Both political
parties – policies and ideology – are based in childhood pain and anger. I don’t
care if you think your political ideas are self-evidently valid. No ideas about
human value can be objectively valid, and no beliefs about human value can be proven
by appeal to other beliefs. That would be like insisting that people are intrinsically
good because they are not intrinsically bad, or that Socialism is right because people need each other. Clouds and shrouds.
Attitudes, beliefs,
convictions, philosophies* come from feeling, and feeling is fused with our
identity which was forged in the crucible of childhood. If you are angry at
the world now, or at Jews or Blacks or the wealthy, you were a hurt child.
The critical
problem of the individual’s feeling applied to society en masse is that we don’t
feel for the masse, we don’t feel for millions of people we don’t know. Society, “a
world I never made,”** forces us to “project” our individual complexity of
feeling onto an unindividuated complex structure. So someone, a Democrat, who feels that individuals should be
free to live, smoke and have sex as they please, may find himself contradicting
that belief in the societal realm by forcing me to sell my house to a Muslim or by supporting a
seventy-percent tax on my income. Clearly not allowing me to live my life as I
please.
Where does
childhood pain and anger come into the picture? Right there: The liberal chooses
to force rich people to pay. He is angry, and the angrier he is, the more he
wants to stick it to them. If he really loved the poor, he would dedicate his
life to them. But a rare Democrat, from a better childhood, may dream of a
society of volunteers: Give from your heart – not from a gun at your back – and
all will thrive. That is, the pure essence of libertarian thought.
A Republican is
likely to be antisocial and angry about the intrusions and presumptions of
anyone who is not his family. And “family” will be a proprietary bond, not a loving one, owing to lack of love in his childhood. He will not see society as a necessity, but as a yoke
connecting his neck to other people’s necks, little different from a parent
forcing older brother to share his precious video games with younger sister.
And yet society is a necessity. His feeling is blind to this necessity. He sees
himself as either a loner or a family man living on an island that needs no
other islands.
Another
Republican, though, who is not an angry inner child, has different emotional definitions
of “obligation” and “freedom.” He knows that the limited amount of land we
live on must be shared, and that individual freedom – the Conservative’s theme
song – has primarily an emotional not a political meaning. It has an emotionally
complicated nature, is not simplistic oppositional-defiance. It does not mean
Ayn Randian solipsism. It contains humanity and community. He teaches his son
to live by his own lights and for his personal happiness, and demonstrates the
pleasure of helping someone else get on his own feet, enjoy his birthright
of freedom. He doesn’t allow his neighbor to own all the grocery stores and orchards and to charge
a hundred dollars for an apple.
John Bolton is
the angry child who, treated unfairly by his parents, will never willingly lend
his treasures to his little sister. He can’t allow himself to feel even a molecular vibration of the bond, care, and free gifts of life he never received: That would break through the wall and kill his starved child’s heart. He must feel bad about community. American
power in the world is his sublimation of personal revenge. “Democrat,” as he senses the
idea, means not only sharing – anathema to him – but slavery masquerading as love. And it resonates with the loss of his real self in childhood. He would rather die than vote for the good father he needed, Joe Biden.
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* From Chapter 12, “The Creative Solution – Sartre, Munch, and Wolfe” in James F. Masterson’s book on personality disorders, The Search for the Real Self. On Sartre: “Sartre’s ‘lack of being’ grew out of his recognition that he lacked a real self, that he had become ‘a model grandson’ as a narcissistic defense against the emptiness of his own life. He defended against his fears of engulfment and emptiness by behaving in a manner that would satisfy the perfectionistic demands of the adults in his life. By identifying with the idealized projections of his mother and grandparents, he could ward off the feelings of fragmentation and nothingness. When these adults appeared to him as whole and perfect, he could bask in that wholeness and perfection as if it were his own. He performed as a mirroring object to meet their needs, rather than his own, to complete their selves at the cost of his own real self.”
“The major themes of the abandonment depression appear in Sartre’s philosophy of consciousness, being, nothingness, and the human condition: the emptiness of the impaired real self, the lonely individual struggle to use creativity to establish a modicum of a real self, the fear of engulfment. He ultimately concluded that being in itself (i.e., consciousness) is nothingness, and nonbeing has no identity. Both positions reflected and reinforced his own experience of the emtpiness he associated with his impaired real self. To him, the radical freedom of consciousness meant acknowledging that one is the absolute creator of oneself and one's destiny. Being for itself. The extraordinary responsibility implied by this role is felt as anguish, and a longing arises to escape from freedom into the secure solidity of self-identity possessed by things in the world. But we are not like the things in the world; we have consciousness and are condemned to be free. We escape this freedom only in death.”
“Because the adults in his family did not acknowledge and support Sartre’s emerging self, he had to create it by himself. As a result, he assumed all human beings had to develop a real self without help, in a void, totally alone. The void and emptiness that encircled Sartre would fill up with the fears of engulfment he associated with efforts to activate the real self and to defend against it with the grandiose self.”
“His concept of Being-for-others remained a threat to the autonomous state of Being-for-itself. His philosophy thus became a rationalization of his emotional dilemma – being and nothingness.” Pages 211 and 212.
** From A. E. Housman’s poem, “The Laws of God, The Laws of Man” – “I, a stranger and afraid / In a world I never made.”
