Manifesto: Republicans are the bleeding hearts: The latest child massacre

Is it the Republican in the person who is afraid to live without a gun at his side or in his home? Or is it the person in the Republican who is afraid? Is it the Democrat in the person who feels . . . a certain way that doesn't require him to be armed with an ultimately lethal weapon, or is it the person in the Democrat who feels . . . that way?

My phrasing – "a certain way" – isn't obscure to be cute. It's incomplete because the feeling that isn't scared shitless or angry shitless to be without a gun may be more the absence of a feeling. The absence of paranoia, or of alienation, or of sociopathy. Or the absence of the lack of identity that is remedied by the false identity of gun toughness.

The answer to my question is: It's the person not the brand, the individual beneath the belief who has fear, anger and a diffuse identity. It's the individual beneath the belief who can live in a fundamentally positive sense of life. Liberals have been called "bleeding hearts." But I believe it's the Republicans of the bleeding hearts, who stanch the flow with defenses of offense: guns, more money, antisocial laws.

They cannot join a community to protect the community because as individuals they are incomplete, unformed. They are always trying to hold themselves together. The radically needy child – the "man-child" of Trump and the rest of them – is not integrated enough to be there for others.

The Libertarian and New Conservative flaw

When I was 17 and 18 – 1968 and 1969 – I was a Libertarian. Libertarians value individualism and freedom intrinsically and extrinsically, alpha and omega. There is a long, illustrious history of political freedom-fighting and intransigent, principled men and women that anchors the Libertarian movement. Many books and papers on the morality and practicality of liberty and its embodiment in capitalism were written or endorsed by Libertarians. In those days, there was a fundamental, if discreetly expressed, bifurcation in the thinking, which could be described in this extreme: Should there be a government over us, whose only purpose would be protection from force and fraud, or should individuals acquire (buy) their own services, such as private post offices, streets, police forces.

In that early Libertarian ideology (I've been away from it for fifty years), individualism, liberty and capitalism were a unity, and that unity was both an intellectual edifice and a feeling. It was a feeling that built the edifice. It was not a kind one. Many people would say it was an immoral one.

I remember owning that feeling. And now, as a studier of psychology, I can discern the various chemical elements that constitute not one feeling, but a complex of different emotionalized sensations.

There is the noble element, what might be called the Ayn Rand element. The heroic, hard-working, self-made person who has a passion for a personal goal from which he will not be deflected: Roark and his architecture; Galt and a free society. There is the self-esteem element: I care about myself, I have every right to keep what I earn and produce. There is the narcissistic element that wants to put aside, whenever one's felt needs importune, the fact that we live in a society: I am ok to destroy all of my competition by any strategy. I may pollute the air.

And then there is the element of contempt, which is also the Ayn Rand element. There may be pure nobility somewhere in the human soul, but it is not here. We high school and college Libertarians didn't care about the poor people who wanted to take our charity by force. We had no different, kinder feeling about the handicapped, the children, or other oppressed people. All were worthy of being ignored and yes, looked down upon.

It is this molecule of contempt, the ignoble part of Libertarian pride, that has spread on carrier waves of politics and religion throughout the land, turning the mind subtly like a kaleidoscope to hateful and coercive feelings, enabling millions of people to admire – admire – a narcissist and sociopath, Trump. This contempt is born in pain and loss in childhood, injustice and alienation, all morphing to a philosophy of individualism: the alone, unhelped person. Libertarians and New Conservatives feel the ghosts of their injustice and alienation that become false nobility and wounded disdain. Soaring on the wings of political victory, they are sanctified, happy. In defeat, they are angry, hurt children.

Death rhapsody

Following up on an airier discussion in the previous hour's session, a client texted: "I have heard 'live like it's your last day' etc. etc. probably 10 thousand times before. It never got through to me, in anything other than a terrifying moment or two, until a few weeks ago. Heck, it's a cliché."

Liking to keep things heavy, I texted back: "I'm 70 and I have no idea if my last day will be serene and loving and accepting or depressed, desperate and disappointed. What I do know is that I won't be trying to push my thinking and feeling in one direction or another. It will be what it is."

Later in the evening, I realized that in my response I was thinking of my status on my deathbed, not my full last day: waking up in the morning, knowing I'd pass away at some point in the night, and picturing what I might do to make the day nine-months'-pregnant with meaning.

That day would be problematic: I'd have a few people to apologize to (again); a family member or a few to quietly condemn, with melancholy; some roses and fulsome things to smell and a black starry sky to look at; no blog post (silence would be the real me at that point); and no one to kiss, unless my wife outlives me, which I profoundly hope.

More interesting to me, in a very dreadful way, would be the deathbed hour. Because I honestly don't know in which direction my spirit would go. Picturing my life's failures, including birth and childhood. Or feeling love and a life lived pretty well. Or some unknowable mystery of feeling. I suspect I will think as little of thinking, or "thoughting,"* as I do now. I believe our thoughts are always a poor representation or a conceitful hiding from our true oceanic mess of a Self. Yes, we want to paint this ocean, and on that painted surface we want to paint names of our lives. But I am certain that's never true.

We are as uncomprehending at death as we are at birth.

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* See – https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/09/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_1274.html, https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2015/03/curmudgeon-1-thoughting.html and other "Thoughting" posts.

Gems of generalization #1: Baby mama and baby grandma

 

A woman wrote to slate.com’s advice columnist, “Dear Prudence,” a grievance about her mother. In part and in segments: 

“My problem is my mother. My brothers’ wives are both expecting, and she is over the moon about being a grandma. Except neither of my sisters-in-law are particularly close to my mother. . . . My mother will stalk their social media in order to get the latest news. She has set her phone to ping when they post. And now, all our conversa­tions revolve around the pregnancies and speculation about the babies. I honestly don’t care if the nursery has a zoo theme or not. I especially don’t want to discuss it 15 different times. I have tried redirecting the conversations or bringing up new topics, but my mother just bulldozes back to babies.

“For example, recently, while figure skating, the rink owner came up to me and asked me if I wanted to earn some extra money as a part time coach since it was obvious I had the right experience. I agreed. I met my mother later for dinner. When I entered the house, I told her I had exciting news. She stopped cooking and exploded into a smile: You are having a baby! I told her no – I got offered a job because of my figure skating. All my mother’s enthusiasm leaked away. . . . I was hurt and my mother kept pushing and pushing more baby talk at me. I snapped and told her I was sick of the subject. Could we talk about something else? My mother told me not to be ‘jealous.’ . . .

“I have always been close to my mom, since my brothers are much older and dad died when I was young. I understand she is excited, but it is like I don’t exist anymore. My only use in life is to be a road to grandbabies, and if I don’t (and I am leaning towards don’t), well, what do I matter? . . . My mother has her priorities set and interest in me is in the negatives. I am hurt. I am lonely. I miss my mom. . . . My life, my goals, and my passions are worthless to my mother, all because she is going to be a grandma. . . . What should I do?”

I disliked Prudence’s response and posted this comment:

"What a sweet and useless answer to the non-child daughter from Prudie. My take is that the daughter was 'close' to her mother, growing up, not because of a healthy bond but because the daughter was always needy of and clinging to a mother who had other priorities. There is a phenomenon where faulty mothers become golden (-seeming) grandmothers. It is not easy to understand, but it may be similar to those Borderline Personality-disordered mothers* who disrespect their own teenage daughters but fawn over their daughters’ friends. The mother is immature, still a child, and can’t 'relate' as a source of nurturant authority to her daughter. But as a child herself, she seeks attention and approval from outsiders – her daughters’ friends. And then, her daughter’s child. It’s a logical set of dynamics."

I’ve written about toxic grandmothers (https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2015/05/a-warning-to-grandmothers.html), those who degraded and abused their own daughters then swooped in like pink knights in shining armor to fete the grandchild, sometimes went the attorney route to win “grand­parent’s rights,” sometimes tried to wrest custody of the child. Here I just wanted to ask affected daughters and sons (and their therapists) to see the mystery of a parent who loves the grandchild and not them. It will not be because you are unworthy. It will be because your parent is a child needing a parent, a friend.

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* There could be other dysfunctions of immaturity, not necessarily a personality disorder, and fathers are not excluded from this dynamic.

Id has become super-ego

  

The id

“The id is the instinctual component of personality that is present at birth, and is the source of bodily needs and wants, emotional impulses and desires, especially aggression and the libido (sex drive). The id acts according to the pleasure principle – the psychic force oriented to immediate gratification of impulse and desire – defined by the avoidance of pain.” (Wikipedia)

Freud: “It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.”

“. . . contrary impulses exist side by side, without cancelling each other. . . . There is nothing in the id that could be compared with negation . . . nothing in the id which corresponds to the idea of time.”

The id “knows no judgments of value: no good and evil, no morality. . . . Instinctual cathexes seeking discharge – that, in our view, is all there is in the id.”

The super-ego

“The super-ego . . . reflects the internalization of cultural rules, mainly taught by parents applying their guidance and influence.” . . . For Freud, ‘the installation of the super-ego can be described as a successful instance of identification with the parental agency,’ while as development proceeds ‘the super-ego also takes on the influence of those who have stepped into the place of parents – educators, teachers, people chosen as ideal models.’

“The super-ego works in contradiction to the id. The super-ego strives to act in a socially appropriate manner, whereas the id just wants instant self-gratification. The super-ego controls our sense of right and wrong and guilt. It helps us fit into society by getting us to act in socially acceptable ways.” (Wikipedia)

Here is a way to describe the psycho-evolution that has taken place in our country suddenly and has overcome much of it since Trump was elected president: Id has become superego. The primitive, guttural, aggressive, amoral and immoral spasms and cries of the Right have been so diligently, so pandemically reframed as the good by a massive concatenation of individuals and institutions that they can no longer be stared down by the actual good, by time-proven conscience. Intentions of care and decency seem to have withered, have weak knees, have been derided, defeated, rendered impotent. I am sure many of us can feel this defeat, this impotence. Trump, a true sociopath, warms millions of people’s hearts with love and with fire. Women’s rights to their bodies – their lives – are torn from them. Simple and practical social aims are hated with the intensity of insanity and insane pain.

The moral magnetic poles of our world have nearly reversed.

One doesn’t reason with the id. In its non-instinctual conceptualization, it is based in the deepest childhood loss traumas and later solidifying losses. To unmask the id would be to return the person to his infant on fire in the crib, to the lost, unparented child. But then – to assign this poisoned force the imprimatur of morality: This is to give it ultimate power. The corrupt person now sees himself as right as God, not a pariah or aberration. Clasping hands with his fellow millions, he feels good, like a Narcissist. “As he basks in the comfortable habitat that he has constructed, an air-tight cocoon of narcissistic enjoyment, life can seem pretty good. In fact, he does feel good; he feels secure, and as long as nothing punctures the closed circle, he will not be aware of any serious personality problems. He thinks he has it all, and those who know him would agree, since he has carefully selected and enlisted them to be part of his world and therefore buttresses his view of himself.” (James F. Masterson, M.D., The Search for the Real Self, “Portrait of the Narcissist,” page 93.)

None of us knows what to do to reverse this regression. Critical thinking among the Right has become impossible. Challenge Marjorie Taylor Greene or Josh Hawley or Donald Trump on their puerility and sociopathic craziness and they will smile and pontificate more righteously than the Pope, who has some humility. The fascinating irony, of course, is that these people are children frozen in their development, in their psyche. So we ask: How can children win? How can the weakest, the inchoate, prevail? This may seem impossible, yet it makes ultimate sense: It is only children who deserve revenge.

Ceasing to believe what you feel

Thirty years ago, I would not have believed – had I thought about it – that children had any right to have their way, to get what they wanted. I would have felt that their opinions were silly and ignorant. I would have felt that a young child's anger about her circumstances was meaningless, to be responded to with greater anger. I would have felt that her simply expressing herself was a nearly insane affront to the hierarchies of the world – the wrongest of wrongs.

Those would have been unarticulated feelings that would have been the deeper substance of what shallow therapists and their clients like to call "core beliefs." An impasse would have arisen, though, had I been asked to exhume the feeling, convert it to thought, and verbalize the thought. That's because I was far gone, but not that far gone that I would have consciously endorsed the belief, even while the feeling existed. That's to say, I would have surprised myself by my own inner contradiction.

I am certain this is the mental subterrane of many parents. The problem is that until they go to therapy, they may never be asked to materialize their hidden, hurt-formed, deep-rooted feeling as conscious conviction. And so they continue to be emotional history-based, treating their children as less-than, as owned, as deserving of punishment, as "misbehaving"* rather than simply behaving in a way that doesn't harmonize with their parent's equilibrium or unconscious unmet needs.

There are doubtless countless internal delusions adults harbor that might be disabused in a shock of disorientation. A man may find that he actually has never respected his hard-working father. A woman may come to see that her lifelong goal of becoming a nurse or a writer or a chef was a fantasy not a fact. You may discover, one day, you are more child than adult. These dormant epiphanies stay buried for a good reason: They speak to childhood failure that we can't base our life on. To be faced with our fundamental escapes is to dissolve our sense of who we are. Take note: Your child is as good as you, is your equal, but since you never got to be equal as you grew up, your child will seem superior to you.

That is undermining. And humanizing.

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* https://www.gordontraining.com/free-parenting-articles/children-dont-misbehave/

The Cosmic Bullseye

 

I am blushing. My New York Times comment to a Charles Blow article* got a pretty fair number of appreciations:

In a way, I think that the biggest problem of our time is that we have become aware, thanks to the news and the Internet, how emotionally disturbed so many of our fellow citizens are. https://nyti.ms/3Eef4D5#permid=117833903.

Plain and simple, grammatically rough, and hitting the cosmic bullseye. Because while awful circum­stances come and go all the time – “Pandemic PTSD,” the “Great Resig­nation,” “Great Grief,” more road rage and gun violence than usual, Blow cites – real­izing that so many people are so corruptly messed up is to dye our psyche, turn our soul to dark­ness, change who we are. It’s the Psychological Messiah, or Antichrist. Realizing this, we will not go back. We have instantly devolved into stunned, huddled watchers.

It started when we realized, two elections ago, that millions of people loved or were deluded by a narcis­sist and socio­path, Donald Trump. And it continues today, tomorrow and into the future, where these people hate a basic­ally innoc­uous president, hate Demo­crats because they are Demo­crats, and love sopho­moric haters who have not an ounce of class. There is mental illness – never to be stigmatized – and there are those person­ality disorders who throw their full colostomy bags at social workers.

This is "disappointment" writ across time and space.

Counselors: If you believe you are helping these afflicted clients, you are professionally mistaken. To remain congenitally angry as a trait is to cover core hurt – yes, from child­hood. And to be barri­caded, defended at one’s depth is to be impervious to help. You are letting them blow off steam and cry tears that come from their twisted umbilical cord. But that steam is infinite, as are the tears.

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* https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/opinion/covid-pandemic-ptsd.html.