Autonomy and the construction of reality

 

I want to add a thought to yesterday's entry on the anniversary of the insurrection. 

     From Freud I learned about fantasies of omnipotence and primary narcissism – experiencing the world and others as extensions of self with no independent value or reality. Autonomy. What Trump does in politics – constructs reality to suit his egoism; constructs tiny epistemic bubbles and ferocious echo chambers in which his fantasy-self has  some "reality" – has been the cultural norm for his social class for centuries now. That is what every narcissist does in a small way: social media makes it easy (most of us have at least a bit of the narcissist in us; another way of saying we are sinners). Trump has millions in thrall to the fantasy world required by his narcissism. It's just a matter of scale. 

       The prototype was Milton’s Satan – “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”  

That may be said to be the root of all evil, as Milton perceived. It is the pure condition of sin unless modified by some real care for something outside the ego. (I love Paradise Lost read aloud by Ian Richardson.) Narcissism might well be translated as "original sin." And the difference between us fallible mortals and an angel like Satan is that our narcissism is a form of spiritual damage, a spiritual disease - not chosen in pure unconditioned freedom as an angel theoretically could choose it. (Read about Trump's family and you will know where the damage - which he at some point embraced and identified himself with - came from.) 

    The proper emotional response to Trump is pity or compassion. But he can only be helped by breaking the link between his worshippers who feed his narcissism and the man himself. The courts may be the last best chance for the man to be forced to see the truth and be saved ("... and the truth will set you free,"). To see him as a broken spirit is the last best hope for his worshippers. Being made into an idol is the secret goal of every narcissist. By cooperating with this project his worshippers become idolaters, worshipping a fantasy rather than the true God. Everything is says is Truth. Everything is does is purely good. It is not an accident that the first commandment is against making idolatry. His appeal for so-called Christian nationalists reveals something deeply disturbing about that mentality, for Trump is about as close to Christ as I am to the edge of the universe. 

   ("Christian nationalism" - what a devilish oxymoron. Jesus a xenophobe? Jesus a hater of the downtrodden? Jesus directing the construction of a wall to keep all those hopelessly impoverished people out? What happened to the Good Samaritan? What happened to the beatitudes? "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did to me." But as we know, all kinds of horrible stuff is done in the name of God. Idolatry, all of it. Any bad or evil thing done in the name of God or Christ makes an idol, a human construct, out of God. Well, what does the epistemological bubble say: “This is an invasion. This is like a military invasion.... Drugs, criminals, gang members and terrorists are pouring into our country at record levels. We’ve never seen anything like it. They’re taking over our cities.” Scrooge. Dehumanize and demean to cut the heart off from compassion.  Just dehumanize whoever you want to be cruel to. I don't know what to do about immigration but I do know there is nothing Christian about that. And people like me? In comes the echo chamber: WOKE or RINO or LIBERAL or VERMIN - i.e. someone without anything to say who is just insanely and obsessively out to get Trump, as though that were their life purpose. Lord have mercy. Pardon this digression.)

      Acknowledging the worth of others, that other people are limits to a person's will like nothing else in the world, limits the ego. Nature, if it is Creation, limits our range of choice in different ways. We may use it well, but not destroy it. We must preserve in our use its essential beauty and goodness (“And He saw that it was good, very good.”)  It is not ours but God’s and it exists only because God loves it. At least, that has been the mainstream Christian teaching. The common good also limits the will of those who govern (with or without consent). It may be difficult at times to judge what the common good requires; the one who governs needs practical wisdom to understand what is right and the courage to do the right thing. All these limits define our humanity and yet are precisely what must be rejected at all costs by the narcissist - who is spiritually sick and deserves pity, at least while they are not in the process of destroying something good; then they must be stopped - for their own good as well as the good of what they would reduce or destroy. 

       That is what Trump and his radical left antipodes have in common: a refusal to recognize that reality limits the will, whether the reality be nature, one’s own body, the country, or other people. They share a refusal to recognize any value that does not have its source in their own uneducated desires. They can have nothing to be accountable for; they are their own judge and jury. They are, in Nietzsche’s words, beyond good and evil. They are autonomous. 

 

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Afterthought

      The state of culture in America reminds me a bit of the setting for many of Plato's dialogs in Athens, with the sophists being the enemies of truth, the servants of the autonomous ego. Socrates in conversation really cares about truth – about the whole family of truth concepts: deepened understanding, more comprehensive insight, awareness of alternative viewpoints, conceptual clarity, logical consistency, etc. His sophist interlocutors often do not. Their egos and their social capital are typically at stake. Argument and conversation become a veneer; not a vehicle of understanding and self-disclosure but a mask concealing the desire to be right elevate their egos and increase their social capital, partly by diminishing their interlocutor. Words become weapons. They kill Socrates. 

    The driving conceptual metaphor (discussed in Metaphors We Live By) that informs our language of argument (as in giving reasons to support a conclusion) is ARGUMENT IS WAR, and it represents the attitude of the sophists: we attack, undermine, destroy the opponent’s argument and defend our own from attack, etc. The point is not to understand together with a partner, but the propagandist’s: to produce an emotive effect creating the mere appearance that puts you in a good light and the opponent in a bad one. Arguments in this sophist version are not a means to justify or understand but one tool among others to diminish others and elevate the self. 

    Using argument like that is like using an umbrella as a sword or a book of philosophy to hit someone over the head.