One of the most significant threats that can occur to any democracy is that of the election to a position of leadership of someone who has the potential to be an autocrat. Such a person can attempt to undermine the checks and balances with respect to other branches of government in order to use dictatorial powers. Such a person can consolidate his control and decide that elections would only potentially upset his long-term plan for the country. It would then become much simpler to declare himself president for life. This course of events has unfortunately happened before in history. Two of the most notable examples of this happening in the last century were Russia under Lenin and Germany under Hitler. In many cases, autocratic leaders maintain the pretense of multiple candidate elections in order to satisfy the expectations of the world community. The elections are fixed, as the autocrat keeps winning election after election. A good example of this is Mugabe in Zimbabwe.
One of the secrets of an autocrat’s success is his capacity to take advantage of the frustrations of the populace in order to get the populace to back him. It is a matter of getting people to back him and his vision and his sense of destiny. It is a matter of getting people to merge psychologically with him and to make the imprints that he wants to make and preserve on the world their imprints. The reason that people are willing to give up so much of their individual identity and merge with the autocrat is that they perceive their own opportunity to make and preserve individual imprints to be significantly diminished. A major reason in the modern world that the opportunities to make and preserve individual imprints are significantly diminished is the effects of modern technology on human fields of experience in the external world.
This diminishment occurs on several distinct levels. First, technology has replaced what once would have been called artisan work with mass production by complex machines in factories. Second, robots are replacing the human workers who used to work with the mass production machines. Third, more recently, there has been the introduction of 3-D printers which make products from scratch with only the most minimal involvement of human beings.
Finally, there is the replacement of natural organic surfaces and the surfaces of artifacts and architecture of more traditional cultures with the hard cold unyielding surfaces of modern technology, modern technology-based artifacts and modern technology-based architecture. The more natural and traditional surfaces created fields of experience that yielded to new ongoing organic imprints, so that a person could feel potent and fully alive, able to make and preserve his own organic imprints and create a surrogate immortality built both on actual products and on the memories that remained with other people after his death. But now that technology is so good at preserving indefinitely all kinds of imprints, there seems to be less and less room in the fields of experience of people today for truly new imprints. That is, apart from the invention of new devices, that either get rid of work and the possibility of new imprints being made by other workers, or else create more and more layers of mediated experience that remove people more and more from the immediate sensory world and the opportunity to make and preserve new meaningful organic imprints.
So this is a difficult time for people in a country like the United States, people who want to feel alive and create their own individual surrogate immortality. Along comes someone like Donald Trump, who not only offers to bring back manufacturing jobs, but who, on a deeper level, offers to restore a sense of potency. Believe in Trump and you can participate in his vision which will create a collective imprint on the U.S. A collective imprint that will endure and turn into a collective surrogate immortality. Believe in Trump and blur into him.
Blurring into a political leader in order to leave a collective imprint is not what one would normally consider a typical strategy in a modern democracy. One of the supposed advantages of a democracy is its focus on the individual. In the United States, according to the Declaration of Independence, there is a fundamental belief that all human beings have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The implication is that each individual has a right to pursue his own distinct path to personal satisfaction and will not feel predisposed to give up his own distinct path by blurring into someone else’s path. Although political leaders can be charismatic, they are not supposed to use psychological tactics that seduce people into becoming a part of an enveloping collective identity. Having a good chunk of the populace merge into an enveloping collective identity is the foundation for setting up a totalitarian government, which, of course, is antithetical to the maintenance of a democracy.
And this is why Trump is such a dangerous man. His sense of entitlement, his belief that he has the right to go around all kinds of established rules and conventions with regard to the American government, complements perfectly the desperate dreams of his supporters who want nothing more than to believe there is some magical way for them to bypass their sense of impotence with regard to their daily lives. Trump allows them to live their dreams, if only vicariously, through him. By letting them blur into him, Trump allows these people to participate in creating vicarious organic imprints on their field of experience. The vicarious collective organic imprints of a Trump presidency. In so doing, it allows these supporters to feel fully alive and to feel they haven’t lived their lives in vain. So that when they are about to die, they will know they have participated in leaving a meaningful impress on the world.
Trump is unique in the way he changes many of his positions so often both out of expediency and out of a desire to be able to control and manipulate Americans by throwing them off balance. He also is constantly making new surprise attacks on individuals, corporations and movements with no warning. And although it throws them off balance, Trump’s supporters love the abrasive friction of all of his changes and surprises. But in other parts of the world, there are leaders and movements that are also penetrating the numbness and the jadedness of their constituents by coming up with revolutionary proposals to change things dramatically. The change is not necessarily focused on actually fixing particular problems with particular solutions, but rather is oriented to leaving new dramatic splashy collective imprints that pull people out of their numbness and jadedness and allow them to feel more fully alive. Many times the changes brought about by these new leaders and movements don’t really fix the problems of their supporters and may actually exacerbate existing problems situations. But, on some levels, increased abrasive friction may be exactly what these supporters need. And someone like Trump, who flip-flops on many issues and creates ongoing shows and surprises is actually perfect for creating the ongoing intermittent kicks that keep these people alive. And his flip-flops and surprise attacks are perfect for making many new imprints in which his supporters can participate. And many of these imprints can be preserved in people’s memories leading to a constantly expanding collective surrogate immortality.
Now Brexit was a big collective imprint and a big shock and it is going to precipitate all kinds of other shocks as the leaders of Britain and the European Union try to navigate Britain’s separation from the European Union. This was not a change that was very well thought out by most of its supporters, and it could very easily produce unforeseen consequences that will repeatedly impact in a negative way the very people who wanted to promote it.
There will be more votes in the future that bring about unfocused dramatic change, as people try to promote the kind of change legislatively that they can use as a psychological substitute for the kind of change they would actually desire to bring about in their fields of experience within their daily lives. It is highly unlikely that these changes will deal effectively with the underlying problem that people have today of a loss of organic grounding in their living environments.
In one of my earlier columns, I wrote about two different kinds of crime that corresponded to adaptations to two different kinds of living environments. In more traditional more natural environments, a person could be overstimulated by organic stimuli, by the flowing blendable continual stimuli that are the foundation for strong emotions. This, in turn, created the foundation for crimes of passion. I use the term crimes of passion in a much broader sense than it has been traditionally used. In my construct, it means not just revenge for unfaithfulness in love, but also any crime based on greed, lust, anger, envy and other strong emotions.
Then, as modern technology started moving into living environments and creating sensory distortion: understimulation and overstimulation, people started to use crime to pull themselves out of their numbness and jadedness in order to feel simply alive. Thus began all the seemingly senseless crimes like the mass shootings by one or two gunmen that have become so prevalent in modern American society.
Somehow, I am beginning to think a similar pattern is appearing in the process of voting in modern democracies. People used to vote based on passionate beliefs, passionate connections. This was how it happened as people were transitioning to modern technological living environments. During the transition, people still had some significant connection to more traditional styles of living environments. In America, homesteaders kept pushing further and further west, keeping alive the idea of the American frontier. Even those who remained in the big cities could fairly easily escape to rural areas.
But now even rural areas are dominated by the transformative experiential effects of modern consumer technology. People are increasingly numb and jaded and feel increasingly impotent in terms of their capacity to make and preserve imprints in their fields of experience. A man like Trump comes along and he pulls people out of their numbness and jadedness and out of their sense of impotence. And the more he flip-flops, the more he makes people feel more alive and that they are part of a movement that is making things happen. It doesn’t matter what is happening, just that something is happening in their lives. This is what we are dealing with in the Trump phenomenon.
© 2016 Laurence Mesirow