I recently found myself reading Ernest Becker’s 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death. While the work is in some respects very dated (especially on issues of gender and gender identity), it is chillingly on-target in the chapter entitled “The Spell Cast by Persons — The Nexus of Unfreedom.” This chapter is an excellent summary of the insights of the psychoanalytic tradition up to the early 70s on cult leaders and cult behavior, from Freud to Ferenczi to Fromm, with then-recent material on the Manson Family.
You can find a pdf of that chapter here.
I will share some of the quotes that jumped out at me:
It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief. It is this alone that can explain the “uncanny and coercive characteristics of group formations.” The chief is a “dangerous personality, toward whom only a passive-masochistic attitude is possible, to whom one’s will has to be surrendered,—while to be alone with him, ‘to look him in the face,’ appears a hazardous enterprise.” This alone, says Freud, explains the “paralysis” that exists in the link between a person with inferior power to one of superior power. Man has “an extreme passion for authority” and “wishes to be governed by unrestricted force.”
[The chief] makes possible a new experience, the expression of forbidden impulses, secret wishes, and fantasies. In group behavior anything goes because the leader okays it. It is like being an omnipotent infant again, encouraged by the parent to indulge oneself plentifully, or like being in psychoanalytic therapy where the analyst doesn't censure you for anything you feel or think. In the group each man seems an omnipotent hero who can give full vent to his appetites under the approving eye of the father. And so we understand the terrifying sadism of group activity.
It has been said of Trump that “shamelessness is his super-power.” Well here that very phenomenon is, laid out in detail, in a phenomenon called “the infectiousness of the unconflicted person.”
Freud found that the leader allows us to express forbidden impulses and secret wishes. Redl saw that in some groups there is indeed what he perfectly calls the “infectiousness of the unconflicted person.” There are leaders who seduce us because they do not have the conflicts that we have; we admire their equanimity where we feel shame and humiliation. Freud saw that the leader wipes out fear and permits everyone to feel omnipotent.
[Note: Thus is Trumpism experienced as a kind “cleansing fire” for those who wish to openly profess and act upon racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, generally obnoxious and even nihilistic ideas. He gives permission to say “Fuck You” to everyone, especially the “liberal elites” the “snowflakes” and the “protected minorities” of conservative folkore. To turn away from Trump means for his followers, the final victory of these forces]
Redl refined this somewhat by showing how important the leader often was by the simple fact that it was he who performed the “initiatory act” when no one else had the daring to do it. Redl calls this beautifully the “magic of the initiatory act.” This initiatory act can be anything from swearing to sex or murder [notice Trump revels in all of these, shamelessly, ostentatiously-— they are features, not bugs]. As Redl points out, according to its logic only the one who first commits murder is the murderer; all others are followers. Freud has said in Totem and Taboo that acts that are illegal for the individual can be justified if the whole group shares responsibility for them. But they can be justified in another way: the one who initiates the act takes upon himself both the risk and the guilt. The result is truly magic: each member of the group can repeat the act without guilt. They are not responsible, only the leader is. Redl calls this, aptly, “priority magic.” But it does something even more than relieve guilt: it actually transforms the fact of murder. This crucial point initiates us directly into the phenomenology of group transformation of the everyday world. . . . In other words, participation in the group redistills everyday reality and gives it the aura of the sacred—just as, in childhood, play created a heightened reality.
Redl showed that groups use leaders for several types of exculpation or relief of conflict, for love, or for even just the opposite—targets of aggressions and hate that pull the group together in a common bond.
The instructive thing about his examples is that most of the “central person’s” functions do have to do with guilt, expiation, and unambiguous heroics. The important conclusion for us is that the groups “use” the leader sometimes with little regard for him personally, but always with regard to fulfilling their own needs and urges. [note how Trump’s status as a wealthy, east-coast urban elite, a former Democrat, a porn-star groupie, philanderer, scoffer-at-morality and Christianity, and one-time supporter of abortion rights makes absolutely zero difference to his largely rural, evangelical Christian followers]. W. R. Bion, in an important recent paper extended this line of thought even further from Freud, arguing that the leader is as much a creature of the group as they of him and that he loses his “individual distinctiveness” by being a leader, as they do by being followers. He has no more freedom to be himself than any other member of the group, precisely because he has to be a reflex of their assumptions in order to qualify for leadership in the first place.
People use their leaders almost as an excuse. When they give in to the leader’s commands they can always reserve the feeling that , these commands are alien to them, that they are the leader’s responsibility, that the terrible acts they are committing, are in his name and not theirs. This, then, is another thing that makes people feel so guiltless, as Canetti points out: they can imagine themselves as temporary victims of the leader. The more they give in to his spell, and the more terrible the crimes they commit, the more they can feel that the wrongs are not natural to them.
. . . we are faced with the even more astonishing conclusion that homicidal
communities like the Manson “family” are not really devoid of basic humanness. What makes them so terrible is that they exaggerate the dispositions present in us all. Why should they feel guilt or remorse? The leader takes responsibility for the destructive act, and those who destroy on his command are no longer murderers, but “holy heroes.” They crave to serve in the powerful aura that he projects and to carry out the illusion that he provides them, an illusion that allows them to heroically transform the world. Under his hypnotic spell and with the full force of their own urges for heroic self-expansion, they need have no fear; they can kill with equanimity.
On the psychology of Blutkitt, or “Blood Cement” -— is this the explanation for Lyndsey Graham?
If, as we have seen, the group comes ready-made to the leader with the thirst for servitude, he tries to deepen that servitude even further. If they seek to be free of guilt in his cause, he tries to load them up with an extra burden of guilt and fear to draw the mesh of his immorality around them. He gets a really coercive hold on the members of the group precisely because they follow his lead in committing outrageous acts. He can then use their guilt against them, binding them closer to himself. He uses their anxiety for his purposes, even arousing it as he needs to; and he can use their fear of being found out and revenged by their victims as a kind of blackmail that keeps them docile and obedient for further atrocities. We saw a classic example of this technique on the part of the Nazi leaders. It was the same psychology that criminal gangs and gangsters have always used: to be bound closer together through the crime itself. The Nazis called it blood cement (Blutkitt), and the SS used it freely. For the lower echelons, service in the concentration camps accomplished this loyalty; but the technique was also used on the highest levels, especially with reluctant persons of prominence and talent whom they wanted to recruit. These they induced to commit extra atrocities that indelibly identified them with the SS and gave them a new, criminal identity.
Final thought: All this suggests, as I have suspected for a very long time, that one can only get so far railing against Trump’s abuse of power, his cruelty, the spectre of him as a dictator slowly consolidating supreme power. These things may be true and they clearly motivate the Democratic base to turn out against him, but the same accusations, unfortunately also charge up his base: these are features, not bugs. His power to “own the libs,” inspire fear, punish Puerto Rico, elevate war criminals to hero status, etc. keeps him looking powerful to his cult.
Thus the truly subversive power of Nancy Pelosi, who takes every opportunity to reveal Trump’s essential weakness, his fear, his cowardice, his dependence (for example on Putin).
The one thing cult followers will not forgive in their chief is “weakness” of any kind. And Trump’s hysterical outbursts in speeches and Twitter make his most hardcore followers wince precisely because they reveal that his is not a “strong chief” and “father figure” at all, but a weak and frightened baby.
Further thoughts:
This highlights my greatest fear about the approach Joe Biden takes. Joe wants to “slay the monster”; he actually builds up Trump as powerful bully whom he can take down in some kind of macho contest of the silverback alpha males. But that only plays into Trump’s hands.
Trump is a slime monster who needs to make the world his own personal slime pit. He eats it, he excretes it, he wallows in it, he pulls everyone else into it. It is there that he is king. Don’t get in there with him, Joe.
It’s the Pelosi strategy of aloof, calm dismissal, of pointing to Trump’s “lost little boy” neediness and pathetic, hysterical outbursts that have the potential, at least, to diminish his power and hold over his base.
Further thoughts X2:
In a comment I made below speculating about why Lindsey Graham is willing to betray the legacy of John McCain for Trump, I wrote:
. . . and his shame and guilt over betraying military honor and everything McCain (supposedly) stood for only fuels his devotion to Trump. It is really repressed shame that is the plutonium of this reactor.
Here’s the paradox: The idea that “Trump’s shamelessness is his superpower” that he attracts followers with the “infectiousness of the unconflicted person” must be seen for what it is-----a desperate, life-and-death performance of a man who is, in fact, filled to the brim with soul-crushing shame that he cannot ever face.
What people like him have is a kind of demonic energy devoted to denying guilt, shame, culpability, even normal human weaknesses. His ego is so fragile and rigid and thin that to admit the smallest doubt, error, or imperfection would crash it. Thus the entire world must be remade to prevent this from happening.
Trump will burn the entire planet down before ever facing his own failure, his own shame, his own worthlessness, the fact that he is the ultimate LOSER.