Our political landscape is one psyche

“A recent study shows that children who are raised to have strong beliefs are also more likely to rebel against those views as they age.” The Atlantic, May 1, 2014*

Initial hypothesis

Visiting the cosmic plane for a moment, doesn’t it seem that in any sizable, non-homogeneous group of strangers – municipal meetings, county referenda, state and national elections – there is typically a broadly even divide between adherents of the two main political-moral ideologies, Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal? Big issues and elections often come down to close or very close counts. Eyed from a neutral or naïve stance, shouldn’t this seem awfully strange? Shouldn’t we expect, tabula rasa, one cause or candidate to be clearly better than the opposite one? I think it’s a matter worthy of inquiry that in a country of millions, ardor will be nearly equally proportioned between the diametrical philosophies of: individual and the masses, property rights and redistribution, keeping and giving, self-aggrandizement and egalitarianism, proud and humble.

If this observation has even the scantest substance, then I believe we are looking at a phenomenon the cause of which must be subterranean and recondite. This would be the psychology of family dynamics and the individuals within them. It seems necessary that something in the atmosphere of homes, the chemistry of parents’ benign and toxic influence and force, produces either clear perception or rebellion that in the aggregate manifests as feeling differences about self, others, life and world. Political ideologies are at root emotional, attitudinal, ego-defending systems. They begin in childhood, in feelings of love, injustice, anger, revenge that are later justified and codified. Part of the complexity is that either pole of feeling can and does feed either ideological position.

The answer can’t be as formulaic as, for example, brutal, unloving Republican fathers producing needy, humanitarian sons; or cold, hypocritical liberal parents producing egoistic, moralistic conservative children. Obviously, many offspring do not depart from the family dogma. That might explain one-half of the entrenchment of the two poles, but couldn’t explain the original sources of the “equal difference” I’m suggesting. I believe at its core structure is an energy in the nature of traditional parenting that leads to opposition, to opposites, including the political but extending beyond it to the psychological and existential. A liberal may have a big heart for the less fortunate, but actually may be motivated by hatred for the rich and successful. A conservative may have contempt for the weak, but could simply be someone who values his own autonomy and freedom. There must, then, be a more fundamental energy: a thesis leading to antithesis. What it is that brings half the country to vote for a Narcissist bigot, and the other half not to?

Improved hypothesis

I came to think that the conflict we all accept, liberal versus conservative, is fundamentally illusory, because the feeling source beneath it is an oceanic unity. We respond to lifeboat situations** created by society’s felt need for governance. In this contrivance, people are not free to be social or insular, to help or refuse to help others according to their lights, their sense of compassion. Instead, we buy in to institutions that concretize mutual indebtedness and forced brotherhood: We cannot be libertarian. Our choices are of degree: pay some taxes or many, not none. Support public or private schools, but require children to be educated. Champion decriminalization of certain drugs but not others, and certainly not all. Defend police methods or abhor them, but you may not purchase your own police force, as David Friedman, Milton Friedman’s radical libertarian son, proposed. On the battlefield of Hobson’s choices, our feelings are muddled and can morph according to our internal states and our impressionability. A given entrepreneur is a hero, but I nevertheless dislike “capitalism.” Millions of people breathe in and admire Obama, breathe out and admire Trump. America is interventionism, or is it isolationism? I, oddly enough, am “political fluid,” where “don’t tread on me” feelings merge harmoniously and absurdly with respect for the social compact. Many people change political parties.

Settled hypothesis
The two hypotheses have given way to a final one: The core of each person is ambivalent, literally containing two opposites. We need to bond, but must be a self. We reach out for love, but recede into ourselves because that critical need can never be met in its deepest place. We need engulfment in a mother, but then we smother. We grow the persona of independence when we are neediest. We love democracy, but individuality. The inner split in us must manifest in the political, ideological duality. Our political landscape is one psyche.

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* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/parents-political-beliefs/361462/.

** The lifeboat situation: https://mises.org/library/lifeboat-situations.

The five-minute good object

I have come up with the “five-minute good object” rule. It occurred to me as I was falling asleep last night. Our miniature schnauzer was lying between my wife and me, and for some unknown reason started licking my hand, wrist, forearm. It didn’t stop. For Simon, this was an exceedingly rare behavior: He had imprinted, seven years ago at the pet store, on my wife, and I believe his occasional shows of affection to me, since then, have been instigated by guilt. But now, the gentle slurps kept coming. What happened was this: After some minutes – I’ll say five – I was visited by these stirring and unexpected feelings, incredulous feelings: “What? I deserve this much affection? I deserve this much attention?” I realized at that moment that I was a person whose entire life must have been constructed with – and probably on the base of – the absence of love, and that love needed to have been shown in an extended packet, over several minutes, for it to reach meaning, for it to have become the gift that brought a child to life. I remembered an occurrence one evening, around age six or seven. For the first time in my aware life, my mother, talking with my Aunt Molly, had picked me up and placed me on her lap. I remember that I had been normal and fine all that day. As I sat there, the strange and wonderful place, internal feeling overwhelmed me and I threw up. Maybe one minute had gone by. Not five. Not ten. She deposited me on the floor and went to clean herself up. She never picked me up again. I know – as we can feel a truth beneath our airy thoughts – that after that I continued on more of a phantom of a child, a person. There had been that potential moment, and it had been undone rather than sustained. It hadn’t been enough.

Proviso is that I don’t know enough of healthy families, so I can only state a theory that probably countless parents (though not those of my clients) already practice: Attentive affection to a child has to, in an early stage, be timeless. It cannot feel to the child like a passing moment that is just an equal part of the day, but a place of time stopped, of full heart-felt, eye-seen focus. The attention has to be an oasis in the world, but where the oasis is bigger than the world. Somehow, “time” is the factor that becomes the person’s timeless not contingent feeling of self-value, of self-esteem. Real self-esteem comes from love which is implanted in the child. Like a photon of light, it is outside of time and does not grow old.*

Five minutes straight, a whole world in a drop – but you are not counting.

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* “Since photons are moving at such excessive speeds, time dilation comes into play and must be accounted for. Once this is taken into consideration, according to the photon’s frame of reference, Heeck found that its lifetime would be a rather short three years; however, from our frame of reference, light would live about one billion billion (10¹⁸) years.” https://futurism.com/science-explained-long-can-photons-live-will-ever-die.

Gottman the diagnostician

Last year I posted a noxious article* on Gottman and his statistical and descriptive, not etiological and depth, approach to marital problems. I later realized, with ambiguous guilt, that I had condemned him for lacking a résumé he had never claimed to have. In a presentation video, Gottman stated that he was not a “relationship guru” but rather “an expert on how to do research on relationships.” That is, it has not been his purpose to plumb the depths, but simply to declare what behaviors distinguish the “masters” from the “disasters.” I would nevertheless insist, in my defense, that to provide such information is to imply that it can be successfully used; is to imply that troubled couples are essentially doing wrong, not that they are being wrong in their character and psyche. But that would not be true. Most failing couples fail not because it didn’t occur to them to avoid criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling,** but because of faults in the core of their individual psyche.

Nevertheless, I’d say there is a very reliable value to Gottman’s work, a diagnostic value. A hundred therapists will teach the Four Horsemen and their antidote virtues to their clients, but most will find that as time passes nothing has changed, or the relationship has continued to deteriorate. Why is this couple still criticizing and being defensive toward each other when they have it on powerfully researched authority that these actions are harmful? Why does this husband continue to spray his contempt, having learned that this feature is statistically the main death knell for marriages? Why don’t they change after being given the good news of happier couples with their “bids” for emotional connection, their “love maps,” their “fondness and admiration” for each other? In perplexity, the therapist looks at the individual. The husband is “old school.” He can’t enter a new school because the old one is the emptiness and rage inside him: his father’s contempt, his mother’s vacuity of love. He has become the paradox of desperate need grown calluses that distance his wife and children.

And his wife is still a child. She felt “secure” under his harsh and controlling protection, as she had felt with her father, until he became abusive one shove too many one time too many. Now they try to work it out in your office. But this can only mean she re-acquiesces to his control as he pulls a cheap straitjacket around his anger – palliatives to put it mildly. If she actually grew self-esteem, he would feel abandoned again. If he softened his calluses and found his child-deep love and empathy, she would be “bored,” a misidentification of the fear that her walled-off child’s heart would be touched – too painful. At best, the couple would be dissolved to two separate people, two regressed people, unmade to conceivably be remade.

I recommend using Gottman as icing on a successful cake, or as a diagnostic tool: If the horsemen continue to ride high despite your efforts, go deep.

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* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2018/05/little-rant-1-enough-of-gottman.html.

** Gottman’s “Four horsemen of the (marital) apocalypse.”