What happened last night in Washington
When my child was little, we would talk things through. When a child was disgruntled in my friend’s Montessori school, they would talk things through. When the President’s narcissism is offended, he whips up riot. But it is everyone else’s narcissism as well. This is a symbiosis.
Narcissus was condemned to stare at his reflection forever, and the only way to escape the hollow ache of a self-centred life is to provoke others to do something different. You light the touchpaper and stand well back. As President Trump called for people to go home whom hours earlier he had urged, should stand firm, I thought I saw someone standing back from the fireworks. Without help, however, it would have been a one-person firework show, because Trump is just another Trumpian.
As narcissists need others to show them that they exist, they get elected only because crowds of narcissists exist who need the myth of ‘strong leaders’. All share the same panic: that they may not exist in any real way. It is the fear of an abyss, and annihilation, with meaninglessness inbetween. Instant gratification, constant distraction, everything we associate with dopamine — everything we used to try to get children to grow up beyond — can only delay and intensify the reckoning with that fear. Meanwhile everyone is goaded into pretend life.
The fear is the flipside of a coin. God is everything, and the world is nothing by comparison. Rejecting God, we are left with the world which was nothing by comparison. Heroes and social superiors were everything, and we were lesser by comparison. Rejecting hierarchy, we are left with everyone’s feet of clay. This process of rejection, like entropy in nature, is not reversible. We are confronted with the world as it is, in its mundanity, and for those who cling to the old romanticism and the old idealism, it is insufficient. Desperate hope and doubt and imposter syndrome is not just the peculiarity of an individual whose sense of self was destroyed by overwhelming but remote parents; it is something that any limited human creature has to learn to transcend.
By great force of will, reality-deniers would like to bring back the old imagination. They storm the Capitol. That won’t work. Our situation has become absurd, and is general, and probably it needs to be seen like that.
Thomas Merton wrote that we looked for the ship, not the wake of the ship. Our sense of self is either the sign of something beyond the sum of its parts, or it is absurd. What theology calls our creatureliness is either the sign of a Creator, or it is absurd. Either way, the self in its limitation and glory will not be recovered in self-created political fantasies; they only defer the problem. They are echoes of a self which we fear may be only an echo. Neither ‘strong leaders’ nor less positive forms of ‘the Other’ can ground us.
People need to sit down like small children, and talk things through. They need to do as small children do, and ‘use their words’. It is not only small children, who find this struggle against their panic and their pride nearly impossible to face. It takes time to talk things through, and to do so seems avoidable right up to the time that it seems impossible. School systems now are so concerned with process that they do not provide children with those moments any more. Teachers do not dare to provide them. Whereas Montessori takes children seriously, the lazy stuff which more often passes for child-centred education has given in to the demands of each moment.
But before education collapsed into child-minding, and parenting became the business of the strong-leader state, many children did manage to grow up. Before a society of symbolic labour and passive entertainment, which was visual and sensational and preferred images of youth and ease to images of age and complexity, children grew up through the personal achievement of slow, hard disciplines, in a world which did not give into demands. These slow self-overcomings are what we need to have back, whether machines make them necessary or not. Should we choose to overcome our own narcissism, we could escape these vicious Trumpian cycles.
