The Obsessional Neurosis of Political Reactionaries
An Egoist Psychoanalysis of Political Polarization
In 2019 I held a presentation at a conference which was all about political polarization. I used a specific example of what was then referred to as the MAGA-hat kid. Anyone remember this guy?
In this paper I analyzed the ‘before, during and after’ social media back-and-forth between the American left and right, which was taking place in response to the situation. Here is a brief reminder of what happened (coming directly from the conference paper I had written):
Read the full conference paper here
“Judging from the videos which made their rounds after and during the scandal became viral, the timeline of the events which took place on January 18th, 2019, started without the Covington High School boys, who had just attended the 47th Annual March for Life, a pro-life activist event. Before the boys arrived, a group named the Black Hebrew Israelites stood near the Lincoln Memorial, preaching their beliefs. Several Native-American individuals were at the same location as they were participating in the First Indigenous People’s March. Some members of the Black Hebrew Israelites decided to confront the Native-Americans, some asked them to stop preaching what they had perceived as offensive. When the Covington High Schoolers walked up and stood where they were allegedly supposed to stand to wait for their bus home, some members of the Black Hebrew Israelites shifted their attention to them, insulting them with homophobic rhetoric and other statements. There is no evidence […] that the boys reacted in the same manner. After the Covington kids moved away and while on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, a Native-American man named Nathan Phillips walked up, banging his drum. He decided to stand in front of one of the boys, Nick Sandmann, who looked him in the eyes and smirked. The picture and video of this smirk became viral on social media during and after this event. When covering the event, CNN initially claimed that a “[v]ideo shows a crowd of teenagers wearing ‘Make America Great Again’ hats taunting a Native American elder after Friday’s Indigenous Peoples March at the Lincoln Memorial” after the Washington Post reported on the developments of the story. Articles were later deleted, and positions were clarified.”
Newer developments show the ridiculousness of the whole ordeal as Nick Sandmann’s family filed lawsuits against several media organizations, including CNN, alleging defamation and seeking substantial damages.
In January 2020, CNN settled the lawsuit with Nick Sandmann. The terms of the settlement were not publicly disclosed, so the amount of money involved remains unknown. This settlement resolved Sandmann's claims against CNN, but he continued pursuing legal action against other media entities.
Sandmann also reached settlements with The Washington Post and NBC. As with CNN, the details of these settlements were not made public. These resolutions concluded Sandmann's high-profile legal battle against major media organizations, which he and his legal team claimed had misrepresented him and his actions during the incident.
Needless to say, The Washington Post jumped the gun and made the entire political left or basically anyone who tried to rise up against Donald Trump’s politics look ridiculous and hysterical.
The reason why I used this as an example in the presentation was because it was an absolutely gorgeous example of what I termed social media dialectics to explain the left’s part in the rise of the alt-right. And the medium I used to show this development was memes, which - to this day - is one of the fondest tools of political reactionaries.
In this essay, I am going to look at social media dialectics from the perspective of egoism as presented by Max Stirner in his text The Ego and its Own, in an attempt to show how and why Egoism is an antidote to social media-driven political reactionism.
This topic is super fascinating and super relevant. I need to get a little psychoanalytical here as well so please stick with me. It will all make sense in the end.
The Neurosis of Political Reactionaries
In my conference presentation, I explored the similar reactions and mutual relationships between both sides in reaction to the scandal. I looked at immediate and subsequent social media responses, while connecting these reactions to Freud and Lacan's concepts on neurosis to illustrate an inherent individual struggle.
Immediately after the incident, figures associated with the political Left expressed their discontent on social media. For example, film producer Jack Morrissey tweeted, “#MAGAKids go screaming, hats first, into the woodchipper”.
Meanwhile, the political Right primarily claimed "fake news" and quickly allied with Nick Sandmann.
This shows an allegiance to a news source that confirms an ideological stance on one side and a quick rejection of mainstream media's credibility, coupled with an allegiance to an ideological agenda, on the other.
The following day, social media was flooded with memes shaming the opposing side. Congresswoman Deb Haaland, for instance, tweeted, “The students’ display of blatant hate and disrespect, and intolerance is a signal of how common decency has decayed under this administration".
Supporters of the Covington High School boys engaged in similar behavior: YouTube videos were created, supposedly critically assessing the situation, but often ending in moralizations and shaming of the opposing side’s behavior. One such video on BlazeTV shows host Glenn Beck calling Nathan Phillips a “despicable liar”.
Additionally, numerous articles appeared, either rationalizing or mocking rationalizations.
These responses can be framed as symptoms of a neurotic attempt to reconcile bias with an absolute truth. According to a mix of theories on hysteria and obsessional neurosis by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan—particularly Freud’s 1909 case study of the Rat Man—obsessive and neurotic defense responses involve three actions:
Suppression, Allegiance, and Mythologization
Freud developed his concept of hysteria in 1895, explaining that,
“in neurosis, the ego suppresses part of the id out of allegiance to reality” (Freud 1895: 202).
He developed the concept further in his case study on the Rat Man:
“The Rat Man case study involves several sessions with a man whom Freud had been seeing at regular intervals to analyze his obsessive thoughts. He is referred to as the Rat Man because he kept speaking about a memory which he had been having pertaining to a man he considered cruel, talking about the torture of rats. The patient told Freud that he pictured the torture happening to one of his loved-ones. The real events surrounding the manifestation of this thought pattern was not closely discussed by Freud. Lacan later took the real events to establish a correlation. The events included a perceived debt to be paid to a Lieutenant during his military service and the complicated scenario surrounding his ability to pay back the debt. Lacan explains that the labyrinth the Rat Man builds to avoid the perceived punishment for not yet having repaid his debt can be attributed to an obsessional preoccupation with it, which ends up perpetuating his inability to pay and widening the scope of the labyrinth in which the neurotic patient finds himself lost:
“This phantasmatic scenario resembles a little play, a chronicle, which is precisely the manifestation of what I call the neurotic’s individual myth.” (Lacan 1979: 414)
Lacan mentions that Freud finds in this case study the patient’s preoccupation with honorable behavior and its connection to betrayal, social debt and compromise. Lacan then points out the objectification of the cruel captain as a mythologized absolute enemy and how it relates to the idea of opposing the enemy’s behavior as part of an engrained self-identification:
“Myth is what provides a discursive form for something that cannot be transmitted through the definition of truth” (Lacan 1979: 407).”
So, in his case study on obsessional neurosis, Freud described the Rat Man's obsessive thoughts involving a cruel man torturing rats, a scenario that became a phantasmatic labyrinth in which the patient found himself lost.
Lacan expanded on this, noting the patient's preoccupation with honorable behavior and its connection to betrayal, social debt, and compromise. Lacan explained that the mythologized absolute enemy in the patient's mind provided a discursive form for something that could not be transmitted through the definition of truth (Lacan 1979: 407).
Applying Freud and Lacan’s theories to the case of social media dialectics, we see:
1. Selective suppression of information, as the MAGA hat carries certain ideological implications.
2. Allegiance to the ego’s subjectively established framework for reality, including seeing in-group identifications as objective behavioral markers.
3. Mythologization of an absolute truth, where the opposing side's behavior is seen as absolutely intolerable, serving as an absolute enemy.
The consistent focus on the opposing side can be viewed as an attempt to provide the ego with a form of truth that can silence the drive itself.
Freud explains the futility of this obsession in his 1929 essay Civilization and its Discontents, where he states that the tension between the drive for contentment and reality (the pleasure and reality principle) cannot be reconciled:
“The programme of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled; yet we must not — indeed, we cannot — give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfilment by some means or other.”
(Freud 1929: 29)
Lacan individualizes this inherent impossibility to reconcile the myth with absolute truth, causing a neurotic cycle of repetition:
“[t]he element of the debt is placed on two levels at once, and it is precisely in the light of the impossibility of bringing these two levels together that the drama of the neurotic is played out.”
(Lacan 1979: 415)
The Synthesis of Social Media Dialectics
Thus, political polarization online can be seen as individuals seeking to combat anxiety and the fear of uncertainty over the impossibility of ideological absolutes. The id is partially suppressed as any chance of ideological ambiguity is squashed by legitimizing the group’s mythical enemy.
Unfortunately, however, this mythical enemy IS the synthesis of social media dialectics. The externalized mythical enemy legitimizes self-identity.
And so now you have calmed your inner chaos with what if not CONFORMITY. And what does that mean for society? Well…
As described by Elizabeth Anker in her 2014 book Orgies of Feeling, this legitimization translates to a need to align one’s desire for self-ascription with authoritative power structures capable of establishing a rule of definition, explaining a return to ideology-based information exposure:
“In political theory, legitimacy is conventionally defined as the acceptance of power as authoritative, as the polity’s consent to the rules that emanate from governing structures and as the justified use of force and violence”
(Anker 2014: 114).
So what am I saying? YOUR ANXIETY IS AT FAULT FOR THE OPPRESSION OF MY INDIVIDUALITY!!!
THANKS A LOT!
But What Exactly Is That Anxiety?
To understand the anxiety driving political polarization and reactionary behavior on social media, it would prove useful to look into the nature of this anxiety itself. This anxiety is not just a response to external events or ideological threats; it is a deep-seated, existential unease rooted in the individual's struggle for identity and certainty in a world that is inherently ambiguous and chaotic.
Freud and Lacan's psychoanalytic frameworks provide a useful lens for examining this anxiety. Freud's concept of neurosis involves the ego's suppression of parts of the id to maintain allegiance to a constructed reality. Lacan expands on this by highlighting the individual's creation of myths to cope with internal conflicts and societal pressures. But I would like to use another framework to add some insights to the ones offered by Freud and Lacan - Max Stirner’s Philosophy of Egoism.
Stirner's Egoism rejects all fixed ideas and constructs. In Stirner's view, societal norms, ideologies, and collective identities are spooks—illusory constructs that basically confuse individuals on their way to their ownness. This perspective sheds light on the nature of the anxiety experienced in politically polarized environments: it is the anxiety of losing oneself to these spooks. Unfortunately, what people tend think is the cure is actually just a pill to avoid the symptoms.
This is something Max Stirner taught us a long time ago.
"Man, your head is haunted; you have wheels in your head! You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you, a spirit-realm to which you suppose yourself to be called, an ideal that beckons to you."
—Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own
In the case of the MAGA-hat incident, both the left and the right reacted out of a fear of losing ideological footing. The left perceived the incident as a symbol of the degradation of decency under the Trump administration, while the right saw it as an attack on their values and an example of media bias. These reactions are not just about defending political stances; they are about defending the very essence of the self that has been constructed around these stances.
From a Stirnerian perspective, the anxiety we observe is the result of individuals clinging to these ideological constructs as if they were part of their own being. When these constructs are threatened, the individual's sense of self is threatened, leading to defensive reactions characterized by suppression, allegiance, and mythologization. And this is what is then instrumentalized by ideological entities to increase power and control.
Suppression
The suppression of information that contradicts one’s ideological stance is a defense mechanism to protect the ego from the anxiety of uncertainty. For example, the initial reactions to the MAGA-hat incident involved selective suppression of context to fit the narrative that aligned with one's ideological beliefs.
Allegiance
The allegiance to ideological frameworks provides a false sense of stability and certainty. By aligning with a particular group or ideology, individuals gain a sense of belonging and purpose, which alleviates the existential anxiety of ambiguity and isolation. This is evident in the quick alliances formed in response to the incident, with both sides rallying around their respective interpretations.
Mythologization
The creation of an absolute enemy helps to externalize and simplify the source of anxiety. By mythologizing the opposing side as the embodiment of all that is wrong, individuals can project their internal conflicts onto an external target, thus creating a narrative that provides clarity and direction. This is seen in the demonization of the other side through memes and social media posts.
Why Stirner Has The Cure To Anxiety
Max Stirner's philosophy offers a pretty radical solution to the shenanigans of conformist society that cause us all sorts of identity struggles, because in his work he presents a framework that challenges the very foundations of societal norms, ideologies, and collective identities. This in-depth, to-the-root-kind of approach is its greatest strength.
The Nature of Stirnerian Egoism
Stirner’s egoism is centered on the idea that individuals are basically just the choosers of ownness. What that means is that the more the individual lets themself act on desire and self-interest, the more ownness is established. The main thing that keeps people from doing so is the fear and simultaneous belief in the power of these spooks, as mentioned above. He criticizes these fixed ideas and constructs imposed by society not because he wants to start beef with them but because they are myths told to people to keep them from their ownness. So these spooks, according to Stirner, enslave individuals by making them subordinate their own desires and uniqueness to abstract concepts that have no intrinsic value.
Anxiety as a Product of Spooks
The anxiety that characterizes much of modern life, especially in the context of political polarization and social media dialectics, can be traced back to these spooks. People feel compelled to adhere to ideological frameworks and collective identities because they believe these constructs give their lives meaning and direction. But this adherence also creates a constant tension and fear of failing to live up to these external standards.
In the case of the MAGA-hat incident, the anxiety on both sides of the political spectrum can be seen as a reaction to perceived threats to their ideological spooks. The left's fear of moral decay under a conservative administration and the right's fear of media bias and misrepresentation both stem from a deeper anxiety about losing their ideological foothold, which they have conflated with their personal identity.
Stirner's Cure
I am using Stirner’s framework to propose that the cure for this anxiety lies in the COMPLETE rejection of and constant vigilance toward these spooks. By recognizing that these fixed ideas are illusions with no inherent authority and the constant focus on not being turned away from one’s ownness, one can begin to be ownness. And this gets easier over time. It becomes ingrained in your interpersonal relations.
Pessimism & the Danger of Following Self-Interest
Stirner emphasizes the importance of following self-interest. I tend to view self-interest as a more mature version of the Deleuzian and Guattarian concept of desire as a rhizomatic force. Self-interest is what becomes apparent when the actual form and process of the rhizomatic force of desire comes into the individual’s frame of focus and is mastered as a way to embrace the creative nothing and move toward ownness.
Pessimism, in the words of the world’s greatest pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, is a reaction to “a constant process of dying.” Arthur Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy posits that suffering is an inherent and inescapable part of human existence. He argues that the "will to live"—a relentless and insatiable drive—fuels endless desires and dissatisfaction, making true happiness fleeting and unattainable.
I claim that Max Stirner offered a framework that presented pessimism as a form of skepticism that can offer the most profound insights into one’s own desires by fostering a more honest and introspective view of life’s inherent struggles and limitations.
Pessimism, with its focus on the inevitability of suffering and dissatisfaction, encourages individuals to confront the often painful realities of their existence rather than clinging to illusory hopes of perpetual happiness. This confrontation can lead to a clearer understanding of one's desires by revealing how they are influenced by the relentless pursuit of fulfillment in a world characterized by impermanence and struggle.
By acknowledging that desires are driven by an insatiable will to live and that true contentment may be elusive, individuals are prompted to question and scrutinize their motivations and goals more deeply. This skepticism helps dismantle superficial or culturally imposed aspirations and allow for a more authentic exploration of personal values and needs.
By learning to become self-interested by exploring a pessimistic view of one’s own motivations, I believe that the anxiety over identity, can be alleviated.
"I am my own only when I am master of myself, instead of being mastered either by sensuality or by anything else (God, man, authority, law, state, church, etc.); what is of use to me, this self-owned or self-appertaining one, my selfishness pursues."
— Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own
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