The seeds of our politics

My political opinions should be acceptable to everyone, because I dislike all politicians, parties and ideologies equally: Hillary, Trump, Bernie, democrats, liberals, socialists, conservatives, republicans, alt-rightists, libertarians. To me they are all wrongheaded because they are systems, and their believers, that grew from individuals’ childhood psychology – from feelings – which can never accurately translate or be “projected” into universal policy. The political world today is an acting out of this interior logic: “I hurt, so the entire world must pay and be prevented from ever hurting me again.” All ideologies, in their bare essence, follow that logic. Differences are due only to the nature of the hurt and one’s defenses against it.

A liberal may be someone who, early on, suffered powerful, controlling people such as parents or teachers or bullies. He may have been inculcated to a bent-over self-esteem that says we are our “brothers’ keeper.” In his adult life, he will value the poor by despising the wealthy and powerful.

A conservative or libertarian may have been an ego-less and falsely loved child who manufactured self-esteem from a creed of alienation, individuality, ultimate autonomy (“I own my life, and therefore all the property and goods that come from my individual effort”). Out of touch with his own heart, he will not see, or want to see, the heart in others.

While it is easy to object to my idea that all who believe a dogma or have joined a political club are injured “inner children,” this is more apparent if we look at the defense mechanism of dissociation. Dissociation is the burying or stifling (repression or suppression) of our pain – practically the Operations Manual of childhood. We lose touch with our Self. In that lost place, we become more suggestible, impressionable, to where a network of disparate notions (capitalism and socialism sleep together in both major parties) or agendas can be “believed” as if they were a singular principle. Secondly, children’s self-suppression is the incubator of global attitudes that, again, gravitate to emotional ideologies. Who, after a moment’s awareness, can’t see that our lofty political systems are feeling systems – ‘They need, you must provide, I deserve, they don’t deserve, we demand, get off my lawn, get a job, distribute your wealth or we’ll do it for you’?

We are children who grow up to carve our pain and our attitudes in granite and in our politics. Maybe because of this deep flaw, we should turn back, like children, to the golden rule.