The Decisive Question

“The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance. Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty. The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life. He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy. If we understand, and feel that in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change. In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted.”

C. G. Jung
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
p. 325

painting by Rene Magritte

"All my writings may be considered tasks imposed from within; their source was a fatal compulsion.  What I wrote were things that assailed me from within myself.  I permitted the spirit that moved me to speak out.  I have never counted upon any strong response, any powerful resonance, to my writings.  They represent a compensation for our times, and I have been impelled to say what no one wants to hear.  For that reason, and especially at the beginning, I often felt utterly forlorn.  I knew that what I said would be unwelcome, for it is difficult for people of our times to accept the counterweight to the conscious world.  Today I can say that it is truly astonishing that I have had as much success as has been accorded me--far more than I ever could have expected.  I have the feeling that I have done all that it was possible for me to do.  Without a doubt that life work could have been larger, and could have been done better; but more was not within my power."

"A book of mine is always a matter of fate.  There is something unpredictable about the process of writing, and I cannot prescribe for myself any predetermined course."

"My life has been in a sense the quintessence of what I have written, not the other way around.  The way I am and the way I write are a unity.  All my ideas and all my endeavors are myself.  Thus the 'autobiography' is merely the dot on the i."

"In Bollingen, silence surrounds me almost audibly, and I live 'in modest harmony with nature.'  Thoughts rise to the surface which reach back into the centuries, and accordingly anticipate a remote future.  Here the torment of creation is lessened; creativity and play are close together."

Carl Jung, who died on June 6, 1961, 50 years ago today. [See also this post and its links.]

Jung 

Change

The postelection reaction continues, composed of analyses, harranges, acid jokes, hopeful statistics and expressions of sadness, emptiness, fear and despair. There are numbers, maps, riddles, conspiracy theories, exhortations, and bitter litanies flying through cyberspace--- even a poem, posted on T. Goddard's Political Wire:
The election is over, the results are now known.
The will of the people has clearly been shown.
We should show by our thoughts, our words and our deeds
That unity is just what our country needs.
Let's all get together. Let bitterness pass.
I'll hug your elephant.
You kiss my ass.

Some rose to even greater eloquence, though we readers of the SF Chronicle have come to expect it of columnist Jon Carroll. He reminded those inclined to flee the country or otherwise give up the fight that "The same people are underserved as were underserved on Nov.1. The need for courage and compassion and hard work is as great as it ever was. If you quit now, the bastards have won....We are political players in the most powerful nation in the world, and that is a responsibility." You can find the rest of this column here:
JON CARROLL

Despair and deep sadness still hover and the consequences of the election will continue to devastate: the Iraqi children and the American Marines dying in Fallujah, the polar bears dying in the Arctic, the suffering that will ensue in a million lonely ways, when pain goes untreated for want of health care, and the politically deluded as well as the disenfranchised struggle for their uncertain survival.

There is also plenty of anger. More than one politico has advised that it's time to play just as dirty as the opponents. One analyst pointed to an attack ad in which the Republicans portrayed their congressional opponent literally as the devil, with graphic suggestion of the apocalyptic consequences of his election. This Democrat's advice was not just to go negative but to get vicious, because it works.

There is undeniable emotional satisfaction as well as some political sense in unrelenting attack. If the Republicans want total war, let's see if they can take it. But then, it's the appeal to only emotions that in itself is scary. Do you defeat the enemy by becoming the enemy?

For some it is the losing, and the manner of it that fuels anger: the cheating and lying that put the triumphant smirk back on the dopey face of the man we are ashamed to call this country's choice for president. The disasters, ineptitude and stupidities of this administration are writ so large in such garish colors, yet they won. (Or did they? There's just enough evidence of fraud, tampering and suppression to seriously doubt whether George W. Bush actually got more votes, especially in Ohio and Florida, than did John Kerry.)


In any case, we know our society needs to change, and there are lots of people doing that work. Awhile back, I wrote about what I called the Skills of Peace. I started out exploring a variety of subjects, efforts, people that seemed to me to contribute to dealing with conflict and creating peace on various levels. I came to see that there were three essential divisions: the political skills (which also meant economic, sociological, history etc., anything that applied to the world, nations, regions, and large groups), communication skills for all of these large groups, and also for small groups and relationships; and skills applied within individuals (spiritual, psychological.) In other words, the outer worlds, the inner worlds, and the interfaces (communications.)

I managed to get a little of all these into a single magazine piece, though it was the psychological that got the shortest shrift. In some ways it was the hardest to quickly identify as a skill area. People understood that Peace Studies equipping students with geopolitical knowledge is pertinent, and so are various methods of communication, especially if the purpose is mediation or resolving conflict. Readers also understood the search for inner peace through meditation or religious study or even philosophy.

But it was a harder sell to include the relevance of psychological concepts as tools, and their use as skills of peace. Yet to me this is equally essential. We've seen what politics alone can and can't do. Spiritual quests alone don't do much for Iraq. But as an added skill in conceptualizing geopolitical problems and their contributing factors, in judging right and wrong actions, and in communicating, it seems to me psychology---specifically Jungian psychology and its derivatives---offers essential tools.

Jung offers a wealth of tools and insights, but I believe that if people learned only a few, and worked with them, the improvement would be enormous. If every school taught the basics of the conscious and the unconscious, the personal and collective shadow, and the tendencies towards projection, inflation and denial, we would be on the way to a better world. More to the point, to one with a better chance of surviving more or less intact.

But what does this have to do with politics? Let me quote the opening of Jung's essay, originally titled "The Present and the Future," and published in English as "The Undiscovered Self." Jung wrote this in the mid 1950s, responding to the specific history of World War II and the then-current Cold War: the ongoing gathering of the world into two camps ostensibly based on ideology, fueling the nuclear arms race and threatening Armageddon at any moment.

"Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable substratum of the population.

One should not overestimate the thickness of this stratum. It varies from country to country according to national temperament. Also, it is regionally dependent on public education and is subject to the influence of acutely disturbing factors of a political and economic nature. Taking plebiscites as a criterion, one could on an optimistic estimate put its upper limit at about forty percent of the electorate."

"Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic."

Individuals can arise as leaders and participants whose "views and behavior, for all their appearance of normality, are influenced unconsciously by pathological and perverse factors....Their mental state is of a collectively excited group ruled by affective judgments and wish fantasies. In a milieu of this kind they are the adapted ones, and consequently they feel quite at home in it. They know from their own experience the language of these conditions, and they know how to handle them. Their chimerical ideas, sustained by fanatical resentments, appeal to the collective irrationality and find fruitful soil there; they express all those motives and resentments, which lurk in more normal people under the cloak of reason and insight."

Around the same time, Jung gave one of his few lengthy filmed interviews---for a professor in Houston, Texas no less. Probably the most quoted part of it is this:

"Nowadays particularly the world hangs on a thin thread... Nowadays we are not threatened by elemental catastrophes. There is no such thing as an H-Bomb [in nature]; that is all man's doing. We are the great danger. The psyche is the great danger. What if something goes wrong with the psyche? And so it is demonstrated in our day what the power of the psyche is, how important it is to know something about it. But we know nothing about it. Nobody would give credit to the idea that the psychical processes of the ordinary man have any importance whatever."

But even the most cursory glance at this election shows that importance, as well as the legacy of ignoring the psyche. America has never taken the psyche seriously; even its psychology has been dominated by mechanistic behaviorists who insist that designing better drugs is the beginning and end of their job. A still conspicuous victim of this ignorance is the Vietnam veteran.

The first conventional idiocy is that everything we think is under our conscious control is under our conscious control. The second is that the world is divided between good people and bad people, and the good people are thoroughly good, while the bad people are uniformly evil. Not many people would admit that they believe this, but their actions suggest they do.

Most of us recognize, though perhaps we don't admit, that we are prey to compulsions that may arrive with their own delightful rationalizations and excuses attached. And we may even admit that there is good and bad in all of us, though in a very profound way, we can't let ourselves really believe this. It would mean that we aren't totally good, which in our either/or way of thinking, means that I am bad.

When America supported the Vietnam war, all soldiers were good and the enemy people, which included all protestors, were evil. When the majority of Americans got conflicted about the war, and then the U.S. pulled out and our soldiers hadn't won the war, the returning soldiers were abandoned. (I include myself among those who ignored them at first, though for different emotional reasons.) America's shame (for losing, for all the awful killing and the atrocities, for the uselessness of it all) was projected onto the soldiers.

Those soldiers got no help in dealing with their return, and the war was a forbidden subject for decades. The Wall seemed to help heal the veterans and the country, but it wasn't enough, apparently. Because the Republicans found they could exploit (and finance) their residual resentment, and a small group of Vietnam veterans---led by a man who had been Republican political operative for decades, and others who were exposed as bad officers in an historian's biography of John Kerry---not only engaged in character assassination based on demonstrably false charges, but acted out a classic projection in insisting that Kerry had accused all Vietnam veterans of engaging in heinous war crimes, when he had done no such thing.

But our establishment media---from our most august newspapers to the cable news channels of ill repute---doesn't even have the vocabulary to begin to discuss this. And on this politically exploited psychological tangle the election may have turned.

The greatest danger of fundamentalist Christianity isn't that it injects religion into the political dialogue. Between the scientifically-based, purportedly value-free rationalism and moral relativism of the blue state, and the dogmatic, anti-intellectual, intolerant fundamentalism of the red state, lies the psyche as Carl Jung described it. Psyche is one of the Greek words for soul, and Jung believed that religion (which he saw as an attitude and an experience, not a creed, set of dogmas or practices) is as essential to humanity as reason.

The real political danger isn't religion, it is dogmatism, linked with the belief that one group knows the truth and is wholly good, while others believe falsely, and among them are the wholly evil.

Nor is the problem stupidity, or ignorance of what every scientific rationalist knows. It is ignorance of the psyche, and a willful blindness to its workings and its effects, based perhaps on one dogma or another. It is a failure to take responsibility for ourselves, for our own psyche, and to give it over to some church, or some voice on the radio, or some determinist theory.

The Jungian view of the psyche (not exclusive to Jungians certainly) is that there is both good and evil in all of us. That some evil resides in our unconscious, in what Jung called the shadow. Now at least some Christians believe we all have the capacity to sin, that there is sinfulness in our natures, but they believe they can be redeemed of sin either by being born again, or by belonging to the right church of chosen people, or by following their rules of righteousness, or seeking forgiveness in prescribed ways. They don't see how the shadow shapes how they see things.

The Jungian view is that we can't face seeing certain things about ourselves, so we project those exact qualities on others. We think of ourselves as generous, but are afraid to give away too much, but we feel guilty about it. So we project that feeling onto someone else: we criticize them for being selfish. Is that person actually selfish? Maybe, maybe not, but projection invariably exaggerates: you see the bad more powerfully, because in some unconscious way you feel very bad that there might be some bad in you.

Projecting from the shadow is a normal part of our relationships, in marriage, the workplace, the community, and in our dreams. Everyone does it. The crucial difference is in accepting and understanding that this happens, and checking ourselves---asking ourselves the question, am I projecting in this situation? Because the shadow has the energy of the unconscious, most of the time we trick ourselves into believing we are justified. But getting those feelings out of the shadow and into the light of consciousness is a crucial task.

There is no shame in having a shadow. The unconscious is a completely vital part of us. (Jung believed it was the source of our creativity.) But people can't consciously control what they deny or don't understand, and so they continue to be ruled by the shadow aspect of the unconscious.

But what does that have to do with politics? According to Jung, the individual who withdraws his own shadow projection from his neighbor is doing work of immense immediate political and social importance.

Says Jungian Marie-Louise von Franz, "If more people don't try to reflect, and take back their projections, and take the opposites back into themselves, there will be total destruction."

But there is another level in Jungian thought, which pertains to the section of "The Undiscovered Self " quoted above. Jung believed that in addition to each of us possessing a personal unconscious, there is a collective unconscious that we all inherit. And just as we have a personal shadow, there is in any given time and place a collective shadow: a collection of unwanted tendencies too awful to admit. There are times as well when this collective shadow leads to collective projections.

In Nazi Germany, von Franz said, people fell into a collective shadow through their personal shadows---through personal greed perhaps, or feelings of inferiority, they rationalized Hitler and what Germany had to do, to rule inferior people perhaps, or return itself to greatness, take its rightful share of the spoils, and destroy the evil nations thwarting its destiny. Only a perverse and powerful collective shadow could apply an ugly residual racism to a need for identity and national pride and transform it all into a vicious, inhuman and systematic genocidal frenzy. Taken separately, German grievances against other nations had some validity. Taken more moderately, its aspirations might have been constructive. But the energy of an unleashed collective shadow created a monstrous paradigm, which built up over years before reaching a climax with Hitler's rule. What people would normally SEE as monstrous became rationalized as ultimately good, partly because they believed it, and in the atmosphere created by the force of the collective shadow, it felt good.

"In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age and its sufferers, but also its makers," said Jung in 1934. "We make our own epoch."

The power of projection, for instance, can be seen in the fear of terrorism. In rhetoric and behavior, the Christian Fundamentalists and the Islamic Fundamentalists are mirror images; they are each other's shadow. Yet our media would never suggest that the fear of terrorism is predominantly psychological. But how could it be seen as anything else? Most Americans travel daily at speeds exceeding 60 miles an hour, in vehicles that crumple and kill the occupants when they encounter each other at a fraction of that speed. Drivers, riders and pedestrians, we are all in proximate danger on the street, every day. But most people don't sit in a corner petrified at the possibilities of accidents. On the other hand, even if an individual knew that a suicide attack would take place on New York City on a specific day, the chances that any individual would be at that place at that time is minute. And of course, nobody would have that kind of information, so the odds of being in the particular part of the particular city at that moment must rival the odds of getting struck by lightning while sleeping. 9-11 has become such a symbol because there has only been one 9-11. It is the psychological response to the images, the associations, the fantasies and the projections, that gives terrorism its power.

Note that the only places where Americans experienced 9-11 deaths went to Kerry, while those who voted with their fears were among the most remote. Note that millions of people in heterosexual marriages vote their fear of homosexual unions, which have no impact whatever on their marriages, which are likely not trouble-free (for few if any marriages are.) How much easier it is to fulminate over others than deal with conflicting emotions in the morass of one's own life. Or to project objectless anger over one's economic plight on some symbolic evil, some distant and indistinct alien.

This should remind us not only of the importance of knowing the psyche, but of all that we think, feel and do in making change. So some of us may do the world some good by going to Canada and liberating something stifled within, just as others stay and engage in political debate and action. Those who have retreated these past days into music or Star Trek (I've done both, I'm afraid) or art and drama, may also be performing necessary work, or at the very least, necessary play.

Just as this world needs people willing to battle traffic and idiot bosses, it needs people walking the wilderness in solitude. The world needs people connecting with reality and real people to make a better future, and people connecting with fantasy and unreal people, to summon the archetypes for a better future. We probably all need to talk a little more to the animals, plants, rooms, skies, electronic devices and pots and pans that make our time on this planet possible and good. And don't forget to give that shadow a good--but safe---workout (Robert A. Johnson's little book, "Owning Your Own Shadow" is a good place to start.)

The Burning Bush

I had a curious reaction to seeing George W. Bush in his third debate with John Kerry. I felt sorry for him. I'd never seen anyone look so uncomfortable and frightened as he had seemed over the three debates. His famous smirk and defensive sneer, and his dissociated fumbling of answers in the first debate were replaced by overcompensating anger in the second. In the third debate he grinned with the desperation of a trapped animal showing good will so he wouldn't be abused. When he watched Kerry, his eyes were blinking so rapidly I thought he might faint.

I saw a man stripped naked and afraid. I saw a weak person trying to survive until he could once again be sheltered and loved. Putting him up against even a tired John Kerry, with his serious intent, his command of the issues and his full adult humanity, was almost cruel. John Kerry is flawed, as we all are. But John Kerry is a man. George W. Bush is a wounded boy.

We've seen that frightened wounded boy before, sitting in front of children of grade school age, a child's book in his hands, immediately after he'd been told that a second airliner had crashed into the World Trade Center, and it wasn't an accident. He was then, and still is, President of the United States.

The debate was last Wednesday. This past Sunday, an article appeared in the New York Times Magazine that electrified Washington and the blogosphere. It was by Ron Suskind, who authored the best selling book in which former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil chronicles Bush's obsession with Iraq and his willing ignorance of anything that contradicted his preconceived views.

Suskind begins by quoting Bruce Bartlett, a Republican official in both the Reagan and Bush I administrations, speaking about G.W. Bush: "This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts. He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence."

Bush explained his decisions by saying he went on instinct, on intuition. But soon he wasn't explaining his decisions at all. The circle of advisors grew smaller and tighter, and knew not to question. Because Bush is Chief Executive, his faith-based initiatives were no longer a personal quirk. They were holy writ.

The article quotes Christie Todd Whitman, former Secretary of EPA as saying on the day she announced her resignation, "In meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty."

(Suskind notes that Whitman, "her faith in Bush...renewed," now denies saying this, and heads the Bush campaign in New Jersey. Which is evidence why Suskind's initial premise---that a Bush victory would mean a civil war within the Republican party-is wrong.)

The article states that Bush really sees the war against terrorism as Christians against the heathens. It quotes Bush talking to a private dinner of fat cats and suggesting his second term priorities will be faith-based initiatives, drilling for oil in the Alaskan wilderness, mollifying the Saudis, and that he expect to make up to four appointments to the Supreme Court. Suskind writes that Bush's appeal is his sense of certainty, gained from his faith-based decision-making. In perhaps the most widely quoted portion on the blogosphere, Suskind writes:

"And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ''You think he's an idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire reality-based community. "

This final observation has already become such a rallying cry that one well-known left-leaning blogger, Atrios, has added to the title of his blog the legend: Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community.

But the opposition of faith and reality doesn't quite get to what really is going on in Bush, or even in the Bush followers, it seems to me. I see it in different terms. I'll express it in the simplest, shortest possible way: when G.W. Bush believes he is listening to God, he is listening to his own unconscious. Bush is a captive of his own shadow: at least his personal fears and rages, and perhaps by now something of the collective fears and rages.

Because he is ruled by his unconscious, when he looks at the Other he sees mostly his own projections. He can't discriminate in realistic terms, to discern who is an enemy and why. He sees only the evildoers, the projections of his own shadow.

He is a captive because he does not know this is happening. He believes the source of his certainty is elsewhere. He must have certainty, because he is a wounded mess, and fundamentally has a weak ego, which requires constant reassurance and approval. The only place he can go for certainty is his unconscious. It speaks to him. But even if he could understand this, he couldn't face it. He can't face that he could be wrong. Not any more.

Many now enable him, for their own benefit. Without his protectors, flatterers and supporters, he is naked, he reverts to the behavior of a scared child.

Many people who had their doubts about his intelligence were reassured when he named Dick Cheney as his v.p., and then Colin Powell as his Secretary of State. They would tell him what he didn't know. But the essential problem with George W. Bush isn't his lack of knowledge. It is his lack of self-knowledge.

For one thing, it's why he doesn't listen to anyone like Colin Powell when they tell him what he doesn't want to hear.

But his well-known disdain for introspection is not just the personality preference of a clearly extraverted executive. It is essential to his equanimity. He couldn't remain sober, let along function, without the certainty that his projections provide.

All that is bad enough. It means that the most powerful human on the planet is in very meaningful ways a buried child. If he had been President of the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis, none of us would be alive today.

And that may not even be the worst of it.

Also this week, I took another look at the play I wrote two summers ago, which features a fictional meeting between H.G. Wells and C.G. Jung in New Mexico in 1940. This sent me back to reading a biographical account of Jung in the years preceding and during the rise of Nazi Germany and World War II. That in turn sent me to related texts.

The similarities of issues and ideas in 1940 to the present political context have definite echoes in my play, and they would be quite clear to a contemporary audience, if any ever had the opportunity to see the play performed. But after the debates and reading Suskind's article, reading an account of Jung's activities and thoughts in those years by someone I hadn't read before (Barbara Hannah, a student and later long-time friend of Jung) took on new textures of relevance.

Jung was horrified by the rise of Hitler, and it influenced the course of the last series of books he wrote, in the 1940s and 1950s. They all concerned the conjunctions of conscious and unconscious. I don't pretend to understand very much of what little I've read of this work. But Hannah's biographical account makes it clear that Jung believed there were times when the unconscious predominated in society, and one of those times was the 1930s and Hitler's Germany in World War II. Germany was possessed. "It's no use saying you are not at war with the German people, you are," Jung told Hannah, who was English. "They are all possessed like Hitler and absolutely unapproachable."

Hitler, a fundamentally weak person who flew into childish rages, used modern propaganda techniques and other emotional manipulation to convince Germany he had the simple, correct answer, and he was the strong leader who would protect them and make them conquerors again. They would have control over their lives, and take their rightful place in the world. They would avoid injury and humiliation by smashing their enemies before their enemies could attack them.

Now suppose you were reading or seeing a fiction, in which an American President, in office by virtue of a Supreme Court decision that stopped a vote recount and endorsed his victory by a handful of votes out of millions, took the nation to war against a smaller country that hadn't attacked the U.S. or even a single U.S. citizen. Suppose that later, when the U.S. armed forces are bogged down in that country, and violence and terrorism are increasing there, it is discovered that every single pretext this President gave for going to war has turned out to be not true. Further, there is informed suspicion that much of the evidence was known to be false.

Still, this President announced that he would attack any nation he deemed a danger, without provocation and more or less without evidence. Whenever anyone within his administration or even near it questioned his premises, strategy or public relations imagery, his minions would vilify them without scruple, and attempt to destroy them utterly by any means possible, including lies.

Suppose this war continues to go badly, at the same time as enormous deficits are accumulating, and the economic well-being of the country is in question. There are grave questions about the continued vulnerability of the country to terrorism, while some measures taken to prevent terrorism have turned out to be inept intrusions, randomly violating civil liberties and punishing innocent citizens without system of redress or justice.

Suppose as well that most citizens are economically worse off, and there is widespread dissatisfaction with the system of medical care, which seems on the verge of collapse. Public education is unequal, and mostly very bad; Americans are becoming the worst-educated, least-healthy citizens in the industrialized West. Then gasoline prices go through the roof, signaling a grave energy crisis in the near future. At the same time, a shortage of flu vaccine just as the flu season starts, not only threatens the health of vulnerable people, but suggests the public health system is itself highly vulnerable, if not in shambles.

Suppose corporate greed is unchecked and is rapidly being consolidated in a few hands. Financial institutions practice usury with impunity. The U.S. government improperly imprisons both foreigners and citizens for years, and engages in torture and abuse in Iraqi prisons and Guantanamo prison. America, once admired throughout the world, became feared and hated by most of the world, all in the course of two or three years. And hovering above all of this, is an atmosphere inexorably heating, threatening all life on the planet, but which this President ignores, while he denies that he is ignoring it.

Confronted with all this, you would be justified in saying this plot is over the top. Any one of these things in the past would have been sufficient to bring down a presidency. Yet the president in question is apparently leading in the polls, and has at least an even chance---some say a likelihood---of being returned to office.

How can this be? Some are now looking to the faith-based versus reality-based model. I believe that's too simple, and it is not entirely accurate. Evangelical Christianity is to Bush what German nationalism was to Hitler. It's the form taken by the appeal to the collective shadow, the national unconscious.

The unconscious is itself a reality. It is part of all of us. In many ways it nourishes us, and is the source of much knowledge. But consciousness is crucial, to be aware of what comes from the unconscious, to judge and discriminate, to decide. To tap the unconscious is vital. To be dominated by the unconscious, to be unconscious, is fatal.

Why might it be erupting now? The ecology of ignorance, and its constituent parts (the contemporary forms of "modern propaganda"), is a contributing factor. My intuition, my instincts tell me there is also a class component. Middle class Americans are uncertain about their status. Many came from (and are headed back to) the lower middle class or working class; in the recent past they had money, but they weren't sure they had class. Now they don't have money but they still have some stuff, and the uncertainty is joined by whiffs of fear only symbolized by the bogie man called terrorism. Bush has wounds like theirs, the lack of self-knowledge like theirs, (though probably worse) but his inferiority feelings are linked to a legacy of superiority from his very certain ruling class upbringing. They feel his pain. But they see his certainty. Their inferiority needs his sense of superiority, and the confidence he gets from his projections, from his shadow in the unconscious.

Jung took a longer view, analyzing a dynamic of opposites and how they turn into one another over eons-as, for example, "the dilemma of Christ and anti-Christ." The reversal of dominants, called enantioendromia, was a tendency Jung explored in his last books.

Those familiar with the Biblical Apocalypse may note that the anti-Christ appears to be the Second Coming. Perhaps those of a strictly reality-based rationality cannot admit the possibilities of eras of evil erupting and possessing entire peoples. Fortunately, if that is indeed what happened in the 1940s, there were nations strong enough to stand up to Hitler and his Germany, and their allies, and defeat them. Hitler appeared to be a tower of strength and resolve. But like most bullies, he was actually a coward. Perhaps even a wounded child. Nevertheless, much of Germany followed him. And his followers crushed anyone who dared to oppose them.

The President of Projection

This column---mmm, blog I mean--- usually defers politics to the gonzo literati at American Samizat these days, but in the process of making myself available for a backstage role as I usually do at presidential campaign time, I find myself thrust a bit forward, though on a very small stage. Partly because John Kerry's surge in the Democratic pre-nominating contests has been so swift and so complete, he's has no organization in this isolated corner of California. So when I showed for a John Kerry meet-up, I became part of a small core group, and on two occasions (one past, one coming up) the only one available and foolhardy enough to speak for the candidate in public.

Today I found myself on a platform with an actual presidential candidate, though he was a local but prominent candidate for the Green Party nomination. A Democrat like Kerry is more likely to get attacked from the left than the right in this neck of the woods (unless such a candidate actually went into the woods where logging was occurring.) So my remarks and rejoinders took a different trajectory than they normally would elsewhere, especially in this election year. My central argument hasn't changed much since 2000, actually: that I believe in progressive causes, long-term thinking, new ideas, demonstrations and other non-violent actions to advocate and to keep officeholders accountable, and I love the openness and the give and take of the Primary process, but when it comes election time, I become a member of the hiring committee looking at two resumes. One of these two is going to get the job of President. More often than not, I've found the Democratic candidate to represent my beliefs sufficiently, and I've trusted that candidate to be a decent President, while I've found the Republican candidate to be a mortal threat to civilization and (as the Klingons would say) without honor. As they have so often turned out to be, I might add.

This year is different only in the number of candidates in the primaries I could have cheerfully supported (even apart from their supreme virtue in not being G.W. Bush) and the fact that the one of them who is going to be the nominee, John Kerry, is so utterly right for the moment. So my support is definitely not "lesser-of-two-evilism" (as the Green candidate dubbed it.) Kerry's presidency could transform this country at the moment it needs it the most, and I frankly am astonished at our good luck so far.

But the point of this column (and by that of course I mean blog) is not to praise John Kerry or recapitulate my remarks of today (nor rehearse my remarks for next Sunday's county Democratic convention) but to offer a few meandering thoughts about how people seem to view the presidency, and how that might influence their voting behavior.


It's said that George Washington fled the presidency because he was afraid people were going to try to make him king. The pomp and circumstance of royalty is powerful even in a democracy (powerful enough that our chief teenage rite of passage is the prom, and we insist on royal treatment for our major transitions of marriage and funeral.) But there is also the deep history of kings as mystical figures. The king as personification of the nation is only part of it. Their blood gives them the divine right to rule because kings had direct connection to God, the first proof of which was that the crops grew. If they didn't, the king was killed. Later that practice was amended so the king could substitute a fool, a kind of scapegoat, in his place for the ritual sacrifice.

Later the one King became identified with the one God. And so as Alan Watts said, "In the United States we are in a serious social and political conflict because we think we ought to be living in a republic when the great majority of citizens believe the universe is a monarchy."

Today pomp and circumstance has been augmented by celebrity, and the mystical identification enhanced by the enormous power the president of the U.S. represents. So mix all this together and you've got a powerful if bewildering and contradictory set of expectations, on all kinds of levels.

I began to see all this is a particular way during the first days of the Clinton administration. Partly that had to do with it being Clinton, a Democrat who came along not a moment too soon after 12 years of Republican destruction; and especially that he was almost exactly my age (In fact, I am six weeks older) and roughly the age of my contemporaries. And partly it had to do with some new conceptual tools I acquired or let's say adapted from C.G. Jung, at about the same time.

That Clinton was our age made identifying with him to some degree pretty natural. It was interesting to note how differently it played out. I think it made all of us reevaluate our lives, and not too cheerfully, since he was President and we weren't. But it really bothered some men my age, including some far more successful than I. Some of them realized it, but I think a lot did not. They were hostile to Clinton without quite knowing why. But if you listened to them, you knew why, basically.

This comparison kind of identification is more broadly a kind of projection, which is one of those conceptual tools. Many people projected their expectations onto Clinton, not because he was our age but because he was our President. He was supposed to represent and fulfill our hopes and dreams, in every way, all the time. I began noticing it so much that I began calling him the President of Projection.

It seems true of any president. But why? Another tool came in handy to answer that. This part may be a bit offensive, though (if you aren't offended already.) I've been something of an amateur political junkie for many years. But I know that most people don't follow politics or statecraft, or what got to be called the "policy wonk" stuff (also in the Clinton years.) (In previous years we just called it "government" or "issues.") Yet everyone has opinions, and if they don't, they'll make one up when asked by an acquaintance or a pollster.

Jung's theory of functions says we each have predominant ways of perceiving things. Besides being more extraverted or more introverted, we primarily favor our thinking, feeling (or evaluating), sensation or intuition. During our lives we develop that function to be quite sophisticated and discriminating. Often we develop a second and sometimes a third function. But almost never the fourth. And that "inferior" function becomes our Achilles heel when it finally becomes activated, because we react very strongly, and even with great certainty, yet our perceptions aren't very sophisticated and we are prone to make huge errors. The classic example is the plot of "The Blue Angel." The professor (the thinking man) who falls in love with a beautiful woman (through his sensations) and makes a complete fool of himself, and destroys his life. Thanks to his powerful sensations, he can't think straight. He couldn't have been fooled by a weak argument, but he couldn't tell he was being used by a woman he felt was the love of his life. Another example is Daisy Buchanan's husband in The Great Gatsby, a former athlete, apparently a sensation type but definitely not a thinker, who talks enthusiastically about a book that "scientifically proves" the white race is superior. He is taken in through his inferior function of thinking.

How I applied this to politics is perhaps a little roundabout (since it doesn't apply to the functions directly) but it makes sense to me. The basic insight that does apply is that we're apt to get hooked and suddenly most strongly about subjects we aren't used to dealing with, that we aren't sophisticated about.

People feel very strongly, but their feelings lead them to indiscriminate conclusions, because they haven't developed their powers of perceiving the reality of political situations. Now that doesn't mean people who don't read political journals are therefore going to be wrong about a candidate or an issue. Nor does it mean that people who follow every Senate vote or blip in the polls are capable of seeing the forest for the trees. It just explains to me how people can have such strong feelings about things they admittedly don't know much about. It's a combination of this inferior function idea, and the idea of projection. The President is supposed to be perfect, and when he's not, we're devastated.

This possibly accounts for some of the predisposition of people to have the same knee-jerk reactions when their "hot buttons" are pushed. Republicans have made a living on this for over 20 years, by labeling every Democrat they don't like as liberal soft on crime perpetrators of class warfare, who hate America, don't share "our" values, and will leave America defenseless. Not to mention bleeding heart baby killers who won't let kids pray. Who want to raise your taxes (even though they say they just want to put back the taxes on the wealthy Bush took away.)

On the other side, at primary time some left of center voters in Democratic primaries have been ready to turn up their noses at anyone who doesn't emphasize the exact issue they care about the most, or who don't talk like Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader on the stump. I think it's possible to support a candidate you don't agree with 100%, and even if you believe Chomsky and Nader, maybe a candidate who has been a Senator or Governor or both for a few decades and has talked to professional pols, scholars and scientists, and voters from every walk of life and leaders from other nations and cultures, might know a thing or two they don't.

Then of course sometimes people react to knowing they don't know much about what's going on by throwing up their hands and saying I guess those people know what they're doing. Which can be even worse. But the problem that Democrats usually face at primary time is the nitpicking demand for perfection, and the projection. Picking a candidate is not a bloodless process, of course. It requires some sort of emotional commitment, bond, even identification. But when it becomes unconscious projection, it can become dangerous.

But the early Clinton years also evoked another response from some of my contemporaries. Because they had similar jobs by then---in some sort of executive capacity, say, perhaps even in government, though on a different level and different scale---they understood that just like them, the President had 24 hours in a day, at least some of which had to be devoted to sleep, rest and family. He could not do things by magic. Like them, he had to deal with impossible demands, deadlines, subordinates who screwed up, intrigues, betrayals, bureaucratic bungling, incompetence, vicious rivalries, and ordinary human problems. Not to mention competing priorities, mixed messages, competing and conflicting interests, head colds, and muscle strains from exercising because of sudden weight gain. In other words, they were more forgiving, and less liable to project king-like expectations, because they identified with what they imagined was a similar situation, though worse (and of course in some ways, a lot better.)

We don't have to study the Congressional Record to develop some sophistication in judging our leaders. We're going to hear a lot in the coming campaign about this Kerry vote or that Kerry vote in the Senate, and out of context some of them are going to sound bad. Most will be distortions and lies, but let's say some aren't: Could they be seen as mistakes? Or will people judge them out of proportion, as huge failings? And will they judge proportionately to the enormity of taking a nation to war on false pretenses, or decimating the lives of millions to make some rich people richer? I guess we'll find out. My own sense is that this country may be turning a corner on a lot of nonsense it used to swallow, at the same time that projection is not so severe to be blinding.

I don't know if George Bush is evil or a bad man, and I don't care. I care if he uses evil means to deceive the public. I care if he's wrong. I care if the reigning Republicans are so cynical that they have utter contempt for the voters, which I believe they do. But I'm not looking to marry any of them anyway. I'm looking to hire a President to lead this country in the right direction, and do some things that badly need to be done, or there won't be much of a future for Democrats or (most) Republicans, and especially if we're including the climate crisis, for Christians, French, bears, dogs and cats, and possibly wildflowers.

This War

In 1954 or so, Carl Jung was asked if he thought there would be nuclear holocaust. His reply: "I think it depends on how many people can stand the tension of the opposites in themselves."

What we are seeing is war. The consequences of releasing the dogs of war. We are seeing the havoc.

What we are seeing is all wars. The state of the art violence, death, heroism, blunders, unforeseen consequences, adaptations, lies, crimes,hysteria, back-biting, glorifying, vilifying, relentless unfolding of havoc. People become their group, because they are attacked and because they are attacking. Most do what they must do, to stay alive, which at times is the same as winning, the same as killing, and at other times and places is the same as escaping, surrendering. Many do what they must do as captives of their allegiance in a particular situation, which is to kill and die, to glorify and vilify. There are always those seeking personal advantage from death-dealing and dying, while in lofty safety elsewhere.

War evokes love and unleashes hate. It dictates behaviors that generate hate and liberate love. War is not necessary but when we will not understand ourselves, war will happen to provide us with object lessons. As this war began, it seemed to make sense that the best chronicles of World War II were the works of absurdity, of black humor or gallows humor: Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five. But they were written two decades after the war. The absurdities of the moment are much too grim. They are cause for shock and awe.

War unleashes and liberates everything inside us, especially from the unconscious. We act with emotional certainty that appears even to us to be rational deliberation, and react with rage, fear and impulse, whether fighting the war, fighting against the war, reporting the war, running the war. We are immersed in events. The events matter, but they will control us until we understand ourselves.

Everything soon becomes the good guys against the evil ones. And so at the moment every war begins, it is lost. It doesn't have to be that way, even as a consequence of defending against the evil that men do. But until we can understand that this tension exists, of the opposites within ourselves, every war will do what every war has done, which is to prepare the ground for the next war.

Living with this tension is essential. Acknowledging it is basic to taking effective action. Sometimes taking a step back is to take a step forward. In our world taking a step back is to look more deeply in the mirror.