This newsletter has been provoked by a comment made in an interview with one of science fiction’s rising stars, Ray Nayler. Speaking of evil, Nayler says this:
I have now lived in many countries and met a lot of people from different backgrounds and with different points of view, and I have never met someone who was evil or fundamentally out to do harm. (I’m speaking about people who are healthy, because there are disturbances in the mind that can cause people to want to do other people harm). The people who do the most harm, in my experience, think they are acting to protect the people close to them, or they think they are doing what is necessary to achieve some imagined better state for themselves in the future. They act out of selfishness, ignorance, or with misguided intentions. Those things can be very harmful, but they are not evil. (57)
He goes on to say that for this reason he does not believe in villains, using as example Shakespeare’s most famous villain, Iago. To him, such villains are merely a way of creating conflict in fiction: “I don’t think we need to have recourse to Iago anymore to drive a narrative forward” (57).
I confess that when I read this, coming as it does from a talented, intelligent and sophisticated writer, I was astonished. I still am. To use the obvious but inevitable example, has he read nothing about Donald Trump and his lifelong delight in cruelty and bullying? Perhaps Nayler would stretch his qualification about “disturbances in the mind” to include the likes of Trump and that other sadistic bully, DeSantis, but that is stretching the qualification mighty thin, it seems to me. I respect Nayler, and am not at all trying to be a bully myself, but what of the Holocaust? Yes, the Nazis were trying to “achieve some imagined better state for themselves.” It was called the Third Reich, and it was to be achieved through such brutal torture and mass murder that what Iago did—which consisted of telling vicious lies—pales in comparison. To say that the Nazis were not fundamentally out to do harm is, I am afraid, simply wrong. Similarly, do Internet trolls and cyberbullies think they are “doing what is necessary”? No, there is a delight in inflicting pain, born of hatred and a complete lack of empathy. I wish Nayler were right, but there is such a thing as nihilism.
Nayler’s position cannot be dismissed as merely naïve. He could cite some famous allies, notably Socrates, who maintained that all evil is ignorance. The assertion is founded upon the assumption that the human race is rational. There would be no sense doing anything wrong unless you thought some good came of it, either to you or to others. You might be misguided, but at least you would be operating according to a rational calculus of benefits and losses. Christianity, however, is often credited with the insight that human beings are not rational: truly rational behavior is in fact a rare achievement. Evil results not from a miscalculation of the intellect but from a corruption of the will: from desires that are not remotely rational but are all the more powerful because of it. “The evil that I would not, that I do” (Romans 7:19)—and if that is true of Paul, what of the rest of us? Paul’s insight was developed by Augustine into the doctrine of original sin: since the Fall, the human will has been corrupt. We are not born innocent and learn evil from experience. We bring the predilection for evil into the world with us: there is no such thing as an innocent child. What Paul called the “natural self” is inherently evil, and we must become “born again,” dying to our natural self and being born as a “spiritual self” through grace before we are capable of any good. Those attracted to this point of view often insist on “the reality of evil,” a favorite theme of so-called neo-orthodox Protestant theologians in the early 20th century as a reaction against the overly rosy view of human nature, as they saw it, promulgated by liberal Christianity and the Victorian myth of rational progress. The rest of the 20th century certainly bore them out. But if evil is real, it must either have been created by God or else be something that God did not create, something that exists independently of God. Neither conclusion is acceptable to orthodoxy. Hence the official doctrine of the Catholic Church as put forth by Thomas Aquinas of the privatio boni: evil is not real in itself but is the mere absence of good. Jung, the son of a Protestant minister, became almost obsessed with attacking this view in his later life.
It might seem as if Jesus were agreeing with Socrates when he said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” about the people who crucified him. Perhaps that was true of the rabble he was facing. It is clear that some of the January 6 insurrectionists were such deluded fools that they actually thought they were being patriots. But it was not true of the man who set them on. A lot of us, including me, were willing in 2016 to accept Trump tentatively as a misguided populist who genuinely wanted to champion those who had been left behind by the neo-liberal economy represented by elite Democrats like Hillary Clinton. We know better now. Trump knows very well that when he lies, cheats, breaks laws, he is doing wrong. He not only doesn’t care but exults in his wrongdoing. Laws and restraints are for losers—if you believe they apply to you, then you are a loser yourself, and deserve to be used as a tool by those in the know. As Amanda Marcotte, the most trenchant and hard-hitting analyst of the MAGA phenomenon, keeps insisting in Salon.com, the greater number of Trump’s followers are not being duped by him. They know that everything he says is a lie—it is precisely what they love about him. They are not fools—they are drunk, intoxicated, swept up in the exhilaration of the will to power.
What they are intoxicated by is an energy coming out of the unconscious, and the one thing we may grant to Trump and his followers is that possession by the unconscious, what Jung calls “inflation,” is not only highly contagious but progressive, so that it is possible that Trump and his followers have progressively degenerated. Certainly their extremism seems to have fed upon itself over time, and, like a river fed by flood waters, has begun to sweep over boundaries that contained it in the past. Something is implied here about human free will. We choose freely, and are responsible for our choices. Yet, once we choose evil, it takes us over, as Macbeth discovered. We become possessed by an energy out of what Jung called the collective unconscious, and, since the collective unconscious is inhuman, we are dehumanized, turned gradually and progressively into monsters. Hitler and Trump are monsters, like Iago (though not as smart). Science fiction and fantasy writers have known this intuitively, whether or not they knew the theories of depth psychology. Sauron and Gollum in The Lord of the Rings; Voldemort in Harry Potter; Darth Vader in Star Wars; Jack Torrance in Stephen King’s The Shining: all of them were once human, but, having gone over to the dark side, they become demonic. The same is true in real life of serial killers, especially the type of sadistic psychopaths that torture their victims.
But why choose evil? What is it that causes some people to damn themselves, psychologically if not supernaturally? Evil is the will to power, but desire for power is not necessarily evil. Abraham Maslow was shrewd when he identified his basic need of “self-esteem” as a need for the kind of power necessary for autonomy and self-sufficiency. We all need the sense of power that we call self-respect, the ability to cope with life. But what drives some people to go further and long for more power than anyone needs, to long for limitless power, godlike power? This is what is sometimes called the mystery of evil. Adam and Eve had no need to listen to the serpent’s promise that “Ye shall be as gods.” Their God was not the tyrant sitting on the throne of later tradition but a God who came at close of day and conversed with them as a friend. There really was no reason to listen to the serpent—it is truly a mystery. But there are a few clues. In the early 20th century, Freud had an opposite number, Alfred Adler, who, influenced by Nietzsche, said that the basic drive of the unconscious was not the pleasure principle, as Freud maintained, but the will to power. Adler coined the term “inferiority complex” to describe the symptoms of those who feel they lack power, who feel helpless and therefore humiliated. He also coined the term “overcompensation” to describe the neurotic attempt to cope with an inferiority complex by going in the opposite direction, perhaps to the extent of developing a “superiority complex” in which people convince themselves they are better than others, better than they actually are. A more recent term for this condition is “narcissistic personality disorder,” and it is obvious that the description of it perfectly fits Donald Trump.
The primary emotion driving such a neurotic is a feeling of resentment, and it is resentment that drives the attempt to overcompensate—not by the development of real superiority, which could be admirable, but by grandiose fantasies of greatness, a megalomania which is really just a form of denial, since it is based on illusion. Perhaps it is here that we may find a way to credit Nayler’s conviction that all evil is rationally motivated, even when its reasoning is illogical and unrealistic. Why does Iago hate Othello? In more than one soliloquy, Iago adduces various “reasons,” none of which is remotely plausible. When he reaches for such flimsy excuses as a suspicion that Othello has slept with his wife, which is obviously untrue, we begin to realize that Iago has no real reason for his hatred, and is driven to disguise the fact even from himself. This led Samuel Taylor Coleridge to speak of Iago’s “motiveless malignancy”: in other words, radical evil is truly irrational, so much so that we cannot in the end speak of a motive. But if Iago is not driven by a reason, he is clearly driven by a feeling—a feeling of burning resentment. In one sense, this resentment has no cause—Iago has no rational cause for resenting Othello. But perhaps the cause is another feeling, a feeling of inferiority, leading to resentment and envy. I have little doubt that Milton’s portrait of Satan in Paradise Lost was influenced by the psychology of Iago. What drives Satan is resentful envy, and what it drives him to is grandiosity and a desire for revenge. Of course, we have not eliminated the mystery of evil, merely located its origin in irrational feelings rather than rational reasons. But what caused the irrational feelings? In The Productions of Time and elsewhere, I suggest that the origin of the will to power and its resentful envy is epistemological, the essentially paranoid response of consciousness when imagination’s power of connection fails and consciousness feels isolated and threatened by the external world and other people. But to follow that line of reasoning would take us too far afield at the moment.
People like Hitler and Trump are little weasels compared to archetypal characters like Iago and Satan, but they fit their psychological profile exactly. With one exception: Trump’s malignity is not exactly motiveless. We know that he was emotionally abused by his monstrous father, Fred Trump. But what about Trump’s followers? Well, Jung has an impressive essay called “After the Catastrophe,” first published in 1945, an attempt to grapple psychologically with the evil that Germany perpetrated in World War II, an evil of the blackest sort on a scale hitherto unknown. He says:
It has filled us with horror to realize all that man is capable of, and of which, therefore, we too are capable. Since then a terrible doubt about humanity, and about ourselves, gnaws at our hearts. | Nevertheless, it should be clear to everyone that such a state of degradation can come about only under certain conditions. The most important of these is the accumulation of urban, industrialized masses—of people torn from the soil, engaged in one-sided employment, and lacking every healthy instinct, even that of self-preservation. (200)
He goes on to inveigh against the Welfare State like a cranky conservative, but actually his diagnosis would have been endorsed by Marx. The Industrial Revolution ended feudalism, but replaced it only with what Marx called “alienated labor” under dehumanizing conditions in an urban setting. The result in the United States was the Gilded Age, in which robber baron capitalists formed an oligarchy that exploited and dehumanized the working class, eventually bringing about a Wall Street crash and the Great Depression. I have just seen Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which showed that a good number of people flirted with the Communist Party in the 1930’s because of their bitterness with the bankruptcy, literal and figurative, of the rigged capitalist system. The McCarthy crowd was paranoid about Communist organizers, unions, and the like because they knew damned well that there was good reason for the social unrest of which these phenomena were symptoms. The New Deal created a form of capitalism which, for 30 years or so, managed to calm the unrest of the masses through the creation of decent jobs with safety regulations, limited hours, and unions; of a social safety net providing health care, unemployment insurance, prevention of vast income inequality through progressive taxation. It provided, in short, the means for a halfway decent life for the average family, one that made possible a measure of autonomy and self-respect, signified by the phrase “the dignity of labor.” Since the Reagan era, much of this has been undermined. There is a reason for the opioid epidemic, the surge of mental health issues, the nasty, bitter mood of today’s public no matter what the good news. Jung contemptuously says that a mass population under alienating conditions is turning into "a herd of sheep, constantly relying on a shepherd to drive them into good pastures” (201).
Such people feel inferior; they feel like failures, partly because they can see that the more successful people clearly regard them as failures, as losers. The inferiority feelings then quickly turn into resentment. Jung says of Germany in the years when the Nazis were coming to power: “The Germans were never wholly indifferent to the impression they made on the outside world. They resented disapproval and hated even to be criticized. Inferiority feelings make people touchy and lead to compensatory efforts to impress” (202), a description that startlingly resembles the Trump world today. Moreover, people who already feel abandoned and despised economically are told in addition that they suffer from collective guilt, which is the real subject of “After the Catastrophe,” which asks how Germany was to deal with its guilt for what it did during the war years—and how the rest of the world was to deal with it as well. Germans had to deal with guilt for the war itself and especially, of course, for the Holocaust. But similarly, white, middle-class Americans are told they are collectively guilty for the atrocities of slavery, of Indigenous genocide, of anti-Semitic mistreatment of Jewish people, of the persecution of gay, lesbian, trans, and many other non-heterosexual people, of misogynistic treatment of women. Their country is not historically one of the first two nations (along with Britain) to re-invent democracy after it had lain dormant for 2000 years since the ancient Greeks, something of which we can be proud—no, our history is a catalogue of oppression and hatred. And that is only domestically. Internationally, we are collectively guilty for the imperialist, colonialist behavior that we constantly deny, despite the well-documented history of the United States subverting legal governments and installing puppet regimes out of “national interest,” of conducting imperialist wars in places like Vietnam and Iraq.
Yes, all these things are absolutely true, along with the democratic ideals that were and are also true. And, no, that does not mean individual guilt, as I will be told—for as a white, middle-class, heterosexual male, I am just as collectively guilty as any right-winger. And yet, it does. Jung explains:
The psychological use of the word “guilt” should not be confused with guilt in the legal or moral sense. Psychologically, it connotes the irrational presence of a subjective feeling (or conviction) of guilt, or an objective imputation of, or imputed share in, guilt. As an example of the latter, suppose a man belongs to a family which has the misfortune to be disgraced because one of its members has committed a crime. It is clear that he cannot be held responsible, either legally or morally. Yet the atmosphere of guilt makes itself felt in many ways. His family name appears to have been sullied, and it gives him a painful shock to hear it bandied about in the mouths of strangers. Guilt can be restricted to the lawbreaker only from the legal, moral, and intellectual point of view, but as a psychic phenomenon it spreads itself over the whole neighborhood. (195)
Later, Jung says,
It may be objected that the whole concept of psychological collective guilt is a prejudice and a sweepingly unfair condemnation. Of course it is, but that is precisely what constitutes the irrational nature of collective guilt: it cares nothing for the just and the unjust, it is the dark cloud that rises up from the scene of an unexpiated crime. It is a psychic phenomenon, and it is therefore no condemnation of the German people to say that they are collectively guilty, but simply a statement of fact. (197-98)
To sum up, “collective guilt, viewed on the archaic and primitive level, is a state of magical uncleanness” (197). I find this remarkably insightful, and startlingly relevant to what is going on in the United States right now. At the heart of the present culture wars is “critical race theory.” When critical race theory says that the United States is a structure of “systemic racism” and that a white person cannot say “I am not a racist” but can only try to act in “antiracist” ways, it is talking about collective guilt. And collective guilt is personal. It is not saying, “I do not blame you but rather the system.” It is saying, “You are the system, whether you want to be or not, just as you are a member of your family even though you did not choose it and may abhor it.” “In this way,” Jung says, “we are unavoidably drawn into the uncleanness of evil, no matter what our conscious attitude may be. No one can escape this, for we are all so much a part of the human community” (198). This is “the reality of evil.”
How can collective guilt be lived with? Jung’s recommendation does not sound very attractive:
If a German is prepared to acknowledge his moral inferiority as collective guilt before the whole world, without attempting to minimize it or explain it away with flimsy arguments, then he will stand a reasonable chance, after a time, of being taken for a more or less decent man, and will thus be absolved of his collective guilt at any rate in the eyes of individuals. (197)
This seems to say that no self-respect is possible. We are always guilty, like a Kafka character. To some extent, I think this is true. Maslow’s ideal of self-esteem needs to be qualified with Jung’s concept of confronting one’s shadow—and Jung was quite clear, long before critical race theory, that the personal shadow cannot totally be separated from the social shadow, because we are part of our society even as we are also partly independent of it. Self-esteem without acknowledgement of the shadow is mere inflation, mere megalomania. Even if we are not personally guilty, we can be ashamed and heartsick about being part of a system that denies both economic and social justice to Black people (and others), of belonging to a white race that does terrible things to Black people every day of the week; ashamed and heartsick about being a male in a society in which so many men treat women in an unspeakable way, and so on. Such feelings are not heroic or saintly: they are or should be just a minimum basic expectation for being a decent human being, not something one deserves a medal for. They do not need to be accompanied by the kind of theatrical groveling that is sometimes called “virtue signaling,” nor by the self-righteous accusation of others that is what is meant these days by “woke.” Much of this self-righteousness comes, in my perception, from white people. Humility is good for the soul, but humiliation breeds resentment all over again, and the cycle simply turns. We may also recognize that we benefit from the very system we abhor, yet cannot leave and have very limited power to change. The demand to “confess your privilege” may not always be made tactfully, but it is at base a demand for honesty and basic fairness.
We have responsibility for the system we are involved in, and accepting that responsibility is the first step towards getting beyond collective guilt. Responsibility means doing what we can to make our society better rather than worse, even if it seems that that is little enough. I understand words like “antiracism” in that sense. We cannot come to terms with injustices that happened 200 years in the past without abolishing them in the present. Society is going to have to be overhauled to eliminate the conditions that give rise to guilt, feelings of inferiority, and resentment. We have to return to the kind of society at least imperfectly created by the New Deal, in which middle- and working-class people could have a decent and economically secure life, not this precarious gig economy. The society created by income inequality has produced a population of tens of millions who feel humiliated, insecure, desperate, and therefore increasingly resentful. People in a state that is depressed in all senses become highly suggestible, vulnerable to impulses coming out of the unconscious. The unconscious is not evil, but it attempts to compensate for intolerable feelings of failure and inferiority. Such people are vulnerable to the promises of megalomaniacal grifters who promise to make Germany or America great again. The following description of Hitler fits Trump with uncanny accuracy:
All these pathological features—complete lack of insight into one’s own character, auto-erotic self-admiration and self-extenuation, denigration and terrorization of one’s fellow men (how Hitler spoke of his own people!), projection of the shadow, lying, falsification of reality, determination to impress by fair means or foul, bluffing and double-crossing--all these were united in the man who was diagnosed clinically as an hysteric, and whom a strange fate chose to be the political, moral, and religious spokesman of Germany for twelve years. Is this pure chance? | A more accurate diagnosis of Hitler’s condition would be pseudologia phantastica, that form of hysteria which is characterized by a peculiar talent for believing one’s own lies. For a short spell, such people usually meet with astounding success, and for that reason are socially dangerous. (203-04)
When Trump demonstrates that there is no line he will not cross, that he refuses to feel qualms about any violation of social norms, his followers are thrilled—it shows them that they too need not be bowed under the burden of inferior feelings. And they ape his behavior: the increased frequency of anti-social behavior, as with rude and even threatening passengers on airplanes, is directly connected with Trump:
This sense of insecurity is the source of the hysteric’s prestige psychology, of his need to make an impression, to flaunt his merits and insist on them, of his insatiable thirst for recognition, admiration, adulation, and longing to be loved. It is the cause of that loud-mouthed arrogance, uppishness, insolence, and tactlessness by which so many Germans, who at home grovel like dogs, win a bad reputation for their country abroad. (208)
Not just airline passengers, but members of Congress and other legislatures: Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Ron DeSantis, the whole strutting, preening parade of clowns.
Needless to say, the other side of this superiority complex is the projection of their sense of inferiority on scapegoats, which includes everyone who is not what they are, namely, white, male, heterosexual, and Christian. People who are not white, not male or, if female, not properly subordinate to males, not heterosexual, not Christian (Jewish, Muslim, whatever) are not “normal,” not “traditional,” not what God ordained that people should be. They are the guilty ones. The culture wars are entirely a frantic effort on the part of millions of people to remain in denial. What culture warriors are basically trying to deny, to oppress, ultimately to eliminate, is difference itself rather than any specific difference. “I am not different, I am not marginalized, I am not rejected because I am inferior”—which implies that secretly that is exactly what they fear they are, or might easily become, and must project that identity onto other people. When your mirror refuses to tell you that you are the fairest of them all, you have to blame Snow White: “After all, this is a woman who lives out in the forest with a bunch of dwarves, and that’s just not normal.” I am not against gender or diversity sensitivity training, but it will be only marginally effective against this panicked need for scapegoats. The most effective way to reduce misogyny or racism is going to be indirect, by creating a society in which people have less of a compulsion to create scapegoats.
The more we reduce the mistreatment of marginalized groups now, so that we are less guilty as a society of persecuting them, the more we will be able to face the abuses of the past honestly. I do not believe it is impossible to navigate the dilemma of collective guilt. Privileged folk like me might remember that what Catholics call examination of conscience is a valuable spiritual discipline. Years later, I recognize that my Catholic upbringing has been helpful in keeping me from having too good an opinion of myself. It is training in self-honesty, in admitting what you are capable of, admitting what you have actually done and tried to rationalize or deny. No one should have an easy conscience, because no one deserves to. Although he came out of the Protestant tradition, Jung recognized this, which is one form of the Christian doctrine of the Fortunate Fall:
Without guilt, unfortunately, there can be no psychic maturation and no widening of the spiritual horizon. Was it not Meister Eckhart [the medieval mystic] who said: “For this reason God is willing to bear the brunt of sins and often winks at them, mostly sending them to people for whom he has prepared some high destiny. See! Who was dearer to our Lord or more intimate with him than his apostles? Not one of them but fell into mortal sin, and all were mortal sinners.” | Where sin is great “grace doth much more abound.” Such an experience brings about an inner transformation, and this is infinitely more important than political and social reforms which are all valueless in the hands of people who are not at one with themselves. (216)
Jung ends the essay by saying, “The question remains: How am I to live with this shadow? What attitude is required if I am to be able to live in spite of evil? In order to find valid answers to these questions a complete spiritual renewal is needed” (217). I think Jung underestimates the need for political and social reforms, yet I recognize that he is right that I must strive for such a spiritual renewal for myself, in fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12), yet not without hope, for myself and for us all.
References
Jung. C. G. “After the Catastrophe,” 1945. In Civilization in Transition, Volume 10 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. 2nd Edition. Princeton/Bollingen, 1970. 194-217.
Nayler, Ray. “Ray Nayler: Biosemiotics.” In Locus: The Magazine of the Fantasy & Science Fiction Field. Issue 747. Vol. 90, No. 4. 28-29, 56-57.
Glad to meet you, Thomas, in a manner of speaking. And thank you for reading the newsletter. I'm delighted to get an intelligent query within an hour of posting! As for Trump's immediate family, Don Jr. seems to be a chip off the old block. Whenever I hear of him, it's because he's making a Trumpish comment on some conspiracy theory or whatever. I suspect Ivanka does NOT want to end up like Meghan and Harry, hated by everyone. Or like Cordelia. Ivanka and her husband have used the family connection to enrich themselves without breaking with daddy. She's "loyal" insofar as it serves her to be. Same for Melania. The only one to oppose Trump is the niece, Mary Trump, the judge, who can afford it because she's out of reach of any revenge he can take. That's the best I can figure it. I don't think anyone is loyal in the sense of real loyalty--it's all self-protection and self-interest.
You seem to know Trump quite well. Something I've wondered is why, given his "obvious" narcissistic personality disorder, his family seems relatively well-adjusted. By all accounts, they appear "normal" and loyal to him despite the huge rewards they'd have for pulling a Harry & Meghan. You'd think the people who know him best would be able to see what's clearly in front of them. Hitler, Stalin, Mao all had disastrous family lives. What's with Trump?