You might remember Richard Reid, the failed British suicide bomber who, in 2001, had trouble lighting the fuse on his explosive-laden trainers, which therefore did not explode and take down an American Airlines flight carrying a crew and 197 passengers. Reid, unrepentant, is currently serving a life sentence in a Colorado supermax prison, awaiting whatever afterlife greets the soul who tries to enact divine will but botches the job.
Reid says his survival indicates that God still has plans for him in this world. I think those plans are mostly about keeping him on ice until God figures out how much mercy to give a human who doesn’t believe in mercy.
Something like Reid’s screw-up was recapitulated last week, when Herschel Walker, Donald Trump’s handpicked candidate for U.S. Senator, was rejected by a majority of the voters of Georgia. The fuse on Walker’s football cleats wouldn’t ignite, and he lost to Raphael Warnock, a soft-spoken, educated, intelligent, ethical minister. That’s cause for rejoicing, but 1,721,199 Georgians (48.6% of the state’s voters) voted for Walker. That margin is a little close for anyone who wants America to bear a passing resemblance to the country we learned about in high-school civics class.
Warnock, in his victory speech, thanked all the people of Georgia, and promised to do the best he could for his opponents as well as his supporters. He didn’t mention the $380 million that the two parties spent on the run-off election, or that free will might have a hard time existing in a world of negative political ads.
$380 million could have given a bunch of poor families in Georgia a better Christmas, but for the moment it must be considered well-spent. The negative ads that focused on Walker privately funding abortion while publicly opposing it temporarily saved this country from losing its civic traditions, its senses of decency and decorum, its democracy, and its constitution.
Donald Trump will no doubt try to place another suicide bomber on our Airliner of State, and since he’s running for president in 2024, it might be himself. It is, however, getting increasingly evident that the ex-president is just as bad a fuckup as Richard Reid. His oligarch backers can forgive him for trying to destroy the country and its constitution. They just can’t forgive him for making them look stupid.
If you’re looking for cheery holiday reading, try to avoid Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. It’s not a happy book. It suggests that humans are eternally on the verge of burning civilization to the ground because deep down inside, they hate it.
I read Civilization and Its Discontents every three or four years, usually around Christmas, when Christians, who nominally follow a Jewish revolutionary who freed humankind from the guilt and terror of their worst impulses, join the other side and let those impulses out at all-against-all Black Friday sales. They adopt a rigid religious authoritarianism that defines their tribe and excludes and punishes anyone outside of it. They drown questions of social justice in the bathtub of societal ritual. Subliminal guilt is assuaged by piling gifts onto children, whose delight at each new toy reminds their parents of a time when fantasies of omnipotence could be entertained, at least until a sibling broke the wings off the airplane or kicked over the dollhouse or broke the head off the superhero action figure. Then it was time for a tantrum, and at Christmas, even adults get to have them.
Freud has a lot to say about power and our infantile struggles to control our world. Civilization demands that we obey its rules or die. Often enough our life stories are a chronicle of how we maintain a sense of control in the face of a lifetime of doing what institutions make us do. When we lose control our all-too-typical response is to break something.
Freud is in bad odor among students of human nature these days, but many of his ideas are still alive, despite generation-long attempts to repress them.
But it’s not unreasonable to think that individual freedom conflicts with family, tribe, or nation. Or that life-and-death struggles take place between a family and its members. Or that tantrums result from the utter frustration of being the center of the universe but having the universe happen to you rather than you happening to it. Or that two-year-olds and their parents might want to obliterate the people and institutions who are between them and what they want.
You’re not supposed to think about these things, especially around Christmas. You’ll upset the children. You’ll really upset their parents, especially if they realize that their two-year-old is coming to grips with an impossible situation that results in criminal fantasies, best expressed by the limitless Oedipal rage of a supermarket tantrum. If the two-year-old was wearing a suicide vest, a tantrum wouldn’t be such an occasion for amusement among us nonparentals.
Freud saw adulthood as a lifetime negotiation between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. He said that while it’s a sad process, there are moments of pleasure to be had before your ultimate defeat as a wee mortal. Becoming an adult means that you accept the limits of your life and its effect on the world, and there is a kind of austere satisfaction in that. You can pat yourself on the back for doing the best you can under the circumstances.
What keeps most of us from this state of restrained wisdom is our inner two-year-olds, who never go away and never grow up. They’re still part of us, waiting for the right moment to destroy a world that refuses to obey their demands. It sounds extreme, especially when you consider their lives depend on the world they would destroy.
But we fantasize the death of enemies, and teachers and bosses and companies and schools and family members and all the other things and people who keep us alive. No matter. Our psyches each contain a nihilistic little shit, one who intuits that it can destroy the world by destroying itself. That’s dangerous knowledge in the hands of a two-year-old.
Hence Richard Reid. Hence the self-destructive sequence of events that has been the business and political career of Donald Trump.
It’s not just the poor students who want to see the school burn, or the mid-management drones who would experience their company’s bankruptcy as a moment of freedom, or the doomsday preppers who wait with increasing impatience for the end of the rule of law.
It’s important that more than half of us learn not to let our inner infant get what it wants. Sooner or later that infant will rather die than not get its way.
The goal of psychoanalysis, Freud said, is to produce the ordinary tolerable unhappiness that comes from accepting limits, accepting life and its inevitable end, and accepting that we’re not the world, we’re only an infinitely unimportant small part of it. The realization comes as a shock, but most people survive it.
Adulthood comes when the infantile lust for power becomes the skill that allows you to build a piece of furniture in your woodshop, paint in your studio, play in your symphony, act on your stage, restore your antique car. A job becomes more satisfying when it’s done as an art, and people who make their living by letting their inner two-year-old have playtime now and then—I include teachers, auto mechanics, successful business owners, surgeons, bakers—live longer than people who let the little beast act out its inherent hostility, thinking that with enough sound and fury, they can win.
Humor helps, kindness helps, love helps.
Psychoanalysis helps, I think. It produces tolerably unhappy people who are enjoyable to be around. When you wonder if life is worthwhile, you should probably think about the enjoyment your existence gives other people. You should probably think about the people who love you. Those things can tip the balance in most cases.
Students of Trumpism wonder how a popular movement can destroy institutions and customs that have been successful for generations, dissolve communities that have given sustenance and comfort to their members, and repeal laws enacted to protect the innocent and the vulnerable. However hard to believe, it happens. At this point in Trump’s trajectory, it’s obvious that only luck saved this country from going down the disastrous road that Mussolini and Hitler and Putin took their countries.
It’s a road whose destination is death. The death of a dictator is a function of how many impulses he can satisfy before they kill him. The only variable is how many people he takes with him.
If you wonder how people would willingly vote for a would-be dictator like Trump, consider that part of you that would rather die than not get its way.
Freud wrote at length about humanity’s death wish in Civilization and Its Discontents, but the concept was hard to get across to his audience. People who could get their minds around the Oedipus Complex and accept the Id and the Superego, the Oral and Anal Stages of Development, and even Penis Envy, have trouble thinking that they might want to die. It’s only when you look at other people do you see that death wish in action.
Fifty thousand people die by suicide every year in this country, and that’s not counting smokers, accidental drug overdoses, auto accidents, do-not-resuscitate orders, young men who let old men send them off to war, and sports where the experts die.
You may consider Trump supporters poorly-educated losers who have been duped into voting against their best interests, but they’re more sophisticated about the psyche than the people who want civilization to keep going. They know Trump promises death. They know he doesn’t believe in God or anything else, and they know that people will die by violence if he becomes president again. They know it will cause a civil war, and that many of them—maybe all of them—will die in it. It’s not for nothing that the American right-wing cheers on Putin’s genocide.
When they talk about freedom, they’re talking about the purest, most distilled variety of not having to do anything that reality or anything else requires you to do, the kind that only comes when you’ve got nothing to lose or are two years old.
That’s why it’s not physical death that they, in their heart of hearts, believe in. It is, instead, the death of the womb, the death of consciousness, the death of responsibility, the blessed state where all needs are taken care of, where frustrations are nonexistent because thought is nonexistent, where change does not happen in a universe that is universally protective. It’s a state that we’ve all gone through, and we remember it fondly, happily. We miss it. We want to go back to it. We’ll follow any Pied Piper who promises to lead us to it.
Freud may have had his blind spots, but he knew quite a lot about death and politics.
The shortest day of the year is coming up. Julie and I will do our best to celebrate it as adults, even though adulthood means accepting all sorts of unpleasant things. (I’ve been forgetting to get the day’s wood in until it’s dark and below zero outside. I’ve been out at the woodpile with a headlamp, with a parka over my pajamas, slipping and sliding in bedroom slippers with a heavy armload of wood. It’s only a death wish if I lock myself out and Julie doesn’t hear my pathetic scratchings on the door.)
Anyway, in a week the days will start getting longer. The sun will get a little brighter and warmer each day, and it will pick up the pace in February. After a long and dark winter, green grass will start growing again. Leaves will unfold on trees. Life will start reaching toward the sky, yearning for something—call it God—that gives meaning to the wonder of being alive. Morbid thoughts will be put off until next November, the inner two-year-olds of national and world leaders permitting.
These are not small consolations. They are among the best things life has to offer. They’re way better than death, no matter what form it comes in.
Donald Trump will be back. If not him, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Ted Cruz or Ron DeSantis or Kari Lake. There are always people who think their inner two-year-old is really who they are, not recognizing that they also contain an inner parent whose job it is to raise that two-year-old into a decent human being, one whose delight in the world brings joy to everyone, but whose infantile narcissism is tempered by empathy.
Senator Warnock of Georgia seems to have learned that lesson, and it’s a good sign that the people of Georgia have voted him into office. A voice that speaks of caring, mercy, and the joining together with one’s neighbors for the benefit of all is what this country needs right now.
I know that civilization is suffering through an infestation of pathological narcissists, and that the way they behave seems to give us permission to behave just as badly. But they hurt people, and if you follow their example, you’ll end up hurting people too.
One of the milestones of adulthood, I think, is that moment when you decide to stop hurting people. That’s when you realize there’s more than just a raging two-year-old inside you, and that you might have more to do in your life than obliterate the world.