Epistemology and Trumpism

2 Replies

A friend recently quipped, “Get the behind me thoughts,” a play on the famous words of Jesus when under temptation from his nemesis said, “Get the behind me Satan.”  But the quip contains great wisdom for our thoughts are more powerful than we can ever imagine and, yes, are usually the way in which dark forces penetrate our reality. A New Age guru Mike Dooley quips, “Thoughts are things.  Choose the good ones.”  Dooley recognizes that we have the built-in capacity to take pause with the thoughts that flow through our mind and provide a “reality check” to them.  But it is easier to never question them and be merely carried along by the current of our ideological pre-conceptions without ever bothering to subject any of them to scrutiny.  Most of us do this in the subtleties of our heart, in our “pre-conscious” so that some things that pass through our mind to say are filtered out in the interest of social appropriateness and wisdom. Persons who have Tourette’s Syndrome demonstrate what happens when that filter is gravely impaired.

And Donald Trump gives us another example of someone with an impaired filter.  For example, having been taunted about the size of his penis by Senator Mark Rubio, Trump disregarded all decorum and propriety and reassured the American population that “there is no problem there.”  And Tony Schwartz, the ghost writer of his book, “The Art of the Deal” has described Trump as not having a filter, having only a stream of consciousness reality and a penchant for saying things without any understanding of how they will appear to the public.  And with this impaired cognitive filter and his shoot-from-the hips style, Trump has routinely tossed ideas out which needed to be presented more thoughtfully or not at all.  But with this impaired judgment, he has appeared to his base as somebody who “tells it like it is” or “tells the truth” and is not like the more polished politician, “Crooked Hillary.”  Therefore, his speeches have been a font of red meat which has impassioned his base even to the point of hinting at violence should he not be elected.

Trump is the classic ideologue and is now the standard bearer for a political party which has at its base millions of people that fall into the same category.  They are ensconced in a morass of unquestioned assumptions, assumptions which are now under assault by the relentless grind of modernity. But their response, when threatened, is like that of Trump, merely to double down and shout their dogma even more loudly.  Ideologues are trapped inside a self-referential world consisting only of carefully selected ideas which buttress their preconceptions.  When they are subjected to a critical interview, they cannot handle it and often appear ridiculous in their response.  I have Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas in mind here.  But there are others.  .

But, I must issue a caveat in closing.  Most of my country and my world are concrete thinkers and if they suddenly were “enlightened” into a post-modern world, our entire world would immediately collapse!  The entire spectrum of human cognition has a place though at some point each vein of thought on either extreme, if unchecked, can easily cross into sheer lunacy.  And most concrete thinkers, and what Trump called “my uneducated voters”, are very good people and in a sense the backbone of any tribe.  I know.  I was raised in a culture of concrete thinking people and those people were very good people and I’m very grateful to them.  But what has happened in my country is that the economic and political elites have ruthlessly exploited this base of their party and have manipulated them into giving them their political support even while wielding the reins of the government for the primary purpose of amassing and concentrating power and wealth

A Caveat Re Trump

Leave a reply

I had several interesting and provocative responses to my post about Trump and his shame-based character earlier today. One particular gentleman was definitely conservative, as evidenced by his reporting about something he heard on Rush Limbaugh, but he was very gracious and articulate and completely worthy of my respect.

He brought to the table for me something that I already knew but often is not apparent in what I post here.  There are at least two ways of looking at this current political morass we are experiencing, and probably more than two.  I vehemently oppose Donald Trump and find him an abominable candidate for the Presidency; BUT, there are intelligent, moral, and thoughtful people who support him.  They are driven by concerns that supersede Trump’s obvious character flaws.  I disagree with them.  BUT, they are not stupid nor are they bad people.  There are people I know very well, including family members, who will vote for Trump even though some of them have admitted they will be embarrassed to do so.  I do not understand it but there is no need to.  But there is the need to respect them.

The thing that angers me most is that the leadership of the Republican Party has been so devoid of spiritual and moral integrity that they have taken a passive stance to the ugliness of the radical base of their party, selling their soul because they know their party is not viable without the support of these “deplorables”, some of which the Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, several years ago described as “knuckle-draggers.”  The party elders have amongst themselves the capability to bring to the table a viable candidate, someone about whom my friends and family will not be embarrassed to vote for.

Yes, Hillary is a flawed candidate.  But she does not meet the criteria for psychopathology as does Donald Trump.

Donald Trump and his Shame-Based Psyche

9 Replies

If we don’t know already enough about the character of Donald Trump, we now have another glimpse into the dark recesses of his heart with a new book, “The Truth about Trump” by Michael D’Antonio.  The author uses Trump’s own words from an interview two years ago to show us just how extensive is the shame-base that governs this man who could soon be the next President of the United States.  This shame-base is so deep-seated and pervasive that he cannot acknowledge any wrong or having lost in anything.  It boils down to an inability to admit, “I am wrong” about even the simplest matter.  Often when it would have been politically prudent to have acknowledged that “I misspoke” or “I now regret having said that” or some other euphemistic say of acknowledging he had made a mistake, he will merely double-down on the matter.  At times it has been comical.

 

All of us have a shame base and it serves a purpose, forcing us to “join the human race” and play by its rules…more or less…even when at times these rules seem to be more than we can bear.  But if we cannot play by the rules we will be an “out-lier” and possibly become the bully on the playground who fails to regard common civilities and perfunctory kindnesses necessary to “join in the reindeer games,”  those from which Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer was excluded. The playground bully is comfortable with the disruptive influence he has on the play-ground, and even thrives on it in some perverted manner.  Those that carry this impudence to an extreme and cross a certain boundary at some point will end up in the principal’s office and face frequent suspension from school.  For the “play-ground” must have rules as otherwise the “civilization” that it represents will disintegrate into complete chaos.

 

In any ordinary “play-ground” Trump would have already been suspended or institutionalized in one of the facilities at which I used to practice counseling for incorrigible teen-age offenders.  But Trump stumbled onto a “playground” that was amenable to his excesses, allowing him to reach a point at which he could not be stopped.  Oh, sure now his Republican Party is greatly troubled by his presence and by his power but most of them still will not acknowledge that they created an atmosphere in their Party the past few decades that would permit him to climb to power by fostering a culture of dishonesty and hypocrisy which would make someone like Trump viable.  If they’d have maintained some basic sense of moral and spiritual integrity, the resulting structure, i.e “boundaries”, would have made it impossible for demagoguery to gain traction.  To illustrate, for the past eight years of the Obama presidency they have been passive in response to members of its constituency that insinuated and declared that Obama was not an actual citizen of the United States, was actually a Muslim,.  Often I watched the GOP leadership sidestep opportunities to quash this type of non-sense but they would always equivocate on the matter, not wanting to alienate their base who thrives on hysterical non-sense.

But my main concern today is, “Why do intelligent citizens continue to support him when reports such as the D’Antonio book clearly reveal that Trump is mentally unstable?”  And furthermore just yesterday a Conservative firebrand, Glenn Beck, described Trump as a “psychopath” about whom he was frightened.  Trump’s instability is so egregious that it is commonly accepted but many conservatives sheeplishly declare they are standing firm in support of him, lest Hillary Clinton be elected..  So, where is reason in my country today?  Have we lost our mind?  Are we crazy?

Well, no.  The problem is that “reason” is not the guiding force in our lives and never has been.  Our reason is but the surface dimension of life and is always subservient to subterranean dimensions of the heart that we do not wish to acknowledge.  As Woody Allen once said about marrying his step-daughter, “The heart wants what it wants.”  Or as someone else once put it, “Our thinking is the belated rationalization of conclusions to which we have already been led by our desires.”  To put it still another way, our reasoning which purportedly governs our life is always governed by the unconscious.  But for many people the notion of being influenced by unconscious motivations jeopardizes their ego-driven belief that they are totally in control of their lives,  that they “know” what they are doing, and are “right” about what they are doing and believing.  To recognize this hidden dimension of their heart would jeopardize their illusion of being in control.  And control is the core issue in this political campaign.  It is a battle between people who are firmly entrenched in a now-threatened view of the world that we are in control of our lives and those of us that have imbibed of what I think can best be described as post-modern thought.  This modern view of the world recognizes that we only have a perspective on the world and do not see things objectively, making it necessary to lighten-up a bit with our view of the world and allow more diversity that we used to think was necessary or even possible.

And this, my friend, is scary!  What makes it so frightening is that the ego can no longer reign in our hearts and lives, forcing us to humble ourselves a bit and see, understand, and experience that our view of the world is very finite and given to being very self-serving.  By nature we see and believe only what we want to see and believe.  Or, in the famous words of Jesus, we “have eyes to see but see not, ears to hear but hear not.”

NYT book review of D’Antonio book:   (See NYT review of the D’Antonio book–http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/us/politics/donald-trump-interviews.html?_r=0)

Macbeth’s “Distempered Cause” and Donald Trump

5 Replies

Shakespeare must have been an impulse ridden young man for his characters often wrestle with the issue of self-control, best illustrated with his description of Macbeth being unable to “buckle his distempered cause within the belt of rule.”  This image is that of a corpulent man trying unsuccessfully to fasten a buckle around his protruding belly.  It brings to my mind, the corpulent Oliver Hardy, of “Laurel and Hardy” comedy team from the early 20th century, comically attempting to fasten his belt.  Shakespeare presented Macbeth as deeply flawed, not merely in attitude and behavior, but deep down in the heart in the depths of his “cause,” or heart/will.  Macbeth’s inability to control his impulses, leading to murderous intent, stemmed from something that had gone awry deeply in his soul.  He was, to borrow a description from Ranier Rilke, “The toy of some great pain.”

This Shakespearean observation of Macbeth has been on my mind often recently as I’ve watched Donald Trump unravel before our eyes and watch his Republican Party stand by haplessly, not having had the courage in their own collective heart to intervene when they could have.  Trump presents such a vivid picture of psychopathology and it has been amusing, and sad, to watch his cohorts attempt at various times in the past year to rein him in.  But when one’s “cause” is so deeply “distempered” or diseased, there is no reining it in.

Trump is still living out of what we clinicians call “the terrible two’s” when the world is one’s oyster.  Usually one’s familial and social context will provide limits so that the child will come to see that the world is not his to exploit for his own ends, but is a domain that requires cooperation.  And surrendering to this external demand is excruciating to a nascent ego but most of us manage to endure the pain,  learning to appreciate the value of trading immediate gratification for the deferred variety.  Trump’s family indulged him, and so did his political “family” early in this campaign.  One of his 16 competitors in the primary season, Senator Lindsey Graham, noted onetime in retrospect, “We all cowered in the corner of the stage” before Trump’s onslaught of bullying behavior.  The “willfulness” that Trump demonstrates has made him wealthy but at the expense of a lot of people.  A strong-willed person, with just a modicum of self-restraint, can be very successful in about any area of life.  Will, or the exercise thereof, is very important but it can lead to one’s downfall.

Shakespeare is probably one of the most wonderful discoveries of my life.  He knew the human heart and vividly illustrated its beauty and its foibles in his plays and sonnets.  And it is very revealing that until my mid-thirties, I could not understand him and actually loathed him!  His wisdom fell on deaf ears.  At that point in my life I was only beginning to emerge from the darkness of “having ears to hear, but hearing not; having eyes to see but seeing not.”

“The World is My Oyster” (Not)

Leave a reply

I hardly know where to start.  This Donald Trump demon that has been unleashed on the American psyche has tripped all of my triggers too and “literarylew” has “more offenses at my beck than thoughts to put them in.”  So I’m reaching into my stuffed “beck” and pulling out, “The world is not my oyster.”

To Trump, the world is his oyster.  He is a two-year old boy who never had limits set when he went through the developmental stage of the “terrible two’s” and so remains a two year old boy, “breathing out threatenings and slaughterings” anytime he is faced with a limit.  All of us go through this developmental stage, very much related to what we clinicians describe as the Oedipal transition. Though this is a challenging moment in our young lives, most of us learn to control our rage and acclimate to the external world, accepting deferred gratification over immediate gratification.  Without this willingness, we fail to fully enter the human race.

I know it was challenging for myself and even remember a dream in my early thirties when I was beginning to address my early childhood repression.  In this dream I was a furious little tyke, red-faced, shaking my fist in defiance when denied what I wanted.  It took a girl friend at the time to point out, with a laugh, what that dream was about.  She knew me very well!  And I can tell you very clearly now, in my mid-sixties, I feel the frustration of dealing with the experience of the world not being my oyster.  I often declare, “I want it all” and add, “Why should I have to accept limits” as I deal with the frustrations of aging, especially the realization that the river Styx is fast approaching.  But mercifully, back in my terrible two’s, the gods (i.e. “God”) recognized he did not need to unleash a redneck Arkansas Trump on the world and tied me down with a fundamentalist Christian load of guilt and shame.  And, central Arkansas, you better be grateful to Him!

But Trump has used wealth to create a world for himself in which he could get by with the assumption that the world is his oyster.  And, now given to the severe pathology of the American psyche, the Republican Party finds itself willing to cater to his narcissism to the point that he is their nominee for the Presidency.  Furthermore, and gravely troubling to me, evangelical Christians are lining up behind him in over whelming numbers displaying a profound lack of critical thinking skills.

Accepting the fact that the world is not our oyster is merely accepting limits.  Watching Trump allows us to see an impulse that we all have, if we could only come unleashed for a few minutes.  I think Trump’s fanatical following by the Republican extremists represents their unconscious desire to become unleashed, to give vent to their darkest, most violent impulses which are a very “human” response to the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”  But this is a dimension of the “human” experience that must be kept in check and certainly does not need to be encouraged by demogogues.

The Delusional World of Trump Continues

8 Replies

I just finished my morning foray into the mad world of Donald Trump and was not even taken aback to see that he is now focusing on the mental instability of Hillary Clinton.  This is just further illustration of how completely out of touch with reality he is; for, if he paid any attention to the feedback that he is getting from friend and foe he would realize that he should not touch the subject of anyone’s else’s “mental instability.”

But this is the problem with narcissism, especially when that mental illness has reached the stage of malignancy it has with him.  For in that state of madness, one is impervious to feedback from the outside.  One then finds himself comfortably ensconced in a delusional system and inevitably will have constructed himself a social world consisting of people who will help him maintain his lunacy as they too live in a version of the same delusional system.  Theologian Paul Tillich described this as “an empty world of self-relatedness”, a pristine world comprised of people who march lock-stepped to the beat of the same demonic drummer.

I speak from experience.  As noted before in this venue, I grew up in a context of delusional narcissism in which I learned that I was one of God’s “special” and “chosen people who had the truth; and, yes, others perhaps had the truth also but no one had it like we did!  And I’m not free of this poison yet and will never be completely as it always tempts me to bask in the safety of my present day mind-set and dismiss any and all those see the world differently.  But when the Grace of God has intervened and one has “named the demon” the demon can no longer work its tyranny in your heart with the same degree of abandonment.  Yes, I still catch myself taking myself too seriously…in this venue and in the whole of my life…but then “reality” chides me and I am reminded again that I’m only a finite perspective in a world of other perspectives.  I don’t have “the” Truth though I now feel that I am in the loving hands of the Truth and therefore don’t have to be so damn “right” any more.

And this is often quite uncomfortable.  For in my heart’s core I still have that childhood desperation for “certainty” but am learning to live without it, learning that this is what faith is about.  And, yes, this is faith in God…though that is a long story…but it also is a newly found faith in myself as I’m discovering that the certainty which used to offer comfort was specious at best and was predicated upon a denial of my human vulnerability.

Trump has a god-like power over many people in my country.  His message preys on reptilian-brain fears which are readily assuaged by his promise that he is gonna “Make America Great Again.”  He knows that he can say and do anything he wants to and his followers will stay with him for they are hapless before his demonic falderal.  Last fall he even declared publicly that he could shoot someone dead in the streets of New York City “and my poll numbers will still go up.”  The very next day his poll numbers spiked.  He offers a delusional hope and when desperate people have imbibed of this nectar it is usually impossible to take it from them.

And many evangelical Christians are drinking the kool-aid with relish, disregarding the advice of one of their own spokesmen, Chuck Swindoll, who posed the question of Trump, “Where is the basic thread of human decency?”  It is not there but many evangelicals, terrified by the reality of the modern world, are willing to sell their soul for the specious hope of a “strong-man” who will turn back the clock and restore our country to the “good old days.”  They fail to realize that these “good old days,” that I remember well, were the days when blacks knew their place, women knew their place, gender diversity did not even exist, and those Communists occupied the place that “Muslims” occupy in our present day mindset.  The “good old days” required rigid demarcation between “us” and “them” which is best illustrated by Trump’s promise today to “build that wall.”  “Walls” and boundaries are necessary for life.  But when they are emphasized to the neglect of openness and inclusiveness they are destructive, destructive of the world outside but also of those that are inside the “safe” confines of those boundaries.  As W. H. Auden noted, “We have made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”

Elif Shafak’s Perspective on Western Faith

4 Replies

Elif Shafak is a Turkish novelist whose Sufi faith is a powerful influence in her life and in her writing.  In this excerpt from The Forty Rules of Love she sheds a valuable light on faith from her tradition in which she can see unity where in the West often we see only difference, where our “distinction drawer” is too much in control.  (The italicized material will be my observations.)

Instead of losing themselves in the Love of God and waging a war against their ego, religious zealots fight other people, generating wave after wave of fear.  Looking at the whole universe fear-tinted eyes, it is no wonder that they see a plethora of things to be afraid of.  Wherever there is an earthquake, drought, or any other calamity, they take it as a sign of Divine Wrath—as if God does not openly say, “My compassion outweighs my wrath.”  Always resentful of somebody for this or that, they seem to expect God Almighty to step in on their behalf and take their pitiful revenges.  Their life is an uninterrupted state of bitterness and hostility, a discontentment so vast it follows them wherever they go, like a black cloud, darkening both their past and their future.

This is a picture of the ego in firm control, using their purported “love of God” to wreak havoc on the world, including those most dear and close to them.  When the ego is tyrannizing our world, it desperately functions as a distinction-drawer keeping parts of our human experience separate from our awareness and projecting it “out there.”

There is such a thing in faith as not being able to see the forest for the trees.  The totality of religion is far greater and deeper than the sum of its component parts.  Individual rules need to be read in the light of the whole.  And the whole is concealed in the essence.

But the ego is a constellation of rules that seeks to “rule” our world, that is impose order upon it to make it consistent with our need for order and perfection.  Its goal is to know all of the rules, never forget one of them, so it can always be right.  It builds for us what W. H. Auden called, “A life safer than we can bear.”

Instead of searching for the essence in the Qur’an and embracing it as a whole, however, the bigot singles out a specific verse or two, giving priority to the divine commands that they deem to be in tune with their fearful minds.  They keep reminding everyone that on the day of judgment everyone will be forced to walk on the Bridge of Sirat, thinner than a hair, sharper than a razor.  Unable to cross the bridge, the sinners will tumble into the pits of hell underneath, where they will suffer forever.  Those who have lived a virtuous life will make it to the other end of the bridge, where they will be reward with exotic fruits, sweet waters, and virgins.  This, in a nutshell, is their notion of the afterlife.  So great is their obsession is with horrors and rewards, flames and fruits, angels and demons, that in their itch to reach a future which will justify who they are today they forget about God…..Hell is in the here and now.  So is heaven.  Quit worrying about hell or dreaming about heaven as they are both present inside at this present moment.  Every time we fall in love, we ascend into heaven.    Every time we hate, fight, or envy someone we tumble straight into the fires of hell.

The ego does not want us to live in the present moment.  It is a creation of this time/space continuum that we have been confined within by the biblical “fall” leaving us comfortable only when immersed in memories of the past…good or bad ones…or hopes of the future.

Is there a worse hell than the torment a man suffers when he knows deep down in his consciousness that he has done something wrong, awfully wrong?  Ask that man.  He will tell you what hell is.  Is there a better paradise than the bliss that descends upon a man at those rare moments when the bolts of the universe fly open and he feels in possession of all the secrets of eternity and fully united with God?  Ask that man.  He will tell you what heaven is.

Why worry so much about the aftermath, an imaginary future when this very moment is the only time we can fully experience both the presence and absence of God in our lives?  Motivated by neither the fear of punishment in hell nor the desire to be rewarded in heaven, Sufis love God simply because they love Him, pure and easy, untainted and unnegotiable.

And when you love God so much, when you love each and every one of his creations because of Him and thanks to Him, extraneous categories melt into thin air.  From that point on, there can be no “I” any more.  All you amount to is a zero so big it covers your whole being.

This “love of God” is a challenging notion as it is so easy to be trapped into loving only some idea of God, some culturally contrived notion of God, which has nothing to do with the experience of Him/Her/It/Whatever.  And here I pause as I’m at the threshold of silence, where all words become futile.

But when the “idea of God” is seen, and experienced for what it is, that being an idol, the theological teaching of God’s immanence and transcendence can become meaningful to one.  Yes, God is “out there” as well as “in here” and this intuitive insight can best be said as simply, “God is.”  And this God who we now see and feel “is” comes with a parallel development, the discovery of our own simple, bare, “is-ness” in what would be otherwise a cold and barren universe.  We discover our “zero-ness” which is so big it does cover everyone and everything, uniting us all.  In the Christian tradition we call this “the Spirit of God” which the Apostle Paul described as Christ and noted “by Him all things cohere.”

The Tyranny of Labels in Video

4 Replies

This video brilliantly illustrates everything I have been obsessing about with my emphasis on “distinction-drawing” and actually everything I’ve been trying to say for the past five years on this blog.  If we live our life in the tyranny of the narrowly defined world our ego has carved out for us, individually and collectively, we will always have conflict for there is no end to the need to draw distinctions between “us” and “them.”  Here again we see here the curse of religion…all religions…the ego always tends to take the spiritual wisdom provided there and turn it into a weapon under the name of whatever god we worship.  And, of course, there is the temptation to make this point accusatorily, “You do this but I do not” but the luxury of this self-deception is no longer mine. Losing that “luxury” is relevant to something said this morning in The Guardian about Donald Trump’s narcissism, “Trump does not have an interior life.  He ‘had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury…an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.’”  This “rumbling” is what my spiritual tradition calls “the Spirit of God” and if there is no “rumbling” there is only ego-ridden certainty which is devoid of any Spirit.

And when the ego’s tyranny metastasizes to a certain point, there will always be violence.  For the ego’s need to know that we are “right” can reach the point where we will to express with action the repressed experience of being “wrong,” a feeling that cannot help but arise when we are introduced to a world which is based on the tyranny of labels.  I do think that religion often offers the opportunity to dive into the depths of our heart and acknowledge this feeling of “wrongness” but it entails the willingness to face the pain of disillusionment, in Christian doctrine described as “being lost.”  This is why Aeschylus described the grace of god as “awful” centuries ago for he knew the agony of being disillusioned of the unquestioned certainties of our ego-constructed world.

“And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”  Aeschylus

 

My First Experience with “the Other.”

3 Replies

Something happened yesterday that resurrected ancient memories from my youth when Jews were one of the many that had been banished into the vast category of “them.”  I’m in a book club at the local Episcopalian Church which meets weekly and reads non-fiction books which always touch on spiritual themes.  One of the group members has often referenced the Jewish religion in our discussions and yesterday it suddenly dawned on me that she is of the Jewish faith.  I’m not for sure why that surprised me as this church, and this reading group, is very eclectic and views faith from many different perspectives.  And I have worked with and socialized with many persons of the Jewish faith and have never had any discomfort with them. I think that what happened is that on this occasion a memory from my preteen years in Bible camp was resurrected and for a moment I silently re-lived the first experience of encountering first a Jew.

Bible camp is part of fundamentalist Christian youth culture and often the high light of their summer.  It consists of sermons twice a day, a morning devotional, bible studies, and plenty of games and recreation.  On this particular occasion when we were being informally oriented to the schedule, I overhead someone say of a lovely young girl standing near-by, “She is a Jew.”  This was not said disparagingly but it definitely conveyed the attitude of, “She is one of ‘them.’”  In the following few days I often encountered her in various groups and recognized her immediately and felt in my heart deep angst and sorrow about her “fate” in life.  I was not angry or rude, nor was anyone else in my memory, but I was deeply concerned that this nice young girl “didn’t believe in Jesus” and subscribed to a faith that had “killed our Lord and Savior.”  I think that my distress was probably  my first experience of the phenomena of “otherness” and it was troubling. And this illustrates how my faith was bathing me in a spirit of ex-clusiveness.

As I relived this moment from my youth yesterday in the book club, I pondered over the experience and wandered what it must have been like for that young lady in a group of young people in which she was radically “other.”  And I also wondered, “What in the hell were her parents doing allowing her to be there.?”  She sat through the hell fire and brimstone sermons, suffered through the altar call, and certainly at some point someone tried to lead her to Jesus.

As I’ve shared recently I am fascinated with the “distinction-drawer” that operates in all of us and with this flash back I got to see an early manifestation in my young heart of this ego contrivance at work.  And it illustrates how I learned to use my Christian faith to bifurcate reality into “us” and “them” and take great delight in knowing that “us” had it exclusively right.  Living in the Western world I was presented with a binary world and it is very difficult to ever question basic premises like that.  But as poet Adrienne Rich eloquently noted, “Until we see the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot begin to know ourselves.”

 

The Ego and “Distinction Drawing”

2 Replies

Fr. Richard Rohr today offered observations about the ego which are relevant to my present focus on the “distinction drawing” that is an essential part of our identity.  He pointed out how the ego is concerned only about itself which is just a basic dimension of being human and only becomes toxic when it metastasizes and begins to project its shadow outside onto “them” and in extreme attempts to obliterate “them.”  The best example is Isis but the same phenomena is found with any extremist group.

Ordinary ego functioning is, yes, “egotistic” but it is usually benign and helps provide group/tribal coherence.  It provides an identity which always sets one apart from “them.”  I shared recently about my upbringing in a conservative Landmark Baptist Church and it does provide an example of an inordinate need to “draw distinctions” and thus overly emphasized the biblical admonishment, “Come out ye from among them and be ye separate” and “Be ye a peculiar people.”  I often facetiously note to friends that my little church clearly succeeded in this endeavor and, with chagrin, admit I won the prize for “peculiar”!  But let me assure you that in my little central Arkansas community these people were not toxic, were very good people, and did a great job in providing me the social and educational structure that would allow me to now be able to “discourse” about them.  Conservative groups, with non-toxic ego needs, are the backbone of any tribe and even of the entire world.

But when the toxicity metastasizes, we find phenomena like Isis and Westboro Baptist Church, the latter of which is a caricature of Baptist churches.  In these groups the “distinction drawer” has become so powerful due to repressed fears and anxieties from the reptilian brain that there is a need to strike out at somebody.  In a way they are so much under the grip of the unconsciousness that they are powerless which is how Rohr interprets Jesus’ dying words on the Cross, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”  Jesus knew that those who hated him to the point of wanting to kill him merely were not conscious of what they were doing.

When distinction drawing becomes too rigid, when the need for boundaries becomes paramount, it always leads to an over emphasis of what sets the group apart rather seeking for common denominators with others. It is not accidental that one of the most appealing dimensions of Donald Trump is his promise to “Build that wall” to keep out the Mexicans.  And it is not often remembered now but not long after he started this emphasis one of his competitors went to the absurd extreme of proposing to build a wall between our country and Canada also!  Trump’s message appeals to frightened people who see their out dated certainties threatened.  The message of “building a wall” is a symbol that resonates with the need to “set boundaries” and keep change from happening, not recognizing that “change” is an essential dynamic of life and must be embraced rather than opposed.  Otherwise we would still be living in the Stone Age.