Manifest behavior is always the summation of competing wishes and inhibitions, most of which are unconscious. When someone makes a great show of his personal piety yet his manifest behavior is often damaging to others, it is worth wondering if he is expressing forbidden unconscious wishes in ways that are disguised and acceptable to himself. Jimmy Carter, our nation's worst ex-President, offers an excellent case in point.
Carter describes himself as a friend of Israel, only interested in Peace in the Middle East and the world. Yet he is now planning to meet with Khaled Meshal, one of the leaders of Hamas, an agent of genocide, in Damascus, the capital of a terror supporting and enabling state which oppresses its own people in ways that the left's fantasies of the Bush administration's tortures cannot even approach.
While many believe, and he grants copious evidence to support the belief, that Jimmy Carter is in part motivated by anti-Semitism, let us take him at his word that he is not an anti-Semite and is in fact motivated solely by a desire for peace and love. What are the implications of such a position?
First of all, it is an impossibility. The Pope correctly beatifies those few individuals who live lives of such virtue and selflessness that we can truly believe they are containers of minimal stores of hate. For the rest of us merely human, our reptilian brains (midbrian and hindbrain) are filled with aggression, hate, lust, rage, and all manner of emotions unacceptable to civilized men and women. As I have pointed out before, the input descending from the most recent parts of the brain, the neocortex, is predominantly inhibitory on the lower strata of roiling emotions. Much of the chore of remaining civilized has to do with modulating the expression of those emotions and the behaviors that they would motivate.
In Psychoanalytic terms, our defenses protect us (and others) not only from unacceptable ideas, but from the impulses that are ubiquitous and often insistent. We all find ways to express our unconscious wishes and feelings, but hopefully primarily do so in measured and acceptable ways.
The highest form of defense against such unacceptable wishes is through sublimation, ie finding a healthy pathway for gratification. As an example, all human beings contain sadistic impulses; most of us find ways to tame such impulses and direct them into productive pursuits.
The aggressive component can be channeled into the drive to be a successful athlete, lawyer, or businessman. The classic example in Medicine is the surgeon who channels his sadistic wishes to hurt people into the more acceptable form of cutting them open in order to cure their ailments.
When one, instead of recognizing and metabolizing his hatreds and aggressive drives, denies their existence, they continue to live on in the unconscious, empowered by the denial. The expression of such denied aggression can be seen in the Preacher who is "holier than thou" and takes great pleasure in condemning the sinner to eternal torment. Some will happily supply details of the unimaginable torments (easily imagined by the Preacher) of those unfortunate consigned to the Preacher's vision of Hell.
Another way of expressing such unacceptable impulses is via a third party. There are people who are particularly adept at stirring up others to rage. Radical Islamists are particularly talented in stirring up their followers into manic rage against those who they believe have threatened their religion. The Imams, of course, are men of peace representing the religion of peace, yet their followers commit egregious acts of violence and mayhem in their name. It requires learned academics and media people operating above their level of comprehension to explain how violence actually equates to peacefulness.
Jimmy Carter is the Godfather of the modern leftist hater. He presents a pious mien, untroubled by rage or hate. He truly sees himself as a man of peace. Yet Hamas is openly and unapologetically genocidal. Jimmy Carter hates through others maintaining deniability of his own monstrous impulses. His evil is worse than the banality Hannah Arendt described because he should know better. The compartmentalization required to embrace the murderers of innocents while proclaiming their moderation is breath taking yet never seems to give pause to our ex-President. Jimmy Carter is a hate filled and bitter man and every effort he makes seem to support monsters. It is a mystery only to him.
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