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| | | For Arnold, successful organizations are internally contradictory. It is in realizing that no matter how much “creeds” change the strategies of the effective politician are the same, that Arnold finds all ideologies claptrap. Yet, they remain necessary for appeasing the individual member, which is why they exist. Thus, the respectable politician is effective because he understands that for the organization to deliver (de facto), it needs to allow this (sufficiently broad) mythology to run rampant (in theory). | |
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< | Given the politician’s focus on the organization itself, how are we to understand his role vis-à-vis the institution’s individual members? Perhaps by analogizing to the psychiatrist/psychotherapist. Therapists rely on “relationship-building” and “confrontational” techniques (with medical psychiatry omitted for simplicity) to treat the mentally disordered, balancing between much tolerance and little intervention. Similarly, the politician can be thought of as managing his own host of patients – the individual “neurotic” members of his organization. Essential to treating them is his fidelity to the organization itself, in the service of which ideology becomes a technique of political management (akin to that of psychotherapy). Just as the therapist relies largely on minimal intervention, so too does the politician; he only intervenes to confront individual members who pose a threat to the continued coherence of the organization, just as the therapist intervenes when the patients endanger the therapy’s success. | >
> | Given the politician’s focus on the organization itself, how are we to understand his role vis-à-vis the institution’s individual members? Perhaps by analogizing to the psychiatrist/psychotherapist. Therapists rely on “relationship-building” and “confrontational” techniques (with medical psychiatry omitted for simplicity) to treat the mentally disordered, balancing between much tolerance and little intervention. Similarly, the politician can be thought of as managing his own host of patients – - the individual “neurotic” members of his organization. Essential to treating them is his fidelity to the organization itself, in the service of which ideology becomes a technique of political management (akin to that of psychotherapy). Just as the therapist relies largely on minimal intervention, so too does the politician; he only intervenes to confront individual members who pose a threat to the continued coherence of the organization, just as the therapist intervenes when the patients endanger the therapy’s success. | | | But what is the “neurosis” of man that respectable politicians manage? This involves asking why “tears and parades” dominate the world. Arnolds describes these as “mythologies” – fundamental lies and mirages. I call them “neuroses” and, by relying on Freud, turn all social psychology intro intrapsychic psychology. Freud suggests that we are all driven by the pleasure principle, by easy physical and emotional rewards. As we mature, society demands that we substitute immediate pleasure for long term gratification, so we move from the pleasure to the reality principle. The faulty adaptation to this reality principle is what creates “neuroses”, to the treatment of which Freud applies psychoanalysis. | |
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< | Approached from this point of view, the tendency for “tears and parades” inherent in all men consoles us by glorifying our existence, making our societal conformism seem worthy of the incurred hardships on which it relies, and, in conjunction with our existential dread, helps us creatively transcend death. Simply put, the “neurosis” is our dissociation of mortality, to the appeasement of which we embrace such exalted ideologies. | >
> | Approached from this point of view, the tendency for “tears and parades” inherent in all men consoles us by glorifying our existence, making our societal conformism seem worthy of the incurred hardships on which it relies. In conjunction with our existential dread, "tears and parades" help us creatively transcend death. Simply put, the “neurosis” is our dissociation of mortality, to the appeasement of which we embrace such exalted ideologies. | | | Social Psychology as Inherently about Multiplicity: "We are many, not one" | | | The Paranoid Style of American Politics | |
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< | An offshoot of such complex collective personality states are the ones that embody the “paranoid style” in politics (as Richard Hofstadter coined it)– an enduringly universal psychic phenomenon that uses paranoid modes of political expression (namely, polemic hyperbole, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy) by normal people (Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics). In the context of American politics today, this paranoid style is expressed by the contemporary right wing, as is most emblematically manifested for instance, by the far right QAnon conspiracy theory. | >
> | An offshoot of such complex collective personality states are the ones that embody the “paranoid style” in politics, as Richard Hofstadter coined it – an enduringly universal psychic phenomenon that uses paranoid modes of political expression (namely, polemic hyperbole, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy) by normal people (Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics). In the context of American politics today, this paranoid style is expressed by the contemporary right wing, as is most emblematically manifested for instance, by the far right QAnon conspiracy theory. | | | Ironically, through the incorporation of Putnam’s multiplicity of self, the paranoid style organization (or spokesman) can be seen as playing on the multiplicity of social psychology but manipulating it to forge a worldview to its members that denies that very multiplicity – that reduces the world to a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, rejecting the ambiguity, conflict, and fallibility of the self. To make such worldview credible, the paranoid style spokesman goes to great lengths to give it coherence (often by copying the tools of his sworn ideological opponent), but such successful coherence is premised on a completely personal interpretation of history, turning “every accident or incompetence into an act of treason” (Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics), that is magnified through the effects of mass media. Hofstadter suggests that the enemy of the paranoid style spokesman is in many ways a projection of the spokesman’s self in both its ideal and unacceptable aspects. Through the lens of Putnam, this can be seen as the paranoid style organization/spokesman (and thereby the paranoid style member) attempting to deny its own (and its enemy’s) multiplicity of self, by disciplining their mind to viewing reality through the absolutist, dual lens of good and evil.
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