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.
