Yesterday, in the New York Times Sunday magazine, Mark Edmundson wrote an interesting article on Freud and the Fundamentalist Urge. The article does a decent job of reviewing some of Freud's ideas on the attraction for absolutism that came to its greatest fruition in Nazi Germany's worship of Adolph Hitler. When the tension between the demands of reality, the urges from the instincts (Id) and the prohibitions from the Superego become unmanageable (for the Ego), there is often an urge to find a simple resolution and the "Great Leader" offers it:
Where the individual superego is inconsistent and often inaccessible because it is unconscious, the collective superego, the leader, is clear and absolute in his values. By promulgating one code — one fundamental way of being — he wipes away the differences between different people, with different codes and different values, which are a source of anxiety to the psyche. Now we all love the fatherland, believe in the folk, blame the Jews, have a grand imperial destiny. The tyrant is also, in his way, permissive. Where the original superego has prohibited violence and theft and destruction, the new superego, the leader, allows for it, albeit under prescribed circumstances. Freud's major insistence as a theorist of group behavior is on the centrality of the leader and the dynamics of his relation to the group.
The article is well worth reading in its entirety. However, the way in which I came to the article is also of interest. One of my oldest and dearest friends, who thinks I have gone to the "Dark Side", suggested in an e-mail that I read the article.
I know you don't read it much anymore, but there was an article in this week's NYT Magazine that I found interesting. The writer, Mark Edmundson uses Freud's theories to explain societies fascination with totalitarianism and dictators. I wonder if he has hit upon why people find it so easy to support George Bush and why the Right's tactics have been so successful to this point.
Dr. Sanity commented on those who claim that we are moving toward a theocracy and coined the term Christianity Derangement Syndrome (a play on the well described Bush Derangement Syndrome):
So, as a result of this interesting disorder, here we are in a war with Islamic fundamentalism, and many on the left seem to think that the U.S. is at risk in having a Christian theocracy imposed and that the Bushitler is more dangerous than Bin Laden.
During the 2004 Presidential campaign, one of my friends was so pre-occupied by this issue, she literally could not understand why I would vote for Bush, since it was clear to her that he intended to usher in a religious state.
Since that time, I can't help but have noticed that all the women of my acquaintance are now wearing nun habits; that holy communion is being forced down the throats of unrepentant leftists; and that there has been a dramatic decline in sexually explicit material everywhere as the purveyors of same have been rounded up and summarily executed by the religious police.
Why, last week I (a professed, unrepentant agnostic) was forced to enter a church to obtain sustenance (they were having a bake sale).
You may be asking youself, "What in heaven's name are these people so frightened of?" How do we make sense of symptoms of paranoia so bizarre? So....displaced....from the real threat?
In the same vein, those who believe with all the force of their emotions that we are in imminent danger of descending into fascism, ushered in by George Bush, have minimal evidence to support their fears. Thus far, the only threats to free speech are coming from the Islamists and from those who cower before them while erecting scaffolds of rationalization to excuse and explain their cowardice as principled heroism. No leftists or Muslims, or any other victim group, is currently being rounded up and shipped to work camps or death camps; a modest number of enemy combatants have been held in Guantanamo and their status has been reviewed and continues to be under review by the courts. A small number of people in this country have had their electronic communications intercepted without a warrant because the other end of the conversation belonged to a suspected member of a terrorist organization outside of this country. This is a very long way from fascism.
Jeff Jacoby has an interesting take on Totalitarian chic, and contrasts the ease with which we recognize the evil of Hitler while somehow managing to minimize the horrors that Stalin, Mao, and Castro et al have brought us. He asks some uncomfortable questions:
What explains such "communist chic?" How can people who would never dream of drinking in a pub called Gestapo cheerfully hang out at the KGB Bar? If the swastika is an undisputed symbol of unspeakable evil, can the hammer-and-sickle and other emblems of communism be anything less?
Between 1933 and 1945, Adolf Hitler's Nazis slaughtered some 21 million people, but the communist nightmare has lasted far longer and its death toll is far, far higher. Since 1917, communist regimes have sent more than 100 million victims to their graves — and in places like North Korea, the deaths continue to this day. The historian R.J. Rummel, an expert on genocide and government mass murder, estimates that the Soviet Union alone annihilated nearly 62 million people: "Old and young, healthy and sick, men and women, even infants and the infirm, were killed in cold blood. They were not combatants in civil war or rebellions; they were not criminals. Indeed, nearly all were guilty of . . . nothing."
Of his various explanations, I agree that the most satisfying is the simple matter of "out of sight, out of mind":
But perhaps the most compelling explanation is the simplest: visibility. Ever since the end of World War II, when photographers entered the death camps and recorded what they found, the world has had indelible images of the Nazi crimes. But no army ever liberated the Soviet Gulag or halted the Maoist massacres. If there are photos or films of those atrocities, few of us have ever seen them. The victims of communism have tended to be invisible — and suffering that isn't seen is suffering most people don't think about.
"Communist chic?" The blood of 100 million victims cries out from the ground. To wear the symbols of their killers is no fashion statement, but the ultimate in bad taste.
Perhaps this also helps explain how so many people can express greater fears of George W. Bush than of Osama bin Laden. Our societal sensory organs, primarily the reporters and editors of the MSM, have been very careful to avoid exposing our sensitive perceptions to the horrors of the Islamic fascists. They correctly noted, in their lust to show every possible frame from the abu Graib evening of abuse, that visual images evoke powerful emotional reactions and therefore it was necessary to show the pictures from the abu Graib story, while at the same time, visual images evoke powerful emotional reactions and therefore it was necessary to NOT show pictures of the Danish cartoons, not to mention true atrocities like the beheading of Nicolas Berg.
Mark Edmundson makes some excellent points. Societies that cannot tolerate internal conflict will have a tendency to look for a totalitarian leader to offer a simple and clear resolution of the inner conflict. This almost always includes finding an enemy to demonize (often the Jews) and the legitimization of violence toward the designated enemy.
For Freud, we might infer, a healthy body politic is one that allows for a good deal of continuing tension. A healthy polis is one that it doesn't always feel good to be a part of. There's too much argument, controversy, difference. But in that difference, annoying and difficult as it may be, lies the community's well-being. When a relatively free nation is threatened by terrorists with totalitarian goals, as ours is now, there is, of course, an urge to come together and to fight back by any means necessary. But the danger is that in fighting back we will become just as fierce, monolithic and, in the worst sense, as unified as our foes. We will seek our own great man; we will be blind to his foibles; we will stop questioning, stop arguing. When that happens, a war of fundamentalisms has begun, and of that war there can be no victor.
Perhaps in his next article Edmundson can look for evidence that our country is stifling dissent and becoming "just as fierce, monolithic and, in the worst sense, as unified as our foes".
And here is a bit of free advice for the MSM; if they don't want to fall even further behind the curve, they might notice that the war in Iraq has been won. Old Spook does the honors:
I don't know if champagne is chilling somewhere in the Pentagon, but perhaps it should be. While the media was reporting an "increase" in U.S. combat deaths over the weekend, there were continuing signs that the insurgency is losing its steam, and that terrorist ring-leader Musab al-Zarqawi's days are numbered.
Very soon Iraq will have a government in place composed of Iraqis; in the fall we will have an election in which the Democrats could conceivably capture one or both houses of Congress from the disorganized, disingenuous, and dispirited Republicans, and in two years, no matter what happens in November of 2008, George W. Bush will no longer be President: Some theocracy! Some fascist state!
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