine is as silly as saying that if we were all lobotomized, we would be fine. We are not built to be just rational or bovine. Being rational is only a part of what makes us human, and it's not the most important part. The heart's capacity to respond to goodness and beauty is. 

So what does it mean to be in your right mind?  For me as a Christian it starts with the assumption that original sin--our fundamental condition as dissociated--is our starting point. That means we all start out fundamentally alienated from what is. This condition of alienation is something all humans experience and so seek deliverance from it. But most people, especially in a secular society resort to all kinds of ineffectual methods to effect this delivery, and most of them result in one form or another of craziness--substance abuse, hyper sexuality, wealth accumulation, will to power. These are all ancient forms of craziness, but they are particularly virulent forms of craziness now because there is no check that is deeply grounded in a collective sensibility of the Logos.

So our attempts to save ourselves from our alienation make things worse, but this is ok if it aggravates our felt need for deliverance. I think this is the real point of the Prodigal Son story. The Prodigal was in a better position than his older brother because he at least knew his need of deliverance whereas the older brother was a resentful prig. He was safety-seeking rules follower living in what Kierkegaard calls the despair that does not know it is in despair. The younger brother is a classic example of a moral decision made with mixed motives. That the motives were mixed does not matter; all that matters is the part of his motivation, as inchoate as it might have been, that was a hearkening to the Deep Real manifested through the Father. The younger brother is more 'awake' than the older brother even if his mind is still more fogbound than clear. It's a beginning.

We are born deluded and alienated, and salvation is the process of getting clearer in our heads about what is real and what is delusion, and then doing the work to achieve a deeper communion with what truly is. The Buddhists and Hindus agree with Christians about the essential nature of our delusion, but their ideas about what it means to be saved are somewhat different, although I don't think incompatible. I think of their approaches--and the approaches of any authentic religious practice--as complementary with the Christian approach. Religions become inauthentic when anything about them becomes an end in itself. Inauthentic religion develops when an aspect of religious truth is distorted by a dissociated appropriation of it. Authentic religion, no matter from which tradition it derives, is religion under the liberating and illuminating aspect of the Logos. The Logos is 'what is'.

The goal of philosophy or spiritual practice is to establish a deeper communion with the Logos. This is not a head trip, but rather a reorientation of the entire soul. But as with the satori experience of the Zen Buddhist, this intuition is not ready at hand. Wisdom hides itself; it must be discovered. Or rather it reveals itself through the dissipating fog if we are paying attention.

{This is a slightly revised and updated  reposting of an essay first posted in December 2017.]

Thoughts on the Kavanagh Affair

When he was first nominated, I saw Kavanagh much as I saw Gorsuch: an establishment figure who leans conservative, and thought that's what you're going to get because clueless establishment Democrats allowed Donald Trump to win the election. But better someone like him than someone like Harriet Myers or Clarence Thomas, or someone else who's crazy or ignorant, in other words more like Trump. I was disturbed later to hear of his role in the Starr investigations, and of his role as a Republican operative in the early part of his career. He's different from Gorsuch in that respect. But it seemed kind of stupid for Democrats, except for the political optics, to fight his nomination. He appeared until recently to be as good as we were going to get. 

When the Blasey Ford accusation first came to light, my first reaction, as I'm sure was the reaction of many if not most Americans was--"Really, we're going back to high school now to find ways to stop these nominations?"  I realize that politics is blood sport, and that the Dems are really angry at Mitch McConnell and the way he treated Merritt Garland, but this and the timing and all the things that Republicans complained about  seemed pretty pretty low. Nevertheless, it became clear fairly quickly that the accusation was very likely true and was supported by other circumstantial facts. And let's not kid ourselves--every Republican who supports Brett Kavanagh knows that he's lying and that Blasey Ford is telling the truth. 

I don't believe for a minute that Kavanagh didn't do the things that he's accused of doing, but there's a reasonable case to be made that stuff that happened in high school and college should not be determinative of the possibilities for people thirty years later, especially if their lives and careers have been exemplary since then. But very quickly it became clear that it wasn't about what happened, but about Kavanagh's fundamental truthfulness and ability to own up and move past stupid, drunken stuff he did as a kid.

And that's where in my view he failed completely. He unequivocally denied what every honest person sees plainly is the truth, and this alone is disqualifying. Yesterday's statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee further aggravated his credibility and questions about his fitness. At this moment it remains to be seen whether there are two or three swing votes among the Republicans that will block his nomination.

For the rest of the Republicans the issue is not what's true or not, but whether they can get away with ramming his nomination through. The Republicans see this as a purely tactical problem--regular order, norms, etc. be damned.  The Dems have played their best cards and now it's up to them to do the same. Their strategy is to complain about the politics of personal destruction, and that has some traction. I can see how making public at the last minute a woman's accusation about events that happened over thirty years ago seems unfair. But politics is blood sport, and it came out, and then the question becomes how does Kavanagh and his supporters deal with it. And from my pov it's hard to imagine how they could have handled it worse. 

I think that any reasonable person would have preferred that Blasey Ford's accusations to have been taken care of behind closed doors so that Kavanagh could have made a considered decision about whether he wanted to put his family through the ugliness that was sure to follow should he choose to fight. I can understand why they suspect Feinstein of gamesmanship on this. So what? The Republicans are finally on the receiving end of tactics that they would have used themselves if the positions were reversed. But once the accusations were public, he reacted in the worst possible way by denying what would become clear to everyone is undeniable, and so this compounded his problems and boxed him into a corner. Now, not only does his behavior as a teenager and young adult raise questions about his fitness, but so does his fundamental honesty and capacity to own up to what he did. It's a pretty ugly picture. 

Kavanagh, after having been confronted with Blasey Ford's accusations, should have withdrawn or if he chose to fight it, should have fought through it with a different strategy. He should have admitted the stupidity and awfulness of his behavior as a non-adult, showed contrition for whatever harm he caused, and then focused on his productivity and accomplishments as a adult and public figure since then. He would then argue it's on that basis, not the basis of what he did as a seventeen-year-old or college kid that should determine whether he's fit to serve on the supreme court. This may or may not have worked, but at least it would have been an attempt to be honest, and it would have told us something positive about his character, his humanity, his ability to be honest with himself and the public, that whatever he did as a kid is not who he is now. And at the very least would have provided a much easier path for the Republicans and even some Democrats to vote for him. 

But that's not what he did. Instead, he presented himself in court yesterday in such a way that it's easier for me to believe that the nasty, belligerent drunk he has been portrayed as is still there lurking under the surface and will come out if provoked. He presented himself as a right-wing tribalist following Trump's dictum to deny, deny, deny. It should be clear to everyone that while clearly he's more sophisticated, as a matter of fundamental character, he is no better or more fit for office than the man who nominated him.

Zizek, McCain, Trump, and Big Daddy

I'm no expert on Slavoj Zizek, the Lacanian psychotherapist and edgy philosopher from Slovenia, but I find his distinction between the Oedipal Father Figure and the Primal Father Figure an interesting frame through which to observe the events surrounding the death of John McCain in the last week. Elites in the American media and political establishments leapt at the opportunity to lionize John McCain as an exemplar of an American code of honor and service that contrasted with Donald Trump's pettiness and self-serving venality. In Zizek's frame, McCain is an exemplar of an ethos dominated by the Oedipal Father, the mythological successor figure to the Primal Father figure for which Trump is an exemplar. These archetypes work in each of us, at levels of unconsciousness most people are unaware of. They have reality-defining power.

The Primal Father in Freud's and Zizek's mythos represents self-assertion in the service of self-gratification--the Primal Father is the crude bull moose who maintains by force a monopoly of access to the females in the herd; he has no rules, no honor except the prestige of being the herd alpha and doing as he pleases without constraint. Just try to stop him. The Oedipal father, on the other hand, represents duty in the service of group cohesiveness and a strict group code--honor, service.

The problem for Zizek is that both in their different ways create constructs that Freud called the Superego, that Zizek called the Big Other, and that I'm calling Big Daddy. The Superego works at an unconscious level to shape our feelings of guilt and of self worth insofar as we we live up to the behavior and attitudes the code demands. Our feelings of self-worth as successes or failures is determined by the Code. So in McCain's case, his sense of success as a human being depended on how well he measures up to the Oedipal superego, while Trump's sense of success depends on how well he measures up to the superego as defined by the Primal Father figure. 

In McCain's case, his family was military. His grandfather and father were both admirals. His family programmed his superego with an old-fashioned code of military stoicism, honor, service, and self-sacrifice. In many ways he lived that code, and in many ways he failed to. That's the way it is for most people for whom such a code is a strong influence in their acculturation. The superego, the internal Big Daddy, creates both an image of what one's ideal self should be, but it also represses energies that Zizek describes as perversions of the code, and are a source of continuous temptation to transgress the code. Jung calls these repressed aspects of the psyche the Shadow. 

It explains a lot of our everyday experience, for instance, why "good' girls" find "bad boys" so attractive. Bad boys represent the repressed energies that living in accordance with the Oedipal code produce. The more rigid the adherence to the code, the more repressed these energies. But one way or another they seek an outlet through transgression or 'sin'. The more repressed the dark energies, the more joyously liberated one feels when he or she transgresses them--until the guilt sets in.

But here's the thing, first noted by St. Paul in Romans 4:15: If there's no code, there's no transgression. If there's no law, there's no sin. So it follows that If there's no superego, there's no guilt. Getting rid of the superego is Zizek's project. And while Zizek sees the Church as the chief reinforcer of superego--the Church must have a law or code otherwise there would be no sinners, and if there were no sinners, there would be no need for redemption or for the Church to mediate that redemption. Well, ok, but Paul, of course, was arguing that he was liberated from the law by awakening to a deeper, transcendent source of order. But I agree with Zizek that the church often operates as if that 'awakening' had little to do with its raison d'être. 

So the Big Daddy operates in our psyche like a repressive dictator who punishes us with intense feelings of guilt and self-loathing when we fail to live up to its ideals, while at the same time it creates its perverse opposite, energies within the psyche that seek to subvert its rule and transgress its code in rebellious ways. McCain is a classic example of living the tension between being the good boy and the bad boy. His "maverickness" is related to the second, and In the past week we celebrated how he was an exemplar of the first. But we didn't talk about his partying, how he dumped his devoted first wife for a woman eighteen years younger, how he got involved in bank scandal that was related to his second wife's family's business, his ambivalent record and attitudes about race, etc. 

Very Trumpy stuff there, but the American establishment at this moment needs an exemplar of the Oedipal Big Daddy to contrast with someone who almost in every way transgresses its codes. McCain is honored for the ways in which he strove to act honorably, and he is forgiven for the ways that he failed. That's fine, so far as it goes. He's like most everybody else that way, and his eulogizers do what almost all eulogizers do, which is to celebrate how the eulogized embodied the community's values and to overlook the ways he or she failed to. He tried and sometimes succeeded--at least he tried. Trump doesn't bother to try even in the least degree. It would be shameful for him to be honorable because within the Primal Father archetype honor is complete b.s. and hypocrisy. Power and enjoyment are the only thing that matter.

Zizek says that the Oedipal--strict social norms--Father figure shaped American society until the 1960s when it was supplanted by a version of the Primal Father figure that has shaped since then what we think of as the postmodern. The postmodern ethos is shaped by a mandate to gratify one's appetites unconstrained by traditional repressive norms and traditions. The superego of people shaped by the Primal Big Daddy commands them to satisfy his or her appetites. It has little regard for the common good or commitments that would constrain the pursuit of those appetites. This is the 'code' that took hold in the 1970s, and has played a huge role in shaping popular and elite culture. It is the perfect ethos for consumer capitalism, and is justified by a neoliberal ideology in the political and economic spheres. And is there anybody who embodies it more fully and unambiguously than Donald Trump?

But Zizek points out that rather being truly psychically liberating, the Primal Big Daddy  'superego' comes with its own set of commands, which boil down to something like this: “Thou shalt satisfy your appetites. Thou must thereby enjoy and fulfill thyself in whatever way you see fit." And so it follows that any kind of self-denial or sacrifice for a higher good is repressive and alienating. [I should point out that Zizek is somewhat muddled (if not completely bonkers) in this regard when contrasting this kind of thralldom to superego with his idea about "desire" and  "immoral ethics", for whom someone like Robespierre was an exemplar, but I don't want to get too far afield here.]

But the problem with this new command lies in that it doesn't bring real enjoyment. At best it's a kind of sterile enjoyment. A more robust form of enjoyment was a possibility in the old Oedipal regime in a way it is not for those living under the rule of the Primal Father. Before there was a liberating joy in the transgressive act, but if the new rule is to transgress without there being a broadly respected repressive code to transgress, there’s no fun in it. Enjoyment becomes a grind. We have to find new traditional constraints and taboos to become liberated from. That's where the fun is--in identifying and breaking whatever unbroken taboos are left. 

Someone like McCain always honored the code of the militarist, authoritarian Big Daddy, even if he failed on occasion to live up to it. The Primal Big Daddy has no respect for the old codes, sees them as impediments to the fulfillment of his appetites, sees those who are constrained by them as repressed fools, and finds its sense of identity and moral mission in flouting whatever vestiges of that code remain.

And that's the difference between John McCain and Donald Trump. Trump is an exemplar of the Primal Big Daddy code. McCain saw himself as a rebel because he believed in the code, but Trump isn't a rebel because there are no codes he believes in. He is a bull moose for whom there  is no rule except to do whatever satisfies his appetites. He only feels a sense of self-loathing when he fails to get what he wants. There is no honor except the prestige that comes with power and humiliating one's foes. There is no sense whatsoever of the validity of the old Oedipal honor code that requires the repression of one's appetites for the good of the community. 

The larger question is whether any society worth living in can do away with an Oedipal Big Daddy. But Is it a question of getting rid of Big Daddy or finding a source of order that subverts his influence? Zizek would probably say that any source of order is a Big Daddy and the ideology that justifies his rule, and every Big Daddy is necessarily a source of repression for those who live under his rule. And repression is by definition a bad thing and liberation is by definition a good thing. But is it, or is it that we need to be liberated from the whole repressive/transgressive system. Is such a thing possible?

I think it is, but it requires a level of self-awareness and maturity that is simply too rare at this point in our collective development to have much of an influence in shaping a truly free and yet ordered i.e., just, society. I believe with MLK that the arc of history bends toward justice, so it's not that what we do now does not matter. We must do what's there for us to do, but we must also realize that the human being's capacity for self-absorption and self-delusion cannot be underestimated, and that most people snap out of their delusions only when reality whacks them upside the head one way or the other. The greater the level of delusion, the more violent is the whack required. In the short run all manner of whacks upside the head seem a necessary precondition for any real movement forward in American society.

Liberation does not come from just transgressing the old repressive codes. Liberation comes only if one can in some way transcend the code, not just transgress it--no matter which Big Daddy's code it is. The post-Axial spiritual traditions, particularly Pauline Christianity and Buddhism, teach that it is possible. Zizek thinks it's possible, too, through his Lacanian brand of psychoanalysis. Seeing similarities and differences here is something I hope to get into in future posts. 

So this past week we were continuously exposed to people praising McCain as an exemplar of the code of honor, service, and self-sacrifice for the greater good, i.e, the American nation state. It's clear that the elite establishment approves of McCain and has nothing but disdain for Trump. And at the same time, all the Trump supporters have nothing but disdain for the elites who eulogized him in the National Cathedral on Saturday.

But the underlying values of the establishment and of Trump's supporters are an incoherent hodgepodge--sometimes praising a code of discipline and sacrifice, other time celebrating an anything-goes code of sating one's appetites however one sees fit. That's what it means to be postmodern--thinking or believing contradictory things, because most are in thrall to contradictory unconscious organization of reality that sometimes celebrates repression and at other times desire, sometimes superego, other times transgression. Most postmoderns are oblivious of their self contradictions or why what they approve or disapprove this or that has any rhyme or reason. They just feel what they feel, and you've no right to judge them. And if they should become aware of their contradictions, they just shrug their shoulders, because there's no center, no ground on which to stand to make such comparisons and judgments. 

Trump is unusual in that he is so unambiguously one thing, so completely, predictably, guiltlessly a man of predatory appetite who is so blithely oblivious of any sense of the old honor codes. He's not conflicted the way most are. He's pure in a most remarkable way for a public figure. He takes the post-sixties ethos of appetite to its extreme, and this is why I think that his libidinal, norm-crashing presidency is not to be feared in itself, but is rather a precursor for an authoritarian backlash that celebrates honor, country, service to the state. The Trump supporters will get behind such an authoritarian regime and its leader because they are not that particular about their violent Big Daddies. They only care about strength, not whether it's honorable or not.

Trump is not the real threat because he is not really an authoritarian. He's too disorganized, impulsive, and self-absorbed to think beyond his own appetites. A real authoritarian is a disciplined true believer and expects others to believe what he does and to submit to his prescribed discipline for the greater good. Trump believes nothing, and is really more a creature of the anarchic Cultural Left in that sense, as are most neoliberal, cosmopolitan elites. But he is someone who provides a gateway for someone who will be a real threat. The violent, appetitive Primal Father eventually loses to the violent Oedipal Authoritarian Father, so the real danger lies in the emergence and popular embrace of an authoritarian Big Daddy who will reassert a repressive code that everybody better get in line with or else.

Elites will embrace the arrival of this kind of Big Daddy because they're tired of the chaos and how nothing works anymore, and because they have lost faith in a democracy that makes possible the presidency of a sleazy con man like Donald Trump. They will embrace any new Big Daddy who will tell them they're better than that and who can free them from their tortured ambiguity and normlessness.

There's a a reason why the military is the only institution that Americans have not lost faith in. So the Big Daddy to come will likely be  ex-military, someone like John McCain or John Kelly, someone disciplined and organized, someone admirable according to the old service-and-honor code, reasonable seeming, upright. But when push comes to shove he will impose their code on the rest of us for the 'greater good', and we will go along because who doesn't want the greater good, especially when things seem so frighteningly chaotic?

See also Moral vs. Moralistic.