Donald Trump (the Philosopher-King) and the LoveWisdom of the Oppressed
How the President of the Unprecedented Sorrow reveals the true nature of the dominant culture, and how the people he cannot govern reveal the true nature of reality
Part I, Essentials
The killing of George Floyd has come as an intense wake-up call, just as the dominant culture tries so hard to go back to sleep—this urgent drive to get “back to normal,” when normal held so much anxiety, grief, and suffering for so many people. Once again the dominant culture has to rely heavily on those it has oppressed to fulfill the function of LoveWisdom.
LoveWisdom means the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love. We usually use the confusing Greek term “philosophy,” but that term has become so abused that we need to revalue it.
We can learn a lot about the true meaning of philosophy or LoveWisdom if we can begin to see the people speaking out about injustice as philosophers par excellence. Mr. Floyd’s lynching-by-knee struck the psyche as a crucifixion—he did, after all, suffocate, at the hands of an unjust state (from a larger perspective, a conquesting, colonizing force), and in the process he demonstrated the lack of spiritual roots in the culture, how it has become a servant of mammon (thus the ironic tragedy that his death was sparked by a false image of the false idol, an allegedly counterfeit version of a counterfeit god). George Floyd showed the culture’s lack of wisdom and justice, the incoherence in our notions of law and order, how the culture itself cannot seem to receive a knee offered in respectful calls for wisdom and justice (as when someone offers their knee, with dignity, during the national anthem), but can certainly force a knee in disrespectful acts of ignorance and oppression.
In response to that symbolic crucifixion, people became pilgrims of LoveWisdom, journeying toward the possibility of a better culture, a culture rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty. Blazing their own trail, they nevertheless followed in the footsteps of Socrates, Christ, Buddha, Confucius, the Peacemaker, Gandhi, Ida B. Wells, Dr. King, Cesar Chavez, Wangari Maathai, and many others.
We can also learn a lot about the true meaning of LoveWisdom when we see Trump as a philosopher too—a philosopher-king—and clearly distinguish him from what Nietzsche referred to as “philosophical laborers”. The people we call “philosophers” in our culture mostly fall under the rubric of “philosophical laborers” and those who profess philosophies but do not serve the robust function Nietzsche sensed in real philosophy. Trump actually serves that function, but he does so on behalf of remarkably bad philosophy—philosophy that we should never allow the name LoveWisdom, but which still counts as philosophy in the most technical sense, even though we may find it incoherent, unskillful, and quite unrealistic.
Trump is a philosopher-king, one Socrates would want to step off his throne and get further education. However, as much as we might see the election of Trump as a significant tragedy, and as much as we might see the prospect of his reelection as a potential catastrophe, it will do far less good to angrily declare Trump a philosopher-knave, and attack him for behaving like a childish, unscrupulous servant of the real political powers of the culture (the three connotations of “knave”). We certainly must not endorse Trump’s unethical behavior, and we must even repudiate it, and take steps to change the political, social, and general cultural-ecological situation.
But too many in the culture have confused philosophical criticism and ethical concern with taunting, amateur mental health diagnosis, name-calling, judgmentalism, and all manner of evasions of wisdom and compassion. Now more than ever, we cannot evade wisdom, love, and beauty.
This means we cannot evade ourselves. To confront Trump’s ignorance in a genuinely skillful way requires us to confront our own ignorance, anger, grief, confusion, and even complicity (however unwitting), rather than evading our shortcomings and the fullness of our situation by blaming and shaming those with whom we disagree.
This does not mean we sit passively in the midst of injustice, or that we fail to take a stand for what is right. Nevertheless, we cannot create a just, rejuvenating, vitalizing, and peaceful culture without confronting our own ignorance, our own body and soul, and the body and soul of the world, as part of returning to wisdom, love, and beauty.
To help ourselves return to wisdom, love, and beauty, we can begin by contemplating Trump as a philosopher, and then turn to a contemplation of the protestors as true practitioners of LoveWisdom—in other words, the protestors belong to a more sacred and skillful philosophical movement, while Trump belongs to a rather profane and unskillful one. Trump’s ignorance and unskillfulness has created untold suffering, deepened our own ignorance and confusion, perpetuated the culture’s pattern of insanity, and increased volatility, uncertainty, and misperception.
And that puts the situation squarely in our own laps. We all need to become more skillful right now, because, as things stand, we have elected Donald J. Trump the President of the Unprecedented Sorrow (POTUS). When we reflect on that fact, we can better sense why we elected him, and we can also better sense both the fuller nature and gravity of that error—not just an error, but a symptom.
Why is Trump POTUS? We can ask this question on at least two levels: Why would we refer to Trump as President of the Unprecedented Sorrow? and, How could we have elected a philosopher like Trump at all? The first level provides a context for the second.
Trump is President of the Unprecedented Sorrow in part because we face unprecedented sorrow today. Some people may try and dispute that suggestion, perhaps because so many of us have high definition televisions, laptops, cell phones, and air conditioners, and we have access to antibiotics and vaccines and jets to fly us around the world.[1]
Steven Pinker, for instance, has become the Professor Pangloss of our day, championing this as the best of all possible times (Professor Pangloss is a fictional philosophical laborer—a laborer taking up the labors of another laborer, named Leibniz . . . no matter what terrible things he saw, Pangloss repeated the refrain that he lived in the best of all possible worlds). The techno-optimists of today (we can think of Pinker as essentially a techno-optimist) likely feel tremendous empathic distress for the sufferings of the world, and many of them probably have high ethical ideals and gentle characters, and yet their assessment of things seems Panglossian.
The unprecedented sorrow of today comes in an altogether way with fragmentation. For instance, our laptops, cell phones, jet planes, and countless other trinkets have fragmented us—not only fragmented us by isolating us from one another in various subtle and overt ways, but fragmented us by fragmenting culture from nature, mind from nature, mind from culture, human from non-human, and of course “tribe” from “tribe”. What a sorrow that we do not find delight in each other, in nature and creativity, in making music together, in feeding each other, in telling stories, in a feeling of joy and sacredness in the wonders of each moment together . . . and instead we seek delight in owning gadgets, binging entertainment, buying things, polluting the world, degrading ecologies, competing for material wealth . . . . what a profound sorrow.
We may think we do not seek delight in degrading the world and in general perpetuating a pattern of insanity that includes the cultivation of inequality and oppression, but our actions amount to just that. As we seek delight through our social media feeds, our entertainment subscriptions, and our many possessions and diversions, we must simultaneously perpetuate the pattern of insanity that produces and sustains those things. In the present system, our consumption, entertainment, and accumulation of material wealth and entertainment is the simultaneous degradation of ecologies and cultivation of inequality and other forms of illth (the opposite of “wealth”). And we are stuck in this cycle of sorrows, over which Trump presides, as our philosopher-king.
Trump also presides over a great history of sorrow: The unprecedented genocide of the “new world,” the extinction of cultures and languages, the unrivaled slavery industry, the shocking period of Jim Crow and lynching, the prison industrial complex, the ocean of propaganda, the unsurpassed military-industrial complex and global campaign of manipulation, control, intimidation, and aggression. Nothing compares to 500 years of conquest and slave-trade—the uncountable lives, loves, and cultures destroyed. Nothing compares to the present stockpile of nuclear weapons, the incoherent agendas of ecological degradation, economic inequality, and large-scale oppression. Only in the past few decades have we faced the prospect of a mass extinction event, caused by either nuclear weapons or by ecological degradation. No previous society in our history has ever faced such a horrifying prospect, and that makes this historical moment an unprecedented one, the culmination of other unprecedented sorrows, ignorance and evils we may find it daunting to fully acknowledge.
We inherit the burden of all of that, and so when we elect leaders, we elect people who cannot escape it, but must either make it better, or make it worse—and they make it worse even if they simply evade it or pretend it doesn’t exist. Any lack of wisdom on their part inevitably draws us closer to catastrophe, and further away from compassion and healing. Therefore, the election of wise, compassionate, and graceful human beings has become vitally important, and part of our sorrow relates to the relative abundance of politicians, executives, and celebrities, and a corresponding dearth of genuine leaders and cultural elders (along with a lack of proper respect for those we do have).
Once we begin to see this unprecedented sorrow, and admit that we carry this burden, we can experience far more compassion for Trump—and for ourselves. The compassion doesn’t mean we fail to repudiate his transgressions (or fail to address our own). We should repudiate them, and we should apply discernment and wisdom in mutually respectful—even if at times fiercesome—critique and debate. But compassion means we can accept Trump as a human being. Just like any of us, he wants to be happy, and he doesn’t want to suffer; just like any of us, he often does a terrible job at it.
We can also see the guy is in way over his head. Given the burden we carry, most anyone in his position would be in over their head—at least if they came from the dominant streams of the dominant culture, for those streams do not produce leaders and visionaries, but only politicians and business people. “The real Donald Trump” is unknown to almost all of us, for we see only the product of “reality television,” the product of propaganda and also the product of very human neurosis and ignorance. Knowing this, knowing the general cultural context and also observing Trump’s behavior, we can reasonably suggest that Trump is not a leader, just as our techno-overlords are not really visionaries or sages—not when we evaluate leadership and vision from the standpoint of the philosophical, religious, and spiritual traditions of the world, which would demand that leadership and vision clearly evidence wisdom, compassion, justice, and a genuine sense of grace, beauty, and sacredness.
The last characteristic alone could mark off the crisis we face, and one finds a genuine sense of sacredness almost totally lacking in our philosopher-kings—at least in practice, in the way they relate to the world and its living beings, human and otherwise—to say nothing of the apparent lack of true wisdom, compassion, and justice their activities suggest.
We cannot enter into any serious discussion of these matters without compassion, because its absence weakens our capacity for wisdom—which means our capacity to understand ourselves and the nature of reality, our capacity to think clearly, and the foundation for effective and graceful communication and action. If we simply resort to calling Trump names, we likely get caught up in our own shadow, our own unconscious, and, perhaps ironically, the collective delusions of our culture, much of which is likewise unconscious.
We often hate the stupidity in others that we ourselves have exemplified or fear we have exemplified. In this respect, one of the most important ethical realizations of the dominant culture has remained far too marginalized: The discovery of the unconscious presents a new clarification of our ethical activity, including our political activity.
We have witnessed incredible expressions of evil in the past 500 hundred years. Expressions of evil go back much further, but the time-frame of the conquest of what we call the Americas holds special significance for those who now live in these lands, and also for all those influenced by what happens in these lands (the conquest of Africa unfolded in this era as well, and in many ways, both obvious and subtle, these histories go together). Looking at various expressions of evil in recent or relatively recent memory, psychologists of the modern period grappled with evil as a problem—often sitting in the midst of these expressions, such as those who witnessed the two World Wars and the holocaust.
Many of these psychologists noticed what philosophical, spiritual, and religious traditions have noticed to varying degrees: Our unconscious mind plays a crucial role in our ethical failings, including ongoing conflict and aggression. Our contemporary neuroscience and social science lend further support to this realization. What does this mean when it comes to thinking about “evil,” and trying to improve human culture?
One of the main issues comes to this: Things we don’t like in ourselves often get repressed, and then we project those same things onto others, whether those we call enemies or even some we call friends. As a collective or social example, the U.S. refers to certain groups as “terrorists,” and yet those same groups experience the U.S. as a terrorist state—and they can offer very good evidence for their claim. Thus, the people of those cultures, lacking advanced military technology and vast wealth, may strike out at the big terrorist state, using the only tactics they think they have available to resolve suffering they reasonably see the U.S. as creating. They perceive the U.S. as evil. Meanwhile the U.S. speaks of an “axis of evil,” and reacts to that axis with violence, at times decidedly evil. Talk of justice becomes incoherent when a nation will start preemptive wars, fund dictatorships, topple governments, and assassinate people (obviously without trial).
Even in our personal relationships, with those we supposedly love, we may accuse them of various things that we ourselves fall into all the time. For instance, one friend may accuse another of being “controlling,” when the one doing the accusing is known by everyone as the king of control freaks.
We engage in no mere digression here. This issue has become vital in its importance, in part because Trump’s election seems to have arisen out of precisely this sort of activity (along with other factors). The dominant culture has gotten quite bound up in its own unconscious, and we have no choice but to learn the real practice of compassion, altogether with the holistic practices of wisdom, love, and beauty. We must make the unconscious conscious, make the encumbered energies free.
The early Jungian psychologists in particular did a lot to get this work moving—though, to say it again, we find a nuanced understanding of it already in various wisdom traditions, perhaps most elaborately engaged in the Buddhist traditions, though various streams of Sufism, Jewish mysticism, Christian mysticism, and indigenous traditions, among others, have also engaged this issue. Indeed, those other traditions tend to offer a more comprehensive and holistic view. Nevertheless, C.G. Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, Eric Neumann, and others have done us a great service in writing about some of the core problems. If we do not face them, we will not only fail to unleash our true potential culturally and individually, but we will do so as part of turning Trump into a scapegoat for our own ignorance. The best-case scenario leads to electing Biden, which will not do any great good other than to avoid the potentially catastrophic situation of a four more years of Trump.
We will return to the key psychological issues a bit later. First let’s clarify the way in which Trump serves as our philosopher-king. Nietzsche had some provocative things to say about philosophy that can help us clarify our strange situation:
I insist that people should finally stop confounding philosophical laborers, and scientific men generally, with philosophers; precisely at this point we should be strict about giving “each his due,” and not far too much to those and far too little to these. (BGE 211)
Here we find one way of understanding how we got into an ecological catastrophe, and indeed why we live in an unprecedented sorrow. Our scientists do not understand the importance of becoming true philosophers, and so they remain mere laborers, often laboring in relative ignorance of the philosophical vision of their effective masters. Moreover, the people teaching philosophy in the universities largely remain mere laborers, and consequently only educate others to become laborers. This makes all of us laborers in service to the real philosophers of the culture.
How does Nietzsche define the true philosopher? The true philosopher creates values. We have to see this as a fragmented truth. Nietzsche had a hard time arriving at a holistic philosophy, but he nevertheless managed remarkably incisive critiques of western culture, and even accomplished a degree of prophetic LoveWisdom, foreseeing the great challenges western culture would have to face, the challenges we all now face.
Here’s how Nietzsche gets at the difference between philosophers and philosophical laborers:
Those philosophical laborers after the noble model of Kant and Hegel have to determine and press into formulas, whether in the realm of logic or political (moral) thought or art, some great data of valuations—that is, former positings of values, creations of value which have become dominant and are for a time called “truths.” It is for these investigators to make everything that has happened and been esteemed so far easy to look over, easy to think over, intelligible and manageable, to abbreviate everything long, even “time,” and to overcome the entire past—an enormous and wonderful task in whose service every subtle pride, every tough will can certainly find satisfaction. Genuine philosophers, however, are commanders and legislators: they say, “thus it shall be!” They first determine the Whither and For What of man, and in so doing have at their disposal the preliminary labor of all philosophical laborers, all who have overcome the past. With a creative hand they reach for the future, and all that is and has been becomes a means for them, an instrument, a hammer. Their “knowing” is creating, their creating is a legislation, their will to truth is—will to power. Are there such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers yet? Must there not be such philosophers?— (BGE 211)
We have not entered a “post-truth” landscape. Rather, the philosopher-kings have done what philosopher-kings do: They have dictated truths. In this case, they have dictated truths so scandalously out of attunement with wisdom, love, and beauty that we cannot keep ourselves from feeling a sense of horror—even if some of us repress that feeling in order to follow those philosopher-kings into our collective doom. Not only do followers of Trump engage in such repression, but many people who claim to oppose Trump do so as well.
Nor should we see Trump as the sole philosopher-king, for he rules alongside a host of other philosophers—true philosophers in Nietzsche’s sense of the term. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, the Koch brothers, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, Larry Page . . . these people say, “Thus it shall be!” and so it becomes. The rest of us merely labor—including the intellectuals who decry a supposed “post-truth” context, and yet, with tragic irony, do much to perpetuate its existence.
We should acknowledge two things: That Nietzsche’s idea about philosophy here seems both fragmented and kooky, and, in fact because of that, its cogency in depicting our de facto philosopher-kings shows how fragmented and kooky the dominant culture has become.
What makes Nietzsche’s definition kooky? Well . . . he aims at something and misses. He wants to get at the inherent creativity of life. We all have this inherent creativity. We all express it. We all are philosophers, world-makers—and we could become skillful, graceful, wise, loving, beautiful philosophers and world-makers. But we don’t snap our fingers and “create values” per se. The values pretty much stay constant: Love, compassion, benevolence, wisdom, authenticity, trust, and so on.
Once we start trying to name a new value someone created, we probably find ourselves romping along dead-ends of ignorance.
In a way, what the philosopher-kings of our time do comes to something like this: They get us to value things, often under the guise of our professed values. We say we value love, and they get us to buy a vacation package—so we can spend time with those we love, given that we have too much to do in the normal workday to be present with them. We say we value authenticity, and they get us to buy a laptop—because it’s a symbol of our individuality.
The philosopher-kings don’t teach us much about love, don’t teach us how to love, don’t encourage us to practice love. They have remarkably little wisdom or compassion to offer, and we could hardly consider them artful, unless we choke art down to “the art of the deal”—murdering true art in the process. So, while we do value things like love, beauty, family, friendship, peace, and so on, the philosopher-kings do nothing skillful to help us cultivate these values.
On the other hand, though no one among us values fear and craving, the philosopher-kings provoke our fear and craving all the time. They invest a great deal of their resources conjuring up fear and craving, which we then act upon to labor under their yoke and purchase more of the things they want us to value.
We may find ourselves protesting, “But why should we think Elon Musk or Donald Trump have any influence over our values. Our values are up to us, aren’t they? Don’t people like Musk and Trump bear no responsibility for things like peace and justice?” If this were true, why would we give these people so much power in our culture? Wouldn’t we have to be totally trapped in ignorance and delusion to give the most power, status, wealth, and influence to those who take responsibility for what we should value least? These philosopher-kings lord over us, and as a consequence they effectively create the values of consumerism, consumption, distrust, aggression, and more. They drive our activity toward a vision of humanity and a vision of the world that lacks wisdom, love, and beauty. The philosopher-kings instinctively use our suffering to separate us, when in fact it should unite us. They thus create fragmentation in place of unity.
And they use craving to such an extent that our president, the president of our divided souls, evidences the cycle of craving in his practice of “leadership” via tweet. The state of craving leaves us less able to think critically and reflectively. In the midst of stress, overwork, inequality, lack of a sensible healthcare system, and all manner of systemic incoherence, we can handle no more than one tweet at a time. And we find ourselves compulsively seeking more tweets, and craving our own following, craving the “likes,” craving for re-tweeting. It’s a system of addiction, not a system of good thinking, not an ecology of wisdom, love, and beauty. Trump tweets because we have become that kind of culture. He demonstrates and lives out the values the philosopher-kings have created.
Trump, Koch, Musk, and the other philosopher-kings also create in another frightening (and intimately related) way: They create “reality”. Do we live in a tweetable reality? Even Laozi needed 5000 characters to describe the indescribable sacredness and mystery of life (which he said goes beyond all words, and cannot be told), and even Nietzsche’s best epigrams properly germinate only in a larger ecology of reflection and practice.
But, more directly, we must notice that Trump lies so incessantly, one can hardly keep up, and he so often repeats his simplistic incantations about his past or future actions that he gets many people to accept his conjured delusions as real. He says that something he did was “perfect,” that something he promises to do will be “tremendous,” he asserts that he will produce results, “like you’ve never seen.” Everything with Trump is “perfect,” “incredible,” “bigly,” “the best,” “tremendous,” “fantastic,” “amazing,” “really smart,” and “beautiful,” and everyone who disagrees with his version of reality is “failing,” “awful,” “unfair,” “the worst,” “dumb as a rock,” and so on.
Trump has the audacity to consistently say, “Nobody knew anything about it,” in reference to any personal ignorance. He makes his ego as large as the world. And thus, often, what he understands turns out to be something no one else does, as when he told a campaign audience, “Some of you have two jobs. I understand it. You know, nobody else understood it.”[2]
Are we expected to believe the person born incredibly wealthy understands, and nobody else does—perhaps not even the people working two jobs? How should they understand that predicament, in a culture with so much wealth that we have people like our philosopher-kings? Trump apparently can explain it all to us, since nobody else knows what he knows—he creates an image of himself as a business genius, and a general powerhouse of good decision-making, despite a long record of failures, both ethical failures and basic business failures. Contemplating such things has to do with sensing the insanity of our situation, not making fun of Trump or making these criticisms personal, which is how he seems to take much of the negative press he gets.
We cannot ignore Trump’s ethical transgressions, and at the same time we must see how they go together with the ethical transgressions of the culture as a whole, of the Unprecedented Sorrow in which we live and in which the whole world has become entangled. For instance, one can find no end to the feeling of sad irony as Trump, a mendacious beneficiary of the rigged economic system, claims to his campaign audience that, “We’re running against a rigged system, and we’re running against a very dishonest media.”
Who is this “we”? How—except by “creating” “reality”—could Trump create the sense that he and his voters form an ethically functional “we”? How—except by lying a distorted reality into existence—could the philosopher-king of deceit get his audience to consider the problems of the media independent of the structural inequalities of the culture?
Though we most certainly need critical thinking in relation to media and its systemic biases, Trump has helped cultivate a mass skepticism of media that has become dangerous, as people refuse to even believe reports that we should wear face masks during a pandemic, or that Trump lost the popular vote (and not because of voter fraud), or that systemic racism really exists. Trump seems willing to do anything he can to rig the elections, but creates the impression that he could only lose if there were fraud—and much of his voting base seems to accept this image of reality.
We can find many other bizarre examples of this “reality-creation,” such as when Trump declared that no one knew how many people influenza kills in an average year—except, apparently, whoever it was who informed him. Countless health professionals must have rolled their eyes. Perhaps we should think it better to take some of this as a matter of Trump’s rhetoric, but such a view would evade our own and the culture’s broader habits of ignorance.
One can only guess how African Americans felt upon hearing about Trump’s interview with The Wall Street Journal, in which he proclaimed, “I did something good. I made Juneteenth very famous . . . It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it.”[3] Nobody? Nobody ever heard of it? Trump seems to say these things in part because he has become used to creating reality, and many of us say things like this all the time, as when we tell our partners, “You never spend time with me,” or, “We always fight over things like this.” These extremes in our language evidence a lack of mindfulness, a reactiveness, an absence of fuller attunement with reality.
When Trump says or does one thing, then pretends he has said or done something else, it seems as if we are being gaslighted. And this denial of reality amounts to the creation of a false reality and more unskillful values, such as the value of arrogance, the “alpha male” persona, and so on. This turns Nietzsche’s sense of the energies of life—which we should think of as a sacred sense of empowerment, virtue, and virtuosity—into a materialistic will to power, a delusional will to exert power over others and over life. But we, too, often try and exert power, manipulation, and control over others, over situations, over ourselves. Everything we see in Trump we must look into ourselves and the larger culture to see if we find it there too.
Trump’s creation of value goes together with that of the other philosopher-kings, like Zuckerberg and Musk. Their value creation seduces many people in the culture to value something called “power,” and also to value money and the accumulation of wealth. In the value system of the philosopher-kings, we accept material success as a substitute for character traits we actually respect, such as intelligence, resilience, and creativity, and we abandon our natural sensitivity to whether or not those traits go together with a vitalizing ethical orientation to life. In other words, we most value things like intelligence, resilience, and creativity when they go together with our highest values, the various faces of wisdom, love, and beauty. We think those things matter most of all, and we naturally repudiate the evil genius while embracing the saintly fool.
Not so under the reign of the philosopher-kings. In their dystopian realm, we begin to accept the notion that money itself indicates something good about those who have it, and we do this in a way in which money itself becomes a thing valued, in place of things we ourselves, in line with the spiritual and philosophical traditions of the world, claim to hold dear.
But, again, we get nowhere without compassion—even if our compassion must at times be fierce and discerning. Though some of Trump’s ignorance can evoke our anger, allowing that anger to keep an edge of aggression does no good to us or those suffering from the ignorance Trump brings to light. Though some of Trump’s missteps seem humorous, we should only laugh as part of a reminder of our collective folly and the general fallibility of the human mind. If we laugh out of meanness, or in any way merely critical, we do little to draw nearer to a more just society and a more healthy world.
We face a great challenge here, which includes turning toward the way we all elected Trump, no matter the candidate we voted for, and that, even if we see Trump as a hero, we must also see him as unskillful and lacking wisdom, and see our own ignorance and unskillfulness too. Failing to do this, we remain laborers in service to incredibly bad philosophy. But, we still have the potential to become true philosophers, and to thereby become genuinely creative in a world crying out for our wise, loving, and beautiful creativity.
Let us return to some aspects of the psychological dimension of our situation. C.G. Jung gave a lecture in which he touched upon some important facets of the challenge we now face in improving the culture and facing the fuller significance of the election of Trump:
We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate. It oppresses. And I am the oppressor of the person I condemn—not his friend and fellow sufferer. I do not in the least mean to say that we must never pass judgment when we desire to help and improve. But, if the doctor wishes to help a human being, he must be able to accept him as he is. And he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted him as he is. Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life, it requires the greatest art to be simple. And so, acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem, and the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life. That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ. All these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all—the poorest of all beggars—the most impudent of all offenders- yea the very fiend himself—that these are within me? And that I myself stand in need of the arms of my own kindness. That I myself am the enemy that must be loved. What then? (CW 11, para. 520)
Indeed: What then? Jung suggests that, when confronted with a need for self-compassion (not self-indulgence or a precious self-cherishing, but self-compassion), we turn the heart of Christianity inside out, and we put ourselves on the cross of our own harshest criticism. We condemn ourselves, even rage against and torture ourselves, trying to hide from the world what we think we have found in our soul. Jung says that, when we experience that need for self-compassion, then, even “had it been God himself who drew near to us in this despicable form, we should have denied him a thousand times before a single cock had crowed.”
To say it again, we face some rather daunting challenges here. Don’t we need to condemn racism? Don’t we need to condemn ecocide, economic and ecological injustice, political manipulation, the endless devilry of capitalism?
Perhaps the larger question must come first: Do we want to condemn, or do we want to heal and transform?
If we want to transform, we must do whatever most ethically and effectively empowers transformation. If the activity of condemnation somehow traps us in the pattern of insanity that gives rise to that which we want to condemn, then condemnation will not suffice. We see how quickly Trump reverts to condemnation, and he thereby shows us our own bad habits.
We can at least discern the difference between condemning actions on the one hand, and condemning persons on the other, which goes together with the difference between fierceness and aggression. We may find an action, a manner of speaking, or a whole way of thinking and living deplorable, and at the same time we can maintain a practice of compassion—both for ourselves and for the one who committed the actions. Self-compassion and other-compassion go together—perhaps more importantly, compassion and effective criticism go together.
We cannot think skillfully without compassion and a measure of equanimity, and we cannot then effectively criticize anyone else’s thought, speech, or action without compassion and equanimity, along with a tremendous self-awareness, self-inquiry, a holistic practice of life. To most skillfully take a stand for the good and the just, we must live in such a way as to practice and bring to fruition the good and the just within ourselves. Once we make a duality between our path and our goal, between self and other, between self and world, we will inevitably perpetuate suffering. Jung tries to get at crucial aspects of why this stands as a general principle.
Jung points out that we would rather remain ignorant of ourselves—most certainly if looking into the reality of ourselves might force us into ethical insights that would in turn lead us to change our lives. We remain surprisingly unconscious in many aspects of our lives, but that doesn’t stop us from pointing our finger in countless directions to blame and condemn.
Jung places the question of looking at ourselves in the context of Christianity, and the Christian’s aspiration to live in the way Christ taught, to live in imitation of the life of Christ—a fitting image for U.S. society, so dominated by Christian notions:
It is no easy matter to live a life that is modeled on Christ’s, but it is unspeakably harder to live one’s own life as truly as Christ lived his. Anyone who did this would run counter to the conditions of his own history, and though he might thus be fulfilling them, he would none the less be misjudged, derided, tortured, and crucified. He would be a kind of crazy Bolshevist who deserved the cross. We therefore prefer the historically sanctioned and sanctified imitation of Christ. (CW 11, para. 523)
But we have become such complicated creatures. Something in us can no longer stand the imitation of Christ or the following of any authority—even in the midst of following fads and trends of the consumerist culture. Ironically, we follow trends and receive a profound indoctrination from our culture—much of it unconscious—yet we act out as if we want a self-styled existence. This forms a crucial part of our indoctrination, for a self-styled truth will never ultimately satisfy us. We will return to this essential suggestion in a moment.
First, consider the person the following passage might describe:
He may not know it, but he behaves as if his own individual life were God’s special will which must be fulfilled at all costs. This is the source of his egoism, which is one of the most tangible evils of the neurotic state. But the person who tells him he is too egoistic has already lost his confidence, and rightly so, for that person has driven him still further into his neurosis. (CW 11, para. 524)
How many of us see Trump in that passage? How many of us see ourselves?
We are slowly trying to bring out a constellation of things so subtle and essential that we may have difficulty truly sensing and understanding. We can easily deride Trump as neurotic and egocentric. But we won’t succeed in healing the situation we face because, among other things, we thereby deride his followers in the process, provoking Trump and his followers to dig in their heels. This only deepens the neurotic state, and runs a heightened risk of violence. Moreover, we thereby deepen our own neurosis, because in deriding others we inevitably maintain our own ignorance to some degree, and we forestall the possibilities for healing and transformation.
We face here the spiritual crisis of our time. We find ourselves in the midst of a history of unprecedented sorrow, standing at the edge of potential catastrophe. Our neurosis may become a total psychotic break, and may devolve into complete self-destruction.
In some sense, we do have to end. Shall we end the ignorance and injustice, or shall we end the species? Perhaps we will at least end organized human living (on a large scale), since we cannot seem to make a coherent organized effort.
Jung defines neurosis this way:
neurosis is an inner cleavage, the state of being at war with oneself. Everything that accentuates this cleavage makes the patient worse, and everything that mitigates it tends to heal him. What drives people to war with themselves is the suspicion or the knowledge that they consist of two persons in opposition to one another. The conflict may be between the sensual and the spiritual man, or between the ego and the shadow. It is what Faust means when he says: “Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast apart”. (CW 11, para. 522)
Is Trump neurotic—or are we all neurotic? Who among us feels an inner division? Who feels at times stuck because one part of us wants something that the other part of us fears, loathes, evades? How often do we get in our own way, fight against ourselves, sabotage ourselves in countless ways large and small? This unites all human sufferers. Indeed, suffering unites us with all sentient beings. In our suffering, as in our truest joy, we can say of any other being, “Just like me! That person is just like me! Just like me, they suffer, and they would rather not suffer! They try to be happy, and, just like me, they often do a terrible job at it!”
In particular, in the United States, we can recognize a strange division within white people, who carry not only the burdens of a generally incoherent culture, but who also somehow carry the burdens particular to their participation in racial injustice. The strangeness of this division should not cover over the fact that people of color also experience a division in their soul.
Thus the human neurosis should come to the forefront. We will have no lasting, healing, holistic, and holy justice among people (which we would then not refer to as “racial” justice) if we cannot heal the deeper neuroses that many if not all human beings share. We are united already both in our ignorance and in our hunger for love and liberation, our yearning for wisdom and compassion, for beauty and wonder. We must return to this basic fact again and again. In a passage worthy of repeated contemplation, the Dalai Lama said,
I have been inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution that were adopted as the motto of the French Republic: Liberté, équalité, fraternité. I adopted the same motto. As a Buddhist, the aim of my spiritual quest is to free myself of the fundamental ignorance that has led to the notion that there is a division between people and the natural world, which is at the root of all our suffering. (2017: 36-8)
These words appear in a book appropriately titled, A Call for Revolution. We should contemplate with great care the fact that he places together the basic human neurosis (the basic human split) with a motto for social and political healing—the healing of cultural neurosis. But the cultural neurosis arises from the division in ourselves that we create as we see nature and culture as two separate things. This goes directly into such deluded thinking that sees Black or Indigenous people as “savage” (and the long history of making such people as cut off from a vitalizing connection with nature as white people now experience).
With respect to our particular neurosis in the U.S., we find ourselves divided along a line of color. The words of W.E.B. Dubois, written over a century ago as his “Forethought” to The Souls of Black Folk, remain true enough for our time that we need only write “Twenty-first” in place of “Twentieth”:
Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
Incredibly, and tragically, especially for people of color, we face the same problem today, the same neurosis. As a psychological complex, some of it remains unconscious. That means: NOT conscious. Whatever things we say about it, still more remains beneath the surface. That shadowy presence terrifies a great number of people, of all colors.
Of the shadow in our soul, Jung writes,
It is well known that Freudian psychoanalysis limits itself to the task of making conscious the shadow-side and the evil within us. It simply brings into action the civil war that was latent, and lets it go at that. The patient must deal with it as best he can. Freud has unfortunately overlooked the fact that man has never yet been able single-handed to hold his own against the powers of darkness that is, of the unconscious. Man has always stood in need of the spiritual help which his particular religion held out to him. The opening up of the unconscious always means the outbreak of intense spiritual suffering; it is as when a flourishing civilization is abandoned to invading hordes of barbarians, or when fertile fields are exposed by the bursting of a dam to a raging torrent. The World War was such an invasion which showed, as nothing else could, how thin are the walls which separate a well-ordered world from lurking chaos. But it is the same with the individual and his rationally ordered world. Seeking revenge for the violence his reason has done to her, outraged Nature only awaits the moment when the partition falls so as to overwhelm the conscious life with destruction. Man has been aware of this danger to the psyche since the earliest times, even in the most primitive stages of culture. . . Man is never helped in his suffering by what he thinks of for himself; only suprahuman, revealed truth lifts him out of his distress. (CW 11, para. 531)
Elsewhere he writes,
. . . . Insofar as analytical treatment makes the “shadow” conscious, it causes a cleavage and a tension of opposites which in their turn seek compensation in unity. The adjustment is achieved through symbols. The conflict between the opposites can strain our psyche to the breaking point, if we take them seriously, or if they take us seriously. The tertium non datur of logic proves its worth: no solution can be seen. (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 335)
We keep touching this sense of division, of cleavage in the soul. Now more than ever we need to turn and face it. No “solution” can be seen. This applies right now, as we face the question of how to rightly value human life, and why Black lives matter, why we must look in particular at Black lives.
The pattern of insanity that profanes Black lives profanes all of life. That pattern will push for solutions. The pain experienced by people of color, indigenous people, and all marginalized people may prompt them and so many others to push for a solution. We will find no solution in the pattern of insanity itself, and that means justice comes only in the total rejuvenation of the culture. We must find a new wholeness, a renewed sense of sacredness, a new attunement to reality, a new rootedness in wisdom, love, and beauty.
But to find that wholeness, we must face our inner division, our psychic split. And we must see it in all of us, while most urgently seeing it in Black lives, indigenous lives, and all marginalized lives.
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about the cleavage in the souls of Black folk:
. . . it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. . . . The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, –– a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,––an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
This rift in the soul affects every one of us. It affects Trump too. That’s why we elected him president of our suffering, president of the republic of broken souls.
All of this matters if we want justice, because the dominant culture will tend toward limiting justice in every way possible. In the context of the dominant culture, we run an ongoing risk of limited and ultimately limiting insights—even if at first those insights feel liberating. If we don’t know much about our larger potentials, about the possibility of living in a republic of healthy souls, if the culture offers us no cosmic vision of what we truly are and may become (and, crucially, how to become the best versions of ourselves), and if that culture actively limits us in a variety of ways, then we tend to grope around rather clumsily, and when we find anything that feels better than our current situation, we think we have found a great treasure.
For instance, defunding police departments might seem like a radical step. But Martin Luther King made clear that militarism, poverty, materialism, racism, xenophobia, and capitalism all go together. Talk of “defunding the police” provokes reactivity precisely because of its incoherence. How will we make any progress when provoke so much reactivity?
If we leave the prison-industrial complex, the military-industrial complex, the class war, the robber-baron capitalism, the ecological degradation, and the basic division of the soul in place, then we will only push the problem a little further down the road. We can no longer afford to do that, because the road upon which we find ourselves racing along ends in a cliff or a wall. We will not walk away from the catastrophe. Only by slowing the race and doing all we can to change course will we provide a healthy world for ourselves and future generations.
But our context functions to limit our capacity to make that kind of change. It limits us in two ways: Certain kinds of insights become virtually impossible in certain kinds of contexts, and the insights we do have get weighed and acted upon in accordance with cultural notions. Radical transformation remains possible, but most of our insights will tend to either leave the larger culture intact, or even reinforce it, however unwittingly.
Related to all of this, we can begin to sense how everything hangs together. Everything emerges as an interwoven aliveness. We don’t have much experience thinking with the whole, thinking from the whole, thinking as the whole. Thus we miss the way an apparent insight in our relatively localized view ends up emerging as a problem in some other aspect of the system.
The complexity of our lives and the relationship between this complexity and our suffering may have expressed itself in several ways during the 2016 presidential election in the U.S.
We could put the main issue of that election something like this: What makes it possible for a culture to consider electing someone whose character seems so questionable?
We will turn to that question in Part II of this series.
Let us summarize some of the elementary issues:
1) We face an unprecedented sorrow, in terms of a long history of evil and an incredible ecological catastrophe.
2) We have elected Trump as President of our Suffering, our Sorrow.
3) Trump has shown himself unable to skillfully handle our suffering—and we too must admit that we often handle our own suffering with a significant lack of skill. Trump has functioned as a philosopher-king, creating and perpetuating the values the ground our suffering, and trampling the values that could heal us and free us. We, too, can find a significant gap in our lives between the values we claim to hold dear and the way we actually live.
4) If we merely deride Trump, we will not get at the real issues that led to our electing him, and we will not heal the deeper wounds that gives rise to our suffering.
5) The unprecedented suffering we now face includes within it the history of slavery, oppression, and genocide that Trump presides over as President of our Suffering. Though we all suffer under the regime of insanity, indigenous people and people of color tend to suffer the worst of it. The division in the souls of those descendants of our history of suffering should inspire us to sense the division in ourselves, and should also inspire us to heal the suffering in ourselves and in those most marginalized in our culture. We can all say, “Just like me!” We are united by nothing so powerfully as by our suffering, and by the wisdom, love, and beauty that heals suffering and liberates us all. In other words, wisdom, love, and beauty are as much a part of us (each and all) as the suffering we now experience. We are connected not only by sorrow, but also by joy, not only by ignorance, but by our capacity for transformative insight.
[1] We seem to need a nuanced view—certainly a view informed by systems theory, and hopefully even systems thinking. Some of these developments feel rather impressive. For instance, the recent discovery of a potential “holy grail” of antibiotics (a potentially ironic term) makes even a systems thinker wonder—on the one hand, an incredible discovery that appears to circumvent the most obvious systems criticism of increasing resistance, and on the other hand one at least wonders what doom this may spell for the microbiome upon which life as we know it depends.
In a general sense, the basic question does not come to asking if we should choose between the advancement of scientific understanding on the one hand or a return to Pleistocene living on the other. The question comes to how we can arrive at a more holistic, healthy, and even holy sense of science. The meaning of “science” depends on the larger context, and we must look at the state of the world and the elected leaders of that world if we want to understand the term.
The curious reader can find out more about Irresistin here: Martin et al. (2020). A Dual-Mechanism Antibiotic Kills Gram-Negative Bacteria and Avoids Drug Resistance. Cell, 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2020.05.005
[2] https://www.latimes.com/91116027-132.html
[3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/transcript-of-president-trumps-interview-with-the-wall-street-journal-11592501000