1: Freud, Hobbes, and Liberalism in Groups - 2: Group Psychology Vignettes - 3: Left Ideology, Disconnection, and Negative Rhetoric - 4: Ideological Feedback
Left ideology, itself an ossified reaction compromise
to the unconscious childhood Oedipal dilemma ‘if it’s be King or be dead, and I
can’t be King, I might as well share,’ secretly incentives disconnection in the
guise of connection the outcome of which is an arrested development in or
return to a primal and basic autistic state which the organism was intended to
naturally, but with the help of social scaffolds, grow out of.
1: Freud,
Hobbes, and Liberalism in Groups
For Freud (Preface to Aichorn's Wayword Youth),
primary narcissism is the healthy and necessary basic energy devoted to the
self for survival, in other words liking yourself to the extent that the outside world is secondary (infantile autism). Primary
narcissism becomes secondary narcissism and eventually the narcissism of minor
differences through the adaption of self-focused narcissistic ‘energy’ to the
navigation of social, group situations (the object field) where some sort of
contract or social occurrence has been employed or experienced (alterity). The "narcissism of minor differences," another one of Freud's concept, could be thought of as the derivative of the
original energy focused on survival sublimated into the new demands of the
social sphere which were absent in the pre-societal times, demands which
necessitate a certain renunciation of individual drive satisfaction (the
general thrust of Frued’s texts Group Psychology... and
Civilization and It’s Discontents). Hobbes, the founder of modern
liberal theory, many years prior to Freud, developed a similar theory: in the
state of nature prior to the formation of society or the social contract, the
individual’s only aim or ‘liberty’ is that of self-preservation. Once society is formed, or a 'social contract' is made, one moves from the primary liberty, self-preservation, to the collective
social liberty, what we think of in contemporary terms as a ‘right,’ where one
respects the other’s actions as long as they do not restrict or terminate one’s
own actions or thoughts. This necessarily entails the forgoing of some desires,
instincts mainly, to respect the desires of others, or what is referred to as
negative rights. The two thinkers, Hobbes and Freud, essentially make the same
claim. Both start by speculating a primitive state followed by a change in the
state based on the emergence of alterity or society whereupon personal gains
are curtailed or sacrificed for a safe place within a group. This similarity provides
for us important tools to understand our current cultural milieu populated as
it is with strange liberal/leftist discourse, something we are all familiar with, which
is quick to set forth certain rigid restrictions regarding what people are
permitted to feel, think, and express in the presence of others, that is, in groups.
2: Group
Psychology Vignettes
I am a
psychotherapist and psychoanalyst in training with extensive experience running
group therapy at schools and mental health clinics. What I see in my therapeutic
groups or analytic classes is but a snapshot of the outside world but I do believe it scales to larger populations easily. To do some groundwork on the general
phenomenon of group psychology and liberalism, I present three vignettes which
show three related aspects of group psychology. I will introduce each vignette,
with a brief analysis and explanation, and then synthesis all three before moving
onto liberal dynamics.
Vignette 1:As a
supervisor at a clinic sitting in on supervisee running a group: The group
leader asked a group
member who had just entered the room five minutes late about her frequent
lateness. A few other group members quickly expressed concerns that the group
leader was being sadistic. Whether the claim of sadism is true or false, the
fact remains that there was a clear pattern of lateness which the group leader
had not addressed for most the history of the group. Thus, the leap to sadistic
intent on the professor’s part was not a logical, or cognitive moment, but an
unconscious moment of transference – he was just another sadistic leader
abusing his power. One member said “I know if that were me I wouldn’t want that
to happen to me, being called out like that” to which many agreed. Here it was
clear the members protecting the tardy member were setting up a precedent that
if they themselves were to act the same way that they would not like to be
questioned on their own resistance, and furthermore that the questioning of
such a resistance was a moral fault of the leader, mainly sadism. The idea is
that what we claim to do for the other in a group is also putting into the
group discourse a certain precedent or wish for a certain structure to be
reflected back at the self. This is the golden rule ‘treat others as you’d like
to be treated' (in politics, the idea that 'if we all agree not to run negative campaign ads against each other, we can all come out of this thing OK).We will expand on this more later.
Vignette 2: In another case,
certain students within a class co-taught by myself and a colleague would
express extreme moralistic disdain for another student’s feelings on the
premise that having negative or aggressive feelings in a class group was the same as
acting on them, or in the very least that having these negative feelings would
necessarily lead to harmful action. The disdaining students phrased their
reproach in a sense that to have a feeling was immoral and wrong on the basis
that it was a slipper slope to dangerous action and thus should be avoided to
keep the class ‘safe.’ The use of the word ‘safe’ – and here one might be
reminded of the cliché ‘safe space’ -
within the moralistic narrative set forth an almost
political-propagandist approach to structuring group exchange. That is, the feeling
was ‘what you are doing is not safe, and obviously if we are all thinking
straight we would want to be safe,’ an implication which creates a false
dichotomy, and erects the other’s position as an already predetermined strawman, thus putting the other in the place of either having to renounce their
position or admit to something absurd like ‘I want an unsafe group so I can
have my feelings.’ This is how propaganda works – it creates a false dichotomy,
a double bind.
Vignette 3: The members of a psychoanalytic
school based group I ran had difficulty getting along with one another. They
were more interested in talking excessively about memories they had shared in
the past than they were interested in talking to each other in the room in the
here and now. The excessive talk was not real communicative talk, the members
would talk over each other, rapidly associating to one another without really
listening to each other. The stories did not interact with each other to form a
connective narrative, but rather each story had the same basic content slightly
rearranged to appear different. These stories were similar, but existed only in
parallel, never intersecting with the other stories to create something or
allow for emotional connection. On the surface it appeared that the students
were interacting, but the truth was they were doing anything but.
Vignette 1-3 as Stages: In
Vignette 1 (V1, V2, V3 from here on out), we see how a group member is used by
other members as a reference point to establish a certain structure of
discourse within the group – ‘there shall be no sadism’ - and for the group sadism seems to be inquiring
into resistance, in this case lateness. Here
the group members aid and abet the tardy member so that they themselves could
receive the same treatment if they were ever to be late. In V2 we see a similar
phenomenon with safety instead of sadism. In both V1 and V2, the moral phrase
seems to be implicitly universalized as the way the group should be – 'you wouldn’t want an unsafe group! You wouldn’t want a
sadistic leader!’ These are of course agreeable statements, (and that is just
the point!) but these statements are, as previously mentioned, straw men
fallacies. Both assume the interpretation of sadism and danger as
irreproachable truths and prop the implication upon a ground that is difficult
to argue against, unless one wishes to be seen as pro-sadism, and pro-danger of
others.
Though the content of V1 and V2
is of some interest, the real importance is in the way the content is
structured. This structure is implicit universalization: A traditional moral is
chosen as a wish and inserted into group discourse in the form of a universal –
‘everyone should want this; everyone would want this if they were thinking
clearly’ in order to shape the group exchange in a certain way [remember Zizek’s Hegelian universal category in Parallax View section The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies is based on exception, that is, vulgarly put, negation or exclusion - big surprise...]. In V3 we see this
structure, but without a clear moral. Instead of a moral precedent, each member
is speaking but in a way that does not interact with the other. It acknowledges
the other just quick enough to feign connection and pull away into
disconnection. The universalization here is not the implicit suggestion of
choosing a moral to dictate the discourse, but rather, the implicit universalization
of acknowledging and then negating the other as to create a type of in-group
talk that is precisely the avoidance of real talk, a sort of group disavowal.
In this way, the group maintained the comfortable appearance of being on the
same page, without the cost of actually connecting and having to take in an
other’s presence, or be vulnerable in the presence of an other. This feigned
connection, “alone together” as Sherry Turkle puts it in her book named by the same phrase, offers more safety. This is the
primal disconnection reminiscent of early developmental autistic states posited at the
heart of liberal negative discourse.
3: Left Ideology,
Disconnection, and Negative Rhetoric
Liberalism, with its rhetoric of inclusivity, voice, debate, dialogue, connection, etc., at its theoretical heart posits the opposite radical
exclusivity, solipsism, and disconnection. It is no secret that in the
liberal framework, a right is just if it does not interfere with another’s
right, what is commonly referred to negative
rights. Strangely, this seems to unconsciously establish a precedent for
avoiding interacting with others, or in the very least, interacting as
minimally as possible, or to further push the case, interacting with others
only in a way that will not disturb the status quo as to maintain the
utilitarian approach of ‘the most amount of rights for the most amount of
people.’ Thus, there seems to be more of a libidinal investment in
disconnection or in the very least an absolute minimal connection to others. In layman terms, Left ideology incentives disconnection and
autism. With this comes what I call negative rhetoric.
The function of this liberal discourse and its
negative rhetoric, ‘don’t, won’t, shan’t’ seen through V1 and V2 is to
construct a structure of interpersonal exchanges where disconnection
established by the embellishment of minor
differences is the prevailing law or social schema, what we saw in V3. The
cleverness is that the liberal discourse maintains the illusion of interacting
with others (Nick Land's "alterity in advance") while simultaneously positing the unconscious goal of avoiding
others – the best of both worlds, like Glaucon and the Ring of Gyges (Plato), the common colloquial phrase ‘to each his own,’ or the prevailing cultural
hedonistic malaise of ‘having your cake and eating it too.’ This liberal
discourse masquerading as critical reproach and humanism couched in moral high
ground (thou shall not be a sadist, unsafe, etc.) is transformed into a group
enactment which has an inductive quality to it, what Melanie Klein refers to as
projective identification. That is, speech-acts, and certain narratives tend to
beget certain speech-acts and narratives in response. This unconsciously shapes
the group exchange so that only certain avenues of feeling, thought and
expression are considered acceptable (social cybernetic feedback circuit strengthening certain responses and discouraging others).
Anything outside of the prescribed acceptable discourse become moralistically
disdained and then reified as intrinsically irreproachable. This creates a
subtle and sublime group resistance that detaches from the group members and
imposes itself from pseudo-outside and on high (not unlike the way a psychotic projects back onto the outside, in a vague paranoiac figure, the punitive superego which originated in the feelings generated by the prohibitions of other), and in the process implies its own
moral right as a given while simultaneously undoing the ground on which the
other would critically approach the discourse from, all under the guise of
critical reproach of structure, and liberal care of others. This kind of
rhetoric on the one hand serves a vital psychological and social function of
creating a sort of 'group mind,' while on the other hand restricts communication. That
is, it creates a connection through disconnection.
The unconscious
inversion of positive rights – ‘you can’ – to negations – ‘you can’t’ is more
complex than it seems. That is, the mode of universally positing a positive
liberty is retained while the value transmitted through the mode of
universality is flipped from ‘everyone should do X’ to ‘no one should do Y,’
though X and Y retain the same referent, and difference becomes solely whether
the referent is referred back to through the negative or positive. In this
case, the focus is shifted from what we
can do in social situations, and what we
can talk about in groups, to almost exclusively what we can’t do. When this occurs, despite the left’s obsession
with voice and dialogue, we arrive at the idea of avoiding talk altogether out
of fear of transgression more often than we arrive at the process of engaging
in forms of talk other than the talk
that is transgressive. In other words, with the positive liberty we can talk about A, B, C, E and G, while
with the inversion, the negation, we can’t
talk about D and F. The structural approach, whether we start from positive or
negative, effects the perception of potentialities. In both cases, A, B, C, D,
E, F, and G are all potential options, but the negative or positive approach
superficially creates a false-sequence of potentials. Just as asking a question
a certain way may increase the likelihood of receiving a certain answer in
return, here, the structure of interchange predetermines the avenues of
interchange. And as we see, the negative approach drastically cuts out
material.
This is how the
negative inversion of liberties presents itself in groups: In scenarios where
talk of touchy topics could arise, there is a great fear that one’s own
defenses or ‘vices’ will become exposed, so one makes sure the other’s defense
stays intact or hidden as to defend one's own defenses. This has
a tendency to express itself in a universal gesture. Whereas the abstract idea
of liberty is to universally give everyone X, the negative liberal rhetoric is
to totally remove from the discourse that which could threaten any defense (Y),
for a threat to the defense of the other could also easily shift and become a
threat to the defense of the self (if I make fun of someone else in a group, I draw attention to myself and open myself up to attack as well). The unconscious logic is that ‘If I put
forth into the group a general rule, and then identify with this rule, then the
other should reflect this rule back at me for it offers mutual gains, that is,
the maintenance of defenses within the presence of another, and the feelings of
safety that come with the alternative of which seems to be less favorable,’ or
what Winnicott in regard to psychoanalytic therapeutic treatment refers to as ‘colluding
with the patient's resistances.’ Furthermore, the rule is universalized not
only for the aforementioned benefits, but also as to seem separate to the self,
therefore lending to it both an exalted authority, as well as principle of
selflessness which is generally a favorably perceived principle – ‘it is not I
who wants this, but it is this which everyone would want if thinking clearly.’
This typically works as long as the majority of people are concerned with a
noncreative and reductive feeling of safety (Nietzsche’s lastman) which they
typically are due to the pressure exerted by like minded people investing in the
defense, more than an ability to create something together.
It doesn't end here. Each group member
harbors the unconscious or pre-conscious perception of the secret instincts of
the other and props upon it an artifice of social cooperation, ultimately
positing the secret instincts as intrinsically toxic as to regulate the whole
group’s avoidance of them. To this point, on the topic of group psychology,
Freud writes in his text on Group Psychology:
“We have only to think of the troop of women and girls, all of them in
love in an enthusiastically sentimental way, who crowd round a singer or
pianist after his performance. It would certainly be easy for each of them to
be jealous of the rest; but, in the face of their numbers and the consequent
impossibility of their reaching the aim of their love, they renounce it, and,
instead of pulling out one another's hair, they act as a united group, do
homage to the hero of the occasion with their common actions, and would
probably be glad to have a share of his flowing locks. Originally rivals, they
have succeeded in identifying themselves with one another by means of a similar
love for the same object. When, as is usual, an instinctual situation is
capable of various outcomes, we shall not be surprised that the actual outcome
is one which brings with it the possibility of a certain amount of
satisfaction, whereas some other outcome, in itself more obvious, is passed
over because the circumstances of life prevent its leading to any such
satisfaction”
The idea is that in a group, people who would
otherwise compete for what they want tend to opt out of a possible conflict by
identifying with each other even if it means sacrificing their actual desire.
It is the inversion of the positive liberty - one of us can have the pianist
- to the negative - none of us should have the pianist. Desire of the object is
flipped into desire of restraining one’s self from the object and further
transformed into a desire to protect each other’s defense as the other’s
defense is a reflection of one’s own.
The group would rather stay
together and receive merely a portion of the pie (seeing the pianist, or
sharing a lock of hair) rather than fight one another at the gamble of being
killed, or worse, surviving without any pie at all (thought the irony is that
if some people took a risk, something much greater than the pianist could be
created and had)! Thus, there seems to
be an unconscious understanding and agreement among group members to forgo the
ideal object, to keep it unattainable, so that the relative peace can be
attained instead. This preserves their actual lives through primary
narcissism (violence does not break out), and social lives though the narcissism
of minor differences (identity, and subjective perspectives retain their
‘uniqueness’ within each other’s presences) manifested via liberal rhetoric.
If this sounds familiar it’s
because, again, Hobbes had a similar idea: as the banality goes, the state of nature is “nasty
brutish and short” which thus requires a social contract. In this nasty,
brutish, short nature, anxiety was excessive, and paranoia was the rule. One
may pursue his or her desire, and take what he or she wants, but one would also
have to sleep with one eye open, always wondering if someone stronger would
come and take it from him as he himself had done to others. Thus, as the myth goes, humans
entered into the social contract where they sacrificed some aspects of life,
mainly instinctual desire, the possibility of having everything they could
acquire by their own power at the risk of death, for the feeling of safety and
the reduction of tension. This is, of course, the main thrust of Freud’s (1930)
Civilization and its Discontents,
that it would be better to have a civilization with some rules where we must
renounce some of our personal wishes and share with others than to have a state
of nature where we are constantly at war with one another, and constantly in a
state of tension.
Freud ‘discovers’ this
in the family group, which we shall remember is the Rousseauian and
Marxist germinal unit of the society, where he shows that some
patients recall repressed memories or dreams in which they felt secretly
relieved to watch their brother or sister be beaten by their father. The relief
is usually associated to the fact that they were spared the beating at the
expense of their sibling. The finding
here is that the desire to preserve the self, or avoid conflict in a group
setting seems to trump any moral imperative but is repressed and sublimated to
save the moral sense. Thus, liberalism is a reaction compromise to the
unconscious childhood Oedipal conflict –
‘if its be King or be dead, and I can’t be King, I might as well share.' Prior to the formalized
social situation, narcissism was the law of self-preservation often manifested
in brutish, nasty, violent, or primal instinctual life, mainly killing, or
destroying to get needs met, or killing and destroying out of paranoiac anxiety
that needs will go unmet. In this time period, a Nietzschean “will to power”
state, being a ‘self’ meant surviving the battle or aligning yourself with the
one who survives or is likely to surive the battle. Your enemies were
slaughtered, and your allies were an extension of your own ego, or you were
slaughtered, or made a move to identify yourself with the slaughterer to
preserve yourself. You were either
Genghis Kahn, one of Genghis Kahn’s gang, or a head on one of Kahn’s pikes.
4: Ideological
Feedback
When we leave this
state of brutalism and action to enter into the social realm, we sublimate our
aggressive actions into speech-acts and other activities. Instead of killing
the competitor and gathering a following, or becoming a follower to the strong
to spare the self from being killed, we engage into language games that reflect
these activities in lesser degrees. As
Freud supposedly said, “The first man to hurl an insult rather than a spear was
the founder of civilization” (Freud, 1895). These language games often take
form of universal generalizations of worldviews. For the neurotic, one who has
some contact with a shared reality, it is always easier to hold a belief if
others too hold it and do not resist it, or in the case of resistance, if the
resistances are easily projected, incorporated, or disavowed. That is, it is
easier to hold a universal view of people and the world than it is to hold the
idea that ‘I am this way, and others are not’ or ‘others are that way and I am
not,’ as holding a universal view reduces the possibility of any sort of
cognitive or emotional dissonance or tension and therefore avoids a
narcissistic injury which further removes the need to defend the position of the
worldview as it becomes assumed as natural or moral. This requires a process of
projection.
The idea here is
the simple and old one that people tend to project the qualities onto others
and the world that they wish for themselves. The vulgar and naïve evolutionary
psychologist or biologist espouses the boring narrative ‘we are animalistic,
our behavior is determined by the traces of evolutionary traits.’ Here, there
is a wish to be violent, aggressive, and demeaning and therefore the world is
proposed as such. Likewise, the humanist – and there is no use in saying
‘vulgar or naïve humanist’ as they are all vulgar and naïve beyond repair –
espouses the boring narrative ‘we are all good and the bad social world makes
us bad.’ Here, there is a wish to disavow the true violence and aggression
of the world, so the wish is universalized – ‘it is not I who simply needs to
believe that human nature is good for my own benefit, it is how the world
really is.’ The projecting of
a state of being onto others and the world is a necessary step in creating a
subtle, smooth-surfaced, implicit narcissism. It is important that the
narcissism of minor differences be subtle and implicit because the ideas of
narcissism itself has changed. Through the cybernetic feedback initiated by
clinical and theoretical works becoming pop culture objects, narcissism has
slipped from the hands of archaic theorists where it reserved a certain praxis
and function within a particular discourse and made its way idly into the main
avenues of colloquial consciousness whereupon it takes on
different meanings. It is common to hear ‘you’re such a narcissist’ on popular
television or media. The term is less of a diagnostic and more of a playful
buzzword we may see in a magazine article about a celebrity.
In short, people
are at least faintly semi-aware of narcissism and in order to protect the self
from the obvious attack from the other ‘you’re a narcissist!’ he or she must
find a way to make it seem as if everyone was just as narcissistic as his or
herself. He or she must assert that all
people are this way. Hence, we may hear ‘it’s not me who is special, while
others are un-special, we are all special!’ A blanket laid down, encompassing
all. The underlying idea here is that if
I don’t attack the other, the other will not attack me, then we can be
narcissistic together – it is the inviting of others to join the individual’s
fantasy rather than the individual acknowledging that he or she has a fantasy
that may intersect with another’s fantasy in a way that creates tension. It
feels like ‘why burst my bubble when you can join it and be happy here too
!?’ Or perhaps more accurately, we may
all have our own bubbles separate of each other, or what Sherry Turkle calls being
“alone together.” Why connect at the risk of tension when we could propose the
avoidance of connection as the new representation of connection?
Here, we see that
difference - or disconnection - is safer than similarity, or the feeling of being connected. The minor differences allow us to be in
the same room, but alone, connected through disconnection. This is a Glauconian
idea of justice, seeming good, but really acting ‘bad;’ looking one way but
being another! Soon, lulled into the warm, drunken safety of smooth narcissism,
we begin to develop Stockholm syndrome to our own disavowal of self-interest.
To preserve this, we will round the edges of all opinions, perspectives, and
worldviews as to avoid getting bruises, bumps, or little cuts, wounds that
would let the outside in.
