Globalisation and the Urge to Merge

A good rule in most professions or activities is to use your experience to check your training and your training to check what your experience tells you. Similarly, we should bring psychology to shine a light on politics and politics to bear on psychology. This approach is corrective of excess, insider blindness and the dangers that go with both, and doesn’t mean we should cheesily diagnose politicians - though occasionally their behaviour gives diagnosticians no choice; or use politics to demean or nullify psychology. In the wrong hands they become rival brands, competitive, exclusive and inimical to each other.

 

How is it possible to be certain about the importance or primacy of doubt? If I believe we should doubt every religion, every credo and every ideology, should I simultaneously apply this stance to my belief: that is to say, should I doubt doubt? Because it may well be that on occasions doubt is actually a form of certainty - and the easy-going, permissive, pluralist Western liberalism which says “maybe”, “could be” and now “whatever”, and which gathered momentum and currency during my formative years, is just another dodgy dogma or ideology with a use-by date and natural shelf-life. Freud, of course, believed or, rather, stated that doubt was a form of neurosis which revealed him to be, as well as the polymath genius that he was, a salesman like any other therapist who had cottoned on to a brilliant kind of double-bind or clinical pincer : “if you doubt the validity of psychoanalysis, you are neurotic and therefore in need of psychoanalysis”. He arrived at the position inevitably because his theoretical superstructure was internally rationally watertight: once you have accepted entry into it, you are bound by all its precepts as you meet them.

 

The in-built flaw or, to borrow from the great man’s lexicon, unconscious fantasy in any ideology, whether secular or otherwise, is the belief that it is somehow forever and its potential spread without limit.  Ideologies which in content, if not in nature, are markedly different from ours, we tend to call fundamentalist and extremist whereas the beliefs into which we organise our thoughts and feelings seem to be the organic product of a kind of cosy rationalism: he or she is indoctrinated whereas I just have an instinctive feel for the truth, rather than a truth.  And on a really bad day, especially in a state of perceived threat, the latter beliefs fall into the undulating landscape of what is considered good, and the former into the stark territory of evil.

 

We can purr and revel in the warmth of our tolerant pluralism but a failure to understand that liberalism is a form of indoctrination like any other has left us unprepared for the disturbance, whether psychological, political or social, which inevitably comes when the tectonic plates of relativism and absolutism begin to grind against each other.  In fact, total immersion in the liberal ideal and the accompanying failure or inability to step outside it and understand it objectively from a different perspective leads directly to the re-emergence and spread of its opposite. Thus recently in the UK, a cosmopolitan elite, turned on by diversity and heterogeneity, has unwittingly catalysed a movement which craves homogeneous uniformity and the two other members of the almost-holy trinity, namely purity and security.

 

The survival of civil society depends on the management, moderation and reconciling of polarity, the basic setting of human thought and activity.  A primary obstacle to the recognition of this vital task is the separation of politics from psychology, as though they were oil and water rather than products of mind which use a different lens to describe the same phenomena and which should be applied by one to the other to counteract ascendancy and excess: psychology should be more political and politics more psychological, though at different times.

 

However, the contention that humans are primarily and necessarily dyadic doesn’t go down well with progressive intellectuals who see it as a perversely pessimistic and regressive position to take. Instead, they place dyadism at the dark, distant end of a spectrum which leads eventually to the comforting, inclusive pluralism in which they bask. But their romantic idealism and consequent failure to understand the binary default state of human nature, combined with their belief that over time primitive intrapsychic divisions can be effaced or erased, carry the seeds of the destruction of their project.  This is because, in extremis, the basic, primitive pairings of self-other, me-you, in-out, safe-unsafe, which have a local importance for the individual, will reinvigorate not just binary thinking but binary social structures and constructs as well – for example, Shia-Sunni, Catholic-Protestant, believer-infidel, Hutu-Tutsi, Big-Endian-Little-Endian (in the Swiftian rather than the IT sense), right-left, capitalist-socialist, black-white, nationalist-globalist and so on.  And while the brands may change, the dynamic remains the same.

 

Polarity, thus, is ever-present, though often camouflaged by the spectrum which is constructed upon it. Referendums, the product of a faux-democracy, stimulate this dormant polarity.  They don’t, as if often claimed, promote real division among the electorate or constituency, so much as remind us of our divided selves.  The misapprehension on the part of those who promoted the referendum on EU membership was that voters would base their decision on rational or, more accurately, numerical criteria and objective probability: that is, would continuing membership be likely to lead to greater national and individual wealth – in the  broadest sense of the concept?

 

In practice, however, the more its proponents argued that it would, the greater the determination of a significant majority to vote instinctively, and therefore symbolically. In a sense, there were two, separate constituencies in that majority; one making a calculation about the future benefits of a project with acknowledged flaws, and the other making a corrective, intuitive response to the strapline implied at the top of every EU edict and directive, namely ever-increasing union.   

 

The champions of the European project, urbane sophisticates to the man (and, occasionally, woman), unconsciously converted the unextinguishable urge to merge into the turgid codes and slogans of bureaucracy. However, policy and politics which are driven by unknowing and unmoderated impulses carry the seeds of their eventual destruction.  Authoritarian regimes are in the vanguard of the extreme expression of this urge, despotic leaders holding disparate parts together by strength of will, backed by superior force, although the anti-dynamic power which holds the project together will also blow it apart.  Thus, dictators end up in culverts in the desert or in front of a firing-squad quickly convened as they are caught fleeing from the capital, while the legitimised insanity of North Korean society, crushed into ego-less uniformity by Juche and extreme militarism, follows its inevitable course towards an explosive end: or, as Freud would have it, the greater the degree of repression, the greater the eventual disturbance.

 

The unconsidered drive towards global or continental unity will always bring natural schismatists to the fore because they are needed at times to turn developing stasis into a state of propulsive flux.  In Scotland, Alex Salmond, an instinctive schismatic operator whose delight in the split was perhaps too blatant, gave way to a leader whose excitement at the prospect of schism is no less intense but perhaps more polite and muted.   Farage, Trump, Wilders and Le Pen are different fish in the same river.  That is to say, they all tap into the regressive counter-fantasy of resistance to the urge to merge and retreat into a state of insular purity, boundaried by imagined walls or anti-Schengen barbed-wire.  The fact that all four have partners whose origins lie outside these imagined defences points to their muddle, their outward certainty anyway being a sign of ambivalence and inner confusion.

 

Maturity is a supra-instinctual state and therefore can never be fully realised but leaders who are in the process of acquiring it understand that managed retreat from a position of principle may at key points be in the collective interest. In fact, a capacity to cede power at the height of power is a hallmark of mature leadership. Thus, a mature government would, when it is at its most dominant, see proportional representation as a necessary corrective to a decade of one-party rule. Similarly, EU leaders who were not disabled by the fatal blindness of instinctual fantasy packaged as politics would have acknowledged four or five years ago that it might be time to hand some powers back to member states.  Their failure or, rather, incapacity to do so demonstrates their similarity to the separatist ideologues which their clumsy myopia has thrown up.

 

Our unreconstructable, divided selves never lose their penchant for simplicity and aversion to complexity, ambivalence, ambiguity and equivocation.  Internal schism is projected into absurd polarities which generate oscillation and instability – assimilation versus multiculturalism, individualism versus collectivism, uniformity versus pluralism, and so on.  They seek havens of certainty against the threat of fusion, undifferentiation and erosion of identity and of belonging posed by the magical chimera of globalisation and ever-closer-union: above all or, rather, beneath all, imagined purity must be protected against contamination by the other.

 

The failure to grasp this and to factor it into our politics means that, as liberal, relativist pluralists, we may be right but we are also the danger.