Jimmy Carter and Unconscious Hate

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.

Comments

[R. Sherman]

I'm not sure I would conclude a hidden antisemitism on Carter's part, although there is evidence to support that proposition. I nevertheless agree with the conclusion that he is an angry, bitter person. I believe his loss to Ronald Reagan eats at him daily. He cannot fathom that the American people refused to share his vision for the country. This is evidenced in his continual interference in international politics to a degree not seen before. Recall his diddling in North Korea which undermined the Clinton Administration's attempts to impede that country's search for nuclear weapons. It is as if he needs to show us that he is "presidential," a somebody, and therefore, we will suddenly apologize for voting him out of office.

Cheers.

[GaryK]

Every once in a while over the last few years I have stumbled upon a comment by someone who worked for Jimmy Carter in which the ex-employee related how mean and vindictive Carter was up close and personal.

Carter is also somewhat of a fabulist. I once had the task of checking on Carter’s credentials as, he pronounced it, a “nukeyer physicist” which he was saying was one of his qualifications. What I found through my research was that as a Navy officer participating in the commissioning of a nuclear submarine, Carter had taken a course or two in elementary nuclear physics at a university to prepare him for his duties; hardly the years-long and difficult study and research I think of when I hear that someone has qualified to be a “nukeyer physicist”.

[GaryK]

Every once in a while over the last few years I have stumbled upon a comment by someone who worked for Jimmy Carter in which the ex-employee related how mean and vindictive Carter was up close and personal.

Carter is also somewhat of a fabulist. I once had the task of checking on Carter’s credentials as, he pronounced it, a “nukeyer physicist” which he was saying was one of his qualifications. What I found through my research was that as a Navy officer participating in the commissioning of a nuclear submarine, Carter had taken a course or two in elementary nuclear physics at a university to prepare him for his duties; hardly the years-long and difficult study and research I think of when I hear that someone has qualified to be a “nukeyer physicist”.

[David Scott]

The worst prsident and now the worst ex-president. He should be totally dismissed as irelevant!

[Gagdad Bob]

Carter is the first man to be unqualified to be ex-president.

[RJ]

Jimmy Carter does not seem that difficult to understand. If you look at the former Senator Mitchell you just might see his long lost brother even though you just popped open a can of "Billy Beer" while pondering how prosperous peanut farming can be. Two naval ships will most certainly "scare the hell" out of any sailor: an aircraft carrier and the submarine! The sub is so sneaky in its quest to kill.

Jimmy is a man looking for his soul, thinking he has a good soul...somewhere, if only he could find it!

I don't like the man, never have nor ever have I trusted his judgment.

[David M]

The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the - Web Reconnaissance for 04/11/2008 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...so check back often.

[GaryK]

Correcting my post above, Carter's claim was to be a "nuclear engineer" not a "nuclear physicist," but, I think my point still holds.

[DuMaurier-Smith]

Carter can't accept his failure as President. Some of that is understandable: he was a hick peanut farmer from the South in the view of the Eastern bloc power establishment, and they'd sharpened their knives in anticipation. He could have joined a long line of rustic rubes, and had the establishment's billfolds in his coat and gone before they knew it. But he was in fact a inept rustic rube and died a death of a thousand cuts while in office. Feeling victimized, he's seeking redemption, stumbling in whatever contrarian direction he thinks grace may be found

[MaxedOutMama]

I think Jimmy Carter's extremely problematic relationship with Israel is based on guilt and projection, made worse perhaps by the initial stages of senility.

Look, this man grew up in the segregated south and lived through the worst of its dismantling as well as the apex of Jim Crow. He's got to be carrying a load of guilt. I also think he is carrying a load of resentment about being the worst president of modern times, at least. Poor Carter wasn't good at almost anything as president. The misery experienced in rural ag GA was so deep that most Georgians still remember his presidency with appalled horror. When he came home it was not to cheering crowds.

The squawking about apartheid and so forth emerges from seeing in Israel what really happened in Georgia, and has got to be fueled by the approbation of the extreme left, which is the one place he will find whole-souled admiration.

The problem is that the blacks of Georgia are utterly different from the Palestinians, so his misapplied guilt has turned into a campaign of which the logical outcome is wholesale destruction of Israelis. But as I say, Jimmy wasn't good at anything while president. Remember, this is the man that wandered through Dafur and came out saying that the whole thing is exaggerated.

I feel tremendously sorry for him, because he is clearly so wrapped up in his own destructive psyche. One thing watching Jimmy's recent career has taught me - there's a reason the Catholic church puts penitents under the care of a confessor and under obedience! The damage that this much guilt can cause is immense when it is misdirected. Jimmy would be better off with a confessor and in a monastery, or making stages of the Cross, or under the care of a really good psychiatrist. He tries - give him that. His efforts with Habitat for Humanity show his sincerity. But he's a disaster when he's left loose to wander in a world in which his own inner demons seem to be screaming back to him from the world stage.

[Bill]

I've had the "pleasure" of having to work for an embittered retiree, who's last gasp for glory ended in a major set of charlie foxtrots of his own making. He was given a gold watch, thanked for years of what was often not-*too*-bad-service (as seen by those who didn't directly work with him) and shown the door. Unfortunately his parachute gave him influence over those who followed and he seemed to get serious jollies meddling in their new affairs, often involving cleaning up after his endgame or starting new to create a nondysfunctional work environment, and in the case of his immediate successor, starting fresh from scratch to "complete" what was supposed to be his crowning triumph.

And of course, he bears striking resemblence to Carter.