-- By IrisAikateriniFrangou - 25 Feb 2021

The Function Of Arnold's "Reasonable Politician": Analogizing to Modern Psychiatry & Identifying The "Neurosis" in Man

Introduction

Thurman Arnold’s “The Folklore of Capitalism” abounds in analogies to modern psychology and psychiatry in his effort to integrate 20th century ideals of social psychology in his theory of social organization. Can modern psychiatry help us then, in understanding the role of the “respectable politician”? I suggest that the respectable politician’s function is analogous to that of a psychiatrist, in that it manages the needs of neurotic individuals (like neurotic patients) through the politician’s loyalty to the organization (like the therapist’s fidelity to psychotherapy). In so doing, I will explain this “neurosis” of man, relying on Freud and Becker, that is to explain why it is “tears and parades” which drive the world – as the psychiatrist and politician necessarily know, using this knowledge to successfully placate their “patients”. By “respectable politician”, I refer to Arnold’s conception of the politician who effectively manages the organization’s survival and operation.

The Respectable Politician & the Successful Organization

Before analogizing, we first must ask: what do successful organizations do? For Arnold, they are internally contradictory – they indicate one position in theory, but a different one in practice. It is in realizing the ubiquity of this contradiction (perhaps with the exception of “minor parties” he says, who are not seeking power) or rather, it is in realizing that no matter how much “creeds” change the de facto strategies of the respectable politician are the same (adjusted to a political climate of peace or crisis) 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 “fundamental loyalties must be given not to principles, but to organizations” (p. 384). However, for the organization to deliver (de facto), it needs to allow this (sufficiently broad) mythology to run rampant (in theory), accommodating every individual member and conferring organizational

The makings of a theory

-+++ Analogizing the respectable politician to the professional psychiatrist

Having clarified that the politician’s focus is 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. Psychiatrists diagnose and treat the mental disorders of individuals. Central to the treatment is their loyalty to psychotherapy. The two main subcategories of psychotherapy techniques are “relationship-building” ones and “confrontational” ones. The former relies on the therapist’s minimal verbal interruptions, encouraging the patient to continue speaking. The latter, mandates that sometimes, the psychiatrist confronts the patient (e.g. gross blind spot instances) to maintain the therapy’s effectiveness. Thus, the professional’s management of the patient is geared towards the therapy’s success, balancing between much tolerance and little intervention.

Similarly, the respectable politician can be thought of as managing his own host of patients – the individual “neurotic” members of society comprising his organization. Essential to treating them effectively is the politicians’ fidelity to the organization itself, in the service of which ideology becomes a technique of political management (akin to the technique of psychotherapy). Just as the psychotherapist relies largely on minimal intervention, so too does the respectable politician: he does not undermine neurotic members’ ideologies, but instead he finds value in their expressiveness (since they help the organization “persevere” in the long run, similarly to how expressed thoughts of patients help the “treatment” over time). The politician only intervenes to confront individual members who pose a threat to the continued coherence of the organization, just as the psychotherapist intervenes when the patients’ thoughts or behaviors endanger the success of therapy.

But what is the “neurosis” of man that respectable politicians manage?

Exploring the "neurosis" of man: an attempt at definition

This necessarily involves asking why “tears and parades” dominate the world. That is, why is man in perpetual need of elevated, grandiose ideals that inspire his enthusiasm and are theatrical in nature? Arnolds describes these as “mythologies” – fundamental lies and mirages. I call them “neuroses” and since Arnold’s theory of social organization relies on the dominance of Freud’s “unconscious”, let’s begin there. Freud suggests that we are all driven by the pleasure principle, that is by easy physical and emotional rewards. As we mature, pleasure is replaced with reality and society demands that we substitute immediate pleasure for long term gratification, so we move from the pleasure to the reality principle; gratification is still desired but is delayed by reality’s exigencies. We cannot make ourselves fully rational but we also cannot change society’s heavy dictates (the suppression of our immediate desires, the need to work to earn money etc). There is no easy solution and this is the source of human unhappiness. The faulty adaptation to this reality principle (the repression of the pleasure principle) is what creates “neuroses”, to the treatment of which Freud applies psychoanalysis.

Approached from this point of view, perhaps the tendency for “tears and parades” inherent in all men (to varying degrees, and with various manifestations) is our method of unconsciously coping with society’s exigencies in the face of our recognition that we cannot change society. It is a means of justifying why we put up with society, which in conjunction with our existential dread, heightens the need to glorify our existence on earth. The “tears and parades” then are most conducive to the dramaturgical glorification of life in civilized society aimed to appease our neurosis. This, of course, is a losing battle but the consistency with which it is waged by us is what gives respectable politicians the ability to effectively manage the organization to which we belong.

The need for tears and parades, rooted in the pleasure principle, is enhanced by our dread of death. Per Freud, death is at odds with the ego so we erect “vital illusions” to deny mortality. Death therefore, as Ernest Becker suggests, is a problem we need to solve to avoid it becoming uncontrollably pathological. Becker offers three modes of death transcendence: the religious (transcending the ego by identifying with God), the romantic (identifying with the divinity of our partner), and the creative solution (gaining immortality through the creation of things that live on after us).

Conclusion

Through such lens, “tears and parades” can be perceived as a “creative solution” of constructing lofty ideals and binding ourselves to them to gain consolation similar to that “offered by a… dramatist to his hero who is facing a self-inflicted death” (Freud on religion’s effects, “Civilization and Its Discontents”, Ch. 1). Thus, the exalted ideologies (forming man’s neurosis) can be perceived as the dramatists we create in our own lives, saving us both from death and the conformist exigencies of society (pleasure principle problem). So why do we tear up at a parade? Belief in the ideology of patriotism (to run with Arnold’s illustration) consoles us by making our societal conformism seem worthy of the incurred hardships on which it relies, and by helping us creatively transcend death.

There are many good ideas here: this is a substantial first draft. The best route to improvement, in my view, is focus and a concomitant decrease in repetition. The reason the present draft requires multiple statements of the same points is that the organization is insufficiently linear. This feels as though it is well symbolized by retaining the template organization at the top of the draft, unused. I modified the markup to restore the table of contents to functionality, accordingly.

I think the piece's main idea could be stated succinctly as: Arnold is concerned with the social psychology of organizations, so let's turn all social psychology back into intrapsychic psychology, and see the political or organizational leader as a psychiatrist or psychotherapist treating neurosis in society (called, with necessary ambiguity and over-specificity, "Man"). On the basis of this analogy, and by identifying the "neurosis" as the dissociation of mortality, we can explain why we tear up when the parade passes by.

Getting the idea down in this abbreviated form (which obviously should be modified with respect to any misunderstandings in my version) not only provides the introduction of the draft, but also helps to locate the points where further thinking should occur. What is lost, for example, in the desocialization of social psychology, and the reduction of psychotherapeutic approaches to those that push (pills or discomforts, though you basically ignore medical psychiatry completely), and those that listen? Clarity is always gained by simple taxonomies and reductive analogies: without the Niels Bohr reductive version of the hydrogen atom, we would lose as much as we would gain. But that's because we also do both quantum mechanics and general relativity. We should at least try to compensate for what we lose when we think of social psychology as not inherently about multiplicity, or about "the neurosis of Man" as a category. About the multiplicity of individual personality, the Putnam-ness of the way we are, it might also be useful to do some thinking. What if the direction of flow is not to Arnold from Freud, but to Putnam from Arnold? What if creeds are the processes through which identity states are created? What if organizational behavior involves state dependent learning and memory, resulting over time in complex personality states linked to organizations, resulting in complex observable collective personality states engaging in negative partisanship, or believing in QAnon, or otherwise exemplifying—as Richard Hofstadter so famously put it in an essay that might also well inform your next draft—the "paranoid style" in American politics?