Comment
Bob Brown
Trump, Jung and the bully egotists ruling the world
Donald Trump is not one of a kind. Along with Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping, he is just the latest in a long line of ruthless egotists who have risen to power. To varying degrees, the world’s four most powerful men lack empathy. That’s a clue not only to their ascent to power but to the fact that all four are obscenely rich.
Leaders like these lack the empathy to enter into or share the feelings or circumstances of people outside their personal orbit, family, culture or race. This vacuum of feelings for others is a key to both their personal success and social failure.
Such men are bullies. They belittle rivals and expect everyone else to agree, be subservient, be silent or be punished. Ever vulnerable to an outbreak of common decency, they attract toady supplicants and corruption.
This doesn’t mean that egotists have no feelings. Göring loved his family. Hitler patted his dog. Nero played the lute and Pol Pot was a poetry-loving teacher who studied in France. What they despise, however, is wisdom or compassion greater than their own.
Trump’s plan to empty Gaza of two million people and remove the rubble to build an American “Riviera” has some parallels with Nero’s alleged fiddling while Rome burnt. Suetonius wrote that “Nero’s men destroyed not only a vast number of apartment blocks ... he offered to remove corpses and rubble free of charge but … wanted to collect as much loot and spoils as possible himself.”
We are all on the spectrum of less or more empathy and at the other end are the anxious folk who won’t listen to the news. The simplistic egotists opt in and the worried deep thinkers opt out. It’s not a good recipe for global security, leaving the rest of us to put things right. That ultimately means confronting the authoritarians with public defiance.
A key requirement for confronting dictators is leadership. Without alternative leadership, enough of the middle mass voted for Trump to succeed. Joe Biden failed to devote a due slice of his term in office to finding and facilitating his replacement, the next visionary global leader who undoubtably existed in America.
It is likely that as Biden grew older he became more reliant on the views of his assistants, who were dependent on him staying in office for their own jobs and livelihoods. It is likely, too, that they advised him to hang on until it was too late. This self-interest gave the world Trump.
Trump’s indecencies, including fraud and sexual assault, did not stop him from being twice elected to the most powerful office on Earth. His repeated sexual attacks on women were part of the attraction for voters who’d like to dominate others but want to seem outwardly respectable. The selfish urges of the nation’s collective subconscious relegated the reasonable thinking of its collective conscience. Carl Jung would have called this a psychic epidemic.
Jung could have been commenting on the 2024 American elections when, a century ago, he wrote: “It is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes ... not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst natural catastrophes. The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is psychic danger. Reason has proved itself completely powerless, precisely because its arguments have an effect only on the conscious mind and not on the unconscious. The greatest danger of all comes from the masses on whom the effects of the unconscious pile up cumulatively and the reasonableness of the conscious mind is stifled.”
Roughly speaking, our brains are battlegrounds between instinct and intellect. The primitive instinct for self, given half a chance, will override the modern or civilised reason that says we should share Earth’s plenitude with our contemporaries and ensure the interests of future generations and of our fellow creatures.
With fits and starts, humankind has made progress in subjugating its inherent selfishness and hostility towards others. However, it only takes a hubristic egotist, leveraging older, baser fears and discriminatory tendencies, to have people drop the social considerations without which life on Earth, like peace in any neighbourhood, is ultimately kaput.
Humanity has to be united to deal with the heat ravaging our liveable planet, as well as the threats of nuclear weapons, chemical and microbial hazards, and artificial intelligence. We know that egotists, up against each other, are capable of triggering these threats to life on our planet. Nothing other than communal action will keep them in check.
Billionaires are now manipulating the information upon which our thoughts and decisions are based. They own most of the direct communications with both our best reasoning and worst impulses – Jung’s conscious and unconscious. The populace is at the mercy of their data profiling, algorithms, advertising and seductive news censorship.
Trump’s autocratic instinct has been to corrode the democracy that put him in office and that depends upon true and full information for voters. He demonstrates the radical right’s political inclination to break the constitution and conventions that it traditionally claims to defend and that its adherents so often proclaim as they hold up their Bibles or fly the flag in their front yards.
“Without any doubt Donald Trump is the most lawless and scofflaw president we have ever seen in the history of the United States,” said Laurence Tribe, a leading constitutional scholar and professor emeritus at Harvard Law School.
Quoted in The Guardian, Tribe said Trump had carried out “a blitzkrieg on the law and the constitution. The very fact that the illegal actions have come out with the speed of a rapidly firing Gatling gun makes it very hard for people to focus on any one of them. That’s obviously part of the strategy.”
The shadow of discrimination spread over the world when Trump used his recent inauguration speech to again say he was bringing in America’s golden age and that in everything “I will put America first”. Like the Caesars of old, he also began an internal purge of those who had worked against his criminality and return to power.
It is said that Trump doesn’t understand the environment. That underrates and excuses his intelligence. He knows the facts but lets his imagined golden age override the reality of our human impact on Earth’s biosphere. Rather than end the burning of fossil fuels and forests to stem climate change and the loss of biodiversity, he promised to “drill, baby, drill!”
This cheating of one’s own intellect, repeatedly displayed in the cruelties of the Roman Empire’s Caesars, is facilitated by blaming others. Hence Trump’s confabulation that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive”.
Trump’s hubris and denial of the danger of damaging Earth’s ecosystem ignores both modern science and Jung’s warning about our impact on life on Earth: “In spite of our proud domination of nature we are still her victims as much as ever and have not even learnt to control our own nature, which slowly and inevitably courts disaster.”
Brutes such as Trump rely on everyone else suppressing their better natures. Popular uprisings to defend or restore democracy can succeed or be crushed but are tough going once the bully egotist has power. We are entering a new age of civil insurrection.
Showing humility to hubris, decency to demagoguery and reason to arrogance is a losing strategy. Intelligent and confrontational action is required, and these days that requirement is global – as is the fundamental conscious wish for peace and universal understanding.
The local and global populace must provide strong, humane leaders to take power from the bullies through the ballot box or civil disobedience. The old truism is taunting us all as never before: all that evil needs to flourish is for good people to do nothing.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on February 15, 2025 as "Man and his swindles".
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