I have for a long time felt sad and very angry about the crimes committed by the US federal government, missionaries and religious schools toward indigenous Americans.
Read moreClimate Change and The Self-Object Split
One of the major reasons for the destruction we humans are doing to our planet is the psychic separation we in Western culture tend to experience between ourselves and other people, animals, plants, and everything else “outside” of us. It is referred to as the subject/object split and is exemplified in the rigid skin boundary we experience, even linguistically, between ourselves and everything else. The very way we speak and think shows this and, since this usage starts when we first learn to use language, it is very much a part of how we learn to experience reality.
Dorothy Lee, an anthropologist who studied the languages of other cultures, points out in her book, Freedom and Culture, (p. 132) that over the centuries one finds in English “. . .a conception of an increasingly assertive, active and even aggressive self, as well as of an increasingly delimited self.” In Chaucer, for example, who was writing in the 15th Century, events were more often seen as happening to the self instead of the self acting on the events. Chaucer might have someone say “melikes,” or “dreamed, me,; now we say “I like” and “I dreamed.” When I say, for example, “I am taking my dog for a walk,” I am making it clear that I am a separate being from my dog. I might love my dog, see her as part of my family, but I don’t see her as part of me or that I am part of her. I am even separating myself in my sentence from the act of walking.
Seeing everything as not ourselves makes it relatively easy to act unfeelingly, even destructively, toward other people whom we see as not only “other,” and subhuman. But we also experience animals, birds the oceans, trees, plants and insects as not us. (I will talk about how seeing other people as “other” makes it possible to act destructively towards them, but in this article I’m concerned with the effect on our planet of this way of experiencing reality.)
Even those religious people who decry planet destruction because they see humans as guardians of the environment are still seeing the environment as an object separate from themselves.
We don’t have to view Nature in this way. There have been many other cultures that didn’t make this subject/object split For example, Lee, studied numerous indigenous cultures in North America and the South Pacific and described a tribe of Native Americans, the Wintus, who lived in Northern California. These people had a sense of self that was permeable rather than rigidly separate from them. They didn’t have a psychological experience of ownership of their children, but would refer to a child as “the {name} I live with.” They felt intimately connected to the natural part of their environment and would not consider cutting down a tree to create a house because the tree was regarded as having an existence that was just as privileged as their own.. They felt they were a part of the tree and the tree was part of them. Lee gives an example of the way the Wintus oriented themselves to the environment instead of our way, which is to orient the environment to us. For Wintus the universe came first and humans emerged from the universe, not vice versa. If a Wintu man was walking East to West and a mosquito bit him on what we would say his left arm, and he turned around and came back in the same direction, he would describe himself as scratching his East arm, not his left arm.
These people would only use dead wood for their fires and small rocks because they saw the tree and rocks as having just as much a right to live as they did. When they killed an animal, they would only do it for food and they ate it all, including the hooves. Lee quotes an aged Wintu woman as saying “. . .The White people never cared for land or deer or bear. When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up. When we dig roots we make little holes.. . .We shake down acorns and pine nuts. We don’t chop down the trees. We only use dead word. But the White people plow up the ground, pull up the trees, kill everything. The tree says ‘Don’t. I am sore. Don’t hurt me.’ But they chop it down and cut it up. The spirit of the land hates them. They blasted out trees and stir it to its depths. They saw up the trees. That hurts them.” And so on. If I can be excused from being somewhat animistic, I can see this woman as prescient in seeing the spirit of the land hating us humans and threatening to make us much of the rest of life extinct.
While we can’t undo Western culture, we can begin to experience ourselves as part of what a gestalt psychologist, Kurt Lewin, called the psychological field in his concept of field theory. In this view, we humans are never outside the field but are part of it. We influence every other part of our psychological field and every other part impacts us. When we experience our reality in this way, it’s impossible to see the external environment as completely separate from us. And we are much more careful to treat the rest of the field-environment respectfully and lovingly, because it is us and we are it.
We obviously can’t live like the Wintu Indians lived. But we can begin to allow ourselves to feel more connected to nature, including other humans . And animals. I think of the horrible way we treat them in the factory farms from which most of us get our meat, poultry and pork. We know from observation and research that they experience fear and pain at being treated so brutally. And the people who raise and slaughter them must be affected emotionally very negatively by having to shut off any empathic response to their immense suffering.
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David Manfield 2 years ago · 0 Likes
I can't help but feel a bit beaten down by these concepts, as they are so profoundly remote to the 99.99% who are not Wintu. I would like to be inspired by these perspectives, but I can't. It is not how I live and think. It's one more thing to feel bad about.
Tump as Mythic Individualistic Hero: A Partial Explanation for his receiving over 70 million votes.
Many pundits are puzzled why Trump received over 70,000,000 votes when he is so clearly a disaster as a President. Of course many voted for him because they give him credit for a robust economy. Evangelical Christians supported him because of his agreeing with their anti-abortion stance and his support for other conservative measures. And many corporations supported him because of his removing climate change regulations and his action lowering the taxes of the rich.
But I think many people have admired him because he embodies a very important personage in Western, especially American, culture: the powerful, aggressive , seemingly heroic loner. His whirlwind rallies around the country so soon after leaving the hospital after having contracted and been treated for Covid must have been an embodiment to his followers of a powerful man. Those on the left saw him as recklessly endangering the staff accompanying him and the large crowds at his rallies. But he was probably a heroic sight to his ecstatic audience. Not for him the cautious approach of “Sleepy Joe Biden”, who also had many rallies in the last days before the election, but did so low-key and safely.
I see Trump occupying the long-standing Western cultural myth of the solo, heroic male figure who fights evil. There are many, many examples of this mythic figure, going back to the Greeks: Odysseus, Achilles, Alexander the Great. Other examples I think of: Julius Caesar in Rome. Christopher Columbus in Spain. Even Don Quixote, who, while a ridiculous figure, is heroic in his attempts to save his country by his chivalric actions.
(Of course, Don Quixote has Sancho Panza, who is more realistic than the Don, and a source of humor in the novel, but that in itself makes him unheroic.)
In more recent times, we have the radio show starring the Lone Ranger, riding into a town in trouble, killing all the bad guys, then riding back out at the end to the strains of the William Tell Overture. Of course he has Tonto as a sidekick, but that Native American figure was originally created just so the Lone Ranger would have someone to talk to. But the Lone Ranger is clearly the boss.
Other examples of the solo hero are Superman, Batman, Dick Tracy, Ironman and many other very powerful fictional heroes who fight for the weak, ineffective masses, but don’t have the same needs as ordinary people: for close relationships, love, being part of a group; and even such mundane necessities as sleep, elimination, cleanliness, even eating! Does Superman ever eat? If so, what?
George Washington, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, even Gandhi are seen as heroic, solo figures. And recipients of the Medal of Honor are usually servicemen who have single-handedly saved many men or carried out heroic actions in battle alone. I have never heard of honorees who skillfully organized a number of men to go into danger with them and rescued fellow soldiers.
Hitler was idealized by the German public as the powerful leader of Nazi Germany and very few other Germans were mentioned as leaders in the West until he achieved power and was well into WW II.
This myth of the single heroic male figure has existed all through Western culture, but has been especially relevant in American culture. Ayn Rand idealized that mythic figure, mythic because it’s very unrealistic and, in my opinion, not balanced by other essential human needs. I think that, in sum, it is a very destructive, ubiquitous stereotype. One even sees it in very popular video games where solo figures are moving through imaginary landscapes killing everyone in their way.
All of these currents, in my opinion, have helped to create events like the Trump Presidency, which negates Americans’ actual needs for connection, relationship and growth. It is especially appealing to people who lack a sense of power and efficacy in their lives. Which, I think, is the case for many Trump supporters, who have lost well-paying industrial jobs and a feeling of control in their lives to globalism, automation, the increasing diversity of the American public, and the hollowing-out of the rural areas in which they live. Here in Oregon, the timber industry used to be a very important part of the state’s economy. Partially because of the greed of the large lumber companies and the complicity of many state legislators and the state agency that is supposed to control the industry, the forests were decimated and the communities that depended on timber are struggling. Yet most of them still supported Trump!
The idealization of people like Trump results in a vicious circle. For a psychological understanding of this issue, I turn to Heinz Kohut the famous psychoanalyst. He pointed out that in addition to needs to be responded to with love and appreciation, children have idealization needs invested in their caretakers. These people, most often parents, provide a sense of safety and and comfort when they are distressed. An example is the upset baby who is picked up by her caretaker and soothed. She feels comforted by the big, powerful- feeling body of the parent. Kohut says that the need to feel connected to the caretaker when agitated is more essential to the baby than food. Later on during childhood, the child must put their caretakers on a pedestal. This has traditionally been the father, but can just as easily be the mother. Children need to do this at a primitive, factually unrealistic level during their early years, seeing the caregiver as beautiful, strong, wise and supportive. They can then feel safe and secure and able to identify with their caregivers as they grow and gradually feel their own power. With good-enough parents in their lives, they are able to come to see their parents as imperfect human beings whom hopefully, they can still love and admire, but not at the primitive, global level they needed to when they were very young. As adults, they are now more capable themselves of dealing with a difficult world. But even the normal adult needs to feel part of something bigger, strong and more important than themselves: for example, their profession, the company they work for, their religion, their family, posterity.
Kohut also pointed to what he termed “mirroring needs,” to be seen in infancy and childhood as the apple of the parent’s eye, to feel unconditionally loved. As the child grows, they gradually learn to meet these needs with other people and in a variety of ways, e.g., by getting good grades in school, feeling loved by relatives other than the parents, doing well in sports, etc.
If, however, their parents have lost the good-paying jobs they once had and are irritable, depressed and perhaps drinking or using drugs to soothe themselves, their children lose their needed idealistic vision of their caregivers much too soon. Their self-esteem is affected because the parent can’t meet their mirroring needs. The essential requirement however, for a powerful figure to identify with still exists. And then it’s easy to see someone like Trump, who appears powerful to be that figure. He himself obviously has very intense mirroring needs!
(But we must face the fact that a majority of white males who do not fit into the category of missing a sense of efficacy and power also voted for Trump and I think that’s an indication of something missing for men in general in our country.)
How Can We Deal With This Problem?
Our tendency to idealize people who lead us astray is an issue that must be dealt with if we are to continue as a democracy. Here are some ideas.
1. Teaching young people to admire those people who lead by being cooperative, rather than only competitive. These are leaders who can identify, firstly, with what should be their primary goal, which is to enhance the well-being of the organization they are leading, whether it’s a business, a charity, a sports team or a political constituency. And teaching young people to deny power to those, such as Trump, who are clearly only striving for positions of leadership to gratify intense narcissistic needs. These people are really the leaders of cults who are not interested in having their followers grow to the point where they are not needed, but to continue to almost literally possess them.
2. Culturally admiring leaders who recognize their own limitations and find those to support them who have the skills and vision and flexibility to know what is needed to deal with problems as they arise. I think of a number of people who were able to do that: Obama, FDR, Jack Welch, the ex CEO of General Electric, and Terry Stotts, the coach of the Portland Trailblazers. It is not generally known now that Dwight Eisenhower was that kind of general during WW II. He was an excellent administrator, rather than a skillful battlefield tactician and was recognized by the people who had the factual knowledge of the war as the real hero of WW II. George Patton was better known and admired because he was the kind of narcissistic, reckless but seemingly heroic general who was very aggressive in leading his tank corps. He was actually a precursor to Trump! He was also openly racist.
3. Finally, getting more women into political power. As more of them become elected to political office, we will see that the female tendency to cooperate rather than compete will be regarded as much the better way to lead, for men and women. As a current example, the countries who have done the best to deal with Covid have female leaders. Those who are doing worse, are leaders much like Trump, narcissistic, unable or unwilling to admit to their mistakes and change course when they see that what they have been doing is ineffective, even destructive. .