Politics without Reason: The Perfect World and the Liberal Ideal

Politics without Reason

Previous Publications Welfare, Right and the State: A Framework for Thinking Poverty, Work and Freedom: Political Economy and the Moral Order, with S. Abu Rizvi Attack on Government: Fear, Distrust and Hatred in Public Life Normative Political Economy: Subjective Freedom, the Market, and the State Subjectivity in Political Economy: Essays on Wanting and Choosing Self-Seeking and the Pursuit of Justice Wealth and Freedom Theories of Political Economy, with James Caporaso Needs, Rights and the Market Economic Theory II: The System of Economic Relations as a Whole Economic Theory I: The Elementary Relations of Economic Life Economic Studies: Contributions to the Critique of Economic Theory

Politics without Reason The Perfect World and the Liberal Ideal

David P. Levine

POLITICS WITHOUT REASON

Copyright © David P. Levine, 2008. All rights reserved. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the US—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60377–6 ISBN-10: 0–230–60377–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levine, David P. Politics without reason : the perfect world and the liberal ideal / David P. Levine. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–60377–7 1. Liberalism—Philosophy. 2. Political science—Philosophy. 3. United States—Politics and government—1989—Philosophy. I. Title. JC574.L48 2008 320.51—dc22

2008010846

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: October 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

One of the most deeply rooted traits of the modern soul is doubt of the good, the smile of superiority and mockery, the passion for losing one’s innocence. Pierre Manent

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Contents

Preface

ix

Part I 1 Introduction

3

2 Reason, Desire, and the Self

13

Part II 3 The Flight from Reason

39

4

57

Family Values

5 Moral Renewal

79

6

97

Deception

Part III 7

Desire without Limit

115

8

The Ultimate Fulfillment

133

9 Greed, Morality, and Corruption 10 Corporate Corruption

151 169

Part IV 11 An Imperfect World

189

Notes

193

References

197

Index

203

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Preface

S

ome years ago, I attended a conference at which the keynote speaker proudly announced that she had spent her life “bashing liberalism,” by which she had in mind so far as I could tell the idea that the individual conceived separately from the group ought to form the normative basis for shaping social institutions. We will not consider pride in a lifetime of liberalism bashing surprising in a period during which liberal has become a term of abuse, but we may wonder how a term the dictionary defines as synonymous with open-mindedness, generosity, and reason could have taken on such a role in public discourse. This is the question I propose to explore in this book. Let me say from the outset that in doing so it is not my intent to offer a defense of liberalism. Since my concern is with animosity toward liberalism, I am only concerned with the liberal ideal so far as specific elements in it provoke that animosity; and indeed it is those specific elements that are my concern more than liberalism itself. Although I think the intensity of the attack on liberalism does at times foster a distorted view of the liberal ideal so that it will make a more suitable target, this does not mean that I consider those who devote their lives to bashing liberalism altogether off the mark since liberalism does indeed contain to a significant degree the idea they find difficult to tolerate. Yet, though my purpose here is not to defend liberalism, my interest in the attack on liberalism does express concern over trends in public life associated with that attack, trends that involve flight from reason and repression of the self. These trends, if powerful enough, can foster the hatred and violence so prominent in public life

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and about which many have been rightly concerned. I think the question about liberalism takes us to the heart of these trends and because of that deserves our close attention. I also think that the usual approach to understanding political trends, an approach that focuses attention on the reality-based assessment of the consequences of policy for clearly defined interests, will serve us poorly in understanding the attack on liberalism. More important than calculations of consequences for well-defined ends are the hope-invested ideas that drive conduct and determine what can or cannot be thought and therefore what decisions and actions are or are not possible. My premise in writing this book is that political trends are driven by hope-invested ideas, and that the political trend expressed in the attack on liberalism is driven by a specific and powerful idea, which is the idea of the perfect world. The idea of the perfect world and the hope embedded in it are not, however, expressed explicitly. What get expressed instead are simple propositions that hide as much or more than they reveal: “liberty is the design of nature;” what America needs is “moral renewal;” we need a leader who will “stay the course.” Although the propositions through which ideas are expressed may be held consciously and asserted with conviction, the ideas they express are neither well known nor clearly understood by even their most fervent exponents. Rather, these simple propositions express complex systems of thought, belief, and the emotions that indicate what is significant about them. It is such a system that I have in mind when I refer to the idea of the perfect world, an idea that I would argue has played a large role in shaping public life. My interest in this book is in exploring the complex systems of thought expressed in the simple propositions that occupy so much of the space of public discourse. In exploring these systems of thought, my main concern is with understanding the hold they have over those who believe in them. In other words, my main concern is with the way in which people are attached to their ideas, where I take attachment to ideas to mean investment of emotional significance in them. Because my interest is in the matter of emotional attachment to ideas, my

PREFACE

xi

method of interpretation appeals mainly to what we might refer to as the logic of emotional life. Put in brief, my interest is in how propositions and the ideas they represent express this logic. I take it as a premise that emotional life has a logic, however odd that may sound to those who would treat emotional experience and logic as orthogonal. An important part of the logic of emotional life is the connection between ideas and the fantasies that more directly express the reasons those ideas exert such a powerful force. By fantasy I have in mind a wish-invested narrative of the self. On one level, politics is all about fantasy life. The problem is gaining access to this more primitive dimension of mental life and seeing how consciously articulated thoughts and ideas are connected to it. Considered more broadly, the complex system of thought I refer to by the term idea includes both the explicitly stated proposition and the unstated, and in many ways unknown, fantasy to which it is linked. Since the ideas to be explored here are complex systems of thought, access to which is more or less restricted even to those who hold them, there can be no assurance that our interpretation of the ideas is the correct one. In the application of the logic of emotional life to specific phenomenon there is no method that can guarantee the validity of interpretations, which always remain speculative to a degree. Those readers who expect more than plausibility will therefore be disappointed by what I have to offer. I make no apology for this limitation, which in any case will not be overcome by applying the usual empirical methods to the subject matter explored here. The entire focus of the book is not on proving propositions or offering systematic empirical evidence for them, but on making interpretations plausible by exploring cases and examples, and by involving the reader in a process of thinking about them. Material in chapter 11 appeared previously in Human Relations 58, 6 (2005) and material in chapter 9 was originally prepared for presentation at the Annual Symposium of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations, Haarlem, The Netherlands, June 2006.

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Part I

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1

Introduction

I

n a curious yet effective attempt to cobble together a coalition capable of dominating the political agenda, the Republican Party has lately participated in a redefinition of liberalism as its opposite, while linking a conservative antiliberal cultural agenda centering on issues such as gay marriage and abortion to the one-time liberal policy of free trade and individual rights. Thus, one of the notable remarks offered about their opponent by the Bush-Cheney campaign for the presidency in 2004 was that “John Kerry can run from his liberal record, but he can’t hide.” In elaborating on this message, they emphasized the votes Kerry was alleged to have cast to raise taxes, his allegedly complex and costly program to put government in charge of health care, his tolerance of gay marriage, and his opposition to banning abortion. According to this way of thinking, liberals pose a threat because they seek both to limit and to expand our freedoms. They seek to limit our freedom to pursue wealth while expanding our freedom to satisfy desires other than for wealth. The resulting tangled rhetoric has produced among other things a hopeless muddle around the term liberal, which, after all, at one time referred to those favoring the economic freedoms liberals are now attacked for opposing. Although untangling the muddled language can be important, more important I think is untangling the reasons underlying the hostility toward liberalism common both to those favoring free trade and to those favoring the conservative

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cultural agenda. What about the liberal ideal invites hostility even from those we might assume would be its most fervent advocates? Put another way, what underlies not the opposition to policies lately associated with liberalism, but the aversion to the very idea of liberalism and the ideal it represents? The questions just posed, while important, may take too much for granted. In particular, they take for granted that we know what the term liberal really connotes for those who use it as an object of ridicule. My questions assume that for those hostile to it liberalism is a well-understood political doctrine so that in better understanding that doctrine we will also understand their animosity toward it. This, I think, is at best a partial truth. What we learn from understanding liberalism as its critics know it is not the meaning and significance of the liberal ideal, but something important about those who have chosen it as the target of their animosity. It will prove more helpful, that is, to treat the liberalism that forms this target as a special construct shaped by the needs of those for whom it is the name of the enemy. These needs are not, however, altogether disconnected from the connotations more generally associated with the term liberal and we will therefore need to attend to those connotations as part of our effort to understand the attack on liberalism. Thus, the term liberal can suggest generosity, but it can also suggest license and the pursuit of limitless desire. Similarly, the term liberal minded can suggest openness, but it can also suggest reticence to make distinctions between right and wrong, true and false. The complex connotations of these terms are important because they help us understand the complex relation between liberalism and its critics. In particular, this relation will not be well understood unless we take into account how the critics of liberalism are also drawn to it, and in particular to the attack on limits it is taken to represent. Here, I will apply the idea that there is an intimate link between the self and its enemies developed by Vamik Volkan (1988) in his study of ethnic conflict by arguing that the object of attack is also deeply embedded in the psychic life of those who attack it, that the description of our enemy is also a self-portrait. An important part of my purpose in this book will be to disentangle

INTRODUCTION

5

this complex system linking the liberal ideal to those who see it as a threat. To do so we will need to separate the liberal ideal from its identification with specific policies and treat it as something other than a political program narrowly defined. Rather than treating the liberal ideal as a political program, I will consider it an organizing idea of the self in its world; and I will consider the opposing movement an expression of an opposing, or illiberal, idea of the self in its world. These ideas then express themselves in different specific programs at different times and in different places, programs that may at one time include support for and another time opposition to specific policies such as free trade. I treat the term this way not because I consider matters of policy unimportant, but rather because I do not think we can fully understand the struggle over the liberal ideal if we continue to interpret it exclusively or even primarily in the space of politics rather than seeing in politics one important expression of more deeply embedded forces. Disconnecting the liberal ideal from the specific political program with which it may be linked has been the practice in philosophical discussion where liberalism is not understood primarily as a specific political program, but rather as “a conception of man and society” organized around the ideas of the moral primacy of the individual over the group and the equality of moral status of persons (Gray 1995: xii). What I think is most salient about liberalism treated in this way is how it conceives the good. Ronald Dworkin argues that liberalism “supposes that political decisions must be, so far as possible, independent of any particular conception of the good life, or of what gives value to life” (1984: 64). This is because a liberal assumes that different persons have different conceptions of the good life and that there exists no basis for judging among them. In other words, liberalism takes seriously the differences between persons in what they value in their lives. Then, rather than conceiving government as an arbiter of the good, liberalism conceives it as mandated to secure for individuals the right and opportunity to shape their lives according to their individual and presumably differing conceptions of the good.

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Thus, a liberal society as John Locke would conceive it is a “society of free men, equal under the rule of law, bound together by no common purpose but sharing a respect for each other’s rights” (Gray 1995: 13). At the center of the liberal ideal, then, is the separation of what is right from what is good (Rawls 1971: 446–52, Sandel 1984: 1–7, Manent 1995: 25–26). Indeed, it is arguable that without this separation the normative standing of the individual and the right to be an individual cannot be defended so that separating what is right from what is good is simply another way of expressing an ideal in which the possibility of living an individual life is secure. Treating the good in this way has an implication of special importance for the account I will offer here of the attack on liberalism. Where many different and possibly opposing notions of the good must coexist, and where none can claim primacy, the good will take on a significantly different meaning than it does in settings where only one conception is allowed. In particular, in a liberal world no conception of the good can be absolute since each must coexist with alternatives for which it is not good. This also has the implication that every good is also not the good. Put another way, securing the possibility of different conceptions of the good casts doubt not only on each, but on the good itself. What will be most salient about the separation of what is right from what is good for my purposes, then, will be what Pierre Manent refers to as “doubt of the good” (1995: 14). We can begin then by saying that those who have no doubt about the good cannot be considered liberal in their thinking and intent. Further, those who have no doubt about the good are likely also to be hostile, often intensely so, to those who do since the existence of doubt in the world challenges the dominion of the good. * *

*

Does the connection between liberalism and the idea of the individual justify that identification of liberalism with the doctrine of free trade typically assumed in some circles, though not in others? The answer to this question is, I think, that the

INTRODUCTION

7

link between liberalism and the idea of individual freedom or integrity does lead to a particular view of markets, one in which markets play a central role in shaping institutional ideals. The reason for this is clear enough. Even if we reject the simple view of private property found for example in the work of John Locke, we cannot altogether sever the link between individual integrity, freedom, and the institution of private property because that institution secures for the individual a space for self-determination and a needed protection from the uninvited incursions of others. If the institution of private property is implied in the ideal of individual freedom so must the market in a form consistent with securing the space to which I have just referred. But it is a questionable logic that takes us from securing the space of the self to the policy of free trade. Indeed, as I have elsewhere argued, free trade is a doctrine unlikely to protect individual freedom and in this sense a policy at odds with the underlying intent of the liberal philosophy.1 Because of this, it would be a mistake to assume too close a connection between liberalism and free trade, which then raises the question: why do some critics of liberalism insist on this connection while others have attacked liberals because they are assumed to reject free trade and with it the protections for freedom it is assumed, mistakenly I think, to provide? The complexity of the involvement of the doctrine of free trade with the attack on liberalism arises, I will suggest, because of the way free trade is implicated in the differing aspects of the construction of the liberal ideal favored by its enemies. In exploring the mind of liberalism’s enemies, it will be natural to focus attention on two aspects of their construction of the liberal doctrine that are especially prominent in their thinking and that connect to the question just raised. The first sees in liberalism a doctrine aimed at limiting the unfettered accumulation of wealth and the second sees in liberalism a doctrine that undermines control over thought and conduct. Thus, liberalism for its critics would seem to be both positively and negatively linked to limits because the danger it poses is that it will limit the private accumulation of wealth while freeing

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individuals from those limits on thought and conduct that can alone protect us from chaos and destruction. In this book, I explore a thesis that I think can help identify the common thread holding together seemingly diverse tendencies in the attack on liberalism. This thesis is that ambivalence about the self and about desire as an expression of the self fosters the intense animosity we observe directed toward the liberal ideal. Ambivalence arises because the self is viewed as the locus of a destructive form of desire, one that must be controlled and repressed. I will argue that speaking of ambivalence toward the self is another way of speaking of ambivalence toward freedom, an ambivalence expressed in the impulse toward coercion that plays such a powerful role in the attack on liberalism. The argument underlying my thesis can be briefly outlined as follows: I begin with the notion that the liberal ideal favors reason over belief. Because reason challenges belief, it is experienced as a threat to the hope that we will live in a world of a special kind, one in which a special gratification is possible. This special gratification is the one we achieve through identification with the good. This identification dispels all that is bad in our selves and our world, and because of this the gratification afforded by belief is absolute, perfect. This is what Mervin Glasser (1992) refers to as the “ultimate narcissistic fulfillment,” and the world in which it can be attained is what I refer to as the perfect world. The ultimate fulfillment is everything we could ever want; it is the fulfillment not of this or that particular desire, but of desire itself. The ultimate fulfillment is a goal of emotional life that shapes conduct and ways of relating to others. The ultimate fulfillment is achieved when a specific feeling of self-worth is established and maintained without threat of disruption. This feeling of self-worth is absolute and exclusionary in that it means having the one and only worthy self. There must be an uninterrupted flow of experiences with others that affirm the presence of the one true self. The object that is imagined to provide the ultimate fulfillment is also the one truly good object and the world in which that object is attained is the only good world. I suggest we

INTRODUCTION

9

link the hope for the ultimate fulfillment to the wish for a world of a special kind, a world in which not only is gratification secure but also the main threat to gratification has been purged. We achieve the ultimate fulfillment when we identify our selves with the good and establish that the good that is our selves is the only and absolute good. Identification with the good, however, also means loss of individual self. Because desire is the expression of the self, especially of its separate being, identification requires that we renounce desire so far as desire’s object is the gratification we gain from being a self separate from and independent of others. Put another way, our desire for gratification in being a separate and independent self is experienced as a threat to our connection with the good so that we can only hope for that connection if we repress desire. What makes the hope for the ultimate fulfillment complex and awkward, then, is that what is hoped for and what stands in the way of acquiring what is hoped for are so closely linked. One is the gratification of desire and the other is desire itself. Thus, the hope for the ultimate fulfillment operates both positively and negatively in that it is both a state to be profoundly desired and one to be feared. And it is a state to be feared not only in self but also in others especially when others are, through projection, conceived as the locus of this potentially destructive desire. Arguing that the attack on liberalism originates in ambivalence about desire and the self does not exclude important distinctions that create tensions and opposing trends among those who nonetheless share a commitment to the ideal I refer to as the perfect world. A distinction of special importance opposes those for whom the ultimate fulfillment is essentially a collective goal to those for whom it is primarily an individual end. Because identification operates so powerfully among those in the first group, the implied loss of separate identity into the group establishes a powerful connection between repression of the individual self and the desire connected to it on one side and gratification of the desire associated with the group self on the other. For those driven by a collective ideal,

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the association of liberalism with indulgence of the individual self makes it the enemy of gratification. This cannot so easily be said of those for whom the ultimate gratification is sought by and for the individual. The sharp contrast between these two forms of what at another level is the same phenomenon needs to be taken seriously because the two forms shape importantly different political trends, trends that may intersect at times and even be present as opposing elements within the same individual, but should not be conflated. Here I consider both the shared impulses and the opposing forms those impulses take depending on how they are connected to the collective and individual selves. The thesis briefly outlined above will have a stronger intuitive appeal when applied to those whose distrust of liberalism is inspired by the collective ideal as often expressed in religious convictions and cultural commitments. Less intuitive will be the application of the thesis to those who see in liberalism a license for government to inhibit the individual’s acquisitive instincts since it can be argued that their end is to protect self-seeking, and thus implicitly the self, from external limits on pursuit of its satisfactions. Because of this, they would seem to be advocates of freedom of the self rather than party to the self-repression to which I have just referred. This is a real distinction and one that demands close attention. To support the application of my thesis to those for whom self-seeking is the ultimate value I will argue that wealth accumulation should be understood not primarily as a means for gaining gratification of the self but more importantly as a means to enable the individual first to exert control over the gratification and therefore the desire of others, second to provide proof of virtue and good character, and third to pursue gratification of a desire that can never be fulfilled. So far as wealth accumulation serves these ends it can be conceived as an individual form of the same impulse that involves repression of the self when present in its collective form. Part III of this book is devoted to making the case that wealth accumulation can be understood in this way and that understanding it in this way links animosity toward liberalism rooted in the impulse to control and repress

INTRODUCTION

11

with animosity rooted in its perceived hostility toward wealth accumulation. If my thesis has merit, then to understand the attack on liberalism we need to understand first what can make desire a dangerous force, at least in the eyes of those who see the liberal doctrine as a threat, and second how those who see liberalism as a threat cope with the danger desire poses for them since their political agenda is an expression of their attempt to cope with this connection between to desire and to do harm. In chapter 2, I offer an account of desire and the danger it can be experienced to pose. This chapter provides a conceptual basis for the discussion to follow, where I consider how the control over desire in others can be a way of coping with the threat our own desire is experienced to pose for ourselves. I develop my thesis in the following stages: After the discussion of main concepts in chapter 2, I explore in chapter 3 the flight from reason in politics and the rejection of thinking, deliberation, and doubt. I argue that the flight from reason in politics expresses a deeply held conviction that reason constitutes a threat to the good life and to a world in which the good can be attained and held. I then consider the rhetoric of values in politics as an expression of the way the end of politics becomes to identify the self with the good and in this way become good. Because for many the locus of the good is the family and values are therefore family values, I then turn to the focus on the family so important in the rhetoric of the enemies of liberalism. I suggest how desire has become for them a danger to the good and therefore a force that must be repressed and displaced. Finally I turn to the special form of the good associated with wealth accumulation. Here, I argue that the special importance wealth accumulation takes on stems from the idea that owning objects of value makes us good and in the limit that having exclusive possession of those objects means that we possess the one true self. This leads to an extended discussion of greed and its part in the attack on the liberal ideal. The term greed can be used to denote the pursuit of the ultimate fulfillment in all its manifestations. In other words, our greed may take as its object the usual things of value: money and things valued in money.

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But we can also define the object of our greed along other dimensions. In particular, we can consider the intense and exclusionary desire to be identified with the good also a form of greed, the greed to be good, and thus consider a wide range of phenomena under the heading of greed. My main focus in part III is on the more limited meaning that identifies greed with the impulse toward the limitless accumulation of things of value, which when attached to the self establish its worth.

2

Reason, Desire, and the Self

Desire and Destruction The idea of destructive desire is nowhere better depicted than in Thomas Hobbes’s image of the war of every man against every man, which he takes to be man’s natural state or that state of affairs that will inevitably arise in the absence of a “common power” (1958: 106). Let me begin then by briefly reviewing certain elements in the Hobbesian argument concerning desire and its destructive consequences. For Hobbes, the immediate cause of conflict is not desire but the scarcity of desire’s object: “if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their end, endeavor to destroy or subdue one another” (1958: 105). We might take this scarcity of desire’s object for granted, for example as the result of natural limitations, and to some extent Hobbes seems to see it that way since he offers the scarcity condition as a premise. At the same time, however, doing so would make the war of every man against every man the result of contingent circumstances and hardly inevitable. Indeed, the war that takes up so much space in Hobbes’s thinking about social arrangements might turn out to be the exception rather than the rule. Whether this is in fact the case depends on the nature of desire’s object and what about it would imply that although more than one man desires it only one can have it.

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The object to which Hobbes here refers when he speaks of men becoming enemies is primarily “their own conservation” although taking pleasure may also enter into the calculation. Yet, it is hard to see why their own conservation is an object of the kind that leads men to become enemies. That is, it is hard to see how the conservation of one must prevent that of another. Although the pursuit of pleasure (“delectation” in Hobbes’s formulation) might seem a more promising line of thinking, here too it is not obvious why the object of my pleasure must also be yours and why we cannot both have the objects we desire. Even assuming that desire’s object is the riches that afford pleasure (assuming also that riches do indeed afford pleasure), to arrive at Hobbes’s conclusion we would have to assume that the amount of riches available must be insufficient for each to have the pleasure he desires. The only way to assure this result and make the war of all against all inevitable is to make appropriate assumptions not about the availability of desire’s object, but about desire itself; and this then leads us back to the idea that it is something about desire that causes the problem. The terms of the problem as Hobbes sets it up suggest two lines of thinking about desire that might make it the cause of conflict. The first assumes that desire is inherently unlimited so that however much of desire’s object the individual has, it can never be enough and any amount held by another is an amount of which he is deprived. The second line of argument, which is connected to the first, assumes that our desire is derivative of that of others so that we desire what others have because they have it. This second line of argument is especially powerful because it means that what we desire is an object that we can only gain at the expense of others. The kind of object that has this quality is not wealth per se since there is nothing inherent in wealth that precludes our either sharing it or holding a part for ourselves adequate to our needs while others do so as well. Rather, the kind of object that is scarce is an object that is lost to us in the same act by which it is gained by another, indeed an object that is lost to us because it is gained by another.

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Hobbes places great emphasis on one object that has this quality: power. Power is our capacity to achieve our ends so that, while power may not be desire’s end, it is the means to attaining desire’s end whatever that may be.1 If we take power to be the proximate end, then it may be that power is that “same thing” that all desire but cannot share. This begins to make sense at least so long as the power to which Hobbes refers is the power over other men, since the greater my power over others, the less their power over me. If power simply means the power over things needed to achieve our ends, or the ability to do something that will lead us to attain our ends, then power need not lead us into conflict, though it might. Now according to Hobbes many things constitute power: riches, reputation, success, and so on. But however we conceive these factors, their value lies in the way they enable us to enlist others in our effort to attain our ends. Power, then, is that quality of the self that subordinates others to its ends. Understood in this way, power might mean the capacity to force others to work for us against their will. But this is not primarily what Hobbes has in mind. Rather, the kind of power he emphasizes is the ability not to force others but to gain their willful submission. If we were to summarize under one heading the various factors that, according to Hobbes, lead to this willful submission, we might do so in the language Hobbes immediately moves to from his discussion of power: honor. That is, the various factors that constitute power are also the factors that bestow honor and those who are honored gain the willful submission of others, which in a sense is what Hobbes intends by the term honor. Honor, like power, might be conceived as a means to an end because honor enhances our power, and in certain respects is another term Hobbes uses for power. Yet, clearly, honor can also be conceived as an end in itself, and when it is, power also takes on the qualities of end rather than means. This treatment of power and honor as ends rather than means leads into an understanding of destructive desire because desire’s end is in this way made something that not only excludes others but also

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can only be gained at their expense. To see this, we will need to take a closer look at honor. Honor has different connotations, only one of which leads us toward conflict. The first connotation (esteem, respect) makes honor something that need not be lost to us when we bestow it on another. The second, “deferential admiration,” suggests something more asymmetrical.2 It is not inevitable, then, that we interpret honor in a way that implies that to honor another is to lose honor to him, and Hobbes’s does not always do so. Yet, the large part honor plays in his argument and the way it is linked to power and conflict suggest that an interpretation of honor as deferential admiration might be important in his thinking. Indeed, one commentator characterizes Hobbes’s depiction of desire’s end as a “restless striving for preeminence” (Gray 1995: 9). Honor understood in this way is not reciprocal, and in this it constitutes a kind of scarce good. Beyond the assumption that all desire the same object that cannot be shared, the conclusion that desire makes men enemies requires an additional condition. For Hobbes, the competition over desire’s object does not arise simply because that object is scarce; it also arises because all individuals have equal right to strive for it. Indeed, scarcity can be said to arise from equality, for Hobbes from equality of ability and hope (1958: 105). Were it the case that only a designated few could expect or imagine they deserved power and honor, then their expectation could be fulfilled without the war of all against all so long as those not so designated accepted their fate to honor others and submit to their power, and therefore to live with neither honor nor power of their own. One could take this idea a step further and imagine a structure of honor directed from the bottom up in which those lower in rank gave honor to those higher in rank and submitted to them. Within this structure, peace is possible so long as those in each rank accept the allotment of honor it bestows on them, however small. The problem arises then because the pursuit of honor takes place in a context of equality. Mixing honor with equality as Hobbes attempts to do should alert us to a problem in his conception of desire’s end.

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Honor, after all, refers us not to a modern world governed by the norm of equality of opportunity, but to a world composed of a differentiated structure of social positions where recognition is bestowed on the occupant of a position because he or she occupies that position, and where standing varies according to position. As Peter Berger suggests, where equality is the norm the end is not honor but dignity, and the object is less the position than the qualities of the person who occupies it (1970). Yet, although we may consider dignity the appropriate alternative to honor in a setting where the norm of equality rules, we also lose something important when we leave the connotations of honor aside: the desire for approbation that plays such an important role for Hobbes. To be treated with dignity is not the same thing as to be esteemed and honored, and it would be a mistake to imagine that the distinctive element embedded in the concept of honor ceases to have importance when the shift is made away from hierarchical systems in the direction of an ideal of the individual. Here we are also concerned with esteem in the eyes of others, but rather than esteem adhering to social position, it adheres to the self. This shift toward the self, or in Berger’s language toward an intrinsic humanity that emerges when we are divested of our social roles, does not make social positions unimportant. It only means that when those positions enter into the calculation it is for what is implied about the self that it has attained them. Mixing the older language with the newer, honor is something that is achieved and the achievement is what is honored. This active moment differentiates honor so far as it applies in the modern setting. Equality of aspiration is equality of aspiration to the esteem of others, to having the preeminent self among the many selves. When the value we place on our selves depends on the value others place on our selves, and it may or may not, then our self-esteem depends on our ability to enter into a relationship in which our selves are honored by others. We can then reformulate the premise of Hobbes’s argument as follows: desire’s object is the valued self, which depends entirely on the value invested in the self by others.

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This is the view of the world from the standpoint of honor as the desired end, because the desire for honor establishes a dependence on others of the most powerful kind. To make honor desire’s end means to make self-esteem depend essentially on the esteem bestowed on us by others rather than on that esteem we bestow on ourselves. The difference here is vital as we will see further on because the more powerful is our dependence on others to secure self-worth, the more our desire takes on a destructive character and the more entangled we become in destructive relations of the kind that preoccupy Hobbes. *

*

*

If we were to summarize briefly the problem with desire that leads to the destroyed world of the war of all against all, it is the construction of desire as a force that demands exclusive possession. This exclusivity suggests a connection to two emotions: greed and envy. Desire is greedy in the sense that it is to have and hold all that is of value: the true or worthy self of which, in the end, there can be only one. It involves envy because this desire to have the one true self must exclude others who in failing to gain honor experience envy in its place. The problem is that desire is inextricably bound up with greed and envy so that the pursuit of desire’s object must bring with it conflict and destruction. Desire becomes a destructive force when either it has no limit or when our failure to acquire its object means that we are forced to observe its gratification in another rather than in ourselves. Being forced to observe a gratification in others denied to ourselves multiplies our sense that we are unworthy. This makes our desire for the object a threat to our selves because what we do not desire does not make us feel diminished when it falls into the hands of others. When our desire has no limit, gratification is also frustrated and our goal of establishing our selves as having value can be sought but not attained. Envy transforms desire for the object into a powerful impulse to deprive others of it even to the point of destroying it. Greed, because it knows no limit,

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also tends to transform desire for the object into an impulse to prevent others from having it in this case by holding all of it for ourselves. Envy is an attack on desire, greed a hopeless quest for a gratification that we can never attain. In this they move in opposing directions, greed toward multiplication of desire, envy toward destroying desire’s object. There is none or too much; and it is this inability to find the appropriate measure of desire that causes the problem. The underlying factor is always the raising of the stakes so that in the end desire threatens to consume both self and object. In this respect, we can say that for both greed and envy desire becomes too great to manage. Put simply, desire becomes a danger because it becomes an allconsuming force that has no measure. Envy and greed express our experience of desire as something without measure. This infinite desire causes problems, but there are reasons we cannot easily give it up. What I will refer to as a perfect world is one in which the infinite is within our grasp. So, our inability to give up our infinite desire expresses the depth of our attachment to the hope for a perfect world. To understand why desire tends to develop in this direction, I will consider two related lines of thinking. The first comes from Hegel’s philosophy where the problem of the finite and the infinite in desire plays a central part. The second comes from psychoanalytic object relations theory and the psychology of the self where the sources of the striving to gratify desire without limit are identified in our psychic lives. * *

*

The idea in Hegel most closely linked to that of destructive desire is the idea that desire’s object is to negate the other. This desire to negate the other arises because desire’s end is not to have some particular pleasure, but to gain the assurance that the self exists, an assurance that Hegel refers to as “self-certainty.” The presence of the other bears a complex relationship to this goal because, according to Hegel, that presence is both a necessary condition for gaining the assurance that the self exists, and at the same time represents the

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most powerful threat to it: “ . . . self-consciousness is . . . certain of itself only by superseding this other that presents itself to self-consciousness as an independent life.” To affirm its own existence, the self must affirm the “nothingness of this other.” It “destroys the independent object and thereby gives itself the certainty of itself as a true certainty.” But if gratification is gained by superseding the other, then “for this supersession to take place, there must be this other,” and this means that satisfaction can only be achieved “in another selfconsciousness” (1977: 109–10; emphasis in original). Why does selfhood mean the negation of the object? Why is desire’s object to secure not this or that particular thing or sensual experience, but to secure the feeling that the self exists? If we are to answer these questions, we must understand something more about the nature of desire and the self. Implicitly for Hobbes and explicitly for Hegel, the defining moment of desire and the self is the negation of all external restrictions and ends: Personality begins not with the subject’s mere general consciousness of himself as an ego concretely determined in some way or other, but rather with his consciousness of himself as a completely abstract ego in which every concrete restriction and value is negated and without validity. (Hegel 1951: 37)

Without this universal moment in which all is possible and nothing is actual, the creature is not a self (or self-consciousness in Hegel’s terminology). This is because what it means to be a self is to be the source or origin. Selfhood is freedom and agency; in Hegel’s language, to be a self is to be self-determining and what the self desires is to secure that feeling it has when it creates rather than submits. To understand this idea, it may help to bring in some language from Donald Winnicott, who distinguishes two orientations toward the world. In one, the self is experienced as the source and origin of action, whereas in the other the self is lost into the subjectivity of the other. He refers to the first as creativity and the second as compliance. Creativity is the “doing that expresses

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being” of the self, while compliance is the doing that expresses the being of the other and therefore the nonbeing of the self: It is possible to show that in some people at certain times the activities that indicate that the person is alive are simply reactions to stimuli. Withdraw the stimuli and the individual has no life. (Winnicott 1986: 39)

When what we do represents only our adaptation to a reality predetermined for us, then we are not alive in this sense; or, in other words, we have no being to call on as the mainspring of our action. What Winnicott refers to as creativity in living “indicates that he who is, is alive.” The ideal of self-determination is one of living a life in which what we do expresses our presence in a strong sense of the term. Since the doing that expresses being refuses compliance with the other and the loss of self into the other, to gain the feeling that our selves are alive requires in this sense a negation of the other. Winnicott formulates this in the language of destruction of the object and in so doing echoes Hegel’s idea that the coming to life of the self is an act of negation.3 But, for this feeling that the self is alive (self-certainty) to be secure, it must be something more than a subjective fantasy or imagined state; it must become something objective for the self: a lived life in a world that is demonstrably more than a mere subjective illusion. This world in which the self becomes something real is a world of a special kind. In it we must find ourselves existing outside our own subjective experience, which is outside the sphere of wish, fantasy, and imagination. For Hegel, this finding the self outside means first finding another self and second existing not simply for ourselves but for this other self. In doing so, we make ourselves recognizable as selves. In recognizing others and in being recognized by them we come to recognize our selves. Because of the necessity that the self come into existence for another if it is to exist for itself, the self cannot be satisfied with negating the other. This consideration leads Hegel to conclude that selfconsciousness only exists when it is acknowledged by another,

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an acknowledgement that must be reciprocal. In this reciprocally self-constituting relationship, the two selves “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another” (1977: 112). But this being in the recognition of another also negates the existence of the self as “the pure abstraction of self-consciousness,” which “consists in showing itself as the pure negation of its objective mode, or in showing that it is not attached to any specific existence” (113). Through reciprocal recognition, the self exists as something objective and real without losing itself into an alien reality. The reciprocal element in recognition plays an important role here because it is this element that invests recognition with implications different from those attached to honor, implications that make honor a scarce good that becomes the object of destructive competition. Unlike honor, which is an asymmetric relation, recognition is here conceived symmetrically. Yet, the difference may be less sharp than it at first appears. On one side, those who have no honor cannot provide others with it however deferential they may be. This means that those who bestow honor on others must thereby also receive their own measure of honor in return, if only that measure implied in their ability to honor others. On the other side, there is nothing in the concept of recognition that requires each party to be recognized to the same degree, or as having the same standing. That is, while recognition may require reciprocity, it does not require symmetry. To honor, at least in Hobbes’s sense, is also to recognize, but asymmetrically rather than symmetrically. Recognition is the general term we use to refer to an act that acknowledges the existence of something by perceiving it to fall into a particular class. But, the special use associated with Hegel has tended to invest recognition with the power not simply to acknowledge, but to create. This special power has to do with the peculiarity of personhood, which is a status that a person takes on because he or she is recognized to have it. What makes recognition of personhood reciprocal and gives it the special quality considered here is the link between our knowing an object as a person and its actually becoming a person.

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This link exists because personhood is socially created in that special sense of the term we use for standing, status, and position. This social creation through recognition is essentially what Axel Honneth has in mind when he speaks of recognition not as a reciprocal relationship between persons, but as a relation between the individual and society. Honneth’s concern is with what he refers to as the “social recognition” that he insists can undo “degradation and disrespect” (Honneth 2003: 132; see also Honneth 1995). It is clear enough that there are circumstances in which this claim has both meaning and force. These are the circumstances in which the state can, through altering either the law or its application, secure the full provision of right and thereby the full status of personhood to those previously denied rights and the status associated with them. In this way, the state can alleviate both suffering and injustice. Yet, even where standing, status, and position are formal social constructs, recognition does not fully secure our capacity to occupy them and therefore cannot fully undo the suffering to which Honneth refers. There must also be internal qualities expressed and acknowledged in formal position. That is to say, he who would occupy the position must also have the capacity to do so. Otherwise, appearance and reality diverge so that those recognized as persons only appear to be what they are not. This distinction becomes of special importance when we attempt to call on recognition not to constitute the formal status of personhood, but to constitute the self, which is implied in the treatment of recognition as the antidote to shame, since shame is the experience of a devalued self. Jessica Benjamin seeks to make selfhood the creature of recognition when she defines recognition as “that response from the other which makes meaningful the feelings, intentions, and actions of the self,” and thereby “allows the self to realize its agency and authorship in a tangible way” (Benjamin 1988: 12). Here, Benjamin makes recognition the constitutive relation of selfhood. One becomes a self by being recognized as a self; and one ceases to be a self when recognition of selfhood is withheld. Thus, Benjamin insists, “if the other denies me recognition, my acts have no meaning” (53). What is essential

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in this is the attempt to invoke a concept normally applied in the field of formal social status and position to the creation of those internal qualities we associate not with personhood but with being a self. In Benjamin’s case, part of the stimulus for treating the self as a creature of recognition is the increasing emphasis that has lately been placed on empathic response in early childhood development (Benjamin 1992: 47–48). Our development of a secure sense of self depends on our ability to make a positive investment in our selves, and this in turn depends on our having had a relationship with a caregiver who acknowledged and affirmed our expressions of selfhood. The capacity to know our selves develops because of the capacity of our caregivers to know us. Or, put in the language of empathy, their capacity to empathize with us enables us to exercise our capacity to empathize with ourself, which in turn is what allows us to know and therefore to be ourself.4 If we then equate recognition with empathy, recognition becomes the constitutive relation not only of the person but also of the self that, so to speak, inhabits the person and makes being a person not only a formal status recognized in us by society but also an internal reality expressed when we occupy that status. Doing so is, however, problematic in some ways and the attempt to make recognition constitutive of the self leads us into difficulties that are closely connected to the constitution of desire as an exclusionary and therefore destructive force. *

*

*

The central element in exclusionary desire is the tendency toward asymmetrical forms of recognition of the kind built into the desire for honor as Hobbes interprets it. Our problem, then, is to understand better how establishing these asymmetrical forms of recognition becomes desire’s end, and therefore how the limitless aspect of desire comes to dominate and become the driving force in an exclusionary quest for the perfect world. To do so, I think it will be helpful to consider the argument from psychoanalytic object relations theory and

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self-psychology, which focuses our attention directly on the matter of the dependence of the self on recognition and the possibility inherent in that dependence that the self will get stuck in its development at a phase in which the exclusionary impulse dominates.5 Just as in the philosophical argument summarized from Hegel, the argument from object relations theory considers the starting point of the self to be the urge to negate, though negation is formulated somewhat differently as an urge to incorporate otherness into the boundaries of the self, in the most primitive sense physically to take in what is outside the body and thus make it part of the physical being of the self. This physical incorporation is, however, no more than a primitive form of, and ultimately a symbolic representation for, the negation of the other as a mental act. This negation as a mental act takes place in fantasy as the merger of self and other, a merger that, in Hegel’s language, produces “the I that is we and the we that is I” (1951: 110). Incorporation overcomes otherness by making it a part of the self. Although incorporation may involve a destructive urge toward the other, it can also move in a different direction, one that preserves both self and other. This alternative direction involves the creation of an internalized other, or an “internal object.” The term object here is used in the sense of an object of desire and a source of emotional sustenance. This internalization of the other and creation of an internal object takes place through the mental appropriation of the other. The mental appropriation of the object creates a new reality, which is the object in the mind. The end sought through internalizing objects and establishing them as a force within the mind is to internalize the power they represent, especially the power to provide or withhold gratification, which is the power to create a sought-after feeling or self-state. Through internalization, the self seeks to release itself from dependence on the other for gratification and seeks gratification instead in its relationship with its internal object (internalized other). We can see how this operates by considering the archetype of the internalization to which I refer, which is expressed in the fantasy of

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gratification prompted by the failure of the caregiver to satisfy the infant’s need. In its most primitive form, this is the infant’s fantasy of being fed when it is hungry and its caregiver is absent. This is a fantasized experience with a fantasized caregiver and presages a lifetime of fantasy in which an absent object is conjured up in the mind as a substitute for the real thing. The fantasy expresses the presence of an internalized experience that acts as a substitute for the reality that has, for whatever reason, been withheld. The fantasy is the expression of the mental appropriation of an experience with a good (gratifying) object. The result is that the young child achieves a measure of autonomy from the real object because it is now able to care for itself (Pine 1989: 164–65). The sought-after independence from the object also constitutes a rejection (negation) of it built into the assertion that it is no longer needed and can be replaced by the self. It matters at this point how we conceive gratification, which is to say how we conceive desire’s object. Typically, this gratification is conceived as equivalent to the satisfaction of a primitive physical need (e.g., for mother’s milk). Conceived in this way, the fantasy that expresses the presence of an internal object is at best a poor substitute for the real thing. And, indeed, however important fantasy may be in our lives, we generally do assume that it is second best and ultimately unsatisfying. In this sense, fantasy points us both toward and away from reality. It points us away from reality because it expresses our wish to be free from dependence on it; and it points us toward reality because it affirms and may even intensify our desire for the real gratification only available in relation to a real (external) object. Yet, by interpreting the fantasy as nothing more than a pale substitute for the real thing we lose sight of something vital about it, which is the way it expresses our striving for self-determination. Considered in this light, the substitution of the internal experience may not be so unreal or inferior. To see how this might be the case, we need to understand the implications of the shift from conceiving desire’s object as the thing capable of satisfying a bodily need by affording a specific sensory experience (e.g., the satisfaction of hunger),

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toward the gratification achieved when the self comes to life. If what the infant or young child seeks in relating is affirmation of the self, or of its presence as a self in the world, then the relationship is the means to that end, and so far as the other that provides the infant or young child with that feeling can be internalized, the internal relationship can begin to substitute for the one in the external world; and in this sense the nascent person can begin a journey whose end is a meaningful degree of autonomy from primitive dependence on the relationship with an external object. To be autonomous means to have a self to call upon as the source and determinant of action. Indeed, the end of relating for the infant and young child is to facilitate the shaping of an inner world consistent with separation and individuation, an inner world structured as a self capable of providing the mainspring for action and relating. Central to this shaping of the inner world into a self with the capacity to which I have just referred is the link between having a self and investing value in the self.6 To invest value in the self has the same emotional meaning as forming a judgment about the self that it is good. Indeed, as Charles Taylor insists, the self only exists “as we seek and find an orientation to the good” (Taylor 1989: 34). With this in mind, we can say that what the child seeks through relating is the sense of its worth or goodness, and what it seeks through internalization is the capacity to affirm the presence in it of a worthy or good self. What we do can only have value if the self that determines what we do has value; and if it does not then we must turn elsewhere in determining what we do and how we relate to others. It is in this sense that internalization of a worthy self makes possible independence from the external object, and that failure to establish a positive investment in the self means failure to set the foundation for independence. As it turns out, the more the child is able to internalize the capacity to invest value in the self, the less dependent it will be on recognition and the less in need it will be of emotional nutrients from outside of the kind that involve it in the destructive forms of desire considered earlier.

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Nothing in this implies that internalization makes relating to others unimportant. Rather, what it means is that achieving a sense of self-worth and therefore of the self ’s existence ceases to be the work of others, but can become instead the result of the individual’s own internal processing of its complex relationship to self and to other. To see how this might be the case, however, we need to add another element to our description of the emerging world of internalized objects. This is the element associated with doubt about the value of the self. To understand this element we need to focus our attention on the underlying goal of internalization, which, as I suggest above, is to gain that independence or autonomy from the object without which the organism does not feel alive as a center of action and initiative. This feeling alive has another implication, which is that internalization has as its end the taking of responsibility for the self and its situation. Indeed, self-determination and taking responsibility are two sides of the same thing. To be a self means to take responsibility for the self. When the self does not take responsibility, but instead shifts that responsibility on to others, it establishes the other as the determinant of its situation, and in this it becomes dependent on the other in the most fundamental sense of the term. Without its capacity to take responsibility, the self can be no more than an appendage of the object, and to the degree that it becomes an appendage of the object it loses its status as a self. If we apply this reasoning to the situation that originally fosters internalization—the failure of the object to provide gratification—then what it implies is the necessity that the child take responsibility for that situation. In the simple moral language of early development this is done by forming a judgment of the self that it is not worthy of gratification (it is bad) and in this has brought about (deserves) the deprivation it has experienced in its relationship. However painful this taking responsibility might be, it is better than the alternative, which places all determination on the side of the object and thereby eliminates any element of self-determination. Because this unfavorable moral judgment comes from within, it operates as a parallel presence to the favorable judgment of the self sought

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through internalization of the good object and the gratifying experience it has provided. In other words, the forming of an internal good (gratifying) object is paralleled by the forming of an internal bad (depriving) object. The outcome of the struggle between these two aspects of mental life determines the way in which the individual copes with desire and the degree to which the individual comes to experience desire as a destructive force. Indeed, the more powerful the bad internal object the more powerful are destructive forms of desire in the individual’s mental life. To understand this result, we need to consider more closely why it is that self-judgment becomes a judgment about desire and the identification of the self with it. The most obvious reason for this lies in the association the child has made between its desire and the loss of the nurturing relationship with the good (external) object. Because what has been lost is the gratifying object, and because its relationship with that object is all about gratification, it is natural enough to conclude that the demand for gratification is the reason for the loss of gratification and thus that desire constitutes a threat to the relationship through which it can alone hope to attain its object. We can express this result in the language of repression. Taking responsibility makes the self the source of its own deprivation (active) rather than the object of deprivation inflicted on it from outside (passive). Now the self represses desire as a way of making it worthy of the good object notwithstanding the fact that the repression of desire drains its relationship with that object of any real purpose. By turning the experience of deprivation into its own act, the self constitutes itself as something good, a self without desire that poses no threat to the relationship with the good, a self that is pure and, in the moral language, without sin. The more intense the investment in retrieving the all-good object, the more intense the repression of the self and therefore of desire, which is the desire to be a self. The self must be purified in this way precisely because of the powerful urge it contains to commit the sin that leads to the disruption of the relationship with the good; so in this sense the self remains a sinner in thought (impulse) if not in deed. In the resulting topsy-turvy world, to desire is bad and to repress

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desire is good. One important manifestation of this logic is the idea that desire can be gratified only when the source of the desire (the body) has been given up in favor of the afterlife of the pure spirit, where in some cases we are promised the sensual gratification of a physical body that no longer exists. The purified self is the all-good self. Our continuing hope to become all good in a relationship with an all-good object blocks our evolution in the direction of the ideal of a good-enough self, good enough in the sense that it enables us to be ourself in a world of others we need not judge to be bad simply because they are different from us. What mainly gets in the way of our attachment to a good-enough object-relation is the power of negative self-judgment. The force of the internalized attack on the self necessitates recourse to external objects in the hope that they can offset the internal. The result is what Otto Kernberg describes as “overdependence on external admiration and acclaim” (1986: 246), in other words on the kind of regard Hobbes speaks of in the language of honor. Understood in this way, honor is what we seek to offset the threat to the self originating internally. Thus the external world is made the solution to an internal problem; and this use of the external world to solve the problem of self-denigration takes the form of a profound neediness that grows in proportion to the power of self-denigration, a neediness that expresses itself in what Kernberg refers to as “relentless greed.” Dependence intensifies with the intensification of desire, and as desire comes to be involved with the kind of neediness born of self-denigration, it takes on its most destructive forms. Reason and the Self To be a self means to have a specific relationship with desire. In this relationship, the self is the locus of desire and it is also desire’s end. That is, desire is to be a self. Self-determination, which also involves suspension of external factors determining thought and conduct, is the gratification of desire. The reflexive quality of desire when linked to desire’s more destructive forms

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can create confusion of the kind expressed in formulations that emphasize the use of the self to control or in the limit repress desire. What creates confusion is the treatment of the self as the locus of a desire that must be controlled and simultaneously as the force that controls desire. This then leads to an interpretation of reason as self-command: “Man is a being who is capable of obeying a law that he has imposed on himself, and reason is the faculty of commanding oneself.” Reason as self-command requires the separation of “the will from what it desires” (Manent 1995: 29, 62). The idea of self-command divides the self into two parts: reason and passion. Yet, this division cannot be absolute because even though reason is mobilized to control passion it does so in the name of passion, or to better achieve passion’s ends. This idea that the two parts of the self are both opposed and united is well-expressed in Adam Smith’s account of self-command: The qualities most useful to ourselves are, first of all superior reason and understanding, by which we are capable of discerning the remote consequences of our actions, and of foreseeing the advantage or detriment which is likely to result from them; and, secondly, self-command, by which we are enabled to abstain from present pleasure or to endure present pain, in order to obtain a greater pleasure in some future time. In the union of these two qualities consists the virtue of prudence, of all the virtues that which is most useful to the individual. (Smith 1969: 310–11)

For Smith, the passions are the emotions and impulses that drive the individual to act, especially anger and fear on one side and “selfish gratifications” on the other (1969: 387). Smith argues that some passions may be more easily controlled than others, which he describes as “ungovernable” only to indicate the effort that must be exerted if we are to command ourselves (72). When Smith unites the two moments of the self (reason and passion), he does so in a way that makes passion the dominant moment because reason is deployed so that, for example, selfish gratification will be better achieved. In this sense, it

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cannot really be said that the will stands separate from what it desires, though clearly there must be a distinction between the two if reason and self-command are to have any meaning. A stronger separation is implied where the self must do more than assist the passions through commanding them, for example by choosing among them. Michael Sandel characterizes this latter view of the self in the following terms: The priority of the self over its ends means I am never defined by my aims and attachments, but always capable of standing back to survey and assess and possibly to revise them. This is what it means to be a free and independent self capable of choice. (1984: 5)

Here reason involves not simply prudence in Smith’s sense, but choice among ends as well. The self enters as a choosing subject and not simply as the agent of the passions. We may wonder, however, what it means to separate the act of choice from the passions that in the absence of a subject would drive action. We can answer this question only if we conceive the self as a new reality driven by forces distinctive to it, forces that might, as Sandel suggests, not simply choose among ends, but reshape them as well. The quality of the self that it is driven by forces peculiar to it is the one formulated in the previous section as the shift from having a sensory experience as end in the direction of making coming to life as a self the end. In a way, this end is the “selfish gratification” to which Smith refers, but only so far as we understand that term in a special way, not as giving in to the instincts and impulses driving the organism (its passions), but as seeking the feeling that the self is real and alive. If this is the selfish end, then command of those passions whose origin is outside the self is an important step toward freedom and self-determination. Characterizing this movement away from natural determination in the language of choice, for example choice among ends, while it establishes the presence of a new force—the self—does not really capture what it means to be driven by the desire to be a self. Emphasis on the priority of the self over

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its ends indicates the absence of a full understanding of the relation between desire, reason, and the self, more specifically of how desire is for the self and the self therefore does not exist without it anymore than desire exists without the self. Reason then is not command over desire, but the self that desires to be a self. But the desire to be a self can lead in two different directions, one toward exclusive possession of the one true self, and the other toward a multiplication of different particular selves. In the first case, the desire to be a self is also an impulse to destroy the self as it exists in others. But this destruction of the self in other also destroys the only setting in which our self can become real, which is the world of other selves. This means that the desire to be a self can only be realized in the world as the desire to realize the limitless moment of selfhood in a particular finite life. That the desire to be the one true self can never be realized in the world does not mean that it cannot become the dominant force in conduct and relating, as I will argue happens in the attack on liberalism. What is unreasonable is desire for the perfect world. Desire for the perfect world is desire infused with greed and envy. It is desire beyond reason that turns against the self and therefore against reason. The problem is that both greed and envy express the desire for the self. What makes them unreasonable is that, although they express desire for the self, they do so in a way that is ultimately an attack on the self. This is what fosters the contradictory conception of reason that equates it with selfcommand. When desire loses its limit, the self must be protected from it and turn to the work not of realizing its end in being a self but rather toward the work of controlling or commanding desire. As we have seen, there is a sense in which repression of desire, though it means repression of the self, is also a form of expression of the presence of the self. This is because repression of desire represents the act of taking responsibility for the self. Yet, where greed and envy dominate, the self takes responsibility in a way that simultaneously makes it a presence in the world and seeks to destroy it. It makes the statement: the self can exist but only in the form of self-repression, only if it denies to itself the gratification experienced in being a self. The result is the

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paradox that only through self-denial can the perfect world, the world in which limitless desire meets the source of limitless gratification, be found. But, the perfect world is also the place where the self has no responsibility for gratification. Taking responsibility is linked to a special orientation to the world of others in which those others are no longer conceived to hold what we desire and to provide it or not at their will. Rather the self must become the active agent in securing gratification. The uninterrupted presence of the all-good object and its perfect devotion to our need makes our taking of responsibility not only unnecessary but also more importantly a challenge to the goodness of self and object. That is, when we take responsibility we insist that the good object always available and attentive to our need does not exist. Self-judgment has this same meaning only turned inward. The activity of self-judgment is predicated on the idea that we are not always and altogether good. If reason is our capacity for self-judgment, then reason is also our capacity to doubt the inevitability of the goodness of the self. Because desire without measure is the urge to identify our selves with the object that is always and altogether good, reason is the force that moderates desire and in this sense defeats the power of greed and envy. Will, then, does not stand against desire but is itself an expression, indeed the definitive expression, of the desire to assert the existence of the self. To assert the existence of the self means to assert its separate existence. Separation from the other places us in a world of others and expresses the transformation of desire’s object, the self, into something finite and limited: this particular individual self. This existence of the self in the world of others implies doubt about the good; and this doubt about the good is the work of reason. By contrast, the goal of the destructive forms of desire expressed in the hope for a perfect world is to dismiss all doubt about the goodness of the self. Here, self-certainty, to borrow Hegel’s term, refers to the result of an act that extinguishes all doubt about the unique goodness of the self. Because doubt is the work of reason, to dismiss doubt is to dismiss reason. Dismissing reason is that special

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kind of mental work with which I am particularly concerned in the following chapters. * *

*

To understand how the struggle over desire becomes a struggle over reason, we need to consider more closely the doubt to which I have just referred. This doubt takes the form of an idea about the self, that it is the locus of a limitless desire that if allowed expression will destroy its object. It is important to bear in mind that what we experience as doubt is in fact a growing conviction that the self is a destructive force. One way to cope with this conviction is to replace it with its opposite, which we can do by conceiving the self not as a locus of destructive desire but as the absence of desire. This substitution involves a special kind of mental work, which is the mental work we do to prevent ourselves from allowing powerful ideas to be made available for thinking. Although we hold the substitute idea in the mind, we do not think about it. Rather than thinking about it, we use it to protect the mind from the unacceptable alternative. This work of blocking thoughts and ideas that threaten the relationship of the self to the good is work done to prevent thinking from taking place. To think is to doubt. Thoughts without thinking are thoughts protected from doubt. Because of this, they have an irreducible and inevitable quality about them. The result of the work of blocking ideas to which I have just referred is to invest the ideas we do hold in the mind with this quality of inevitability. They are in this respect like facts: given and preformed, immovable and unavoidable. Thinking attacks this quality of thoughts, and with it the inevitability of what is. Thinking replaces facts with possibilities; it attacks the known quality of our world, replacing it with a new quality, the quality of being not yet determined. Thinking then opens the mind to difference: the possibility of a world different from the one the hope for the perfect world insists it must be. For the thinking mind, the I is not we and the we is not I. To think we must hold different possibilities in

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our minds rather than using one to eliminate the other. This means that the products of thinking contain differences. The opposed thoughts, if they are to be held in the mind must be reformed so that they no longer extinguish one another. This reforming of thoughts so that they might coexist in the mind is the work of integrating them by conceiving an idea in which each opposing thought is merely one moment. Reason is the process of integrating thoughts that otherwise stand opposed and in isolation from one another. As one student of Hegel puts it: The world must not remain a complex of fixed disparates. The unity that underlies the antagonisms must be grasped and realized by reason, which has the task of reconciling the opposites and “sublating” them in a true unity[.] (Marcuse 1941: 45)

To be able to think then is to be able to tolerate these different moments. At the primitive level of emotional experience, the different moments are the thoughts of the good and the bad, and of the experiences of gratification and frustration implied in them. Containing these moments means forming the idea of an object that is sometimes gratifying and sometimes depriving, and, yet, still a single integrated emotional reality. Rather than insisting that what is good is always and altogether good and what is bad is always and altogether bad, the mind conceives a single object with the capacity to be both good and bad. In other words, the availability of reason to us (our capacity to think) is the same thing as our acceptance of the imperfection of our world.

Part II

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n the previous chapter, I considered how the form desire takes affects our access to reason as a way of organizing thought processes and especially how the destructive forms of desire tend to block the reasoning process. I now turn to a salient example of the flight from reason in politics. My example is the 2004 election campaign and the attack on thinking that played such a large role in it. * *

*

As the 2004 campaign for the White House entered its final two months, it became increasingly clear that the outcome would not be decided by any reality-based assessment of the two candidates, whether of their character somehow conceived, or of their policies as indicated in past actions or current pronouncements. Thus, for example, it had become clear that it did not matter: ●

●

●

Which candidate had and which had not distinguished himself during the Vietnam War. Whose health care plan would and whose would not provide security against rising costs and loss of coverage. Who would and who would not be able to shape an exit strategy in Iraq, provide security against the threat of terrorism, or, more broadly, put in place an effective foreign

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●

policy appropriate for the beginning of the twenty-first century. Who best understood the problems of employment and economic growth.

It will seem odd to say that these issues did not matter when they made up the bulk of the political debate, and it was clear enough that strong feelings surrounded them, and that, indeed, they mattered greatly to the electorate. What did not seem to matter, however, was any reality-based assessment of the issues, especially of the consequences for each issue of the election of one candidate rather than the other. In this electoral campaign, as George Lakoff put it, “mere facts don’t matter” (Lakoff 2004a). It did not matter who, in reality, had and who had not distinguished himself during wartime, although distinguishing yourself in the face of the enemy seemed to matter. Health care mattered; but whose plan could make a real difference in people’s lives did not. Terrorism mattered as did the war in Iraq, but a reality-based assessment of neither issue seemed important. Unemployment mattered, but not the real assessment of the factors driving unemployment and of which policies, if any, were more likely to have a favorable impact on the number and quality of jobs available. If we use the term “interests” as a short hand to refer to the reality-based assessment of consequences, we can say that interests did not seem to matter. Concern with the issues, however intense, led not to action based on interest, but to action based on something else. This something else falls under the heading of what we might reasonably refer to as passion. Now consider what may be the most salient example of the way politics had fallen into the grip of passion. This example is the President’s insistence on “staying the course,” and on viewing the world from a never-changing perspective governed by immovable principles and judgments. Thus, in a speech in Michigan, President Bush harshly criticizes his opponent for having “more different positions on the Iraq issue than all his colleagues in the Senate combined,” in response to which the

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audience responds with the chant: “flip flop flip flop flip flop.” The interaction then continues in this vein with the President pointing out a change, or perceived change, in John Kerry’s position and the audience chanting “flip flop” (Bush 2004a). If we consider not the facts of the matter, but the emotional resonance of the chant as an angry indictment of a man perceived to be unreliable in some profound way, and in this sense to have a character flaw that will make him a dangerous occupant of the highest elected office in the nation, we will be led to wonder what message is embedded in the communication. Why does this charge resonate for the President’s supporters? In what sense can we argue that the President represents a leader more likely to stay the course, to be, in his own words, “resolute and firm” (Bush 2004a)? To answer these questions, we need to understand how the charge of waffling directed at his opponent serves to draw a line between two orientations toward the world, one in which thought and action are dominated by conviction, enduring and unchanging values, and rectitude; the other in which thought and action are dominated by thinking and judgment characterized by flexibility, reality testing, and the capacity to learn from experience. In other words, the chant is an attack on thinking and learning in favor of an insistence that what is right must be simple and already known. In speaking this way, I have used the term thinking to refer to a special form of mental activity rather than to whatever goes on in the conscious mind. More specifically, I have considered thinking an aspect of reason, which is the activity of questioning, calling to account, holding “argument, discussion, discourse or talk with another.”1 Considered in this way, we can consider thinking the process of reasoning with ourselves and carrying on discourse with another an extension of the thinking process. The problem with thinking as I suggest in the last chapter, is that it implies doubt. My suggestion then is that the issue of waffling on the part of the President’s opponent is a way of distinguishing between thinking, which can subvert simple known truths, and conviction, which tolerates no doubt and therefore no thinking.

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Because it carries the power of doubt, thinking can be an uncomfortable, even painful experience. “I just want to stop thinking. Thinking this, thinking that. All the goddamned time. It drives you crazy.”2 Not only, however, can the confusion brought about by thinking be uncomfortable, even threaten to “drive us crazy,” but, because it intervenes between impulse and action, thinking can also be perceived as an impediment to action. Thus, thinking leads to hopeless confusion, mental anguish, and impotence. To think, after all, is to hesitate, and he who hesitates is lost. The President offers himself as, and in some ways is, the candidate who will not hesitate. He will not hesitate to defend the nation. He will not hesitate to meet all challenges with overwhelming force. His opponent, he tells us, is the candidate who has to think about what he does before doing it, the candidate who hesitates in the face of complexity, and, therefore, in whose hands the nation will be lost. The decision between the two candidates is not then essentially about issues, but about who will lead us into hopeless confusion and impotence, and who will take decisive action to provide relief for our mental anguish, which is to say for our fears and doubts. It follows that those who oppose the President are not simply individuals and groups who think differently about policy questions; they are individuals and groups who lack conviction. The President’s opponents are enemies of the simple known truths the President represents: President Bush has founded his presidency on the principles that are the backbone of our nation. People of faith across the country recognize the President is a man of strong moral character who has restored honor and dignity to the White House. He has nominated and appointed conservative judges who will strictly interpret the law, supports the sanctity of marriage between one man and one woman by promoting a Federal Marriage Amendment, and has signed into law three major pro-life laws as he works to promote a culture of life. (Bush 2004b)

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The President’s opponents have no sure beliefs to guide action, and therefore, if elected, will put those things we most value at risk. * *

*

It might help in understanding the hostility to thinking evidenced in the political debate if we take a closer look at what is entailed in thinking about experience and why doing so might provoke strong resistance. When we think about an experience, we bring that experience, or more accurately the thought of the experience, to mind. The thought may be little more than an image of the events that make up the experience as seen from our subjective standpoint. When we bring thoughts to mind, we in a sense repeat the experience associated with them; and when we repeat the experience by recalling it, we also bring to mind the feelings originally provoked by it and possibly others subsequently attached to it. If we cannot tolerate those feelings, then we must do something either to rid our minds of the thought that provokes them, or to disconnect the intolerable feelings from it. One way to accomplish the second of the two goals is to take an action designed to transfer the feeling attached to the memory of the experience onto others. We can see this process at work in the response to the attack on the World Trade Center. The success of the attack provoked feelings of vulnerability, shame, and loss. Thinking about the attack requires holding it in the mind, which forces us to experience once again those painful feelings associated with it. To avoid this result, one strategy is to transform the experience from the locus of shame to the locus of pride, which can only be done by disproving the message embedded in it, which is that we are a weak nation vulnerable to violation by others. To accomplish this end requires a violent assault on those who, through the attack, proved themselves capable of humiliating us, which is to say that it requires us to humiliate them.

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No amount of thinking can ever accomplish the end of humiliating those judged responsible for humiliating us. Only action can do this, and this means that all mental activity must be made strictly subordinate to action that will transfer the pain of humiliation onto others. Thinking about the experience not only demands that we delay action but it also demands that we consider alternatives to the interpretation of the event that leads directly into action, alternative forms of action, and possibly alternatives to action itself. To avoid these possibilities, we must avoid thinking about the experience. Mentally, the most we can do with it is to hold it in our minds as a part of the process of planning the act that will transfer the shame to those who sought to humiliate us. The planning process is, in its essence, an elaborated fantasy of justice as vengeance. Although thinking, because it involves doubt about the outcome, cannot be tolerated, we can tolerate the fantasy since it assures relief from the pain associated with the memory of the event. By memorializing the triggering event, which must be “never forgotten,” we place it squarely within the context of a fantasy of justice as vengeance. In this way, the event we associate with humiliation and shame is made part of the wished-for transformative process by which shame is lifted and pride restored. But, before pride can be restored, we must remember the event so that our resolve will not weaken. Remembering activates the painful feelings, intensifying the impulse to take action against those held responsible. Using memory in this way does not link it to thinking, but to promoting fear and aggression. To forget is to weaken our resolve, to undermine our vigilance. Thus, we hold the painful memory in mind and with it the emotional suffering it provokes not so we can think about it, but to steel our resolve for action that will ultimately relieve the pain and retrieve the longed-for world we inhabited, or imagined we inhabited, prior to the event. In the language of hate, remembering the event fuels our hate and intensifies our need for aggression against the chosen enemy. The pressure of our hate assures that, during the planning and execution of the act of vengeance, we can tolerate no doubt, and therefore no thinking.

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Those who might question the wisdom of our response would condemn us to live with humiliation and shame. In planning and executing a violent attack on those responsible for humiliating the nation, we mirror their original action. The parallel in motivation between the two sides was well expressed by an al-Qa’ida spokesman when he insisted that Muslims “have the right to kill 4 million Americans—2 million of them children—and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands” (Middle East Media Research Institute 2002) because doing so would right the balance for an equal measure of harm done to Muslims as a result of the Gulf War and the war against the Taliban. Counting up the number of dead and injured provides a number of dead and injured Americans that would right the balance, and in this primitive sense, achieve justice. Only violent conflict can ultimately determine who will and who will not bear the shame. If this violent combat is what we need to relieve ourselves of intolerable feelings, then the leader we need is not the man who will lead us to think about the experience, but the man who will lead us to do something about it. Although it would be a mistake to treat the attack on the World Trade Center as the causal factor in promoting fear and aggression to dominance in public life, it would not be a mistake to treat it as a strong validation of those feelings, an event that not only energized those already heavily influenced by them but also shifted the balance in those normally less susceptible toward the more extreme state. What this means is that it is now possible to invoke the attack on the World Trade Center, and more generally the threat of terrorism, in an effort to promote feelings of fear and aggression more in line with the President’s presentation of self than that of his opponent. Thus, the Republican Party chooses to hold its convention in the city that was the immediate target of the attack. Doing so emphasized both the threat and the association of the President with an aggressive response to it, which is to say a response that would not get bogged down in thinking and the pain caused by it, but would relieve that pain through action. The President offered himself, perhaps correctly, as the candidate most likely

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to move into aggressive, decisive, and forceful action that would relieve the intolerable feelings of weakness and shame associated with the 9/11 attacks. His opponent appeared, again with some justification, as someone who might think before acting, thereby holding the nation in a state of anxiety rather than immediately evacuating that state in aggression directed at the enemy. Those who cannot tolerate that state will not tolerate the President’s opponent. At the level of interests, the reality-connected judgment of actions and consequences, the President’s attacks on his opponent by and large did not make sense, and his presentation of his own programs was often inaccurate and misleading. But at the level of passion, this was not the case, and it could be said that the President presented himself and his opponent more or less as what they were: one the agent for our decisive and aggressive movement from impulse into an action aimed at removing intolerable feelings of shame and fear, the other as the leader more likely to delay action, consider consequences, and offer a measured response unlikely to be adequate to the emotional agenda built into the attitude fostered by the President’s rhetoric. * *

*

So far, I have considered the response to the trauma caused by the violence done to the nation exclusively a matter of shifting the feelings of shame and humiliation onto those held responsible for the traumatic event, thereby restoring national pride. There is, however, another significant project set in motion by the trauma, which is the project of preventing recurrence. One language that is used to characterize this task, and the language favored by the President, is the language of evil. Framed in the President’s language, preventing recurrence means destroying the evildoers. The language of evil is a highly aggressive language, and represents a verbal assault meant to take from the enemy the possession he holds most dear, which is his conviction that his cause is righteous and that embracing his cause makes him good. Put another way, the language of evil attempts to deprive

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the original assault of its meaning. In so doing, it insists that we must not attempt to understand what cannot, which is to say must not, be understood. Evil cannot be understood, but it can be opposed and destroyed. To understand evil requires that we think about it. As I have suggested, doing so can cause problems. Among these, one of the most important is the tendency to assume an implicit equation between understanding and identifying with. Thus, the seeming lament often heard in response to violence, “I cannot understand why someone would do such a thing,” carries several layers of meaning. On one level, it means literally what it says and can be interpreted as in part a lament and in part an appeal for help. On another level, however, asserting our inability to understand is our way of creating distance between ourselves and those we cannot understand by insisting that they are alien to us. When we use the language of understanding in this way, we equate understanding with being like, which is to say identifying with. To understand is to be like, to refuse to understand is to be different. The language of evil protects us from any possible identification with those who have committed acts of violence by insisting that what they have done cannot be understood. The language of evil serves a second related function, which is to provide a legitimate target for hate, or what Volkan (1988) refers to as a suitable target for externalization. If our hate, provoked in part by the traumatic event, is not to make us hateful, and therefore evil, it must be made something other than hate. The destruction of evil is not an act of the hateful, but a way of ridding the world of those who are hateful. Evil, then, is a suitable target for destructive impulses, indeed it is the ultimate suitable target. By legitimating hate, we make it something other than hate, and we assure that in hating the enemy we do not become hateful, which is to say evil, ourselves. Legitimating hate begins with the redefinition of hate as the demand for justice and then continues as the redefinition of acts of hate as acts aimed at eliminating evil. * *

*

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The world of good and evil is a simple world, one in which we are not confused about what to think and what to do. Reference to evil serves to remove one source of anxiety from public life, which is the anxiety caused by not knowing. To escape complexity, the political process promotes regression from thinking in the direction of belief and the primitive emotional attachment implied in belief systems. Escape from complexity also means escape from the demands of expertise in the direction of simple truths or values. The cost of doing so is to promote the flight from reason into the politics of action that entangles the nation in protracted struggles and costly conflicts while limiting its ability to discover and enact meaningful reality-based solutions to pressing social problems. An important part of this regressive movement is the conviction that complex social problems can be solved simply by the application of values, by invoking simple enduring truths, or, in the limit, by saying the right words: free trade, democracy, human rights, individual responsibility, and so on. To see further how this works out in the political process, consider an example at a more local level, which is a recent race for the Senate in the state of Colorado. During the 2002 election campaign for the Senate, the Republican Party in Colorado ran an advertisement for its candidate on the theme of experience. The ad begins by comparing the experience of its candidate, a large-animal veterinarian, with that of the opposition, a seventeenth street lawyer, with the clear implication that legal training and experience should disqualify the opposition candidate from public office while training and experience as a veterinarian is just what is needed to make a good public servant. The message of the ad might seem odd to those unfamiliar with American politics. Why would a veterinarian be better qualified to make laws than someone trained in the law? What about having an office on seventeenth street in Denver makes one suspect as a candidate for the U.S. Senate? Immediately after presenting the contrasting pictures of the two candidates, the ad offers us an image of the Republican candidate looking into a horse’s mouth, perhaps with the expectation that he might find wisdom there, perhaps with

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the implication that knowing what you might expect to find in a horse’s mouth makes one qualified to govern. Whatever else this image conjures in the mind of the potential voter, it clearly suggests that the candidate knows what he knows about government not because he studied government, but because he, unlike the seventeenth street lawyer, is close to the small-town rural values that make America the special place it is imagined to be. We are reminded of the moment during Bob Dole’s failed presidential election campaign when he resigned from the Senate to run no longer as a man with a lifetime of experience in politics and lawmaking, but simply as a “man from Kansas.” Like Dole, the Republican candidate emphasizes not his years in the Senate, but his life, in this case as a veterinarian, before he was elected to public office. The point would seem to be that it is not training and skill in the profession of the law that make for good government, but something else. This something else is what we already have because of who we are: our character as expressed in our values. Good character as expressed in correct values comes not from training and skill, but from rootedness in the appropriate way of life. It is because he has looked into a horse’s mouth that the candidate will know what is or is not a good law, a good policy, a good judicial appointment, and so on. The candidate with the appropriate values stemming from the appropriate life experience needs no special education or expertise to decide on the weighty matters that face government, he already knows; or, at least, he knows where to look. The right candidate has what the Jimmy Stewart character, who goes from scout leader to senator in the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, describes as “plain, decent, everyday common rightness.” It is, then, not thinking that makes a successful public servant, but knowing without thinking. This conclusion gains support from the success of Ronald Reagan as president, and from the success of George W. Bush’s attack on Al Gore during his election campaign, where Bush made Gore look bad because Gore thought too much and knew too much. In this fantasy of government, rootedness in a way of life is meant to substitute for the ability to think about a problem. The point

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is not what we can learn by thinking about a problem and the use of expertise, but what we already know. Thinking gets in the way of knowing. But, what is it that we know best when we think about it least? In seeking an answer to this question, we might consider another ad offered to the electorate during the same campaign. This ad was on the theme of terrorism. In it, the seventeenth street lawyer is quoted as saying that terrorism is caused by hopelessness. No, the woman who narrates the ad insists in a strident tone; it is not hopelessness, but evil that causes terrorism. She goes on to tell us that not knowing it is evil that causes terrorism indicates that the opposition candidate lacks “Colorado values.” We can conclude then, that what we know best if we do not think about it is evil, and that knowing evil depends on having the right values, which presumably come straight out of the horse’s mouth. When evil appears in public debate, we can assume that hate is not far behind. Knowing who is evil means knowing who is a suitable target for our hate. The introduction of evil is an important part of a strategy to sanction hate by sanctioning its target. Because of this, the introduction of evil invites hate. Viewed emotionally, then, the success of the Republican candidate in winning the election can be assumed to measure, in part at least, the power of hate, and the greater success of that candidate in mobilizing hate. We can also conclude that knowing evil is an important capability in someone we would elect to public office. This can only be the case, however, if the job of the public servant is to know and to combat evil, which means that public life is about the great struggle between good and evil. Conceived in this way, the public arena is a place suitable for the expression of the community’s hate; indeed expressing and acting out hate is what public life is about and what government should be doing. The purpose of the Republican ad campaign was to link the opposition candidate to evil, and thus make him a target for the community’s hate. This is done first by depicting the candidate as someone who works for the enemy. The ad campaign identifies the enemy with “outside interests,” which is to say the

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interests of those living outside of Colorado, and who, because they live outside Colorado, do not have Colorado values. The Democratic candidate, we are told, provided legal representation for outside interests, and took large sums of money from them. A second element in the campaign to make the opposition the target of hate is the effort to link him to the city. Not only is he a lawyer, he works on seventeenth street, which is in the center of the state’s main urban area. A contrast is then set between the representative of small-town, rural Colorado values, and the representative of urban interests linked to those outside of Colorado. Where we might imagine that rootedness in the life of smalltown rural Colorado means rootedness in community, we do not imagine the city as a community. The city is the place where diverse individuals work and live and pursue lives without regard to the duties, obligations, and values associated with community. Put another way, the contrast between the two ways of life, and therefore the two candidates, is the contrast between unity and diversity, the one and the many. The Republican candidate’s campaign, on the emotional level, is a campaign over the issue of belonging to a community. He offers the voters not a set of policies or the benefit of expertise, but the opportunity to imagine themselves members of a community. Given the role of evil, and therefore hate, in the campaign, it seems reasonable to conclude that the community to which the ad campaign is meant to attract voters contains, mobilizes, and channels a good measure of hate, and is, in this sense, a hate group. It may seem odd to describe the Republican Party as an incipient hate group, or to suggest it has as its goal to form the electorate into a hate group. Other, more straightforward explanations for the phenomena under consideration here are readily available. We could attribute the image of the candidate with a horse, the emphasis on his background in veterinary medicine, and the disparaging reference to the site of the opponent’s law office as all part of an effort to appeal to rural voters by establishing a special connection with their way of life. The idea, then, would be that they should vote for the Republican because he is one of them. Yet, being one of them

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means not being one of the others, and this, as with much group phenomena, contains, at least incipiently, a degree of hate for those excluded. So, even if we treat the ad campaign as driven by a demographic strategy, the fact that it appeals not to issues important to rural voters, but to their attachment to a special way of life, leads the campaign in the direction of hate. A problem with the demographic interpretation stems from the fact that, while the Republican Party in the state of Colorado depends heavily on rural voters, it also has a significant voter base in the Denver suburbs, a base of voters few of whom will have looked into a horse’s mouth, or have had need for a large-animal veterinarian. It would not, then, serve the party’s political interest to cast all nonrural voters as a tainted group of others unworthy of trust. An alternative interpretation of the ad that would not exclude suburban voters is that the contrast between a veterinarian and a lawyer is meant to suggest something about the compassion and trustworthiness of the two candidates by playing on the presumably widespread distrust of lawyers, and the sense that people who care for animals are good people. We need not, of course, exclude this possibility. Nothing about political campaigns requires that they offer the voter a single message, or even a consistent set of messages. Nor need we consider the claim that a candidate is compassionate inconsistent with the mobilization of hate. Whether the two messages are consistent or not would depend on the way in which the campaign distinguishes those deserving of compassion from those deserving of hate. Groups can make drawing this distinction a simple matter, because in them compassion is reserved for those who are members and therefore with whom we are identified, and hate is directed at those outside the group, with whom we do not identify. As Freud puts it: “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness” (1961: 61). Those left over, the ones who do not deserve compassion, are those with whom we have nothing in common, and because they are different in this radical sense,

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compassion for them is not possible. Their actions and feelings are as incomprehensible to us as would be those of aliens from another galaxy. We can never know them, or know why they do what they do; we can only seek to maintain, by force if necessary, the barrier separating them from us. We can think of the work of politics in the space of knowing and not knowing. What we already know also tells us what we cannot know, and our inability to allow that we might not know but need to learn controls knowing. The Republican candidate knows evil because he refuses to understand those who do what he considers evil acts. This means that knowing for him depends on refusing to understand. In this construction, to understand is to identify with. On one side, this means that we can only understand those with whom we can identify. On the other side, this means that understanding implies identification, so if we attempt to understand evil that makes us evil. Hate is our way of controlling what is identified with us and what is not; so hate is a way of controlling understanding. * *

*

The flight from reason in politics only poses a problem to the extent that public issues cannot be resolved by invoking simple truths as expressed in well-known values. In other words, only so far as we conceive the issues as complex in a way that makes the simple truths unhelpful does it become important to enter into a thinking process. For some, the issues can, indeed, be conceived so that the simple truths apply; and, for them, thinking just gets in the way. Underlying the question of the role of reason in politics, then, is a question of complexity, and what, if anything, requires that we conceive our world as one where complexity defies any attempt to understand and cope with problems by the application of values and the simple truths they express. Although we might be tempted to suppose that the question of complexity is a question about the world and the problems it poses for us, the attitude that finds a threat in thinking understands the matter differently. Those who treat thinking as

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the problem tend to experience thinking not as a response to complexity, but as its cause. In their experience, the more we think about problems, the more complex they become, just as problems do not become complex if we do not think too much about them. There is more merit to this position than at first glance might seem the case, though even if it does have merit, that does not tell us whether we are better off thinking, and thus making the world more complex, or not thinking and thereby assuring that our world will remain simple. It may be the case that a world without much thinking in it would be a simple world, and that the flight from thinking expresses in part a lament about what thinking has done to our world, and in part a wish that what thinking has done could be undone. Shared values place us in a simple world: a world of revealed truth, of sameness rather than difference, of continuity rather than change. If to reason means “to hold argument, discussion, discourse or talk with another,” reason would have little place in a world where belief dispelled difference, a world like the one Frances Fitzgerald found in the Liberty Baptist Church, where as “an outsider soon discovers, there is no real point in talking to more than one of them on a topic of general interest, for there is a right answer to every question. . . .” (1987: 158). Perhaps it is not too great an exaggeration to say that, if there was a real issue in the elections described above, it was not which of two opposing sets of values will prevail, but whether we will allow thinking to make our world a place where there is a point to talking to more than one person because we do not already know what must be said. All of this suggests that there is a deeper problem that drives significant segments of the electorate in the direction of fear and aggression, making those feelings something the citizen brings to the political process rather than being encouraged into by it. This deeper problem is, I think, the widespread presence in the electorate of high levels of anxiety. The higher the level of anxiety, the less tolerance for the deliberative process and the uncertainties it brings with it, and the more intense the impulse to move directly toward action believed to be capable

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of eliminating the cause of our anxiety. The question, then, is: What is the nature of the anxiety that makes the electorate susceptible to an appeal that presupposes the predominance of a more paranoid attitude marked by fear and aggression? I think the answer to this question is that the anxiety is a response to the prospect that our world will be taken from us. The world to which I refer here is the world of meaning that makes who we are and what we do significant. For many, our connection to this world of meaning keeps alive a special hope, which is the hope that we might transcend the mundane and form a connection with a larger cause and higher power. This means that what we face losing is not merely a way of life, but one invested with a special significance that provides a powerful basis for self-esteem. Humiliation and shame are the destruction of this special meaning and the loss of a vital source of self-esteem. For those living under the spell of the special hope just briefly considered, the stakes could not be higher, and because of this it is understandable that their struggle to prevent the loss of a world knows few limits. Those who imagine themselves engaged in such a struggle, as in his way President Bush clearly does, cannot be bound by norms associated with reasoning together, including the norm of treating opponents with respect. No doubt there was a kind of cynicism in the President’s campaign against John Kerry, as evidenced in his willingness to distort and mislead. But, together with his cynicism he carries a powerful conception of himself as the leader of an epochal struggle to save the nation and its way of life. If we dismiss his attacks on his opponent as mere cynicism, or as posturing to hide the influence of special interests, we risk missing the point. Indeed, in ignoring his deeper motivation, we refuse to understand what the President represents, choosing instead to disparage and belittle the power of the hope and of the fear of the loss of a world in which that hope has been realized. Those who most resist reasoning with others are those most strongly attached to the hope just considered, those whose identity, and therefore existence, is inseparably bound up with being a member of a community of shared beliefs. Out of

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this attachment emerges the familiar emphasis on values, the otherwise odd resonance of the myth of small-town America, and the aggressive insistence that all problems will be easily solved if we only bear in mind who we are. Our world will be saved if we remain resolute and firm in the face of the challenge posed by those who would replace our world with an alien one shaped by alien values, or by those who would give up values and the community they constitute in favor of the finitude of reason and its impotence in the face of mortality.

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alues are what they are. We believe in them. We assert them. But we do not think much about them. When we assert them, we say what they are; we speak the words: Children are shaped by communities. Responsibility requires serving and shaping your community. That requires cooperation. (Lakoff 2004b)

Community, responsibility, cooperation—these are our values. When we assert our values, we do not invite discussion. Shaped in what sense? What is a community? Are children well-shaped by communities, or would it be better to do it another way? Are adults well-made when as children they are subject to this process called shaping? What are we saying when we use the term “responsibility” without indicating what it is we are responsible for? The way we speak about our values tells us and those we speak to not to ask questions such as these. When we say our values we speak not about them, but about our selves:1 We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty.

This is a statement not about liberty, fulfillment, and human excellence. It tells us nothing about them; nor is it intended to.

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But, it does intend to tell us something about the person making the statement, about who he is, and about who is and who is not like him. The words we use to assert our values sound good, but they do not bear thinking about. To value life sounds good; but it is hardly clear what it means; and, without a clear definition of life, it is hard to know whether capital punishment, abortion, or assisted suicide are consistent with valuing life or not. Valuing diversity has some of the same qualities as valuing life, since it seems to say so much while actually saying very little. If you think about it, when asked to value diversity we do not know what it is we have been asked to do: when is something a valued difference and when is it not; and in any case, why are differences the sorts of things we would value rather than merely tolerate? If values are what they are, then it would seem that values can be whatever we want them to be: conservative values, Christian values, progressive values, even Colorado values. What makes something a value is not its content, however ill-defined that might be, but the way we hold it. We do not arrive at our values by thinking; we believe in them. This means that we attach ourselves to our values in a special way. Freud uses the term identification for this form of attachment when its object is another person. When we identify with something we become like it, or assert that we and the object with which we identify are already in some sense the same thing. Identification can not only be applied to other persons as Freud suggests, but it can also be applied to objects other than persons, objects such as values. The link with identification tells us something important about values, and in a way limits the set of those things that can be values to those with which it is suitable to identify. In his essay on group psychology, Freud remarks about identification that it is “the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person” (1959: 37). If this is correct and if it is correct to treat our connection with our values as an instance of identification, then it would be reasonable to assume that only those things can become values that fit comfortably into primitive emotional experiences, and in some way express

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that primitive level of experience. Since primitive emotional experience originates in the family, so does identification and so do the things with which we identify. In a sense, then, all values are family values. The primitive emotional connection has a valence; it operates in the space of good and bad.2 Our relationship with our parent is good when it provides gratification and bad when it does not. Good means gratifying; bad means frustrating. Since it is in connection with our parent that we are gratified and feel good, the goodness suffuses the relationship and becomes its defining attribute; having the relationship becomes the meaning of good and losing the relationship becomes the meaning of bad. Other terms also apply once the matter of gratification is embedded in a relationship: safety, well-being, nurturance, and so on. One meaning of nurturance is to provide primitive gratification. We feel safe when gratification is available as needed; and well-being suggests gratification or its ready availability. The goodness of the relationship becomes an attribute of the infant or young child who, in being good, deserves and receives the desired connection, while in being bad is denied the relationship and the feeling state it provides. This experience is the birthplace of the moral construction of the self in its world, and of the construction of a primitive idea of a good world, one to be sought after, preserved, and protected. This good world is the world that we fear losing; and, in our fear of losing it, we seek leadership from those who provide assurance that they will protect it if it has been threatened or retrieve it if it has been lost. Since primitive emotional experience is the experience of the good and the bad, this means that values also operate in that space and, as we would expect, are about being good and being bad, which is to say they are preeminently moral categories. We attach ourselves to our values because our values are good, and because in identifying ourselves with them we make ourselves good. This is why I have taken identification to be the primary connection we have with our values. We do not simply hold our values, we are our values. Their qualities are our qualities; their goodness is our goodness. The words we use to express

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our values sound good because they evoke feeling states that are good: community, cooperation, liberty, responsibility, and so on. In saying them we feel good because we become good. This is the purpose of the words, as it is of the values they express. If we understand the importance of saying the words, that it is meant to establish an identification, we can begin to understand how it is possible that what we do might seem at odds with our values and yet we continue to imagine that we share their goodness so long as we continue to say the words. By saying the words, we identify with them; we become good. Then, since we are good, whatever we do must be good; that is, we are as good as our words. What is important in this is the odd, though powerful, idea that saying a word creates a reality. This explains something important about the way language is used to speak about values. Meaning with respect to values is created by direct emotional connection rather than by thinking. Values have meaning because they evoke a state of being that is, which is to say feels, good. Because of this, in the world of values, words have power. They do not merely express or refer; they evoke and in that sense create the desired reality. This is the meaning values have for us and convey to others. We would not use the term reason for the way we grasp this meaning and convey it to others. Nor would we refer to the words we use to speak about our values as concepts, since to do so would be to insist that a meaning be elaborated in thought rather than simply felt. The value language offers an invitation to share an emotional experience rather than an invitation to reason with. The politics of values aims at tapping into a special form of connection. This special form of connection constitutes the world that, in the previous chapter, I suggest we fear we might lose. * *

*

Since the political process is all about the use of words, it might be helpful to consider more fully the suggestion made in the previous section that different ways of using words relate to different levels of emotional and cognitive development. There are a number of possibilities. The first, and emotionally the most

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primitive, is that words represent or symbolize experiences. In this use, the word nurturing is simply a symbol for the experience of being fed and cared for. If this is the way we are using language, then whatever emotions we have attached to the experience of being fed will also attach to the word. Yet, even within this most primitive use of language, there is an important distinction to consider. When we use the word to symbolize the experience, it matters whether we confuse the word with the experience, or recognize that the word represents an experience in thought, and therefore using the word is not the same as having the experience. The psychoanalyst Hanna Segal refers to the confusion of word with experience as the “symbolic equation” (1988). When the mind is heavily influenced by this equation, the power of words is significantly enhanced beyond the power they have when we use them to represent emotionally invested experience. The separation between the word as symbol and the experience for which it is the symbol sets us on a path away from imagining that words have power, and away from the tendency to make a too-intense investment in language. To be sure, our capacity to shift back into the more primitive mode can still be used to enhance our emotional experience of life as it sometimes is in poetry and literature for example. Yet, once we separate the word from the experience, we can also begin to use words in a new way, which is as a means for elaborating meaning in thought. In the previous section, I drew the distinction between two kinds of meaning one of which is direct and experiential, the other is elaborated in thought through thinking in words about an experience. This second use of language is the one for which the term concept applies. When we have elaborated meaning in thought, we have produced a concept. When we have concepts, then we can use words to represent not the unprocessed experience, but the concept that results from the elaboration of our experience in thought. At this point it can be said that reason enters if by reason we mean the process of elaborating meaning in words and producing, or conceiving, concepts. All of this has an important bearing on politics in part because it bears on how words relate us to others. When we

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use words to symbolize experience, then the use of words is a sharing of experience. And, when we regress toward the symbolic equation and, however unconsciously, equate the word with the experience, then saying the words is a way of having the experience with another. The word creates and conveys the experience. Thus, when the President says “I believe every person has the ability and the right to be free,” he seeks to make something true by saying that it is.3 His statement of belief is his way of saying that the truth of this statement is vitally important to him, the thought of it creates a feeling state in him; one we might imagine is shaped by a complex mix of memory and desire. It is a testament rather than an invitation to think. By contrast, when, in our communication with others, we use words to represent concepts, using words is an invitation to reason together, to think through a problem rather than share an experience. The value language and the politics of identification operate in the space where words represent and are sometimes equated with experience. To the extent that this equation exists, we will imagine that our words have tremendous power. And, if our audience operates, or can be made to operate, at the same level of experience of language, perhaps our words will in fact have power. If speaking the word freedom cannot set you free, it can surely start you on the road to freedom. When we think about the language of values in politics, we need to keep in mind this aspect of the use of language because it tells us something important about the political debate. * *

*

The first function values serve in the family is to provide children with a framework for living, especially by setting limits and goals for their interaction with others. Because identification is the earliest form of connection, it is the mode of connection to ideals suited to the young child for whom more advanced ways of having ideals, those we associate with reason, are not yet available. The child’s attachment to ideals in the form of morally held values links the child to the larger world of

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relatedness to others. It frames, shapes, and defines relatedness at the level of ideal rather than at the immediate level of feeling state, while also connecting ideals to feeling states. It looks beyond the primitive connection because it takes as its object an idea rather than a person, but it also employs that connection and depends on it. Now ideas mediate the relation with others; and, our identification with them operates, at least to some extent, through shared ideas. Using values to shape relatedness has a special importance, which is the importance of limit-setting. Attachment to ideals as values identifies the limits of self and other, protecting self from other and others from the self. In this sense, values can offer the child a way to hold the ideal of regard for self that is consistent with his or her emotional capacities. Setting limits is an important part of the maturational process, and an important part of enabling the child to feel safe in his or her world so that development can occur. Learning values is not the end of the child’s emotional and moral development, but it is a necessary stage. It happens that this stage is also the stage at which the child’s primary mode of connection is identification, and therefore the only way the child can have ideals is to identify with them, or in the usual language, believe in them. With access exclusively or primarily to identification, there is no other moral stance available, no other way to negotiate the complex and problematic world of relatedness with others. Even later in life when other ways of engaging ethical issues become available to us, the earlier form of attachment still remains active. Thus moral thinking in adults may be an expression of a continuing attachment to the earlier method for comprehending limits of self and other. But, the nature of this continuing attachment can vary as can its power over adult moral construction. Of particular importance in understanding morality in politics is a special meaning morality sometimes takes on, one less connected to the imperatives of early stages of development and more related to coping with dilemmas of relating created by problematic early relationships. To see how this other morality develops, we need to consider more closely the way morality engages matters of being good and being bad.

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As I suggest above, negotiating the world of self and other is profoundly connected to our aspiration to be good and therefore worthy of love. For values to matter, they must become significant in the process of seeking and finding gratification. Values do this by involving themselves with the great question of worthiness. For the child, gaining gratification means being worthy of it; failing to gain gratification means being unworthy. Identification with values marks the path toward worthiness by making us good. This is the way in which values and morality tap into the primitive emotional connection. But, we are not always good, nor are our parents always good to us. There is, at the most basic level of human relatedness, not only love and gratification, but also hate and deprivation. One of our most elemental capabilities is to mobilize aggression when we feel that gratification is withheld or otherwise threatened. And, because the other who really matters early in life is our parent, it is toward our parent that our aggression will be primarily directed. Furthermore, because early in life our ability to modulate our feelings is at best poorly developed, the aggression mobilized against the failed parent readily intensifies, turning into rage, which is hate in its earliest and most primitive form. The impulse to turn our aggression against our parent places us in a dilemma because to destroy the parent is to destroy the source of the good things: love, gratification, and connection. This means that we may experience our aggressive impulse toward our parent as a danger to our relationship and what it can provide. Whether we do so or not will depend on the way our parent responds to our aggression, which indicates to us whether our aggression can or cannot be tolerated. Do we experience our aggression as destroying love if not love’s object? Or do we experience our aggression as something that can be contained within a loving relationship? The parent’s ability to tolerate our aggression also allows the relationship with the parent to assist us in moderating that aggression so that it does not become overwhelming, and this helps us develop the capacity to contain and modulate our feelings. But, if our parent cannot tolerate our emotions, he

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or she cannot help us develop the capacity to contain them. Then, rather than containing our feelings, our parent conveys the message to us that they are too dangerous to be tolerated. In other words, our parent contributes to the intensification of feelings that threaten to destroy the relationship, shifting back to us the task of dealing with them in a way that will not destroy the connection. We can also think about this process of managing emotional states in the context of our relationship with our political leaders. Do they help us contain and manage our feelings? Or, do they contribute to the intensification of those feelings.4 Thus, when the Bush campaign ran ads depicting terrorists as a pack of wolves in a dark forest, the President told us that the world is an unsafe place and that his opponent cannot keep us safe from the threat of terrorism. In doing so, he tapped into our fear of powerful aggressive impulses, here depicted in the primitive form of wild animals. The purpose was not to contain anxiety but to intensify and channel it. Similarly, the campaign undertaken directly after the election to build support for the reform of Social Security played on fear rather than appealing to reason by depicting the future of Social Security as a “crisis” notwithstanding the fact that the imagined crisis would not occur for several decades and that relatively minor adjustments in the program would prevent the crisis from occurring at all. Here, again, rather than contain anxiety, the administration sought to increase it. I suggested above that, when the parent cannot tolerate the child’s aggression, the problem of managing it is shifted back to the child. To secure the relationship with the parent, or at least to keep alive the hope that it can be regained if it has been lost, the child must protect the parent from its aggression. The more fragile the connection with the parent, the more frequent and intense the aggressive feelings will be, the more the task of protecting the parent from our aggression comes to dominate in the way we orient ourselves in our world. To protect our parent from our aggression, we must turn it in another direction, away from the parent and toward a safer object, one whose destruction will not destroy the hope for

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gratification. One way we do this is to deploy our aggression not against the parent we experience as withholding from us the gratification we so intensely desire, but instead against ourselves. We decide that the parent has withheld gratification not because the parent is bad, but because we are. This means that fixing the relationship is now up to us. To fix the relationship, we must fix ourselves. To do this we must stop ourselves from expressing the aggression that threatens the relationship. We use the term repression for this mobilization of aggression against the self. But, the aggressive impulse does not simply originate in the self; it in some ways defines our selves as separate centers of desire and emotional experience. Our capacity to mobilize aggression is our capacity to assert our selves against others. In the world of primitive emotional experience, it is our capacity to assert our needs against the needs of the other. As I suggest in chapter 2, this negation of the other is our primitive way of asserting that we exist. If we do not exist over and against another, we do not exist at all. Then, the repression of the aggressive impulse threatens our existence. This is the dilemma aggression can pose for us if it becomes too overwhelming, or if it somehow gets experienced as a threat to our relatedness with those on whom we depend. The impulse to repress the self if taken too far becomes selfhate, which is the price we pay to protect those we love, but whose love for us does not feel secure. Self-hate complicates our desire to know that we are good, because it means that we know we are not. Our identification is more with the bad than with the good. Our identification with the bad self spawns two significant emotional agendas, both of which can become important in public life: repression and externalization. To be bad is to be undeserving of love, so the strategy of protecting the failed parent by taking on the badness in the relationship contains a contradiction. To resolve this contradiction we can seek to repress the bad self we have become, and we can attempt to shift it onto others. Even though we know that we are bad, if we can identify with a good self given to us from outside, for example in the

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form of values and the rules governing conduct derived from them so that what we do is good, we might sustain the hope for love. Ronald Fairbairn (1943) refers to this as the “moral defense.” It has important implications for the idea that values take on meaning from their participation in primitive emotional experience. Indeed, it is one of the most important forms primitive emotional experience can take, though it is not the only form. Having in this way repressed our bad self within, we are now set to undertake the significant task of finding the bad self outside and repressing it there. This externalizing of the bad self enables us to be twice good, first by repressing our own bad selves, and then by fighting the badness we find in the world around us. The public arena offers powerful metaphors for the battle against the externalized bad self. There are evildoers who must be destroyed, and there are the self-indulgent who must suffer the consequences of their failed self-repression. The former are to be found primarily, though not exclusively, outside the nation’s borders; they are those with alien habits and beliefs. The latter are found inside our borders; they are the liberals and their constituency of those dependent on government. In all of this, the national boundary acts as a metaphor for the self-boundary. The bad self within, represented politically by the liberal, must be repressed. The externalized bad self, represented by the terrorist, must be destroyed. Liberals can be trusted with neither of these vitally important jobs. Discipline enters naturally into this configuration. Because in the moral defense the child takes responsibility for the failure of his relationship with his parent, we can say that the child needs to be disciplined. Discipline affirms his badness and thus affirms and secures the goodness of his caretaker. This is not the discipline that assists the child’s development by setting limits that protect the child and those around him; it is the discipline that affirms that the child is bad so that the parent’s goodness can be protected. The need for discipline of this kind can help us account for the punitive element powerfully felt in much moral discourse. When attachment to values represents a solution to the dilemma created by an excess of aggression directed

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at the parent, we can expect those values to exhibit both sadistic and masochistic elements. It matters, then, whether the values offered to children represent possible solutions to the dilemma posed by an excess of aggression against an uncertain caregiver, or a framework for living with others appropriate to the child’s primitive level of cognitive and emotional development. That is, we have two kinds of values and two kinds of morality, one suited to selfhate and repression, the other to limit-setting and facilitating the child’s developmental tasks. This complicates the problem of what can and what cannot be a value, and of what it means for values to dominate in politics. Yet, although the two kinds of values are very different, because both are about regulating the conduct of those not yet able fully to regulate their own, both apply only where mature emotional functioning cannot be assumed. To be sure, it matters that in the case of the first kind of values self-regulation can never be made consistent with being worthy of love, since the self is the enemy of love’s object, while in the second, self-regulation can emerge to replace regulation of conduct by values imposed by parental authority. In both cases, however, the value language speaks not to the adult in us, but to the child, and a question we should ask is: what are the consequences for public life when political debate is made a debate over values, and thus is made to speak not to the adult, but to the child in the adult? *

* *

Let me return now to the question: what sorts of things can offer the emotional experience we associate with the assertion of values? As I have already suggested, only those things that are part of primitive emotional experience can be values; only the words that represent, or symbolize, the vital elements of that experience can be values. What might these things be? The linguist George Lakoff suggests that we answer this question by distinguishing two different orientations of the parent to the child. One he refers to as “Strict Father Morality,” the other

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as “Nurturant Parent Morality.”5 According to Lakoff, the strict father “is a moral authority who runs the family—supporting it, protecting it, and teaching his kids right from wrong through punishment. . . . ” Strict Father Morality links success to discipline and judges harshly those who fail because failure is evidence of the lack of discipline. Success in life is evidence of good character; failure is evidence of bad character. By contrast, Nurturant Parent Morality makes both parents responsible for their children. “Their job is to nurture their children and to raise them to be nurturers.” Thus, there are two moralities, a morality of discipline and a morality of nurturance. These two moralities, or models as Lakoff terms them, shape two political trends, which he terms conservative and progressive. The first emphasizes self-interest, free markets, and rewards for those who through their success have proven themselves worthy. It encourages a punitive attitude toward the poor: “there will always be losers and the losers deserve to lose.” The second emphasizes political equality and responsible government. Lakoff suggests that we all have access to both models, and that which prevails will depend on which model is activated. The trick, as he puts it is “to get your model activated in politics,” which you do by “using your language.” However we judge the specifics of this scheme, in important respects it offers a concrete expression for the idea that values are ultimately family values, since the values Lakoff discusses arise from early emotional experience and connect us back to that experience. Lakoff ’s discussion also supports the idea that in the world of values, words have power: you gain your ends by “using your language.” The implication of Lakoff ’s scheme is that primitive emotional experience is about nurturance and discipline. Our values express one or the other. Our goal in asserting our values is to assert a world ruled by one of these two principles, and in asserting it to retrieve it: to make it real by mobilizing a political community around the favored principle and around the policies that, if enacted, would enable us to regain a world we once had, or imagine we did.

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Evidently, Lakoff ’s distinction has some affinity with the distinction drawn in the previous section between two kinds of values: those linked to self-hate and repression, and those linked to limit-setting and regard for others. We can account for the desire for discipline underlying Strict Father Morality by appealing to the moral defense, and the need for punishment embedded in it. And, we might account for Nurturant Parent Morality as an expression of a primitive emotional experience not dominated by the need to cope with excess aggression through repression. But we cannot be sure if this is correct until we satisfy ourselves that the term nurture is being used in a way consistent with regard for self and other, and does not, in its own way, express the moral defense. To nurture carries a number of related meanings including to feed or nourish, to discipline, and “to care for and encourage the growth or development of; to foster, cultivate.”6 To assert nurture as our preeminent value does not resolve the matter of the role of coping with aggression if, for example, it refers to discipline, or if it suggests that we deny and repress the powerful role of aggression in the parent-child relationship. And, even if it does suggest a less repressive morality, this does not resolve the question of the consequences of making public life a place where people are encouraged and expected to regress to primitive emotional experience, however benevolent that might have been. There can be nothing more primitive than to nurture if by nurture we mean to feed or to nourish. Because of this, it could be argued that nurturing in this sense evokes a condition too primitive to be spoken of in the language of values, a state in which identification and its object are immediate and concrete, whereas to speak of values requires at least a step in the direction of more abstract thought since it requires that we identify with an ideal. If this is the case, then to nurture in the sense of feed does not offer an alternative to discipline in the space of values since it does not really operate in that space. If to nurture means not to feed or nourish but to foster the development of, then it concerns itself with an end that looks beyond primitive emotional experience in a way that also, but

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for different reasons, fits poorly into the rhetoric of values. This is because the point of development is to enable us to live a life outside the bonds of the family, a life involving relationships with others based on something other than identification. This, we might assume, is the sort of life we lead in the public realm. If identification is the earliest form of connection, then it exists for us prior to and independently of our emotional development. To consider development as an end means that we must move beyond the system of relatedness and meaning shaped by identification and therefore by values. Nurturing as facilitating development means creating an environment within which the child can, so far as it is able, gain the capacity to live autonomously. The term we use for this capacity is reason. But, if this is what we mean by nurturing, it is hard to see how it can be a value, which is a norm we hold not through reason but identification. Thus nurturing fails to compete with discipline in the space of values because it is either too primitive or not primitive enough; it either precedes the attachment to values in the form of ideals or suggests movement beyond that form of attachment. One option might be to redefine the goal of the child’s development and therefore the meaning of nurturing so that they do not involve reason as an essential element, and therefore do not take us beyond the world of values and of attachment in the form of identification. This alternative to reason is the goal of assuring the child will find its way into the community. Emphasis on the ideal of community in Nurturant Parent Morality suggests that it is meant to place merger into the group at the forefront of the solution to the problem of limit-setting. Although we might treat this as the goal of development, in a sense it takes us in a direction different from that mapped out by the idea of development. Embeddedness in the group is an alternative to development, and what the child needs to achieve this end is not development, but to learn the norms of group life, those family values applied at the level of the extended family we refer to as community. Learning the norms of group life exercises not the capacity for reason that must be

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gained by development, but a capacity with which the child is already endowed, which is the capacity for identification, man’s capacity in Wilfred Bion’s words “to sink his identity in the herd” (1961: 89). Nurturance as discipline fits this goal well. To sink our identity in the herd requires that we suppress our impulse to live autonomously, to follow in our conduct the judgment that arises from our selves and to seek to express in living our “unique presence of being” (Bollas 1989: 9). Discipline is then an important element in achieving that embeddedness in the group associated with morality and identification with values. Yet, although linking us in this way to the group, discipline, unlike feeding and nourishing, at least recognizes the presence of the impulse toward autonomy. If to nurture means to feed and nourish, then it holds back our development even more than the values associated with discipline do, because they at least include the need to move beyond the primitive motherinfant dyad. This is why discipline is a part of development. To live a life embedded in the group requires that we solve the problem of living in a particular way. We know how to live because we have internalized through identification a model of living immediately from our parents and indirectly from the larger community of which they are a part. Internalizing a way of being is suggested by the idea that the family must “shape” the child. This is the earliest solution to the problem available to the child, the one to which his original endowment is well suited. It simply requires the exercise of the capacity for identification. Identification is a vital element along the path toward becoming a person. Without it, we would never get beyond conduct determined by our in-born or natural instincts. But, the language of values does not simply recognize this vital work done by identification; it tends to subsume more mature forms of relatedness under the same heading. When we treat the goal of the family not as instilling values but as development, this leads us in a direction different from that so far considered, away from morality and the repression implicit in it and toward reason and freedom. One way to formulate this is in terms of the idea of a “facilitating

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environment.” This is the idea that, rather than shaping the child, the parent provides an environment in which concern for the child’s unique pattern of self-development is the guiding principle. As Donald Winnicott puts it, “the parents do not have to make their baby as the artist has to make his picture or the potter his pot. The baby grows in his or her own way if the environment is good enough” (1965: 96). * *

*

I have spoken so far about identification with ideals as the process that makes those ideals values suitable to occupy their central place in the moral construction of the self in its world. But, consistent with the spirit of the politics of identification, the moral ideal in politics also engages identification as Freud defines it, which involves not ideas but persons. The politics of identification does this by discovering in the world a set of persons who embody its favored ideals or virtues. The tendency of the politics of identification to operate this way expresses its link to primitive emotional experience since it tends to substitute the concrete (real persons or groups of persons) for the abstract (ideals taken in their own right). As it turns out, however, these concrete persons are not as real as they seem, and in identifying with them a more complex process is engaged than the primitive connection to which Freud refers us, although that primitive connection remains its driving force. Each of the opposed formulations of morality operates within its own special construction of the others with whom it offers identification: on one side identification with the wealthy and powerful as symbols of virtue and God’s favor, on the other side identification with the dispossessed as symbols of innocence and virtue. God favors the meek, who will inherit the earth. His kingdom is barred to the rich, who have as much chance of entering as a camel has of passing through the eye of a needle. Or, God helps those who help themselves. You prove that you are one of his chosen by devotion to duty in a calling, especially the calling of making money and amassing wealth.

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The politics of identification operates in the polarized space of good and bad, either/or. One such space is the space of victims and victimizers; another is the space of those who make the right and those who make the wrong choices. These are notably different spaces, though they share one vital feature in common, which is the splitting of good and bad, and the tendency to isolate one from the other. One is either a victim or a victimizer. One either chooses Jesus or one chooses the devil. There simply are no other possibilities because to not choose Jesus means to have chosen against Him; to question the innocence of the victim is to participate in his or her victimization. If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. Yet, although the two moralities have much in common, they are far from equivalent. An opposition defined in the space of choice differs from that defined in the space of victimization in one vital way: it insists on will and responsibility. The space of victim and victimizer is the space of fate. To be a victim is to have no choice; all responsibility lies on the other side, that of the victimizer. To identify with the victim is to identify with one who has no choice. By contrast, responsibility for the choice to do the right thing and live the right life falls squarely on the individual making that choice. To live the right life is an act of will. So, we might say that the divide between the morality of identification with the victim and the morality of identification with the self-made man (or woman) is all about will. Will provides a connecting point between the religious morality of self-repression and the secular ideals of freedom and democracy: “A religion that demands individual moral accountability, and encourages the encounter of the individual with God, is fully compatible with the rights and responsibilities of self-government.”7 The connection is underlined when the ideal of choice is made an ideal of the “right choices” (Gottlieb 2004: 127–28). Here, freedom is understood not as an opportunity to find the self and make its presence in the world known, but as a test of virtue. If a liberal values the self as end then, paradoxical though it may seem, this way of conceiving freedom

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conflicts with the liberal ideal. It expresses an illiberal notion of liberty. The rhetoric of values then means connecting the ideal of freedom with that of responsibility and discipline, especially as expressed in the idea of will. Our “will is firm” and our “word is good.” There are those who will attempt “to shake the will of our country and our friends,” but our will is strong and they must fail.8 Freedom is not, then, simply or primarily something to be enjoyed, let alone indulged; it is a test of will to be passed or failed. Do we or do we not have the discipline and fortitude to make the right choices? Will we choose life over abortion and birth control, abstinence over sex, the traditional family over gay marriage? In other words, will the exercise of the self lead to indulgence and weakness, which is the liberal path, or to repression, which is the path of virtue? One issue that vividly engages the difference between the morality of will and freedom and the morality of nurturance is the issue of equality and inequality. Those who identify with the wealthy and powerful have no use for equality, which simply denies the virtue for which the acquisition of wealth and power provides evidence. To impose equality is to reward those who are not worthy and punish those who are, making will and choice of no account. For those who identify with the victim, inequality affirms victimization; indeed, it is a form of victimization. Inequality rewards the victimizer and punishes the victim, thus reversing what justice would demand. The end is to gain virtue through identification with a chosen object. But to gain virtue in this way, the chosen object must be constructed in the polarized space of good and bad, either/or. This means that the object must be idealized, which is to say made into a fantasized construction that can then be projected onto groups and individuals in the external world. That the poor may be neither innocent nor virtuous does not matter because what we identify with is the innocence and virtue we attribute to them. That the rich may get that way through vice rather than virtue does not matter because what we identify with is an idealized object we know is the repository of virtue. The rest, which is to say the real, we simply ignore. This is all the politics

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of identification. In it, reality does not matter, but imagination animated by hope does. * *

*

The politics of values is politics immersed in the agendas of family life; it is a politics infused with the struggle over dependency need, over discipline, and, more generally, over primitive hate and desire. It shapes a public life in which the participants act, and are encouraged to act, as children rather than adults. However appropriate it may be for the young child to learn values, to insist that public life be shaped by values is to place the world of adult living, which is the world of reason and freedom, in jeopardy. To seek in our political leader someone who can play the role of the stern father or the nurturing mother is to treat government as the agency that will return us to childhood, or at least support the fantasy that we need not move beyond the primitive emotional bonds of family life. Fantasies of government as parent bring into play in the sphere of politics fears and wishes about our formative relationships. Such fantasies are all too powerful and real. As anxieties increase, due either to objective circumstances or to the emergence of leaders bent on promoting that result, the tendency to regress in the direction of a politics of identification gains strength. One result of this is the increasing dominance of values over reason in determining political outcomes. Lakoff describes the challenge for those troubled by the role values have lately played in politics as one of activating an alternative language to the one that has come to dominate. According to Lakoff, we all have access both to Strict Father Morality and Nurturant Parent Morality; each exists within us as a potential. Which dominates depends on which gets activated, and that depends on who speaks the most compelling language. This is, in its way, an optimistic view; at least it is for those committed to the morality currently less favored by the public. To gain the advantage in public life, all they need do is change their language. The less favored morality is not

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intrinsically less popular, just poorly promoted. It is not blocked by any fundamental inconsistency it might have with the basic configuration of people’s inner worlds: their ways of thinking and the way they invest meaning in what they think. There are, I think, two important problems with conceiving public life in this way. First, missing equally from the prevailing morality and from the one Lakoff would substitute for it is any place for reason. Nothing is said about the possibility that, rather than activating primitive emotional experience, whether centering on nurturing or on discipline, we might seek to activate the capacity for reason by speaking the language of reason rather then the language of values. If, by progress, we have in mind the development of the individual from embeddedness to autonomy and from identification to reason, then what could be more progressive than activating a capacity to think outside the framework of values and morality? The problem with this idea is that to take the step toward reason is to take a step away from identification, and doing so limits the power of words we associate with identification. Evidently, reason is not something we can simply activate by saying the right words, since the idea that we could do so places us back in the world before reason. And, because reason is a developmental achievement, what is needed is not simply to activate a capacity already present, but to facilitate its development. Even within the values framework, a second problem arises for Lakoff ’s optimistic conclusion, which, after all, depends not only on the co-presence of the two models in each citizen’s inner world, but also on the hypothesis that neither predominates there in such a way that would prevent our activating the alternative by using the appropriate language. Yet, it may be that those drawn to Strict Father Morality are drawn in that direction not simply because someone has used a particular language, but by a powerful need to exert discipline on themselves and others in accord with the dictates of the moral defense briefly considered above. If this is so, then the impulse in the direction of Strict Father Morality must be a very powerful one originating

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in early experiences that produced profound uncertainty about the relationship with a primary caregiver. This uncertainty produces in the child a powerful need to control and repress the self in the interests of preserving hope to secure or retrieve a vulnerable or lost state of gratification and well being. These powerful impulses cannot be countered by saying words that do not speak their language. If this is the case, then the debate over values is not a struggle over who is most adept at activating their favored values in an otherwise passive electorate, but over whose words speak the language that electorate needs to hear. The question about the words the electorate needs to hear is closely related to another question: why would an adult be drawn to the politics of identification rather than to a politics that speaks the language of reason? The answer has to do, I think, with an agenda built into the moral defense at the most fundamental level. This is the agenda of fixing the self so that it can be made worthy of love. If this is correct, then the words the electorate needs to hear are that the self can be fixed and that fixing the self will secure gratification by securing the return of the loving parent. In public life we cannot, of course, say these words; so instead we say other words that carry the same emotional meaning: We will kill all the terrorists and thus make the world safe. We will fix the economy so that prosperity is assured. Under our leadership, there will be neither domestic insecurity nor foreign threat. We will remain or become once again the best and the most powerful nation on earth. We will provide moral leadership and appoint to positions of responsibility only those of the highest moral character. We will fight evil by fighting our own evil selves as they have been projected into the world in the form of evildoers. In the language of religion, this is the task of making the world a place well suited to God. Public life must enable us to undertake the work of fixing the self outside the self; it must enable us to transform internal work into the task of fixing the world outside. Morality in politics means the politics of making the world good. But, for this to work, the outside world must be bad. If the world is bad, then it must be made right. This making the world right is the work of moral renewal.

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or those bent on moral renewal, to fix the world means to fix the family. Thus, according to Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition, the goals of the Christian conservative movement are all about the family. How, he asks, can we “restore civility, compassion, and faith to our lives?” The answer, he tells us, is by restoring the family: “[w]hat religious conservatives want is to make the restoration of the two-parent, intact family with children the central and paramount public policy priority of the nation” (Reed 1994: 141, 91). With the restoration of the family, “violent crime would decline and neighborhoods would return to safety,” “civility would return to public discourse as well as private affairs,” “more young people would get married and stay married,” “children would go to school without worrying about encountering other students who brandished guns or knives in the halls,” “hard work, diligence, and frugality would be generally acknowledged as virtues.” To achieve all this, “we need a spiritual and moral renewal in America that causes wives and husbands to stay together, children to honor their parents, and neighbors to help one another again” (Reed 1994: Chapter 2). The world we have lost is the world of the family. The key to regaining that world is moral renewal. The key to moral renewal, it turns out, is discipline. In his book, The New Dare to Discipline, James Dobson, head of the Colorado Springs–based organization Focus on the Family, offers his image of a world fallen from grace, a world where

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“wandering droves of children and teens are shooting, knifing, and bludgeoning each other at an unprecedented rate,” and where “extreme violence” is a reality of daily life (Dobson 1992: 206–7). Briefly stated, what has gone wrong is that we have failed to discipline our children: Children thrive best in an atmosphere of genuine love, undergirded by reasonable, consistent discipline. In a day of widespread drug usage, immorality, sexually transmitted diseases, vandalism, and violence, we must not depend on hope and luck to fashion the critical attitudes we value in our children. Permissiveness has not simply failed as an approach to child rearing. It’s been a disaster for those who have tried it. (Dobson 1992: 7)

The problem is violence and immorality; the solution is discipline. This also means that parents, because they have caused the problem, can solve it. Indeed, the solution is simple enough: parents must take responsibility for their children: We have permitted this mess to occur! We allowed immoral television and movie producers to make their fortunes by exploiting our kids. . . . We stood by passively while Planned Parenthood taught our teenagers to be sexually promiscuous. We allowed them to invade our schools and promote an alien value system that contradicted everything we believed and loved. We granted profit-motivated abortionists unsupervised and unreported access to our minor daughters, while we were thinking about something else. We, as parents, are guilty of abandoning our children to those who would use them for their own purposes. (Dobson 1992: 206, emphases in original).

The result of parental failure has been a “moral catastrophe.” Of all the failures in parenting, “none is more disgraceful than the sexual immorality that has permeated the world in which we live,” since “there is no more effective way to destroy the institution of the family than to undermine the sexual exclusivity on which it is based” (Dobson 1992: 206). And, once you have destroyed the institution of the family, you have destroyed

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the foundation of social order, setting loose those roving bands of violent children about which Dobson seems so concerned. Indeed, it can be said that what we might refer to as the unruly child represents, for Dobson, the central threat to society and the central problem of child raising. His book is all about what to do about the unruly child, specifically how to assure that the unruliness within the child will not be allowed to destroy society’s moral fabric and the way of life founded on traditional moral values. Although to some degree Dobson’s indictment of the state of our world is offered as an analysis, he does not really provide any evidence for the existence of widespread social disorder, or any argument that a causal link exists between permissiveness, especially sexual permissiveness, and social disorder. What he offers instead is more of a lament and loudly asserted condemnation along the following lines: man has fallen from grace. The world has declined into chaos and destruction. There is no safe haven. The cause is the culture of permissiveness and especially parental abdication of responsibility for the disciplining of children. Ultimately, this failure results from a denial of God: “It is time for every God-fearing adult to get on our faces in repentance before the Almighty.” “Where in God’s name have we been? How bad does it have to get before we say enough is enough” (Dobson 1992: 205, 206)? Since Dobson does not even attempt to provide reasons linking cause and effect, we can assume that the links operate at a different level. Where reason cannot provide an account, we can assume that a subjective or emotional rather than objective truth is being asserted. The emotional validity of the hypothesis that social disorder results from permissive parenting depends, I think, on two crucial elements of that hypothesis: the fear of the unruly child and the fear of extramarital sex. In light of Freud’s theories, it would be easy enough to merge these two elements by treating the child’s unruliness as an expression of as yet untamed sexual drives, and the fear of the unruly child as a fear of childhood sexuality. Since, in Freud’s theory, the child’s sexual drive is directed at the parent, this fear will be further compounded by the parent’s response to being

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the object of the child’s sexual impulse. The child’s sexuality is, then, the primary threat to the family and by extension to society as a whole. The family must, then, contain sexuality; indeed, the family is here conceived as the social institution within which the threat posed by sexuality is subject to control. The threat within the family is then projected outward as Dobson’s roving band of violent children. Yet, however real the child’s sexual drive may be, and however inevitably it will take the parent as its object, the reality of childhood sexuality does not in itself account for the threat experienced by Dobson and those who find his construction of the problem compelling. The question remains: what factor or factors account for the adult experience of the child as destructive to the point of threatening social order? To answer this question we need to consider how this destructive power is invested by the parent in the child so that the parent experiences the child’s natural impulses as bearing the potential to cause a “moral catastrophe.” In other words, we need to consider the possibility that the roving bands of children bent on destruction represent the projection of something within the parent, something intimately linked to the parent’s own desires. This would mean that the impulse to discipline the child is an impulse to employ the child as an external representation of or container for the adult’s own impulses, especially the adults own aggressive sexuality, and that to discipline the child is to act out repression of the self using the child as a surrogate. The conclusion to emphasize in this is that the program of moral renewal has a powerful emotional source in the experience of an internal unruly child, which is another way of referring to the experience of the adult’s desire as an aggressive and potentially destructive force that must be radically constrained. If we formulate the problem in the language of the moral defense, then the construction appears more or less as follows: For the infant or young child, the world consists of the family, or more specifically, of the emotional relationships sustained there. The destruction of the world means the destruction of those relationships. The destruction of the relationships refers to any event that brings about the disruption of the gratifying connection

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with the parent. When, as is the case in the moral defense, the child has taken on responsibility for the disruption of the connection with the parent, this means that the child experiences its need for the parent as the causal factor in the loss of the parent’s love. This is because the child’s need for the parent is easily the dominant factor in the relationship with the parent, and, indeed, likely has played a role in disrupting that relationship. In other words, the child experiences its need as too intense for the parent to tolerate; so, as a result, need provokes loss of connection rather than gratification. When this experience becomes a dominant element in the child’s early emotional life, the child may be set on the path toward the moral defense, though other outcomes are also possible. As an adult, the early experience is retained as an active factor in shaping relatedness with others, both within the family and outside. This retaining of the early experience is what I refer to above as the internal unruly child. For those shaped by the dynamic processes just briefly summarized, morality takes on a radical meaning. It becomes the solution to an emotional dilemma created by the experience of desire as an aggressive and destructive force. * *

*

The moral catastrophe referred to above results when “we have forgotten God and disregarded His Holy ordinances.” Abdication of parental responsibility follows from loss of faith, and moral renewal means the renewal of faith, which would lead parents to take on their responsibilities. Yet, what has marked public life in recent years is the exclusion of faith, an exclusion that all but assures the dire consequences alluded to by Reed and Dobson. Thus, although the proximate cause of the loss of our world is the breakdown of discipline, the underlying cause is the exclusion of faith from public life. It will be useful therefore to consider faith and its role in public life more closely. The feeling that people of faith have been excluded is important. In the world to be gained, “people of faith would not be denied a place at the table, or an effective voice in the

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democratic process. . . . People of faith have a right to be heard.” The movement toward a faith-based politics is “best understood as an essentially defensive struggle. . . . No one is denying people of faith the right to vote or to live where they choose. But their rights to freedom of speech and religion are under constant attack whenever they enter the public arena” (Reed 1994: 11, 18, 41–42). According to Reed, as a result of their exclusion from the political process, people of faith have been relegated to the “back of the bus.” To this way of thinking, people of faith in America are an embattled majority, deprived of their rights and freedoms by those who would exclude them from the political process on the grounds that faith has no place there. They are not a threat to freedom, but the victims of those who are. If we take these claims seriously, then not only has a world been lost; it has been taken away. When I suggest that we take these claims seriously, I do not have it in mind to offer a judgment on their validity as an indictment of law and public policy. Rather, I have it in mind to consider them from a subjective standpoint. That is, the claims are not mere posturing, but an expression of real feelings. Those advancing them have grievances and feel excluded. These feelings tell us something important about the meaning of moral renewal. They tell us that this is a movement of people who have been deprived of something rightfully theirs and that faith is the reason for their deprivation. Reed formulates the grievance felt by Christian conservatives in the language of right. But, we could also formulate it in a more primitive language, which is the language of need. For the child, need imposes on the parent a kind of obligation, and it is this aspect of primitive need that encourages the later translation of matters of need into matters of right. Indeed, emotional maturation makes it possible to distinguish need from right, making it possible to imagine a need whose satisfaction does not carry the sort of imperative we associate with right. This possibility also allows us to imagine right as something other than the force imposed by need in a relation of primitive dependence on a caretaker.

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If we consider the sense of grievance and exclusion as a response to unattended need, then we might begin to understand the lament referred to here as a response to early parental failure. Doing so clearly fits well with the focus on the family, and the urgent need to fix the family so that it will be intact, available, and attentive to children. In considering the lament of the excluded majority an expression of an early experience of unattended need, I do not mean to dismiss their diagnosis of social ills by reducing it to the expression of a primitive emotional agenda. The diagnosis may have meaning and also be an expression of those early agendas. Even if that is the case, knowing how the diagnosis expresses urgently felt and unsatisfied childhood need can tell us something important about the specific tilt imparted to the political ends pursued in the name of fixing the family. In the previous chapter, I considered how the moral turn can express parental failure and the child’s response to it. What, following Fairbairn, I refer to there as the moral defense emerges as a response to unreliable parenting, which is to say parenting that offers the child insufficient care and love. The moral defense begins, then, with a kind of deprivation, a failure of attentiveness to the child’s need that can later in life be translated into the language of right: the right to be heard, the right to have concerns attended to, the right to preserve and protect life. Consider, in this connection, the preoccupation of the Christian conservative with protecting the unborn. To be aborted is to be deprived of attention in the most radical sense: to have one’s life dismissed as of no account. Preoccupation with preventing abortion might, then, express identification with the aborted fetus, and radical opposition to abortion might be understood as a way of communicating a sense that a nurturing relationship with a parent was aborted too early and needed care made unavailable. The moral defense itself can be considered the response to a life unattended to. The radical inattentiveness of the abortion-seeking mother must be stopped so that the unborn fetus can be saved from the fate the adult

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opponent of abortion feels, as a child, he or she suffered. This fate is the death of the soul imposed as self-repression. The fight against abortion then becomes a metaphorical battle to save the self from the destructive consequences—the living death—that results from a self-absorbed and inattentive parent. Put another way, our own aborted self is projected onto the unborn fetus, and the act of saving the fetus becomes a way of saving our own dead selves. In the moral defense, the child saves the parent at the cost of its own life. To be sure, the child continues to live in the physical sense of the term. But something vital inside has been sacrificed in the relationship: the sense of self-worth necessary to sustain an inner vitality that can animate a real life. The sacrifice of this something vital, which is a sacrifice of life, protects the goodness of the parent. In a sense, then, the moral defense represents a life aborted in the service of the parent. In its way, the child’s taking responsibility for the failure of the relationship is an act of faith; indeed, it is the original act of faith. It is a statement of faith since it insists on a reality for which there is little supporting evidence: the goodness of the parent. It is also a statement that the child has the power to make the bad parent good, a power to be exerted through an act of will: the child wills itself to be bad and its parent to be good. This act of will is also an act of self-deception, since the child dismisses the most profound knowledge that it possesses, which is the knowledge that the parent is responsible for the failed relationship. But, faith may not be enough to counter the pressure of external reality. It may also be necessary to remake the parent on the model of the faith-invested object. This is the power of faith to change the world: “[y]et, there’s a power, a wonder-working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people.”1 But becoming bad so that the parent can be made good now stands in the way of the relationship with the parent and of the gratification it alone can provide. There is now a good object in the world but we cannot, so to speak, reach it. The problem then is to break down the barrier that our badness places between us and the parent we have, through our faith, made good. Since

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we are bad, to do this we must now become good, which is to say worthy of the gratifying relationship with the believedto-be good parent. To become good, we must, in Reed’s words, “honor” our parents. This means that we must repress those forces inside us that we imagine have brought about the loss of the care and love that, on another level, we consider to be rightfully ours. We must repress our desire to satisfy ourselves, and we must repress the aggression we mobilize when satisfaction is not made available. If there is one word that best describes the aggressive desire we experience as the cause of the breakdown of our relationship and therefore the loss of our primitive world of gratification that word would be greed. As children, we are needy, and we are dependent in our need. And, as children we little recognize the needs of others that might get in the way of our own. This is a kind of greediness, and it can certainly be experienced as greed by those whose failure to gratify our need provokes our aggression. The problem is then to overcome our greediness, to renounce our selfish desires, and turn our energies to serving not our selves but something larger: “[i]n the sacrifice of soldiers, the fierce brotherhood of firefighters, and the bravery and generosity of ordinary citizens, we have glimpsed what a new culture of responsibility could look like. We want to be a nation that serves goals larger than self.”2 In serving the greater good we might over a lifetime become good once again and therefore worthy of love. If we were to attempt to summarize all of this in brief, we might say that in an effort to cope with an unreliable caretaker the young child forms an idea. The idea is that he has the power to fix what has gone wrong, make good what has gone bad. The idea in other words is that all will be well if he can fix the family. To fix the family means to make the parent love the child and the child worthy of love. To make the child worthy of love means to mobilize his will to repress his greed. Indeed, to summarize the whole matter even more briefly, the problem is to overcome the greed of both parent and child so that the parents will care for the child rather than for themselves and so that the child will honor his parents

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and grow up to be a good parent. But, when we seek to repress our greed, we risk losing something vital that is sometimes identified with it, which is our desire. The confusion of desire with greed is often a part of the moral stance, so the risk to which I have just referred may be all too real. And, because desire is the foundation of love and compassion, when repression of greed means repression of desire, it opens the door to hate. The problem with the moral defense in politics lies not primarily in the conclusion that we need to fix the family, but in what it tells us we need to do to accomplish that end. Driven by the moral defense, we will meet the parent’s failure to love the child with the admonition that the parent ought to love the child, or, if that is not possible, ought to act as if he or she did. Put another way, the moral defense directs us to substitute duty for love. The difference between the two is significant. Substituting duty for love places a punitive, even sadistic, impulse at the heart of the child’s experience of family life. It also imbues the child with contempt for truth and an impulse toward deception, since he experiences his most basic relationship as one organized around deceit of the most fundamental kind. Put another way, the end of morality in politics is not to assure that the child will be loved, something we could hardly do in any case, but to assure that each child receives a strong measure of moral rightness in place of love. Morality in politics expresses the powerful urge to fix the loveless family by repressing love’s source, which is to say by repressing desire, which is why, as I suggest above, hate plays such a large role here. Many of those dismayed by the moral trend in politics sense the pleasure in depriving and repressing others that seems so prominent there. To a substantial degree, moral renewal means self-repression, and there should be no surprise in discovering that those who would lead us toward moral renewal find gratification in repression. Thus, however true it may be that moral renewal is meant to fix the family so that the needs of children will be attended to, the way those needs are understood incorporates a large element of repression, so attention

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can mean sadistic forms of discipline and control. This is most obvious in the area of sexuality, where moral renewal means sexual repression. But moral renewal is not limited to sexuality, and extends to all expression of human vitality and spontaneity, or what Winnicott refers to as the “true self.” We will not find this quality of moral renewal surprising if we consider more fully the implication of Freud’s proposition that identification is the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person. This means that the child internalizes his primary relationships, shaping his self to fit those relationships, becoming like the parent he experiences there. And he does so whether those relationships are nurturing and good, or depriving and bad. That the parent may not be doing such a good job of parenting does not mean that the child will invent an alternative model of relating to replace the failed model he experiences every day. Rather, immersed in a relationship with a bad parent, the child takes on those very qualities that make the relationship bad for him; he gradually takes the shape of the bad parent, a result that is already implied in the moral defense, which depicts a situation in which the child is identified in this way. The implication of this for the politics of moral renewal is that running parallel with the drive to fix the bad parent and bad relationship is an equally and possibly more powerful drive to recreate it. Wherever we find the impulse to fix the relationship by assuring that children will have the attentive parenting we did not, we will also find the impulse to reenact our own deprivation with ourselves in the role of the parent. We can do this most readily by investing attentiveness with a sadistic controlling quality so that what appears to be attending to the child’s needs so the child can thrive becomes the reenactment of the assaultive and depriving qualities experienced in the parent’s original family setting. That these qualities are offered in the name of care only means that a significant element of fraudulence combines with sadism to make up the agenda of moral renewal. This is, I think, an even darker side of inattentive parenting. When the parents ignore their children’s need because they are preoccupied with their own, the child may well form an interpretation

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of the relationship along the lines of the moral defense. But when the adult acts out an identification with a neglectful parent, the mistreatment of the child takes on an added dimension. Now, the child is subject not simply to inattentiveness, but to a significant measure of cruelty. Concern with issues of attentiveness and dependence animate the agenda of moral renewal as that shapes an attitude toward government. For the Christian conservative, government and the liberalism that feeds government at the expense of the family are all about greed: “[a]nd, yes we do expect government to curb its appetites so that the American family may thrive once again.” In Reed’s wished-for world: “Far less of the wages of hard-working mothers and fathers would be gobbled up by the confiscatory taxes that currently consume so much of the family budget” (Reed 1994: xvi, 34). Greed is a powerful force against caring for others and attending to their needs; indeed, for the Christian conservative, greed and self-interest are hardly distinguished; any redirection of care toward the self deprives others. Thegovernment, once imagined as the locus of greed, becomes an uncaring and self-regarding force. The government, in other words, is used to represent the citizen’s greed, and control over government becomes a way we can control our own greed experienced to exist outside our selves. This makes the government cold and compassionless, hardly the institution a caring society would put in charge of the needy. This same government, with its cold bureaucracy, competes with the warm compassion of private charitable organizations much as greed and hate compete with compassion and love. Thus, in the wished-for world, “contributions to private organizations would rise as Americans, animated by faith, took it upon themselves to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and build housing for the homeless” (Reed 1994: 35). And yet this agenda, which is so bent on returning compassion to public life, insists on deprivation since it drives to destroy the capacity of government to assure the welfare of those unable to secure their own. In this sense, just as the moral defense replaces love with duty, compassionate conservatism

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makes caring mean deprivation. Indeed, depriving others (the “needy”) of government support can be understood as an expression of the compassionless greediness attributed to government. * *

*

The well-functioning family that has been repaired by the power of moral rightness is a well-ordered family. Here, well ordered refers to the imposition of strict controls over conduct that assure it will follow appropriate rules. It is in the end up to us to live our lives in accord with these rules: “[w]e believe in open societies ordered by moral conviction.”3 When we give up on the rules, and loosen our control over conduct, the result is chaos. Those who oppose moral renewal are, then, the forces of chaos and destruction. Those who would destroy faith would destroy all that is and can be good in the world. They would replace order with chaos, discipline with license and selfindulgence, caring and compassion with greed. Those who would make politics a moral battlefield see in their enemy man’s greed and especially its powerfully destructive potential. For those who see the world through the lens of morality, desire can never be clearly separated from greed. Thus, having equated desire with greed and greed with chaos and destruction, the representative of righteousness in politics must carry on a battle against desire to save the world from destruction, and make it a place well suited to God. I know of no better language to describe this goal than that used by George W. Bush to describe those he judges the enemies of democracy: “they seek to impose a joyless conformity, to control every life and all of life.”4 When the language we use to describe our enemy is a language that describes our selves as well or better, then it is likely that the struggle against our enemy is an aspect of a struggle against our selves. The enemy represents our aggressively greedy self when it seeks to destroy constraints and indulge the self; and the enemy represents our self-hate when it seeks to take all joy from our lives. This, at least by

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implication, makes the war against terrorism an act in the drama of family life, which is itself an expression of the inner struggle for redemption of those tangled up in the dilemmas created by the moral defense. In light of this connection, we can begin to see how the project of moral renewal and focus on the family might become the task of fighting evildoers across the globe. Put another way, we can begin to see how the formulation of the problem internally provides a template for the interpretation of the problem externally and ultimately on a global scale. It is not so much that the idea animating the domestic agenda spawns the pursuit of evildoers across the globe, but that whatever problems are experienced on the two levels must prompt a common interpretation and response. It is not, then, that killing terrorists must be part of family renewal, but that, so far as there are terrorists, the thinking that makes the moral majority victims will be activated by them, and the solutions will operate in the same space. We might find this interpretation more plausible if we bear in mind the proposition advanced in chapter 4, that all values are family values, and therefore that the moral drama is ultimately a family drama. If this is true, then the larger arena of world affairs is, for those absorbed in the rhetoric of morality, a stage for the reenactment of a family drama. The two arenas cannot be clearly distinguished. One acts as a kind of metaphor for the other: the nation as metaphor for the family, and saving the nation as emotionally equivalent to the work of saving the family. My intent in making this suggestion is not to reduce international affairs to family affairs, or insist that no real differences separate them. On the contrary, it is precisely to the degree that they are different that the moral agenda works poorly as a template for foreign policy because it sees the two as essentially the same and can conceive no meaningful difference where the difference is essential. We are by now familiar with the rhetoric at both levels. In foreign affairs, the goal is to kill the terrorists and to take away their safe haven in those terrorist-friendly regimes the

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President refers to as the “axis of evil.” We also know what the key elements are in defeating terrorism: the strength of will to act decisively and a firm commitment to freedom and democracy. “In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.” “Where freedom takes hold, hatred gives way to hope. When freedom takes hold, men and women turn to the peaceful pursuit of a better life. American values and American interests lead in the same direction. We stand for human liberty.” And, “liberty can change the world.”5 *

*

*

Strength of will and a firm commitment to democracy are necessary elements in defeating the enemy, but they are not sufficient. There is one additional element: a deeply rooted desire for freedom and democracy on the part of the peoples of nations currently oppressed by dictatorial regimes sympathetic to the aims of the terrorists. The President insists that this element must surely be present:6 I believe every person has the ability and the right to be free. . . . And we believe that freedom—the freedom we prize—is not for us alone, it is the right and capacity of all mankind. I believe in the universality of freedom . . . I believe there’s an almighty and I believe a gift of the Almighty to each man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth is freedom. That’s what I believe. . . . I believe that people want to be free.

Application of the idea expressed here is not limited to foreign affairs; we will find it expressed with equal fervor when President Bush speaks about domestic policy, especially the education of children. I refuse, he tells us, “to give up on any child.”7 All children can learn given the opportunity to do so and the expectation that they will. People want what is right and what is good; and, given the opportunity, they will do what is right and good: “At heart, the American people still cherish the traditional values and

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virtues of this nation, and they want a government that respects those things” (Reed 1994: xvi). These are stirring sentiments, but on what are they based? The answer, I think, is clearly expressed in the statements themselves: belief. The assertion of what is expresses an emotionally invested wish for what might be rather than an observation or testable hypothesis. This does not make the belief wrong in any simple sense of the term. Perhaps all children can learn, and perhaps all peoples yearn in their hearts for freedom. Perhaps Americans still cherish traditional values. But, when conclusions such as these are offered as statements of belief, we need to consider the likelihood that, as with all statements of belief, we are being told not something that is true about an external reality, but something that we wish were true about our selves. The vital point, then, in understanding the implications of the moral trend in politics is the complex relationship between two realities, one internal one external. The distinction, I think, is best understood not as a distinction between a reality that is true and a reality that is false, but as a distinction between different kinds of truth. One is the emotional truth of our wishes and fantasies, and of the fear and desire driving those wishes and fantasies. Fear, desire, and fantasy are all too real if by real we mean carrying the power to motivate action and perception, or if by real we have in mind carrying emotional meaning and significance. But their truth ends at the boundary of our psychic space; it does not apply outside, to others. It is in our interaction with others that we encounter a new reality, one against which we can test our hypotheses. The outcome of this test will not depend on how much we need our hypotheses to be true for us, but on a validity determined independently of our need. This is reality testing in the usual sense, and it only applies to one of the two realities. The moral trend in politics attacks the dividing line between these two realities, insisting that the external reality conform to the internal. In this, belief operates like a force we mobilize not to test but to defy reality so far as it does not conform. The strength of our belief is the measure of the force we exert

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against reality. The more powerful that force, the more we can expect reality to give way before it. But, what is the need driving the specific beliefs considered here: the belief that all people have the desire and capacity for freedom, the belief that all children can learn, and the belief that Americans still cherish the old values? A simple answer to this question is that all of these beliefs express a single greater conviction, which is the conviction that people are good. Belief in the idea that people are good can be formulated in the language of the moral defense because the moral defense is all about protecting the goodness of the child’s world, which is the world of the family and especially the parent-child relationship. Then, as an adult, the idea of the “people” becomes a metaphor for that relationship. The nation and the people are seen as arenas for reenacting the family drama summarized in the idea of a moral defense. So far as, in a limited way, an election can be seen as a test of this conviction about the goodness of the people, it becomes of paramount importance to win the election since doing so confirms that the world is good, while losing undermines belief in the goodness of the people. Then, when we lose, it becomes important to marshal explanations consistent with the inherent goodness of the people: good people were misguided by lies told by morally questionable candidates operating in their selfinterest; the people voted for the right candidate, or would have had they been given a fair chance, or had their votes been fully counted. When an election becomes a test of a proposition as important as the one embedded in conviction that the people are good, that our ideas are right, and that therefore we are good, few limits will be accepted in the effort to make sure the outcome either affirms that belief or can be reconciled with it if it does not. * *

*

The self-styled “moral majority” has given us its assessment of contemporary life: We are in a crisis and the crisis derives from the failure of parents to attend to their children’s needs,

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especially their need for help in coping with powerful emotional states that threaten to get out of control. Although we may be tempted to dismiss this assessment or emphasize the distortions involved in it, we would do well to listen to what we are being told about the world as many people experience it.

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t would be difficult to observe the 2004 electoral process and deny the significant role deception played in it. From the President’s continuing insistence that a link exists between the attack on the World Trade Towers and the regime of Saddam Hussein to his challengers insistence that altering the tax code will create jobs in Ohio, the candidates did not much hesitate to deviate from more or less well-known facts in making claims directly contrary to them or only made consistent with them by the most implausible and tortured argument. In the battle to create an altered reality, the President clearly dominated not only in the extent of his appeal to facts that he must have known defied the evidence, but in the significance of the facts denied. Thus, he insisted that the war in Iraq was going well despite all the evidence and expert analysis pointing in the other direction, that his tax cuts were targeted toward middle income groups when all the evidence clearly indicated they strongly favored those making over $200,000 per year, and that he had a plan to deal with the medical care crisis even though his performance during four years in office had made it clear that assuring quality health care to the millions of uninsured was not a priority of his administration. What is, I think, of special interest in all this is not simply that the candidates, and especially the President, offered the electorate false statements about vitally important matters, but that the facts contradicting those statements were all

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readily available. Thus, while the electorate might reasonably be confused about the complex matter of what should be done about health care or the war in Iraq, judging the veracity of the President’s claims on these matters did not pose much of a problem for anyone who watched the news on a regular basis. If this observation is correct, it raises the following question about the political process: what explains the contempt for truth that dominates there, and the related conviction that politicians can construct reality to fit their needs even when facts contradicting their construction are widely available and widely publicized? Clearly, we might answer this question simply by observing that deception works, and if we assume that the candidates’ primary concern is to get elected, it will not be surprising to find them doing what works. But, this still leaves us to consider what enables candidates to suspend the constraints of ethical conduct that normally at least limit our ability to tell lies in the service of self-interest. Here, I think several factors play a role. In previous chapters, I have emphasized two of these. The first has to do with the conviction that so much is at stake in the election. Once we imagine our electoral battle as a battle between good and evil with ourselves cast in the role of leading the war against evil, telling lies becomes no more than a strategy to defeat the evildoer and thus operates in the service of good. To lie, then, is to do good. We might even imagine that our opponent has forced us to lie by distorting our record and policies, so that any lies we tell are really his responsibility and not ours. The second factor is related to the first and has to do with the conviction that being good is about saying the right words. The politics of identification encourages us to imagine that saying good words makes us good, and that being good makes what we do good, including what we do to deceive the electorate. This neatly resolves the problem of lying since it also makes to lie to do good so long as it is done by those who are good. The logic just briefly summarized might even, by a kind of magic, turn lies into truth, thus dissolving the dilemma lying might otherwise place us into.

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The different explanations just briefly advanced for the prevalence of deception have one element in common: they place deception in service of the good. In this way, they all express a common theme, a theme that also plays itself out when we reverse the causality of deception and place responsibility not on the candidate, but on the electorate. In referring to this reversal, what I have in mind is the pressure on the candidate to say the right words about him or her self, about the nation and its condition, and about the people. The right words are, of course, those words that affirm first the goodness of the nation, and second the goodness of the candidate, that he or she is morally upright, religiously devout, and has the courage of his or her convictions. Viewed in this way, the election is essentially an affirming narrative of the identification of people and nation with the good. And, so far as the people and the nation are not always and altogether good, the pressure to engage this narrative is pressure to deceive. Deception, then, is necessitated by the embedding of politics in a drama of good and evil, a drama in which by siding with people and nation the candidate becomes good, or hopes to do so, while casting the opponent as evil. The candidates do not make up this drama, nor can they avoid involvement with it, though the degree and intensity with which they embrace it can vary and in so doing mark important differences between them. What I have said so far accepts the assumption that what is going on can reasonably described as deception, which requires that we assume knowledge that the truth differs from what the candidate insists it is. But, this does not credit another factor, which is the predominance of ideas in shaping our perception of reality. This factor would underlie reasoning of the following sort, which clearly played its part in the President’s case for his economic policies when he chose to use questionable data to support the claim that those policies were working:1 We are doing a great job with the economy. Unfortunately, the data do not at the moment all reflect that fact. We know

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the economy is doing well because our policies are the right policies not because the data tells us so. Since we know our policies are the right policies and therefore are working, whatever data confirm they are working are the correct data. In using this data, we are not misleading the electorate, but protecting voters from the misleading information offered by our opponent. Were they to follow the false data of our opponent, they would make bad decisions.

We cannot simply reject this line of argument since to do so is to reject any effort to evaluate the meaning of the data in light of our organizing ideas about reality. In other words, to do so means to reject the necessity that we think about the data rather than assume that it somehow offers direct insight without any need for interpretation. At the same time, the suggested line of argument is troubling since it rejects reality testing in favor of belief, and justifies appeal to questionable data on the grounds that belief should judge the data rather than the data helping us judge what we believe to be true. The suggestion is not that we think about the data, but that we simply reject it so far as it is inconsistent with our wished-for world. To the extent that thinking along the lines just suggested dominates, we can say that deception of the electorate is simply an extension of a more profound self-deception on the part of the candidate, who in important ways believes his own press releases even if he must deny reality to do so. This happens when the stakes are raised on two levels. They are raised for the candidate whose rightness becomes part of a grandiose fantasy of him or her self; and they are raised for the nation, which shares in that fantasy. We can see this operating in the observations about George W. Bush offered by one of President Reagan’s advisors: He truly believes he’s on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence. (Suskind 2004)

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It is the more fundamental deception exemplified in this quotation that I would like to explore here. * *

*

One of the implications of the politics of identification is that those seeking to gain or hold public office do so by identifying themselves with ideals with which the electorate is also identified. But, while we may at times imagine that this self-proclaimed identification is purely instrumental, and that candidates and officeholders may, in fact, believe or not believe in the espoused values, it is also reasonable to assume that they are, or eventually become, strongly identified with those values, and thus share the electorate’s identification with them. The result is that the candidate enters into an especially powerful identification with the electorate. But, this means that the candidate’s sense of his or her goodness becomes inseparably linked with the goodness of the values with which he and his constituency have become identified. The resulting connection between the candidate’s good self and the espoused values entails a special investment in the policies that express those values, whose goodness is now an essential support for the candidate’s moral defense. This locks the candidate into a policy in a way that allows little room for flexibility, reality testing, or adaptation through a learning process. Instead, it promotes a dogmatic conviction about the rightness of the policies, and turns inflexibility into a virtue. This is exemplified in a story about George W. Bush attributed to Senator Joe Biden: ‘‘I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad,’’ he began, ‘‘and I was telling the president of my many concerns’’—concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that

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all was well. ‘‘ ‘Mr. President,’ I finally said, ‘How can you be so sure when you know you don’t know the facts?’ ’’ Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator’s shoulder. ‘‘My instincts,’’ he said. ‘‘My instincts.’’ (Suskind 2004)

For the President, the truth comes from inside (“instinct”). Judgment does not involve a creative interchange between internal and external reality, but simply an internal consultation, a tapping into the already known. This is not simply because the President has determined that he has the power to create reality, as one of his aides once insisted, but because conviction of rightness brings with it conviction about reality that cannot be shaken.2 Indeed, rightness of this kind demands conviction. To doubt that we know is to doubt that God speaks to us, which is to doubt that we are right, which is to say righteous; and to doubt that we are right is to doubt that we are good, which is to doubt the goodness of the object with which we are identified, or possibly the strength of our identification with it. Unswerving devotion to a policy regardless of its real consequences is the measure of devotion to the good, and therefore the measure of the candidate or office holder’s own goodness. Put in simple language, if the policy is wrong, so is the self. This equation between policy and self provides a powerful basis for self-deception, which then becomes the basis for what at least appears from outside as deception of the electorate. The President’s reference to instinct tells us something important about the process just considered. It suggests that the President can intuit the right answers to questions, the best solutions to problems, and that his intuition provides not a starting point for thinking about them, but a substitute for doing so. This substitute for thinking is tapping into an inner power that knows without thinking what must be done. How are we to understand the President’s instinct as the basis for making judgments on sometimes momentous matters of state policy? Clearly, instinct stands opposed to reason. This is in part because the President’s instinct is his and

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his alone. It is in this sense a purely subjective matter. You might share what it is your instinct tells you needs to be done, but you cannot share the process by which you arrived at that conclusion. So, not only is appeal to instinct a flight from reason into the purely subjective, but it also requires that others enter into your program as an act of faith. But, not only does it require that others enter into your program as an act of faith; it requires that we do so as well. Appeal to instinct suggests that absence of access to reasons is not limited to others but applies as well to the self. We appeal to instinct because we do not know why we have chosen this course of action, though we do know it is the right one. In the President’s case, the matter is formulated in the language of religion since the inner voice that is the President’s instinct is assumed to be the voice of God speaking to the President and guiding him on the right path. Conviction about the rightness of his instinct is tantamount to belief in God; his dependence on God mirrors the dependence of his followers on him. In this way the office of the President is reconceived on the model of a certain kind of ministry.3 The significance of the link with religion is not to suggest that religion is here the causal factor, but that it provides the most widespread and suitable language for speaking about the phenomenon. The reference to religion can help us understand that what the President tells us when he insists that governing should be based on instinct is that he is identified with the good—he has chosen Jesus. Identification is an immediate connection rather than one mediated by thought, so to insist on this identification is to dispel any need for thinking, which could only erode our conviction and make us weak. That instinct is a primitive form of knowing does not make it unimportant or inherently invalid. What the President refers to as instinct, which we might also consider under the heading of intuition, is a part of the internal communication that is essential in the process of thinking. It is the provision by our unconscious mind of unprocessed thoughts that give us something to think about. What is notable about the

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President’s way of dealing with policy is not his appeal to intuition, but his refusal to engage the interchange to which I have just referred, insisting that we attend to only one aspect of it, the one we might refer to as having thoughts. To see what this might imply, I begin with an observation of Wilfred Bion’s about thinking, which is that “thinking has to be called into existence to cope with thoughts” (1967: 111). Thoughts are something the mind has; whereas thinking is something the mind does. Thoughts have a self-contained quality that resists thinking, even experiences thinking as a threat. Thus, for example the thoughts “abortion is murder,” and “abortion is a right” demand adherence and must not be questioned and explored. We adhere to them rather than think about them because to think about them is to undermine the simple and inevitable truth they are meant to express. Thinking is a process in which we do not take what we know for granted but shape what will become known. In relation to thinking, thoughts are the already known. We identify with them rather than through thinking seek to understand them. In relating thoughts and thinking, two possibilities arise. First, we can attempt to eliminate certain thoughts from the mind so we do not have to think about them, or even have them, leaving only those thoughts we consider it safe to hold. We can seek to destroy, repress, or evacuate unacceptable thoughts to protect the mind from them (Bion 1967: 112). Alternatively, we can cope with our thoughts by thinking about them. When we do this, we attempt to take the act of conception to a higher level by conceiving not further thoughts, but ideas that integrate the opposing poles represented in the opposing thoughts including those that we might find unacceptable. By integrating, I have in mind reshaping thoughts in a way that makes it possible to hold them together in the mind. Thus, for example, we might attempt to form the idea that, while abortion does end a life, it is not necessarily murder. This idea holds both thoughts together, but in so doing also alters them in ways that make them live together in the mind.

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As I suggest in chapter 2, thoughts without thinking have an irreducible and inevitable quality about them. Even though they are produced in the mind, they seem to exert a force over it. Thinking undermines the power of thoughts and also the known quality of the world expressed in them. With these considerations in mind, let me return to the President’s instinct and to his aggressive insistence that his thoughts in their unprocessed form are enough. We can see how this is essentially a strategy to block thinking not only for others, but also for himself. We have already considered possible reasons for this having to do with the threat thinking poses to belief, and the danger that thinking will make the world complex and impede action. Thus, as Senator Carl Levin comments about the President: ‘‘It’s his lack of curiosity about complex issues which troubles me’’ (Suskind 2004). Appeal to instinct expresses what Levin refers to as a lack of interest in complexity. What Levin does not take notice of is the aggression with which the President seeks to impose his own lack of interest in complexity on others, something he does under the heading of loyalty. Loyalty refers to an unthinking attachment of the kind rooted in identification, and is therefore a term well suited to the policy-making process characterized above in the language of instinct. Loyalty is an important feature of the President’s attitude toward governance as exemplified in the choices he makes for appointments to positions of responsibility and his intense resistance to replacing those he has appointed when serious questions about ethics and job performance make it difficult for them to do their jobs. We can see the work of loyalty in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, when the President insisted that special consideration be given in hiring firms to participate in the reconstruction to those based in countries that had participated with the United States in the war to overthrow the Hussein regime. However favorably or unfavorably we might view the ideal of loyalty, we should not ignore the powerful aggression embedded in it. This is aggression also embedded in leadership by instinct. The aggression mobilized to defend a

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decision based on instinct tells us something important about governing by instinct: it tells us that the appeal to instinct hides the reasons for our decisions from us. That the reasons are not subject to the thinking process, which would make them explicit and would enable all to judge them, does not mean that no reasons exist; it only means that those reasons must not be known. We can consider this effort to keep our reasons safe from the thinking process the essential element in deception, which leads us to another question about the President’s instinct: what is the appeal to instinct meant to protect from thinking? What is the President telling us not to think? Evidently, the answer to this question will depend on the specific policy issue under consideration, and in this sense it would be a mistake to attempt to generalize. At the same time, the method applied to policy matters summarized in the term instinct hides not only particular reasons for particular policies, but at the same time staves off the greater threat of reason itself, in this case not only because reason creates complexity as I have argued, but because it might reveal truths better kept hidden. So, the question again, is: what is the greater truth the appeal to instinct hides from us? A simple answer, but one that fits well my overall line of argument, is that the truth that appeal to instinct keeps hidden is that we are wrong, wrong not merely or primarily about a particular policy matter, but wrong in the fundamental or general sense that we are wrongly made. And, if we imagine, as we do at the primitive level of emotional experience, that we are indeed made or shaped by a higher power, then to be wrongly made means either that the higher power has done a bad job of it, or that we are not favored by Him. If, as Lakoff suggests, it is the job of the parent to shape the child, then a misshapen child either is so because he brings to the parent material ill suited for the job or because the good material provided to the parents is misused by them, perhaps because they have not attended to their job. Either way, problems arise as we have seen in our exploration of the moral defense, because the moral defense is developed to cope with this very

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situation. We can, then, consider the appeal to intuition as a part of the moral defense, and we can consider the deception inevitably built into the appeal to instinct as a deception rooted in the moral defense. Put in simple language, the aggression mobilized around defense of instinct, and especially embedded in the demand that others must be loyal to it, is our way of using our language to make what was badly made look good, to force an identification of ourselves with the good when, at the most basic levels of our being, we know we are not good, but poorly shaped by a maker who found in us little material worthy enough to be shaped into something good and valuable. If we put this point in the language of wishing, we can treat what the president refers to as instinct as the thought of a wished-for reality. In the wished-for reality, U.S. military forces will be welcomed in Iraq, where, once we have removed Saddam Hussein, the people will embrace freedom and democracy and offer a model of change to the Middle East, where the momentum from the liberation of Iraq will transform the entire region through a process something akin to the hoped for moral renewal discussed in the last chapter. Because instinct emerges not out of thinking, but out of the more primitive parts of the mind, where fear and desire are the driving force, it is natural to consider the matter in the language of wishing, since to wish is to desire something, and a wish is “a feeling in the mind directed towards something which one believes would give satisfaction if attained, possessed, or realized.”4 This means that disloyalty to the President’s instinct is equivalent to standing in the way of the President’s desire, and his conviction that he has the power to realize that desire in the world. * *

*

So far as the dynamics just briefly described are in operation, it would be incorrect to judge the candidate’s defiance of evidence disputing the correctness of his or her policies simply a matter of deception. Instead, it would have to be considered

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a strategy to protect the goodness of the self, and the moral defense put in place to protect the self from knowledge of its badness. Yet, this observation does not altogether dismiss the possibility that deception might play an important role in politics. That is, there may also be circumstances in which the office holder knowingly misleads his or her constituents due to fear of the consequences of telling the truth and contempt for the electorate’s ability to distinguish truth from untruth. This latter might arise out of a conviction about the electorate’s inherent culpability. Contempt for the electorate might be considered an accurate assessment of its malleability based on past experience. But, it might also be considered a projective phenomenon. That is, the office holder might use the constituency as a container for his or her own disavowed gullible self, for the naive wishful person who wants only to depend on and trust a powerful caretaker. A central issue in the phenomenon of deception would in this case be coping with dependency needs and with profound ambivalence about them. For those imbued with the values of choice considered in the last chapter, the hypothesis just offered concerning ambivalence about dependence fits a larger moral system. Central to this system is the idea of right choices, moral responsibility, and a personal relationship with God. In this system, autonomy can take a radical turn, and dependence can be judged harshly as evidence of a weakness of will. The associated tendency to project dependence onto others who then become the objects of contempt parallels the projection of dependence onto the electorate, also viewed as the objects of contempt. Lying to the electorate is not only effective given its lack of capacity for independent, which is to say critical, judgment; it is also justified, since the electorate by its nature invites deception. If we do not deceive the voters in their own interest, the opposition will deceive them into acting against their best interest, which is to say into acting against what is right. Those who believe in the candidate and in his fundamental rightness will believe what the candidate tells them because they believe he is good. The opposition candidate, so far as he

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can be made to represent evil, will not be trusted, regardless of the truthfulness of his statements and value of his policies. The electorate adopts the stance of dependence appropriate to the child who knows he is not competent to live as an adult independently of his parents and outside his family. Regression to dependence invites contempt as the electorate contains the office holder’s own dependent self, the core sense on the part of the office holder that he or she is not suited to independent judgment and adult living. At its best, the result is a kind of amiable paternalism often seen in political conversation between office holder and constituency. At its worst, the result is a cynical and hateful contempt for the electorate as the container for a disavowed dependent self. Dependence of the kind just considered is especially well suited to those swept up in the moral current and the idea of moral renewal. The renewal of the family means that children will honor their parents, and that families will follow the lead of what Lakoff refers to as the strict father. The result of doing so is that chaos will give way to order and that a dangerous world will be replaced by one made safe by paternal direction and control, a paternal direction and control that follows the identification of paternal authority with moral authority. Transferring this model onto the President as leader absolves the electorate of any need to judge the leader or what he says, because the electorate’s stance is not one of independence implied in judgment, but of dependence that neither requires independent judgment nor allows for it. Those who believe in the candidate’s goodness have a second, related, defense they can mobilize against knowledge that he is deceiving them, which is the conviction that his deception is directed not toward them but toward his opponent and his opponent’s supporters. The assumed collusion against a common enemy reinforces the bond between the candidate and his supporters though it tends to elevate the emotional pitch of the campaign since in deflecting the contempt directed toward the electorate to only that part not privileged to bond with the favored candidate it intensifies the contempt directed toward them. Then, the politics of deception

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and contempt both feed on sharp divisions in the electorate over who is good and who is not, and also intensify those divisions. Of course, those who do not believe in the office holder feel no comfort in the idea of entering into a relationship of dependence and trust, but instead respond to the invitation to do so with anger. Just as the office holder invites the love of believers, love on the model of the child’s love for the parent, he invites the hatred of the disbeliever, who will have none of it. In this setting, the emotional meaning of the communication between constituent and office holders spawns sharp and irreconcilable conflict. * *

*

At this point, it may be useful to look more closely at the safety sought by that part of the electorate attracted to the relationship of dependence on a strong leader just considered. In particular, we may wonder what danger it is hoped the strong leader will keep us safe from. Of course, there may be any number of practical answers to this question beginning with terrorism, unemployment, indigence in old age, and so on. Each of these is all too real, and powerful enough to activate an impulse to regress toward the wished-for safe-haven of dependence on a strong paternal figure. Yet, I think that to stop with the realitybased assessment of threat and imagine that it accounts for the behavior of the electorate does not fully or adequately account for the movement in the direction of dependence just considered. Part of the reason for this is that a more effective mode of dealing with the threats just considered is to think about them, or at least to seek a leader we have good reason is capable of thinking about them. The strong paternal leader who operates on instinct seems particularly ill suited to the task of enhancing security. As Joe Biden put it in his response to the President on the matter of appeal to instinct quoted earlier: “ ‘Mr. President, your instincts aren’t good enough!’ ” If the sought-after relationship of dependence rather than providing the wished-for security actually tends to undermine it, then we must look

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beyond the reality of the threats to account for the nature of the response. A reality-based threat is a threat that exists in the external world independently of our subjective experience, and especially our fears and desires. If dependence on a strong leader will not alleviate the reality-based threat, this does not make it ill-suited for coping with other kinds of threats, those originating not outside—in reality—but inside. And, if there is one set of threats that the relationship with the President as he and his followers envision it can cope with it is the threat of desire and aggression, the threat that in the previous chapter I associate with greed. If the danger lies in our own desire and aggression, and the solution is repression, then who better to protect us from that threat than the strict father? With this in mind, it might even be reasonable to imagine that what I refer to above as reality-based threats, however real they might be, emotionally act as nothing more than stand-ins for the threat posed to our well being by our own desire and aggression. Since the language used to fight terrorists includes the language of defending order against chaos, it is not far fetched to imagine that the rhetoric seeks to meld the subjective with the objective enabling us to fight the threat of our impulses in a tangible external form. If we feel better knowing that our fear is of something external and objective, then a leader who keeps alive the external threat and then leads us in the battle against it is doing a twofold service. We can think about the intensity and rigidity of the President’s insistence that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to peace, order, and well being as an expression of the intensity of the President’s need to have an external threat to divert our attention from the internal. This intensity of need fostered deception of the electorate so far as the reality-based threat is concerned, and could therefore be said to have played a crucial role in the deception that dominated the electoral debate. If we also bear in mind that the need was for an acceptable target for aggression, then we can also link deception to an excess of aggression that invests the moral stance as it appears in the President with a significant measure of hate.

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Part III

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7

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turn now to an account of greed, the importance of which for the attack on liberalism I have indicated at various points in my discussion of reason in politics. As I suggest in chapter 2, the matter of the attachment of aggression to desire cannot be separated from an account of the role of reason in politics. If this is the case, then it is also the case that greed and the flight from reason are not separate matters, but two aspects of one phenomenon. I begin with greed in its most familiar form: the greed for riches. The desire to have more, and indeed to have more than is your due, animates the attack on liberalism in both a positive and negative way. That is, the liberal ideal is seen both to express and to inhibit the pursuit of greed’s end. The liberal ideal is experienced as an obstacle to greed when it is associated with the use of public power to transfer money assumed rightfully ours first to government and then from government to those dependent on it. The liberal ideal is experienced as an expression of greed when the government is assumed to be greedy so that expanding government means feeding the government’s greed. When we experience government either as greedy in itself or as the agent of the greed of those dependent on it, we discover greed in others, and find it a threat to the gratification of our own desires. This threat to gratification is also a threat to our own greed, and it would not be unreasonable to imagine that our experience of government as greedy or as the agent of the greed of others is really driven by our assumption that the

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greediness we experience in ourselves must drive others as well. In other words, it is our own projected greed that we find in government and in those dependent on it. That the perceived greediness of government is at least in significant measure an expression of our own greediness is implied in the prevailing expectation that we can be the beneficiaries of government programs without financing the government that provides those programs. What term other than greed should we use to describe the wish for government to secure quality health care for the elderly and uninsured without increasing the tax burden on employed workers, to provide better schools without paying the taxes needed to fund them, and so on? Combining substantial expectations with a refusal to pay expresses the primitive element in greed that imagines a world without limits, one in which we can “have it all.” This aspect of greed permeates the political process and has much to do with the ambivalence exhibited there about the liberal ideal. If this suggestion has merit, then the place to begin a study of greed and the liberal ideal must be not with the use of government to contain and express our greed, but with the urge to have it all, an urge whose most notable expression is in the desire to accumulate wealth. I begin, then, with the desire to make money, and with an exemplar of that desire, Donald Trump. * *

*

The first thing Donald Trump tells the reader in his book, The Art of the Deal, is that he does not make deals for the money: “I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it.” This does not mean that he is uninterested in making money. On the contrary, making money seems to be all that really interests him. It only means that his interest in making money does not derive from an interest in acquiring the things money can buy. Rather, his interest in making money is pure and uncorrupted by goals having nothing to do with the money itself. Because he does not make it to spend it (though in fact he spends quite a lot of it), his interest in

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making money has, for him, an odd virtue. It is about art, the “art of the deal,” and not about greed, or so he seems to suggest. Or, if it is about greed, it is about an especially pure and uncorrupted form of greed. It may seem odd to speak of greed as uncorrupted since we generally associate greed with corruption. The corrupt seek to make public institutions serve not public ends, but their private greed. Yet, the idea of a pure form of greed plays a large role in political economy, which announces a new morality in which making money does not corrupt so long as it becomes an end in itself. In a primitive way, Trump here appeals to this new morality when he insists that his interest in moneymaking expresses his devotion to the activity and not to any external end the activity might facilitate. The second thing we learn from Trump’s book is that, while he devotes long hours to making money, he does not, during those long hours, do anything we would normally refer to as work. So, though he makes money, and lots of it, he does not work for it. That he does not work does not mean that he spends those long hours sitting idly by waiting for money to fall into his lap. On the contrary, he busies himself to the point of obsession with making money by making deals. For him, successful people are “obsessive; they’re driven, they’re single minded; and sometimes they’re almost maniacal . . . ” (Trump 1987: 47–48). By his own estimate, each day he makes fifty to one hundred phone calls. During one call, Trump reports covering “half a dozen subjects in less than ten minutes” (18). In between the phone calls, he has at least a dozen meetings. Clearly, he is too busy making deals to take time off for work. To be sure, he refers to what he does as work, and in some sense it is. Yet, in another sense, it is not: he does not create or produce anything; he doesn’t study anything; he doesn’t apply technical expertise to a problem. Mainly, he exercises his “instincts” as he puts it, something he did not develop or gain from training. For him, “deal making is an ability you’re born with,” or you aren’t, as the case may be. The maniacal quality of the obsession that makes the successful investor means that he or she is so completely driven by

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the need to make money that pursuit of happiness in the usual sense drops out of the equation. The single-minded pursuit of the deal, Trump tells us, may not lead to a happy life, “but it’s great when it comes to getting what you want.” Clearly, then, what he wants is not to be happy but something else. Perhaps happiness for Trump connotes the absence of that continuous and restless movement that is the life of those committed to the art of the deal. If this is the case, then happiness is a kind of death, and, in the words of David Denby, the effort expended to make money is not so much work as it is “an attempt to steal time from the end” (2003: 196). The goal, then, is not happiness if that involves a state of contentment, and therefore of rest, but something else. Trump makes deals not because doing so makes him rich enough to buy anything he wants, or because doing so makes him happy; he does it to do it. Devoting long hours to the end of making money without working expresses an impulse for which the term greed is not inappropriate. It is not all there is to greed, but it can be a vital part of the phenomenon especially in its modern form. Although the greedy may seem to want the riches they covet and sometimes acquire, those riches can never satisfy them. And, because the greedy are so completely driven by their acquisitive instinct, they devote themselves to what they imagine to be greed’s end, especially money; but, while they spend long hours trying to make money, indeed longer hours than many people who are not particularly greedy and merely work, what they do is not really work, but something else. Trump’s story has some unique features linked to his preoccupation with dealing as a way of life, but its main message is not unique. To see this, consider author and film critic David Denby. When his marriage collapsed and he faced the prospect not only of losing his wife but also of having to sell his home, he made a decision to accumulate the million dollars he estimated he would need to keep his home. Knowing little about investing and less about the so-called new economy of the turn of the century, Denby became obsessed with finding the investment opportunity that would magically multiply his savings and fill with money the void created in his life by the dissolution of his marriage. For Denby,

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greed became an expression of loss: “[w]hatever else I needed, I needed money . . . and I saw that having lost the greatest thing in my life, I was about to lose another thing, and, then, no doubt, another; a loss of substance, a loss of estate, a loss of status, wellbeing, and peace. . . . Extra money wouldn’t bring my wife back, but it would help stem the tide of losses” (2003: 13). In a biblical mood, Denby describes his greed as a “gathering of goods against the emptiness of the wilderness;” (113). As with many of those who became obsessed with the new economy of the Internet and the dotcom boom, there was something magical in Denby’s thinking. Investments promised limitless returns not because they generated profits, but because people believed they would. He would become rich not because he would do something remarkable, but because he would be fortunate enough to pick the stock whose value would grow exponentially not over a period of years, but of months, or weeks, perhaps even days. His life was governed by stories about stocks such as LeukoSite, which, bought for $7 a share was then sold only months later for $300. His life became a search for the magic stock. How did one know which stock would prove out and which would not? Again, work in the usual sense was not the answer. If you studied the companies, you would find it hard to distinguish those that produced fortunes over the short term for the lucky investor from those that lost all their value. In the short run at least, the main difference appeared not to be in the corporate accounts and the technical facts about the product under development, but in the beliefs of those who influenced the thinking of investors and thereby determined whether demand for the stock would drive up its price. Investment in this sector at this time was mainly about risk, chance, and fortune. To appeal to fortune, and the hope fortune will favor us, is implicitly to appeal to the intervention of a higher power. Indeed, fortune is the goddess who bestows her favors at her whim on those whom she chooses. Taking risks based not on research but on hope is a call for proof that we are favored in the eyes of the higher power, proof that we are among the

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fortunate and not pathetic losers. The lure of risk also suggests how investment becomes something other than work. Denby “pulled himself out of despair by taking on greater risk,” which was not part of a rational strategy, but “an act of existential defiance” (2003: 195). When we win that means God favors us; and when we lose that means He does not. In other words, taking risks of this kind is an invitation for God to make his judgment of us known. The risk, of course, is that the effort to prove we are favored will turn out to prove the opposite: that we are not the fortunate son but, in Denby’s language, an American sucker. When greed takes over, fear plays a large role. For the greedy, there is much at stake, and therefore much to fear. One may win, but one may also lose. You lose when you make the wrong deal, or when you fail to make the right deal, or when you make the right deal but fail to stay the course. For Trump, the deal is all about competition. In New York real estate, Trump competes with “some of the sharpest, toughest, and most vicious people in the world.” He loves to “go up against these guys” and beat them. Trump experiences the art of the deal as a competition in which money measures who wins and who loses: “[m]oney was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score” (1987: 63). The vital goal is not the money itself, but to win, because if you do not win, either because you are not good enough or because you are too timid to compete, you become one of “life’s losers,” consumed by envy (59). Like Trump, Denby devoted long hours to investing, and like Trump his long hours looked little like work. Unlike Trump, rather than making a million dollars he lost nearly that much. Also, unlike Trump, Denby cared about what the money he coveted might be used to acquire. Yet, while Denby was motivated by the hope he might be able to keep his home if not his wife, the difference between his impulse and Trump’s may have been less sharply drawn than at first appears. Yes, he had what he refers to as a “legitimate need” for the money. But as he strives to make money to satisfy this legitimate need, he also knows that his hunger had grown “larger than mere rational

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need,” that it “never stopped,” and “had taken” over his mind (2003: 86). As we read his account, we sense that something more important than his home is at stake, something more like his self-respect, perhaps that sort of self-respect that depends on proving he is fortune’s child rather than a pathetic loser. And, if his drive is to prove that he is fortune’s child, then it is not so different from the force that motivates Donald Trump, who clearly wants one thing that money can buy, or that he thinks it can: proof that he is special in the eyes of his God, however secularized his God might be. * *

*

The monetary unit provides a point system for the competition over proof that we are among those chosen by fortune. At least, this seems to be Trump’s message: It is not the money, but the triumph judged by money. Yet, why judge success and failure in monetary units? Clearly, notwithstanding Trump’s disclaimer, there is something special about money. But what is it? To answer this question, we need not enter into any great mysteries. However complex monetary systems become as they develop, and however complex the various functions of money also become in the course of the development of monetary systems, money itself remains a relatively simple matter. Money is value and the monetary unit is the unit of value. To understand the implications of money, we might do well to consult the greatest philosopher of money among the political economists, Karl Marx. Money, Marx tells us, “is the metamorphosed shape of all other commodities, the result of their general alienation.” Money “depicts itself in the bodies of all other commodities . . . ” (Marx 1967: 110). Commodities are sold, Marx goes on to tell us, “not for the purpose of buying others,” but in order to acquire money, “to replace their commodity-form by their money-form” (130). With money, it becomes possible to make acquiring value the end of economic activity rather than merely the means to acquiring things that we need. The

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result is what Marx refers to as hoarding, which is a primitive expression of greed. Here, Marx quotes Christopher Columbus on the subject of gold, which is one of money’s more primitive forms: “Gold is a wonderful thing! Whoever possesses it is lord of all he wants. By means of gold one can even get souls into Paradise” (131–32). Money’s ability to command all things endows it with another important power; it makes money the great leveler: Just as every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished in money, so money, on its side, like the radical leveler that it is, does away with all distinctions. But, money itself is a commodity, an external object, capable of becoming the property of any individual. Thus social power becomes the private power of private persons. The ancients therefore denounced money as subversive of the economic and moral order of things. (Marx 1967: 132)

The more powerful money becomes, the less the power of the “moral order of things,” that fixed system of relations that characterizes all older societies based on custom, tradition, and community. In the moral order of things, each member knows his place and the idea that he might move up in the order of persons by the exercise of talent and effort or the accumulation of riches does not apply. The power of money then expresses the growing sense that the value of our persons is not given, but something we can affect through our actions. In this basic sense, money expresses empowerment of the individual against the social order given to him. Another way to say this is to say that in the older order things were fixed in their relations to one another, as were the members fixed in their relative social positions. Qualitative difference was the rule of the day as neither persons nor things were quantitatively commensurable. One could compare higher and lower, but one could not reduce that comparison to a matter of amount, for example amount of money. Because money extinguishes the qualitative differences between things, it reduces all matters of social position to a single dimension,

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that of amount. When the desire for riches becomes a desire for money, that desire reveals something otherwise hidden about it, the something Donald Trump seeks to draw our attention to when he insists that it is not because of the things money can buy that he seeks to acquire it. * *

*

The most primitive expression of the urge to make money is the urge to build up a hoard of riches in the money form: The desire after hoarding is in its very nature unsatiable. . . . [M]oney has no bounds to its efficacy. But, at the same time, every actual sum of money is limited in amount, and therefore, as a means of purchasing, has only a limited efficacy. This antagonism between the quantitative limits of money and its qualitative boundlessness, continuously acts as a spur to the hoarder in his Sisyphus-like labor of accumulating. (Marx 1967: 133)

Once the goal of economic activity is to make money, that goal can never be achieved because each sum acquired, being finite, points toward the possibility of more. This peculiar quality of money was important in early thinking about greed, which was understood as a special sort of passion, one that might be immune to the disappointment that seems to attend the “dissonance between desire and fulfillment.” For the early modern thinker, “the desire for any given amount of money, once satisfied, is uniquely immune to this disappointment provided that money is not spent on things, but that its accumulation becomes an end in itself ” (Hirschman 1977: 55–56, emphasis in original). This quality of money as end is clearly expressed in an exchange between author Michael Lewis and entrepreneur Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape. Just before he started Netscape, one of Clark’s engineers recalled him saying that what he really wanted was to have $100 million dollars. Later, when Clark was worth $600 million, he revised that figure

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upwards: “I just want to have a billion dollars, after taxes. Then I’ll be satisfied.” Once this goal had been achieved, it no longer seemed adequate: Clark: I just want to make more money than Larry Ellison [CEO of Oracle]. Then I’ll stop. Lewis: What happens after you have more money than Larry Ellison? Would you want to have more money than say Bill Gates? Clark: Oh, no. That’ll never happen.

A few minutes pass. Clark: You know, just for one moment, I would like to have the most. Just for one tiny moment. (Lewis 2000: 256–57)

This exchange explains the comment of one bond trader about the accumulation of wealth on Wall Street: “You don’t get rich in this business, you just attain new levels of relative poverty” (Lewis 1989: 203). But, hoarding is only the primitive expression of greed. A modern economy is organized to make available a more advanced expression of greed, one more in line with greed’s underlying significance. This more advanced form of greed is not the hoard of money, but the accumulation of capital. Capital is the power to make money. When we acquire money, we acquire a fixed amount of wealth, or the power over a fixed part of society’s riches. But, when we acquire capital, we acquire an ever-expanding amount of wealth. This acquisition of wealth without limit is greed’s ultimate goal; it is the form of wealth most in line with greed. So, Marx tells us, the capitalist is the miser made rational: The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at. This boundless greed for riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser. (1967: 152–53)

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The capitalist as Marx describes him loses his person into his capital, or perhaps he seeks to find the person he has lost in his capital. If money is the power over things, capital is the power over money. If real work is the expression in activity of the true self, Trump’s obsessive moneymaking is not work but the effort to find himself in the limitless accumulation of the power over things. In sum, money, and especially money in the shape of capital, is the power to acquire all those things of value that (1) can be owned, and (2) can be separated from their owner. Money is not the things of value themselves, and Trump is therefore right when he insists that in seeking to make money he is not simply seeking to acquire the particular things money can buy, that his goal is a purer one. Still, the goal is money, or at least the power money represents, which is the power over all the things of value that can be separated from their owners without losing their value. Things of value that can be separated from their owners are things whose value does not depend on who owns them, but that carry their value around with them as they move from one owner to the next. In the language of the classical economists, these are things whose value is “intrinsic.” Money, then, points us toward those things whose ownership enhances our worth because they have an intrinsic value independent of us, and it points us away from those things that are of worth merely because we have personally invested significance in them. In other words, money points us away from our power to invest meaning in our world and toward our subordination to an external power to measure our value in its own units. Put in the language of the self, the pursuit of money is a way to make our selves the mirror of the value of external things whose intrinsic value has nothing specifically to do with us rather than to make our selves the origin of what is of value for us. The pursuit of money, then, is what we do to invest our selves with a value that we do not believe they have on their own. Psychically, those apparently varied things to which our greed attaches itself “all ultimately signify one thing. They stand as proofs to us if we get them, that we

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are ourselves good, and so are worthy of love, or respect and honor, in return” (Riviere 1964: 27). To acquire things of value is to acquire proofs of our own value; to see things of value in the hands of others is to have proofs of their value, which can promote doubt about our own. Thus, for the greedy, the value of the self is derivative of the value of the things attached to it, and it therefore depends on who acquires the most things of the most value. If money is power, it is power over worth, ultimately over self-worth. Those who control the flow of money control the self-esteem of those dependent on them for money. This is how Michael Lewis describes his experience as a bond trader for Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. The annual awarding of bonuses was experienced as a “final summing up.” The meeting at which the trader is told the amount of his bonus was experienced as a “meeting with the Divine creator . . . to be told your worth as a human being” (Lewis 1989: 201). But if money is the power over self-worth, it only has this power because we have given it over to it. Money has power over things because that is the nature of money. But money’s power to value things only becomes its power to measure the value of our selves when we can no longer exercise that power. When we carry the conviction that our selves have worth, we also carry the conviction that our judgment of worth matters. But only a self that has worth can carry conviction that its judgment of what is of worth matters. To seek an outside judgment of self-worth indicates a lack of confidence in the internal judgment, which means that we do not consider our selves worthy to pass judgment. Our lack of self-esteem leads us to seek the power to judge what is of value to us outside ourselves. This alienation of the power to invest value in things is an essential element of greed, as is the implied loss of our intrinsic ability to make things take on significance for us. * *

*

A young child uses his or her senses to determine the worth of things. On the most primitive level, a thing is good that

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tastes good, its goodness being embodied in the good feeling it creates when we eat it. More generally, something is good when its encounter with our senses makes us feel good. Adults have not forgotten this experience of the world, and continue to equate the good with the thing that makes them feel good. But, adults are adults because they have reshaped this experience in a way that liberates it to one degree or another from the five senses and especially from the immediacy of the experience of sensory stimulation. We still believe that things are good that taste good, but we have developed other measures as well. This also means that the child’s greed to experience without interruption the pleasure afforded by sensuous experience of good things is also transformed in the adult, whose greed is not limited to the desire for the uninterrupted sensuous experience of good things. To understand adult greed, we must understand something about this transformation, something about the new form of gratification we seek and the new kinds of objects we seek it in when we leave behind, so far as we are able, the childlike greed to eat all the good things. Emphasis on the uninterrupted flow of good things tells us something important about greed. Greed means the inability to tolerate not only the bad things but also the absence of the good things. There must be enough of the good things to assure that there will be no room for the bad things. This is because disrupting the flow of good things, and of the feeling they create, produces a bad feeling, the feeling that we are deprived of the good, and possibly unworthy to receive it. So, our greed refers to our inability to tolerate, for any significant period of time, a state other than gratification. This, then, gives us our first hint of what might be greed’s true end: the uninterrupted flow of good things. But, if this is greed’s true end, might we not achieve it otherwise than by acquiring money? Would it not be the case, as Joan Riviere suggests, that greed can attach itself to many different sorts of things? The “longing or greed for good things can relate to any and every imaginable kind of good— material possessions, bodily or mental gifts, advantages and

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privileges . . . ” (Riviere 1964: 27). And if this is greed’s true end, should we view greed with so much distrust, hostility, and distain? Is not greed, as Riviere also suggests, “an aspect of the desire to live?” And, if greed is an aspect of the desire to live, like the impulse to live, it must be “endless and never assuaged,” ceasing “only with death” (26–27; see also HyattWilliams 1998: 46). Both questions are important. As I have emphasized, the significance of money for greed is in the way it offers a unique vehicle for acquiring power over things, and thus breaking the limit on acquisition that remains effective where acquisition must be predominantly of particular finite things. In other words, the desire for riches is really the desire for power. But, the desire for power is no more an end in itself than is the desire for money or for riches. Rather, money and power share the same end, which is to acquire and hold everything of value, whatever its particular form, to control the flow of good things and therefore of goodness itself so far as that is something that can be acquired, which is to say so far as being good is essentially a reflection of having power over things of value. The idea of controlling and ultimately becoming the source of the good things makes greed a cardinal sin in the eyes of morality and religion. In desiring to exert control over the good we arrogate to ourselves the prerogative of God, and, in effect, dismiss God from our world. Greed, then, mixes with pride, or more precisely arrogance, both expressing the desire to put ourselves in the place of God. We sin not merely when we disobey God, but when we seek “to be like him” (Schimmel 1997: 25). This makes greed the sin “of desiring a life subject to human control over a life of vulnerable trust in the unseen” (Tickle 2004: 28). It is notable that, in the modern secular world, this sin does not seem so much of a sin anymore, and that pride in the self does not seem to pose a problem but to be something we should be encouraged to cultivate. Clearly, this suggests a radical alteration in attitude toward the self and toward desire. The transformation of the idea of pride from a

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vice to a virtue expresses the “profound cultural changes our society has undergone as it has shifted from a God-centered to a man-centered orientation” (Schimmel 1997: 37). Because of its links to pride, this shift has also meant a shift in our attitude toward greed, a shift away from the attitude of the religious moralist as expressed, for example, in the following comment: . . . the greedy suffer from a misdirected and exaggerated love, directed to gods of this world rather than to the true God. In our age of weakened faith, we are especially prone to seeking substitutes for God, and money and what it can buy become foremost among them. (Schimmel 1997: 176)

The movement toward a secular god is essential for this shift in the attitude toward greed, especially when greed is bound up with arrogance and as a result takes on its most destructive forms. When this happens, the desire for power becomes an aspect of the desire for wealth just as the desire for wealth is an aspect of the desire for power. At their core, they are alternative expressions for the same thing: greed. And greed, being an expression of the instinct for life, ceases only in death. We cannot suppress all greed without suppressing life itself. But, this does not mean we should equate greed with vitality, or ignore the destructive implications of greed. The problem is more complex than this. We need to understand what it means to suppress greed and take away all hope that greed’s object will be attained; and, we must understand what happens when we embrace greed and shape our institutions so that they make serving greed their main function. * *

*

Something happens to our greedy desire when the flow of good things is disrupted. First, we experience disappointment and possibly the hope that the flow will resume. Beyond disappointment and hope, however, we might form a grievance

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against the source of the good things for having cut us off; we might imagine that the source of the good things is withholding them from us to keep them for itself, and this can lead us to develop an antagonism toward it. The result of the disruption in the flow will then be that our desire gets tangled up with a measure of aggression against the source of the good things. If the disruption in the flow continues long enough, or even becomes permanent, our aggression may turn to hate, and the object we love because it provides us with the things that enable us to experience the good feeling may become the object we hate for depriving us of that experience. We can see how this element of aggression and even hate enters if we consider one of the implications of Trump’s preoccupation with the competitive aspect of moneymaking. So far as we interpret Trump as being intent on amassing all the money for himself, we can understand his motive as the desire to make himself the holder, and therefore the source, of the good things, since he now has the power over those things. Trump’s wealth gives him power over the deal. Those wishing to make deals come to him, and he decides if they will get what they want or not. The power over the deal makes work unnecessary; it replaces work with judging the worth of others. Thus, his prior success at money making allows Trump to reverse roles. By amassing enough money, he becomes his own source and therefore becomes independent of any external source, which, so long as it remains outside, cannot be relied on to control its own greed and part with the good things. This enables him not only to feel satisfied forever and without limit; it also allows him to visit deprivation on others. If you love to win, you love causing others to lose. And Trump loves to win. Trump’s insistence that he does not make deals to make money but because he thrives on the deal making itself tells us that he has taken on a different end than simply assuring the flow of good things. Because he already has more than enough money to assure the flow of good things, it is reasonable to assume that his insistence that he does not deal to make money is not without foundation, even if we grant that

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he clearly has a powerful need for the things money can buy. This other motive for making money might be the desire to inflict deprivation on others. But, there might also be something else involved. There might be a sense that the ability to assure the continuous flow of good things fails to provide the expected gratification, which raises the question: can money really provide the sought-after gratification? The answer to this question depends on how we interpret gratification. That is, if we interpret gratification on the model of the childlike desire for a sensuous experience of things, then it might be reasonable enough to seek in money the power to assure the flow of those things. No doubt there is always a significant degree of validity to this equation of the good with the sensuous experience of things that make us feel good. But, there may also be something more. That there might be something more follows from Trump’s insistence that deal making does not lead to happiness. To his way of thinking, if you succeed at making deals, you might get what you want, but only if happiness is not what you want. As I have suggested, making others unhappy might be an important part of the answer to the question: what does Trump want if it is not to be happy? The other answer to the question leads us to think about how assuring a continuous and limitless flow of good things leaves us unsatisfied when that flow is disconnected from its original source, how independence of the kind Trump gains through wealth can actually prevent rather than assure gratification, how hate for the source of the good things prevents satisfaction. We have already had a hint of the answer to the question what does Trump want. This hint lies in Denby’s comment that money making is “an attempt to steal time from the end.” An adult, unlike a child, knows that the flow of good things and the good feeling that flow provides can go on no longer than life itself; and the adult knows that life’s time is finite. This knowledge of death reshapes greed, turning it away from the objects favored by the child. Knowledge of death means that gaining those objects can no longer assure satisfaction; they cannot secure us against the “emptiness of the

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wilderness.” So greed must turn its attention elsewhere. There are several possibilities. First, greed might turn its attention toward a life after death. This is the solution to the problem of greed favored at the beginning of the modern period. It calls upon religion and morality. But, in a secular world, this solution offers little comfort, which raises the question: how can we cope with the inevitable end of the good feeling in a secular world? This is the question: what does Trump want? But, it is also the question: what could Trump want that he might have a chance of acquiring?

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n understanding greed, the place to focus our attention is on the reality-denying insistence on knowing no limits that is greed’s central feature. The state of being where limits do not exist and trade-offs do not apply is the state I will refer to as the ultimate fulfillment. I now turn to a closer study of the hope for the ultimate fulfillment, which I think offers an answer to the question posed at the end of the previous chapter. * *

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Consider first Harvey Kaplan’s description of primitive hunger: The animal who hunts his prey is driven by hunger. Hunger arouses aggression but animosity is not felt toward the object, the prey, itself. In fact, the animal is pleased when it catches the prey in its sight. (Kaplan 1991: 513)

The creature feels satisfied when the prey is acquired and consumed. In nature, hunger “activates the urge to find food, to capture the prey, to devour it, and feel satisfied.” Kaplan goes on to characterize this as “greedy hunger,” by which he presumably means hunger that overrides any consideration other than its satisfaction, especially any consideration for others who might be hungry or for the needs of hunger’s object.

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There is, in this, a primitive kind of greed comparable to the infant’s greed to maintain an uninterrupted flow of the good things whatever the consequences for their source, the mother, who might at some point become depleted. I refer to this as primitive greed because, although it exhibits certain of the qualities of greed, it lacks others. First, although the infant may lack consideration for the impact of its pursuit of satisfaction on the source of the good things, the infant remains capable of satisfaction. For the infant, there is such a thing as enough, and because of this, the infant’s hunger is not really the hunger of greed, which finds in its object not satisfaction, but a stimulus to seek more. In the words of Harold Borris, “gratification only stimulates . . . greed” (1994: 38). Second, although the infant may not be concerned about the effect of its greediness on the mother, its goal is not to deplete the mother or take the good things from her for the sake of doing so. That is, the sadistic element, especially the need to deprive others, associated with adult greed is not a part of the infant’s relationship with the source of the good things. Greed emerges when the natural relation of predator to prey is disrupted by the introduction of a new end. The human being breaks this animal sequence with foodgathering activities that are carried on outside the animal’s sequence and have lost their connection to the original need. They have, in a sense, broken loose from the original instinctual drive and lost their original instinctual motivations. (Kaplan 1991: 514)

This comment echoes that of the great nineteenth-century economist, who observes that “the desire for food is limited in every man by the narrow capacity of the human stomach, but the desire for the conveniences and ornaments of building, dress, equipage, and household furniture seems to have no limit or certain boundary” (Adam Smith quoted in Ricardo 1951: 293). This means that we cannot understand greed if we attempt to see in it, as some have, an original drive or instinct. Thus,

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for example, Harold Borris describes greed as “the natural condition of humankind—its secular original sin” (Boris 1994: 71). This interpretation of greed follows from Melanie Klein’s notion of “primitive inborn greed” (Kaplan 1991: 512). For Klein (1993), greed is the starting point, and the developmental task is to cope with innate greed. Yet, even if certain elements of greed, especially its lack of concern for its object, are in some sense original, this does not make greed a natural drive. Precisely because greed has no limit in its object and cannot be satisfied, it differs radically from any natural impulse. To arrive at greed, we need to look beyond the sort of creature that is dominated by its natural imperatives, a creature that is nothing more than a system of drives. * *

*

A vitally important aspect of greed is the way it forces us to conceive desire’s object. For the greedy, that object is not another person in his or her own right, but the source or possessor of the good things. In greed, there is “less recognition of the object and the focus is on possessions and supplies” (Kaplan 1991: 512). When driven by greed, we “attempt to restore a satisfied, full internal state (based on hunger-devouring-taking in) without regard for the feelings of others . . . or even the recognition that others exist except in a vague way apart from the thing that one desires” (519). In our greed, we have no concern for others except as they might facilitate or impede us in finding greed’s object. When driven by greed, we insist on more, and the greedy feel entitled to what they have not been given and what they imagine has been withheld from them. An excess of greed conflicts with recognition of others when “an individual strives for too much of something for its own sake at the expense of the welfare of others.” When this happens, greed indicates “a failure in object attachment” (520). Greediness does not engage or involve others, but fends them off or uses them. Ultimately, the greedy can never have enough because what their greed drives them to acquire and consume does

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not satisfy them, it is not desire’s real object but a surrogate, and because satisfaction for the greedy means exclusive access to the source of the good and therefore to all the good there can be. The emphasis here is on exclusive possession. So long as others have some, the greedy must doubt their worth as measured in what they possess. The limitless quality of greed stems, therefore, from a construction of the world along the following lines. For the greedy, self-worth is measured by the worth of the objects to which the self has gained possession. That is, the worth of things is not determined by the investment of the self in them, but the worth of the self is determined by the objects it possesses. Any access others have to the good calls into question the goodness of the self, which is to say its worthiness. Possession by others is a threat to the greedy because they see in others only the projection of their own greedy selves, and therefore of their own impulse to take and to withhold. The fear that possession by others means deprivation of the self drives the greedy to seek as much as they can possibly acquire of the good things. Thus self-worth can only be assured by attaining the unattainable goal of possessing everything of value. Greed, then, is all about the pursuit not of gratification as it can be, but of a special order of gratification that can never be. This special order of gratification is the gratification without end that dismisses any possibility that the feeling of want, which is to say of emptiness, will return. To assure unending gratification, there must be a comparable unending supply of the good things. When we seek a finite fulfillment, our end is also to feel good, and therefore to feel that we are good. But, this desire to feel good need not exclude others from that feeling, or deny the possibility that gratification will be contingent, limited, and partial. In this finite order of fulfillment, gratification is inseparably linked with frustration and disappointment. By contrast, on the higher order of fulfillment, fulfillment has no limits in others and in ourselves; it is what Mervin Glasser refers to as the “ultimate narcissistic fulfillment” (Glasser 1992). The ultimate narcissistic fulfillment leaves no room for

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others and their desires, as it leaves no room for the possibility that our gratification might be anything but complete and eternal. Those driven by the hope for the ultimate fulfillment are driven by a “relentless greed” (Kernberg 1980: 136) whose object is to acquire all those things that establish the self as the one true self. The hope for this one true self is the hope to make real a grandiose fantasy. Greed can be satisfied by nothing less than an uninterrupted and exclusive access to inputs that establish the reality in the eyes of others, and therefore in our own eyes, of the grandiose self. Greed is in this way tied to narcissism. In contemporary psychoanalysis, the term narcissism has taken on a somewhat complex meaning. Of special importance for our discussion of greed is the distinction that has been drawn between normal and pathological narcissism. The two are distinguished according to whether the narcissism refers to a sense of well-being that comes from investing value in the self, or whether the narcissism arises out of a profound deficit in the ability to invest value in the self. The latter offers in place of an investment of value in the self (1) an obsessive preoccupation with protecting a fragile self, which is ultimately not felt to be of value, and (2) a way of relating to others based not on any importance they have in themselves, but only on the impact they are experienced or imagined to have on self-esteem. In the words of Otto Kernberg “normal narcissistic gratification” increases “self-regard and self-esteem,” while also strengthening “the investments of others with love, appreciation, and gratitude” (1980: 135). It follows that normal narcissism is consistent with the kind of concern for others excluded by the more destructive forms of greed. Normal narcissism refers to a condition in which interest in the self rather than expressing indifference or possibly aggression toward others is instead the necessary condition for any real concern and regard for them. Pathological narcissism, by contrast, implies aggression toward others who must be controlled to assure that they support, or at least do not undermine, fragile self-esteem. In pathological forms of narcissism, the main

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objective is to extract from others the admiration needed to sustain a fragile sense of self, now bolstered by the construction of a grandiose surrogate self. This greedy extraction of admiration from others, which can be facilitated by attaching things of value to the self “fuels a tendency to depreciate and devalue others” (Kernberg 1980: 136) reminiscent of the early modern idea found especially in Hobbes’s political theory that anything that enhances my esteem in your eyes must lower your esteem in mine. The brief description of pathological narcissism just offered suggests how close it is to the phenomenon we have up to this point referred to as destructive greed. The factors, then, that foster the development of pathological narcissism also foster the interpretation of self-interest as an inherently predatory force, notwithstanding the underlying inconsistency between pathological narcissism and any real interest in the self. Because pathological narcissism develops when the individual is unable to make a positive investment in the self and instead finds the self he has profoundly devalued, it cannot be consistent with any real self-interest. Then, so far as the destructive forms of greed are an expression of pathological narcissism, their consequences can only be ameliorated either by repression or by countering the forces that foster the devaluing of the self and the pathological narcissism that can arise when the self has been devalued. This aspect of greed has another important implication. Because, for the greedy, worth depends on possession, it does not depend on any real achievements. This means that the self does not develop, it acquires. Attaching things to the self is not the development of the self into something, but only an effort to mark the self as already being something. Acquisition validates the claim to self-worth; it represents so many proofs that the individual is worthy in the eyes of God, however God is conceived. As Max Weber observes about the early Calvinist, the point of his activity is not to create his salvation, but only to create the conviction of it (1992: 115). This distinction goes to the heart of the phenomenon of

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greed, because the greedy are not, in the end, about real work as a process of realizing what the self can be in its world, but about finding the evidence that the self is special in the eyes of God. The greedy do not make themselves worthy; they seek to demonstrate that they are. The need to demonstrate worthiness drives the greedy to expend tremendous effort and to suffer significant selfdeprivation. In short, it drives the greedy to an excess of industry in the pursuit of wealth. But, should we consider this effort work? Clearly, if by work we mean self-negating labor, the greedy often do prodigious amounts of work, as Donald Trump is quick to suggest. But, as is the case with Trump, something is missing in the activity of the greedy, something we might reasonably include under the heading of work. This something is the creative element linked above to the idea of being a self. If work must produce or create something, then the greedy may labor, but they do not work. And because their labor is inherently self-negating, they also seek to avoid work as much as doing so is consistent with achieving their goal. Because the greedy self does not develop, for the greedy there is and can be no distinction between the potential and real, which also means there can be no notion of a potential that must work to become what it can be. Instead, the greedy wish simply to “be all they can be.” This denial of the distinction between real and potential is part of the equation of the particular self with being the one true self. To be the one true self is to possess all that is of value, all things and all attributes. The greedy cannot be satisfied with a limited subset of things and attributes, and because of this they cannot shape for themselves a finite identity. The refusal to accept the finite life is reflected in the way greed for objects can also be greed for identifications. In the words of Melanie Klein: “Greed is an important factor in indiscriminate identifications, for the need to get the best from everywhere interferes with the capacity for selection and discrimination.”1 Refusal to form an enduring identification expresses that same insatiable desire for the good things we

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find in the desire on the part of the greedy to possess all the things of value. Here, rather than simply owning all the things of value, the greedy wish to be all the valued ways of being. * *

*

The tendency toward indiscriminate identifications is also a tendency to avoid being identified as something real, particular, and concrete. Put another way, this tendency leads the greedy away from shaping an identity, which would limit what they want and what they can have to those things consistent with the way of life linked to their particular identity. This failure to shape an identity and to form an attachment to a particular way of life is of special importance in understanding greed and some of its consequences. To understand this idea, it will be helpful to consider the problem of identity, and especially of the relationship between self and identity, more closely. To do so, I will begin with the idea of the self as a potential or capacity. This is consistent with Heinz Kohut’s definition of the nuclear self as “the basis for our sense of being an independent center of initiative and perception.” Kohut conceives this nuclear self as a “cohesive and enduring psychic configuration” that “in connection with a correlated set of talents and skills that it attracts to itself or develops . . . forms the central sector of the personality” (1977: 176–77). Kohut emphasizes the experience of self-sameness, which is the recognition of oneself in the recalled past and projection of oneself into the imagined future (180). Kohut links the nuclear self to creativity by arguing that it is important for the individual to establish “one sector within the realm of the self through which an uninterrupted flow of narcissistic strivings can proceed toward creative expression.” Kohut suggests that this sector includes “a central pattern of exhibitionism and grandiose ambitions” (54). The self is the capacity for an inner determination of conduct. It does not directly determine what we do, but assures that what we do is no simple adaptation to external expectations.

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The self is the capacity to determine what does or does not pertain to us, what is or is not important, who we are and who we are not. It is our capacity to invest meaning in our world: in things, in persons, in a vocation. But, this capacity can only be made real in action and this activity, when it expresses the presence of a self, makes up a way of life. The shape of a concrete way of life realizes a potential embedded in having a self. This realization of our potential is what we mean by identity and being an individual. An individual leads a life expressive of his capacity to be himself. Greed rejects all limitation to a particular concrete identity. Shaping a life so that it consists of the doing that expresses being a self is not possible for the greedy because in the most basic sense, at the most basic level of the personality, the greedy do not have a self to call on to direct their lives and shape a process of identity formation. What they have in place of the missing center of initiative is their greed, and what greed shapes is not an individual identity, but what I will refer to as a surrogate self. The surrogate self is the self shaped by greed, the self that exists as the reflection of the things of value it possesses. The surrogate self appears to be an actual self, but it is not. It differs from the actual self in the following two vital respects: 1. It has no enduring attachment to objects, endeavors, and experiences. In this sense it has no real identity. 2. It does not determine what is of value for it, but seeks to acquire everything that is defined externally as being of value. One important expression of greed is the refusal to accept the limits implied in having an identity. * *

*

At the center of the phenomenon of greed is the illusion that one can arrive at the infinite by adding up all the finite things. For the greedy, the self does not exist in and for itself

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as a center of initiative and activity, but only as the reflection of the valuable things it possesses. Indeed, if the capacity to make things meaningful is what we mean by having a self, then the greedy do not have one. This is, in modern language, an old idea, expressed, for example, by Thomas Aquinas when he says of greed: “it is a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, inasmuch as man contemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things.” (1989: 2, 118, ad 1). Because of this, it is not surprising that the experience of greed is the experience of something missing. The absence of the vital center of psychic experience recalls Denby’s comment about greed that it is “a gathering of goods against the emptiness of the wilderness.” Because the greedy do not have a self of their own, they seek to put in place a surrogate for it. As Klein points out, they lack the capacity for selection and discrimination that is the essence of what I refer to as the self. Their impulse toward indiscriminate identifications means that the greedy are incapable of any real self-determination, which requires investment in a self-chosen identity that endures and identifies what we are and what we are not and will not be. The tendency toward indiscriminate identifications makes wealth a natural object for the greedy since wealth is understood to free us from the need to shape an identity, and in so doing become something definite, real, and finite in the world. This power of wealth was well expressed by Karl Marx when he spoke of the power of money: My power is as great as the power of money. The properties of money are my—(its owner’s)—properties and faculties. I am ugly, but I can buy myself the most beautiful women. Consequently I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its power of repulsion, is annulled by money. . . . I am a wicked, dishonest man without conscience or intellect, but money is honored and so also is its possessor. Money is the highest good, and so its possessor is good. (Marx 1977: 109)

The greedy view with contempt those that are satisfied with or otherwise limited to a finite way of life shaped by enduring attachments and a particular concrete identity. Those limited

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in this way are inferior since any limitation stands in the way of the ultimate fulfillment. This makes envy a significant implication of greed. Because the greedy must have it all, they cannot tolerate the idea that others have something of value that they lack. A society of the greedy is, therefore, a system of competition over who is and who is not the self. The winner in the competition has succeeded in attaching all that is of value to him- or herself. Money, as Marx insists, represents the value of all things; indeed, it is value in its pure form, without any ties to history or identity; it is human potential that need never be realized but can remain as a potential. Greed for riches is not only the greed to have and possess it all; it is greed to have the ultimate gratification. It is the ultimate moment in the seeking after meaning in life. To become something definite is to give up the world of possibilities and therefore to give up any exclusive claim that what we are is not one way of being good, but the good itself. It is to give up exclusive possession of the good and the source of those things that are considered good. This means that to invest ourselves in a particular endeavor, a particular vocation and the particular work required to do it well, is to give up the gratification that is greed’s deepest hope and aspiration and thus, for the greedy, to make life meaningless. Trapped within this thought process, the greedy cannot do real work, but must substitute something else. This something else is intimately bound up with avoiding enduring identifications by acquiring access to all valued qualities. Wealth and money as its measure and representation offer us the opportunity to have it all, or to imagine that we might. * *

*

One of the questions greed insists we answer in the affirmative is the question: can the acquisition of things of value make up for the shame we feel for our devalued selves? Greed is, at its core, an expression of impoverishment. Where poverty means the lack of property in things of value and therefore

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the inability to derive a sense of worth from the value of the things owned, greed drives us toward the unlimited attachment of valued things to a devalued self in the effort to compensate for what is felt, at the deepest levels of subjective life, to be missing. This connection between greed and poverty makes it unsurprising that the greedy carry with them a profound sense of themselves as poor, which in many cases is literally true. The intensity of the impulse set in motion by the self-experience of impoverishment helps account for the excesses of the greedy. We will not be surprised, then, to find that those at the center of late-twentieth-century corporate scandals began with little or nothing. Ken Lay, CEO of Enron, was born the son of a Baptist preacher. Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom “started out with nothing, but owned $1.4 billion in WorldCom stock at the height of his wealth in 1999” (Staples 2002). John Regas, chairman and CEO of Adelphia, who was convicted of fifteen securities fraud charges for looting his company and duping investors, was the “son of a Greek immigrant who ran a hot dog restaurant” (Leonard 2002). Martha Stewart was born Martha Kostyra to a working-class Polish family in New Jersey. Although Sam Waksal of ImClone did not grow up poor, his parents were Holocaust survivors, who suffered the most extreme deprivation imaginable. All of these examples suggest the intimate relationship between greed and poverty. In this relationship, greed for wealth produces poles of wealth and poverty, while poverty promotes greediness. The early political economists took note of the tendency for a market economy to promote the development of poles of wealth and poverty: Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. (Smith 1976: 709–10)

Marx made developing this insight a central feature of his work, and sought to demonstrate that impoverishment should

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be understood as the result of the accumulation of wealth. What the political economists did not consider, however, was how impoverishment might promote the desire for wealth, and therefore greed, although Smith did observe how wealth provoked envy in the poor and with it an inclination to “invade” the possessions of the rich (710). Impoverishment promotes greed so far as greed expresses the presence of a devalued self. So far as impoverishment in the world of property promotes a sense of impoverishment of the self, it also promotes the construction of a grandiose self-fantasy intended to compensate for the shame brought on by the unfavorable comparison between the poor and the wealthy. Wealth, then, provides the imagined solution to the problem of the impoverished self since it marks the attachment of things of value to it. The more we imagine that our sense of self-worth has been lost because we are poor, the more our poverty promotes greed for wealth as a response. * *

*

The idea of the ultimate fulfillment provides a significant part of the answer to the question: What does Trump want? By extension it also directs us toward an answer to the broader question about the meaning and origins of greedy desire. This answer refers us to the hope that the flow of the good things will be never-ending and that there will always be “a good object to come, able and willing to respond to our demands” (Potamianou 1997: 57). But, although this hope is a part of the answer to our question, there remains something important missing. I allude to this something important in chapter 7 when I note how Trump’s desire to have and hold all of the good things is also a desire to control the flow of the good things to others and especially to have the power to deprive others of them. This desire to deprive others is a desire to impose loss on them, an imposition that is well-represented in systems of interaction organized around competition. I now turn to a closer investigation of competition to see what we can learn from it about greedy desire.

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In competition, our object is a prize that cannot be shared. Economists have long insisted that in competition the prize cannot be shared because it is scarce. But the scarcity assumption tends to sidestep the question of whether the prize cannot be shared because it is scarce or it is scarce because it must not be shared. If scarcity is not a matter of natural limitation, then competition arises not because desire’s object happens to be scarce relative to those who would have it, but because we make it scarce to assure there will be competition over it. Thinking about the problem this way makes envy not the result of scarcity but its cause. In other words, we create competition because we need an arena in which to enact a drama that makes some envious and others the objects of their envy. One way economists assure scarcity is by assuming that desire is limitless, because if desire knows no limits then desire’s object must be scarce no matter how much of it there is. Following this line of thinking, competition arises because of greed. Grounding competition in greed rather than envy may make it a less destructive process and open the door to a more benevolent interpretation of the kind sometimes favored in political economy since the time of Adam Smith (see Hirschman 1977). After all, greed, unlike envy, is not simply an “expression of destructive impulses,” (Klein 1993: 176), but “an aspect of the desire to live” (Riviere 1964: 26–27). Yet, it remains difficult to escape envy when thinking about competition once desire becomes the desire to have everything of value. In competition, we secure scarcity by making desire’s goal something only one competitor can attain. We limit gratification to only one when we make the condition for gaining the prize that others must lose it. In the world Hobbes describes, which I briefly explore in chapter 2, when I honor you I lose honor to you, which makes honor inherently a goal we cannot share and assures that it will be scarce not because it occurs only infrequently in nature, but because its production in a relationship means that it will be gained and lost at the same moment. When our goal is honor in Hobbes’s sense, greed and envy work together. Our greed is for the honor of

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others and the envy we seek to create is the projected loss of self-worth that must result from competition. The process of competition works when participants are subject to specific motivation. This motivation has two aspects: what the participant can expect to gain and what he or she can expect to lose. Competition is, then, about channeling the energies of individuals in particular directions. What the individual can hope to gain is the attainment of a state in which the narcissistic illusion becomes real. This is the prospect that self-limits can be put aside, that the obstacles others represent can be eliminated by eliminating others (as in eliminating competitors or taking their market shares). What individuals stand to loose, then, is exactly what they hope to gain at the expense of others, since others share the same hope. In other words, everything of value to the individual (which is to say the prospect of narcissistic gratification, which in this context is indeed everything of value) is at stake in competition. The exclusionary quality of greed and of the self-interest connected to it gives us the first hint of the vital connection between greed and loss. Greed expresses the fear of loss and the effort to defend against it. The greedy person is constantly aware of the threat of loss, and because of this is driven to attempt to take from others lest they take from him first. He must keep what he has safe from the depredations of others. Thus, greed exists in a system of greed, real or imagined. Greed promotes rivalry and fear. It places us in a world of competitors, a world in which our original insecurity about ourselves is made a quality of our life with others. Their presence is now perceived as the source of our insecurity, when in fact it is our insecurity and dependence on the accumulation of things that makes others a threat to us. This is the threat of loss, and we can say, therefore, that desire turns into greed when desire is powerfully bound up with the fear of loss. Then, what appears to be a desire for things is not a desire at all, but a defense against loss. If the underlying meaning of greed is loss, it is the fear of loss of those things that establish the goodness and value of the self, the fear that they will become the property (or properties) of others. Loss becomes

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especially painful to us because unconsciously it means “that we are being exposed as unworthy of good things, and so our deepest fears are realized” (Riviere 1964: 27). But greed does not merely express and defend against a feared experience, it also provokes the experience it seeks to defend against. Greed attacks the other since insisting that I can be good only if I can possess all that is good means imposing the loss of what is good on the other. More fundamentally, it imposes the loss of a connection with the other. Greed provokes and assures the loss of the other as a source of good things for us. It stands in the way of love. If this is correct, then we cannot treat greed as merely reactive (to the prospect of loss), but must also consider it a causal factor. It is because it fuels the loss to which it is a response that greed seems so primordial. So much is clear in competitive sports where no sooner has the current champion been crowned than the question is asked can he or she repeat, and then repeat once more. The immediate aftermath of victory is that we must start over, play again, and once again risk everything. But, of course, the prospect that the competition will begin anew no sooner than it has ended assures that winning and losing are not so absolute as the comments in the section above would have them be. Competition, then, exists in and through its own contradiction. Everything of value is at stake, and stands to be won or lost. Yet those who win everything must be made to put it at risk and enter the competition anew, just as those who have lost everything will return as hopefuls in the next round. We can think of the competitive system as a system of the controlled expression of greed. In doing so, we shift attention away from the obvious goal of competition, specific things of value, and see that goal as fending off the loss of things of value. If we consider competition, as I suggest, not from the standpoint of what stands to be gained, but of what stands to be lost, then the purpose of competition is to impose loss on others, to take something away from them, and have it all for yourself.

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In the free market, competition, and thus the system of greed, is subject to the least possible control. The problem with competition under these conditions is that too much is at stake. If, indeed, we have everything to gain and everything to lose, then competition must extinguish at least one, and more likely all but one or at most a few, of the competitors, thereby extinguishing competition itself. When this happens, competition no longer sponsors difference, but destroys it. This is certainly the fear we have in face of monopoly, where we are at the mercy of a single supplier. Competition among the greedy is competition as Donald Trump experiences it and insists it ought to be: the process that enriches some while impoverishing others. This makes competition a social mechanism for distributing wealth and poverty. Because the potential to impoverish is built into competition, it imposes no limits either on the creation of wealth or on the degradations of poverty. Removing limits to what can be gained and lost in competition raises the stakes in the process to the point where livelihood and therefore survival are at issue. The survival at issue has been conceived by some in the older language of subsistence, so that impoverishment means either the failure to acquire the means of subsistence or the ability to acquire no more than “mere subsistence.” Livelihood can also, however, be conceived in terms of the self as a subjective experience, and failure in the competitive struggle then diminishes the self. This last possibility is important for understanding corruption so far as that is driven by fear of competitive failure and the attendant loss of social position.

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9

Greed, Morality, and Corruption

The Moral Order In human associations, the central element in the control of greed has been morality and the power of the moral community or moral order over the behavior of its members. To act on the basis of a moral judgment implies that our action is not predetermined by natural imperatives or irresistible impulse, but contains the element of will and freedom. But, although morality has this broad significance that identifies it with freedom, it also carries connotations that shape and direct will and freedom in a specific way. This is the way associated with the ideal of adaptation of conduct to externally given rules. Indeed, closely associated with the meaning of adhering to right and wrong in conduct is the meaning of adhering to rules or norms. Thus morality refers to “behaviour conforming to moral law or accepted moral standards.” Critical to this aspect of morality is the idea that the good exists outside the member, who becomes good by acting in compliance with an external authority, an authority derived from proximity to an ideal, so that moral refers to “a body of requirements to which an action must conform in order to be right or virtuous.”1 The vital part played by compliance in the practice of morality means that it expresses human freedom while insisting on its opposite, which is adaptation to an external and predetermined rule.

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Emotionally, the point of adaptation to rules is that doing so secures a relationship of a particular kind with the source of the good things. Thus through our attachment to morality, we make an attachment to those forces outside us we perceive to be responsible for our well-being, especially for gratification of our most pressing desires. Psychologically, then, morality is all about securing the flow of the good things and the good feeling that the flow produces. As we have seen, morality requires a specific sort of adherence to the good, which is identification with it.2 We identify with something outside ourselves when we shape ourselves according to our chosen model.3 The idea of being good by identifying with a good object contrasts with the way in which greed imagines the path to having a worthy self. In greed, so far as being good is involved as the end, it is understood to mean taking possession of all the things that are good, which involves taking them away from the object that is their source. In greed, if we are good it is because of what we have. In morality, we are good because of whom we identify with, what we believe, and how we conduct our lives. Clearly morality is the enemy of greed, as greed is the enemy of morality. In the language of the psyche, morality seeks to protect the good object and thus the source of the good things from the greedy, who wish to take all that is good from its source and have it for themselves. This conflict between morality and greed is clearly expressed in the idea that greed is a sin, indeed one of the seven deadly sins. Yet, however morality may stand opposed to greed, and, indeed, seek to protect the source of the good from greedy attack meant to take the good things it contains from it, morality also expresses greed. There is, as it turns out, something greedy in morality itself, which also contains that dissatisfaction with limited gratification we find active in greed, and which is greed’s defining quality. Because, for the moral actor, conduct is either good or bad, his aspiration tends, like that of the greedy, to tolerate no limits and to carry a powerfully aggressive impulse against those he imagines might threaten his identification with the good. Thus, like greed, morality is limitless and exclusive.

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Because of this, we can consider morality not just a constraint on but also an expression for greed. Morality continues themes we associate with greed, and is closely linked to it, while also defending against greed and the threat to the good object greed represents. But, the moral orientation goes beyond protecting the object against the attack originating in greed. Because of its close links to greed, morality identifies desire with aggression and therefore self-expression with an attack on the good object. To deal with the problem of desire’s link with aggression, morality attacks desire, seeking to protect the good object by repressing the self, which, so far as it claims its own subjective satisfaction as its end, must be judged bad by the moral order. Greed occupies a special place in the moral order as the primary threat to moral standing. The term used for acts taken against the moral order is sin, and among the sins, greed is often given pride of place. As one student notes, “the truth remains that every system from Hinduism to Christianity has agreed over the centuries that of our seven demons, greed is the mistress” (Tickle 2004: 12). Thus, when asked what is the foundation of sin, Bhishma, one of the most honored figures of the Hindu Mahabharata and symbol of mature wisdom, responds: It is covetousness that makes men commit sin . . . it is from covetousness that loss of judgment, deception, pride, arrogance, and malice, as also vindictiveness, loss of prosperity, loss of virtue, anxiety and infamy spring. (Tickle 2004: 13)

According to the Tao Teh Ching, “there is no greater calamity than indulging in greed.” (Tickle 2004: 14). In some interpretations of the Ten Commandments, theft plays a special role, being the implicit motivating force in many of them: to commit murder is to steal a life; to commit adultery is to steal another’s partner, and so on. On this interpretation, the Commandments appear as invocations against covetousness, and therefore part of an effort to control the expression of greed. In sum, “greed, by any name, is the mother and matrix, root and consort of all the other sins” (Tickle 2004: 15).

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It is clear, of course, that the greed considered here is significantly tinged with another impulse, which is envy. Covetousness derives its special power from the fact that it combines the two in such a way as to magnify their destructive force. In covetousness, not only do I want more, and not only do I want more than I need or can use, I also want what others have. The goal, then, is not merely to assure that I receive an uninterrupted flow of the good things, but that I alone do so. Were others to receive a share of the good things, I would have no choice but to recognize that they are also good, and have good things of their own. But, in recognizing them, as Hobbes insists, I diminish myself in their eyes, and thus, to that degree lose the honor I most covet. If honor taken in this sense plays a role in greed, then so must another of the mortal sins, pride, which for some is more basic even than greed. When greed is shaped by the joint action of pride and envy, it becomes a dangerously powerful force. This combination of greed, envy, and pride into covetousness constitutes what I have here referred to as destructive greed, to be distinguished from the infantile desire for the uninterrupted flow of the good things, which is, of course, the precursor of, and can under appropriate circumstances develop into, the destructive forms of adult greed. Given the primacy of destructive greed among the threats to the moral order, we can consider the moral order a system for the control of greed. That greed is a primary threat to the moral order tells us something important about the purpose of that order, which must be to protect virtue against greed. Virtue here cannot be merely the absence of greed, but the presence of an alternative motivation that greed threatens to displace. This alternative remains when we remove greed. The virtue to which I have just referred is in some ways implied in greed, as the element absent in it. In the first instance, this element is regard for others and for their needs. Although it is clear enough that this virtue is missing in greed, we can also consider the matter on a deeper level. In the end, it is not a matter of disregard for others that makes greed a sin, but the

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contempt greed demonstrates for a special quality deemed to exist in others, a quality variously termed their humanity, their spirit, their soul, or their selves. So the danger posed by greed is not so much that others in the abstract might be treated without regard, but that the quality in others that is due our regard will be diminished by the greedy. What is interesting about this observation is that the quality in others put at risk by greed is the same quality that, in the greedy themselves, is put at risk. Greed does not simply pose a threat to the spirit, soul, or self in others; it equally does so to our own spirit, soul, or self, and for the same reason. We have already seen how this might be the case when we considered how greed can express the presence of a devalued self, one that must be replaced by a surrogate built up out of the admiration of others. This means that greed expresses contempt for the self not merely as that appears in others, but as that appears within the greedy themselves. This last point has some important implications for the specific way in which greed is involved with the moral order. In the moral order, defense of the soul against greed is a matter of great importance. Distinctive to the moral order, however, is a significant degree of separation between the soul and the principle of individual autonomy. In other words, the wellbeing of the soul does not depend on its ability to animate an individual life expressive of an individual identity separate from the group or community. This means that the well-being of the soul does not depend on the capacity to know and pursue self-interest. The soul is here clearly separated from any idea of an individual self as that has developed especially in the modern world. The separation of soul from self, or perhaps I should say refusal to treat the soul as an early expression for the self, has as one consequence a powerful tendency to conflate greed with self-interest. So far as we equate greed with self-interest, an equation typical in much thinking on the subject, eliminating greed eliminates self-interest, and by extension it eliminates all presence of the individual self, and of the effect the self ’s desires might have on the community. In other words, eliminating

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greed assures that the individual self will not pose a threat to the communal or group self, whose safety and hegemony is secured by making it a sin to act on individual desire. *

* *

Morality manages greed by channeling it in two directions. First, morality offers gratification in the future as a reward for abstinence today, thus promoting greed itself as a means to repress greed and its destructive effects on the group. Second, morality shifts greed from the individual to the group, redefining possession and gratification not as a personal experience, but as a group experience. This redefinition of gratification follows from identification, which implies that gratification experienced in the group is gratification experienced by the group, and in this sense is the gratification of all those who are members of the group and therefore are tied together by the bond of identification. The second solution transfers greed from individual to group making the greed a shared end of the group rather than a personal drive of the member. In the group, not only is gratification shifted from present to future, but it is also shifted within the group, so that the greed of all can be gratified by the wealth of some. Gratification through identification means that possession need not be distributed equally through the group, but, rather, that some within the group may be designated to possess and consume its wealth and thus act out the collective greed. Yet, even this license to act out greed remains strictly limited, since it must operate within the norms of a structure of gratification whose end is to control the expression of greed. In this structure, corruption means to violate these limits of greed and sacrifice morality to greed. Communities are, by their nature, built on a hope, which is the hope associated with what in psychoanalysis is referred to as merger fantasy. The self-interest that constitutes liberal society is correctly seen as a threat to this fantasy and to the hope that it can be made real. But this hope is itself an expression of greed since it is hope for the ultimate fulfillment. We can see this link

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between hope and greed more clearly if we bear in mind that it is the individual self that poses a threat to the community’s group self, so it is not greed that poses a problem for community, but individual greed. Greed seeks to establish the particular self not as one, but as the only one, and it seeks this end whether the particular self is the shared group self or the individual self acting outside of and against the group. Thus, the force of greed is part of the impulse that shapes the community, which is an impulse to make the one self the only self. In this sense, both greed and community are the enemies of the idea of the finite self, which is the constituting principle of a liberal society. The problem of a liberal society of self-interested individuals, when viewed from the standpoint of community, then, is not the presence of greed, but the attachment of greed to the individual rather than the group self. To speak more precisely, it is not greed that must be managed in community, but private greed. And the whole point of managing private greed is to offer members the group as the only route to finding greed’s object and the ultimate fulfillment it alone can provide. The claim advanced by the group is that this fulfillment is only available to those who are willing, in the words of Wilfred Bion, to sink their identities in the herd. Both ways of controlling greed seek to do so by creating space between the individual and his or her greed. In the group solution, the individual’s greed is displaced onto the group. This allows the individual to experience his or her greed without taking personal responsibility for it. The second solution transfers greed’s object from present to future. We can be as greedy as we wish so long as we do not seek to gratify our greed, but only to hold the prospect of future gratification. We can see this second solution at work in the early Protestant sects described by Max Weber and R.H. Tawney. The members of the early Protestant sects were intensely greedy if we measure the intensity of greed by the intensity of self-deprivation imposed in an effort to marshal evidence that we are worthy of salvation. In other words, their greed manifests itself as its opposite: thrift. Having been “temporarily thwarted,” greed “changes her robes and her demeanor to ones of simple austerity and becomes,

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Prudentius says, ‘the virtue that men know as Thrift’ ” (Tickle 2004: 28). Here is Weber’s classical account of the implications of the transformation of greed into thrift: When the limitation of consumption is combined with this release of acquisitive activity, the inevitable practical result is obvious: accumulation of capital through ascetic compulsion to save. The restraints which were imposed on the consumption of wealth naturally served to increase it by making possible the productive investment of capital. (1992: 172)

The return of greed to the individual to be experienced no longer outside in the aspirations of the group and its leaders must now be coped with by its transformation into thrift. As thrift, greed now empowers will against desire. The individual subject has become supreme, but at the price of losing hope for desire’s end, at least during the course of the individual lifespan. The intensity of greed expressed in the intensity of the effort to transform it into thrift makes it unsurprising that self-interest cannot here be clearly distinguished from greed. Separation of the individual self from the group results in an intensity of desire for gratification, one of historical dimensions. This appropriately ushers in the theme that self-interest means greed, or at least is in large measure shaped by greed; and, if greed is the soul-destroyer, so must self-interest be. To protect the human soul, then, we must not only subjugate greed, we must also subjugate self-interest. The power mobilized to do so is will. According to Tawney, the essence of Puritanism is will, “will organized and disciplined and inspired . . . quiescent in rapt adoration or straining in violent energy . . . ” (Tawney 1962: 201). The idea of will summarized a whole conception of the individual and what is expected of him. In this conception, emphasis shifts from the individual’s embeddedness in community to the individual’s inner life and separate being. Puritan theology made the revelation of God to the individual soul, “not only the center, but the whole circumference and substance, dismissing as dross and

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vanity all else but this secret and solitary communion.” Salvation is made the direct gift of God, “unmediated by any earthly institution.” The deployment of the concept of will, and the associated isolation of the individual’s relation with God, implied moral self-sufficiency. The Puritan’s moral self-sufficiency “nerved his will, but . . . corroded his sense of social solidarity. For, if each individual’s destiny hangs on a private transaction between himself and his maker, what room is left for human intervention” (Tawney 1962: 227–28)? As I have suggested, the danger posed by greed has shifted from the danger that it will destroy the covenant, and therefore the community, to the danger that it will destroy the individual’s soul. With the growing influence of the idea of subjective freedom, with the insistence on the power of individual will in human affairs, the group solution gives way to the more individual solution that engages a more individualized morality. Yet, the distance between speaking of the soul and speaking of the self is not great, the latter being a secular expression for the former: Sin is the destruction of one’s self as well as the destruction of one’s relationships with others. But the fearfulness of the destruction cannot be grasped unless we realize that the damage is done precisely where each of our natures is organized by some unifying principle that is more than the sum of the parts . . . (Fairlie 1978: 4)

This something more than the sum of the parts is what we “know to be most completely ourselves” (4–5). * *

*

Although I have argued that collective greed is the form of greed suited to the older form of association, the moral order, we will still find expressions of collective greed in modern society. This is in part because the impulse toward submersion into a group, and the capacity to transfer greed to the collective, is a universal aspect of human emotional development linked to the very

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merger fantasy out of which greed is shaped. It is also in part because the modern or liberal society develops out of the older order, and, as with all development, carries forward important features of the older way of being. The result, then, is a kind of uneven development in which greed appears simultaneously in its two otherwise conflicting forms: as individual and as collective greed. This is nowhere more evident than in the parallel developments of free-market ideology, which idealizes individual greed, and nationalist rhetoric, which idealizes the group. We can find an interesting recent example of this in Bush administration’s rhetoric. This rhetoric was well expressed by Bill Clinton in his assessment of the difference between his approach to foreign policy and what he refers to as the “Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz view,” which he characterizes in the following terms: Here we are at the end of the Cold War. We are the only military superpower. We have no idea how long this is going to last, so we ought to get every bad guy we can and fix every problem we can, beginning with Saddam Hussein, not with Osama bin Laden, but with Saddam Hussein. And we ought to do it—if we have to do it on our own, because we’re not an occupying power, we’re not bad people. (Clinton 2004)

In brief, “we need to fix every problem we can while we got the whip hand here.” Clinton’s view differs in operating on the assumption that “there will be problems and bad people as long as the earth exists,” so it will be best to cooperate with others and “build a world of shared responsibility, shared benefits, and shared commitment to our common humanity.” The Bush administration’s hope for a world without evil mirrors and is mirrored by the hope of its main rival, the Muslim fundamentalist, to shape a world under the dominance of Allah. For both combatants, there is one God, and the task on earth is to assure that He is dominant there. This most illiberal hope is also, at its deepest level, an expression of greed, though not in this case a greed for worldly possessions so much as a greed for possession of the world. It is illiberal in that it cannot tolerate

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difference, which is experienced as a threat to merger with that most narcissistically invested of objects: God. Thus, however the liberal ideal, when embedded in institutions, opens the door to greed, it is also threatened by it. If we think of Bush administration foreign policy as an expression of greed, then a seeming inconsistency in that policy disappears. This is the seeming inconsistency between the religion-centered emphasis on values that embed the individual into the larger community and insist on a sense of shared group identity, and the laissez-faire policy with its unrelenting emphasis on abandoning the individual to a destiny determined by market forces. My suggestion is that we consider greed the connecting thread in this policy mix. The policy mix seeks to legitimize individual greed in the economic arena, while disenfranchising it in the arena of national identity and national politics. In other words, the goal of policy is to secure greed in both its manifestations, as a group and as an individual phenomenon. The no-holds-barred greed-based free-market policy in economic affairs mirrors a greed-infused politics that accepts no limits on the nation’s capacity to reshape the international order, and eliminate the evildoers from the world stage. Corruption To the extent that the members of the moral order continue to be driven by their private greed, their investment in the norms of that order cannot be strong. Investment in those norms depends, after all, on the channeling of greed through the group, so that the individual’s greediness sees its satisfaction in the group. When this investment fails, group norms cease to carry any meaning for the member, and conflict develops between the member’s private greed and the group’s ends. When the balance in the struggle between private and group ends shifts toward the former, one result is corruption: the use of the group to satisfy private ends, including private greed. Corruption is a preeminently moral category and morality is the language of primitive emotional life, which is organized

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around matters of good and bad, and around the struggle to be good, to protect what is good, and to remove what is bad from the world. This means that corruption takes its meaning from primitive emotional struggles, and especially from the struggle over desire and desire’s object that forms the basis for emotional development. The corrupt use the moral order to gratify their primitive needs. These primitive needs are sometimes confused with self-interest, but the pursuit of genuine self-interest is not the pursuit of a primitive form of need, but requires the presence of a self-structure, which only arises out of a specific development. Because it depends on development, pursuit of self-interest cannot be considered pursuit of primitive gratification. Thus, the important quality of the need linked to corruption is not that it derives from self-interest, but that it expresses a failed development to higher levels of being and relatedness. Corruption is not simply pursuit of primitive forms of gratification, but the use of a moral order as means to achieve such forms of gratification. It is important to bear in mind that pursuit of primitive forms of gratification is not inherently corrupt, but only becomes so when achieving gratification requires use of the moral system. However, because belonging to a moral community offers a primitive gratification, which is the gratification of merger with the good, we may wonder in what way corruption’s end differs from that pursued within a moral order. The fact that the gratification of belonging and the gratification made available to those who use the moral order for other ends are both primitive gratifications suggests how close corruption is to moral order. Yet, there is an important difference, one that suggests a way in which, even with regard to a moral order, corruption can be thought of as regressive behavior. We can formulate this difference in the following language: the gratification afforded by belonging is gratification from connection in the form of merger into an idealized object, while the gratification afforded by corruption is gratification disconnected from object relatedness. The urge to corrupt, which is an expression of the urge to dismember, is an urge

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to (1) destroy the goodness of the object, (2) find gratification without the object, and (3) sever the gratifying organ and use it to achieve gratification outside the context of object relatedness, which means to seek gratification from a thing rather than an object. * *

*

Morality constrains conduct. All those that belong to a moral order must act according to its norms. If they do, they gain the moral standing represented by the moral order, and if they do not they lose that standing. Because the moral order is an order of proximity to the good, the higher one finds oneself in the order, the stronger the temptation to imagine that one is the good rather than that one becomes good by subordinating oneself to the rule of the good. Thus, out of the nature of the moral order arises the ancient rule that “the King can do no wrong” (Friedrich 1974: 104). Yet, the more one identifies his or her particular self with the good, the less constraint he or she feels from the need to belong to the moral order and to adhere to its norms, because, after all, adhering to norms is only a way of establishing proximity to the good, a problem that does not arise for those who define themselves as inherently good. The difficulty just considered is built into premodern systems of rule where the distinction between the person of the ruler and the entitlement to rule is not clearly established. It might be tempting to conclude that because, in a moral order, rule tends to be personalized and thus the good identified with a particular person, corruption is not possible. After all, if such an identification is made, then use of office in accordance with norms does not differ from use of office for personal ends. Then, as some argue, corruption has no meaning (Johnston 2001: 13). This however, ignores the normative order that, at least in principle, constrains both ruler and ruled. It takes what is only a tendency implied in the construction to be the essential element in it. The failure to distinguish office from person leads us toward corruption. Yet, often those who fail to draw this distinction do

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not see their conduct as corrupt or otherwise morally debased. On the contrary, they imagine that their conduct realizes a moral ideal. This is the ideal of loyalty as virtue, which is an expression of the idea that the good is not an abstract ideal, but a real particular person to whom we might become attached. This has an important implication. It makes virtue concrete rather than abstract, separating virtue from any capacity to hold to an ideal. Related to this, it means that the group and its leader define virtue for themselves rather than seeking to organize themselves to realize a virtue defined outside. They become a self-judging system. Constructing a self-judging system is part of the work of a group, and the movement away from abstract ideals toward virtue as loyalty is also a movement in the direction of constituting a group. The interpretation of loyalty as virtue expresses the absence of a capacity to think abstractly, which capacity enables the individual to make the transition from power to authority. Authority unlike power engages an abstraction in which the investment in the person is replaced by an investment in an ideal or norm (Sapochnik 2003: 185). When the putatively good object, loyalty to which is meant to assure that we are good, behaves badly by violating important norms, virtue as loyalty stands in opposition to virtue as adherence to an ideal. We can understand this dilemma as an expression of the difficulty placed in the path of development toward a concept of virtue not linked to a concrete experience of a particular object. Having personalized the good, and thus having made the good concrete rather than ideal, loyalty takes on the meaning of attachment to the good, which is attachment to the person who is good. This also means that rewarding those who are loyal means rewarding those who are good because they are loyal. Doing so is not abuse of office, but recognizing those whose goodness deserves to be rewarded. Providing offices and other privileges to supporters rewards virtue. This construction then reinterprets what would otherwise appear as corruption as ethical conduct. In chapter 6, I briefly consider an example of this provided by the administration of George W. Bush when, during the occupation of Iraq in the aftermath of the war against the

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Saddam Hussein regime, the decision was made to restrict the opportunity to bid on contracts for reconstruction to firms in countries that had joined the United States in the war. This policy linked reward to loyalty and loyalty to goodness. However plausible this policy might have seemed in isolation, it needs also to be understood in the larger context of an administration that had made a habit of rewarding political supporters with privileged access to government. Just as those who fought with us in the war against evil (Saddam Hussein) were good, so those who campaigned with us in the battle against the opposing candidate were also good. This last expresses a psychic equation between the war against Saddam Hussein and the battle for the White House, both experienced emotionally as instances of the battle between good and evil. Rewarding allies in this battle would hardly be understood as corrupt behavior by those absorbed in the psychic drama of good against evil. Greed and Governance One of Albert Hirschman’s main themes in his study The Passions and the Interests concerns a thesis he attributes to Montesquieu and the early political economist, Sir James Steuart. This thesis has to do with the impact of greed in the form of commercial interest on the arbitrary use of political power, or “how the willfulness, the disastrous lust for glory, and, in general, the passionate excesses of the powerful are curbed by the interests—their own and those of their subjects” (Hirschman 1977: 70). Hirschman quotes Steuart, who argues that, though the introduction of trade and industry are meant to serve “the statesman’s ambition to gain power,” their effect is to curb that power: When once a state begins to subsist by the consequences of industry, there is less danger to be apprehended from the power of the sovereign. The mechanism of his administration becomes more complex, and . . . he finds himself so bound up by the laws of his political oeconomy, that every transgression of them runs him into new difficulty. (Hirschman 1977: 83–84)

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Whatever the merits of this hypothesis, it clearly directs our attention to the consequences of greed for the capacity of the statesman to exercise his stewardship role rather than use the state as a mechanism for facilitating pursuit of greed’s end. It thus raises clearly the question of the relationship between greed and governance so central to the debate over the liberal ideal. Central to the relationship between greed and governance is the way greed affects our perception of others. Specifically, the more powerful the influence of greed in psychic life, the more powerful will be the impulse to experience greed in others, whether they are, in fact, driven by greed or not. This impulse to attribute our own greediness to others and then to act toward them on the assumption that they are driven by greed is an instance of projection, and the greed we experience in others is our own projected greed. The impulse to attribute our greed to others has two important implications: 1. It tends to raise the stakes in the competitive process, to enhance the threat felt by participants, and to reduce the empathic connection with those who fail. 2. It tends to foster the experience of government, or at least of those in positions of authority in government, as loci of greed, and thus to experience government as a threat. Both of these implications tend to promote distrust of government. The result is the tendency to weaken government as part of a strategy to reduce the damage those in government are capable of doing given the enhanced position in the competitive struggle their authority creates.4 Where greed is powerful in society, the state may become a container for projected greed, which is to say the state, or those working in it, may be experienced as motivated by greed. But, the idea of the state as a container for projected greed may mean something more than that we experience the state as a threat. It may also mean that we treat the state as a vehicle for expressing our collective greed. When this happens, two important consequences are possible: (1) the state may act in

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rapacious ways especially toward those defined as outside its boundaries, and (2) the state may be perceived as a competitor for the ultimate fulfillment and thus an object of fear that must be contained and repressed. The first response is typical of group phenomena, which displace aggression from within the group to those outside. As Freud puts it: “it is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness” (1961: 61). We can use what I have said so far to illuminate an important dilemma of contemporary government, a dilemma notable in, but not restricted to, the United States. What we find there must at first glance be a puzzling combination of the empowerment and celebration of the state on one side, and the enfeeblement of the state on the other. The impulse to empower the state follows from identification with the national community, which is to say it is essentially a phenomenon derived from the way communities deal with greed by transforming it into a collective rather than individual impulse. Thus the build-up of military force and its use to impose the national will on others, or to enhance the hegemony of a national culture, empower the state in the interest of serving collective greed. The impulse to enfeeble the state follows from the expression of individual greed that sees in the state a threat both because the state may be experienced as itself greedy, and because it may be feared that the state will fall into the hands of others, also assumed to be greedy. The expression of the impulse to enfeeble the state includes such policies as privatization, tax limitation, and reduction in social programs. Reduction in the latter also express the use of those dependent on welfare as containers for projected greed so that depriving them of support is simply a way of starving their greed of the opportunity to use the power of the state as a means for gratification. We can consider this combining of opposites—empowerment and enfeeblement of the state—an implication of two factors: (1) an excess of greed, and (2) the conviction that the state is essentially a locus for the concentration of power. It needs to be emphasized that the concentration of power in the state is not

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in this the causal factor, but an expression of the causal factor, which is the excess of greed and the need to engage social institutions in the effort to cope with greed. The state becomes a center of power when it must be put in service of greed, or when it must be the container for society’s greed. Although it is sometimes claimed that power corrupts, I think it is more accurate to say that the corrupt seek power because they need power to attain their end, which is the ultimate fulfillment, especially the exclusive access to the good and its source. The corrupt seek power, that is, to exclude others from gratification and to secure all that is good for themselves. The link between power and corruption goes to the heart of the problem of the state, which has, with notable exceptions, been conceived as a center and/or concentration of power. This idea of the state as a center or concentration of power has driven much writing in support of the ideal of minimal government, as expressed, for example, in the following comment by Milton Friedman: The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated—a system of checks and balances. By removing the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority, the market eliminates this source of coercive power. (1982)

If, as Friedman assumes, the state is a center of power, its task is to exercise power either for its own ends, or, more plausibly, for the ends of those who succeed in taking control over it. This idea of the state as a center of power leads directly to the idea that its mandate is to rule, a conclusion that has been met with distrust by many of those who favor the free-market ideal, which seeks to place systems of rule by a central authority with systems of self-rule on the part of each individual.

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n the previous chapter, I suggest how conduct we might view from outside as corrupt might be understood by those engaged in it differently, as the exercise of virtue, specifically the virtue of loyalty. If loyalty conflicts with norms, then violation of norms becomes consistent with moral conduct. The liberal ideal can with reason be assumed to support an attack on norms and thus turn what would otherwise be considered the hallmark of corruption into a virtue. This virtue is part of the new morality of self-interest meant to replace the morality of subjection to the group and what are experienced as its arbitrary norms of behavior. I use the term norm to refer to a standard or expected pattern of behavior. When norms are formally instituted and sanctioned by authority, they become rules or laws, just as rules applied for a long enough period of time may become norms. Rules and norms take on a moral significance when their authority derives not from habit, convenience, or the arbitrary decisions of governing institutions, but from their connection to an ideal of the good. The attack on rules and norms may then be an attack on the good, or it may be an attack on rules perceived to be arbitrary because they are not good. Rules are morally invested when conforming to them makes our conduct, and by extension ourselves, good or right. Morality is all about our effort to be good and right, and therefore to fend off any possibility we could be judged bad or wrong. Because of its involvement with being good or bad, moral thinking is closely linked to primitive emotional constructions of the world

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in which maintaining the separation of good from bad is an important task. Because of its involvement with this task, moral thinking tends toward extremes. The tendency of moral thinking toward extremes is also a tendency toward excess, which links morality to greed and especially the pursuit of the ultimate fulfillment. This is because pursuit of the ultimate fulfillment is linked to a desperate desire to be good, since the worthy self is also the good self. Thus, much of the behavior recently characterized as corporate corruption, because of its involvement with the kind of greed associated with the ultimate fulfillment, bears a complex and problematic relationship with morality. On one side it attacks morality and all externally imposed norms of conduct; on the other side, it insists on establishing the connection of the self to all that is good and worthy, and, because of this, it operates on an intensely charged moral plane. An implication of the complex relationship between morality and corruption is that corruption cannot be considered exclusively or primarily a conscious choice of the actor, but the expression of a construction of the world held to a large degree outside of awareness. The sharp conflict that sometimes develops between the moral claims of the corrupt and their corrupt conduct tells us that much is going on beneath the surface. This is most notable in the inability of the corrupt to perceive their conduct as corrupt. My main concern in this chapter is to explore this complex and problematic construction. I begin with an example. * *

*

In the year 2000, the Enron Corporation declared revenues of $101 billion putting it seventh on the list of largest corporations in the United States. The company’s stock had returned a 1,400 percent gain for shareholders over the preceding ten years. Securities analysts hailed Enron as the best of the best. They are “literally unbeatable at what they do” declared an analyst at Goldman Sachs (229).1 Less than three years later, Enron was in bankruptcy and its chief financial officer (CFO),

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Andy Fastow, had accepted a plea agreement that included a ten-year jail sentence. As part of this agreement, Fastow admitted to working with unidentified co-conspirators to cook Enron’s books and keep more than $45 million for himself.2 Six months later, Kenneth Lay, Enron’s chief executive officer (CEO) was charged with eleven felonies including involvement in a conspiracy to deceive investors and employees about the company’s financial condition.3 On the surface, the Enron story is a story of corporate greed the central element in which is the extensive use of shady accounting practices to make the company appear profitable when it was not, and thereby prevent stock prices from falling to a level consistent with the corporation’s real ability to generate revenue. Enron was all about maintaining this disparity between appearance and reality, about creating “a portrait of a reality that simply didn’t exist” (286). Doing so lined the pockets of Enron executives who cashed in on stock options made highly lucrative by the continuous improvement in stock prices resulting from valuations based on appearance rather than reality. For many, the story ends here. The leaders of the greedy corporation substitute the goal of self-aggrandizement for the goals of honest dealing and doing the real work of developing and producing good products for their customers and making profit for their shareholders. Yet, in the case of Enron, this simple picture leaves out much of importance. Most notably, it leaves out of account Enron’s self-conception as a company in the business of revolutionizing the natural gas business by exploiting deregulation to increase efficiency and rationalize the market. During the 1990s Enron’s innovations “stabilized the U.S. gas market, expanded gas production nationwide and fuelled the phenomenal growth that Enron reported during the decade” (Behr and Witt 2002). To their own way of thinking, the leaders at Enron were not crooks, or even amoral manipulators of the system, they were visionaries engaged in transforming American industry in a direction that could, with little exaggeration, be considered the public good. In the words of their chief operations officer (COO), Jeff Skilling, they were doing “God’s work” (xxv).

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At the center of God’s work was promoting deregulation of industry and demonstrating the gains in efficiency that would result from it. Skilling believed that markets “were the ultimate judge of right and wrong” and that policies designed to temper this judgment “were wrong-headed and counterproductive” (31). Lay, “truly believed in the virtues of deregulation . . . [and] argued consistently that deregulation would save consumers money,” by his estimate $30 billion dollars a year in the costs of natural gas between 1985 and 1996 (88). In sum, the leadership at Enron “believed that the market was the ultimate judge of their work and their worth.” Traders at Enron “didn’t concern themselves with ethics or morality apart from the unyielding judgment of the markets.” In their view, maximizing profit “was not inconsistent with doing good . . . but an inherent part of it” (216). Enron’s association with deregulation together with enthusiasm for deregulation in the business press played an important part in fostering the myth of success at Enron (Scott 2002). Deregulation eliminates norms in the form of legally imposed limits. The attack on norms in the name of efficiency and the judgment of markets led the executives at Enron in a specific direction, the one that, in retrospect, has opened them up to the charge of corruption. This is because, at Enron, the attack on norms did not end with speaking in favor of deregulation and exploiting the opportunities deregulation made available, but extended to treating accounting rules and norms with contempt in an effort to create the appearance of profitability and sustain the value of Enron stock. To their thinking, accounting norms were not about assuring transparency and protecting the interests of investors and the public; they were simply obstacles to be overcome, complex rule systems waiting to be manipulated and circumvented. In a notable understatement on the part of one executive: “We just viewed the rules differently than other people” (227). The accountants at Enron did not take the legitimacy of norms for granted; they did not identify with them simply because they were norms. And, because of this, they felt free to circumvent the norms so

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far as they were able without feeling they had thereby sacrificed their moral standing. Indeed, in manipulating the norms, their actions gained a certain moral standing as evidence of their independent-minded intelligence, a standing that came for them to carry something of the significance once invested in the idea of norms. The ability to circumvent and indeed discredit the norm offered proof of virtue. It was no mere strategy to make money, although its success would be measured by monetary gain. Being good at Enron meant being smarter than others, which included being smart enough to defeat the norms others set up to limit what can and cannot be done. As one Enron trader put it “We took pride in getting around the rules” (275). The contempt for rules so central to the culture at Enron is not without justification. When rules protect the integrity of institutions and those working in them they incorporate important norms. Contempt for rules of this kind represents contempt for norms that protect integrity. But rules can serve other functions, some of which are deeply problematic. These are the rules associated with what have been referred to as “social defenses” (Menzies 1959). When operating as part of a social defense, rules rather than protecting the integrity of worker and institution, serve instead to protect those working in institutions from responsibility for their actions (Hirschhorn 1988: 2). They make action routinized, even ritualized, and thus not only protect workers from responsibility but also inhibit or even prevent creativity and innovation in work. When rules function as part of a social defense, they inhibit initiative and creativity by predetermining outcomes. With fewer rules, fewer outcomes are predetermined, and more space for creativity is made available. Yet, Enron’s attack on rules and norms remains suspect because enhancing the space for creativity was not the primary reason rules were ignored or circumvented. What we find at Enron was not so much a defense of creativity as a desperate effort to hide an unfavorable reality from outsiders, notably Wall Street analysts, required to make important decisions based on their judgment of the real state of affairs at Enron (189–211). In hiding this unfavorable

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reality, the leaders of Enron sought to mislead investors, who, it was hoped, would make decisions on the basis of inaccurate information. In brief, they committed the accounting equivalent of lying, the result of which could reasonably be considered, if not theft, certainly a close approximation to it. Corruption includes as an essential element this effort to hide an unfavorable, indeed unacceptable, reality. It would be worthwhile, therefore, to consider more closely the nature of the reality and the urgency of the action taken to hide it that led the organization down the road to corruption. Corruption is intimately involved with secrets, and with the deception needed to protect a reality hidden as much from the corrupt as from their victims. To understand the underlying meaning of the deception practiced in organizations such as Enron, we need to consider more closely the goal motivating their leadership. What I would like to suggest is that those in leadership positions in organizations such as Enron seek that special order of gratification I refer to above as the ultimate fulfillment. It is this seeking after the ultimate fulfillment that leads to the distortions and delusions characteristic of corruption. Domination of the organization by the hope for the ultimate fulfillment means substituting a personal end for those of the organization understood as a reality separate from that of the persons working in it. We can say that the essence of the corrupt organization is this failure to separate organization from self, a failure driven by the domination in the personality of the hope for the ultimate fulfillment and the treatment of the organization as nothing more than a vehicle for realizing that hope. Thus nearly all of the highly publicized corporate scandals of the 1990s involve people “who for all intents and purposes, created the companies that they eventually helped destroy,” people, who, because they created their companies, continued to think of them as “essentially their property” even after they went public (Surowiecki 2002: xvi). This failure to separate organization from self is expressed in “a powerful sense of personal entitlement,” which two students of the Enron scandal found a common characteristic of leadership in that organization, for example in the way

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the CEO and his family used the company’s fleet of airplanes for private purposes (90, 119). * *

*

Corruption develops in organizations for a number of interconnected reasons having to do with factors such as organizational structure, group process, society, and culture. Here, I would like to focus on the emotional dimension of the problem, especially the part played by psychic structure. Focus on psychic structure directs our attention to fantasies and wishes born of deeply rooted and largely unconscious fears and desires. I would like to offer the following suggestion regarding the emergence of unconscious desires and fantasies conducive to the behavior associated with corruption: In their greediness and sense of personal entitlement, the leaders of the corrupt organization exhibit the qualities we associate with pathological narcissism. In pathological forms of narcissism, the main objective is to extract from others the admiration needed to protect a fragile sense of self. The greedy extraction of admiration from others can be facilitated by attaching things of value to the self, which helps account for the importance acquisition of wealth has for the leadership in these organizations. The greedy extraction of admiration from others can also deplete them and fuel “a tendency to depreciate and devalue others” (Kernberg 1980: 136). Pathological narcissism fosters the impulse to produce a sharp opposition between reality and appearance.4 The corrupt organization, whether public or private, presents itself as a vital center committed to an important public purpose (“God’s work”). Yet, its conduct suggests a cynical exploitation of a public trust. This opposition, kept out of awareness by those working in the organization, mirrors a psychic opposition within the leadership of the organization. At the conscious level, the heads of corrupt organizations imagine themselves individuals of high moral standing. Thus a few days after “the world’s biggest corporate fraud scandal broke” at WorldCom, the head of the company, Bernie Ebbers, is quoted as saying:

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“[m]ore than anything else, I hope that my witness for Jesus Christ will not be jeopardized” (Staples 2002). Yet, at the same time that they imagine themselves doing God’s work, the leaders of the corrupt organization are actively engaged in the work of deceiving employees and investors. One interpretation of this phenomenon is that a psychic opposition develops between a conscious identification with what is moral and good and an unconscious identification with a rapacious self that relates to others as sources of needed inputs and nothing more (see Klein 1993, Kernberg 1980, Greenberg and Mitchell 1983: 128, Fairbairn 1943/1952). To counter the danger posed by the rapacious self, the individual takes on a moral identification with an ideal of the good, which is to say a good self (Levine 1999). The drama of the corrupt organization is the drama of the struggle to maintain the consciously held moral ideal, while serving the needs of the rapacious self. Yet, however opposed these two aspects of psychic experience, they also interact in important ways. Of special importance is the way in which the good self exhibits important features of the bad. It does so by its involvement with a special kind of greed, which is the greed for moral virtue. Thus, the moral claims of the good self, like the rapacious desire of the bad self, cannot be limited or contained. The moral self must be or contain all that is good, and in this it is a true expression of pathological narcissism and the relentless greed we associate with it. An important implication of this aspect of the moral dimension of pathological narcissism is the impulse it sponsors toward exclusivity. Exclusivity not only brings with it the ideal of an all too intense relationship with the good, but also the ideal of a relationship in the light of which those not included seem small and insignificant, for, if they are not altogether excluded from any connection with the good, they are at least more distant from it. The implied grandiose fantasy of being special in the eyes of the good object (God) is the hallmark of those who corrupt the organization. This means that corruption is fostered not simply by the unconscious identification

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with the bad object, and the resulting impulse to turn others into mere means for self-aggrandizement, but also by an identification with an all too intensely good object. The organization captured by a grandiose fantasy imagines itself something special. Those holding positions of authority in it, because they are special and hold a special trust, cannot be bound by normal constraints, including the legal constraints that limit the conduct of other, lesser, organizations. Such arrogance was the defining quality of the leadership and culture of Enron and a central element in understanding the corruption that eventually destroyed that organization (187). Arrogance and corruption go together as the corrupt organization arrogates to itself special privileges and dispensations. Laws and norms apply only to other, lesser mortals. An implication of arrogance is contempt for others viewed as lesser creatures limited in their conduct by laws and norms. All of this makes the corrupt organization a likely site for sadistic behavior. Thus, working for one senior executive at Enron was described as lucrative, but also brutal. In that executive’s own words: “Everyone I’ve worked with, I’ve sledge hammered a bunch of times.” He would “periodically tell even trusted employees they were failures, strip them of their titles, or make them report to someone junior” (51). The sadism built into Enron’s corporate culture was even more powerfully expressed in contempt for and an easy willingness to manipulate those outside the organization. In the words of one executive “[w]e managed to screw and piss off every major utility customer we had. Finally, the word got out ‘Don’t do business with Enron: they’ll steel your wallet when you aren’t looking’ ” (122). * *

*

For the leaders of Enron, the attack on rules and norms carried a larger significance linked to a grandiose fantasy of the organization. However we judge the outcome at Enron, it is clear that the leadership saw the organization not simply as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement, but more importantly as a vehicle for showing what can be accomplished when burdensome

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regulations are removed from industry and private initiative is set free (88; Scott 2002). Although we can take this idea as no more than one expression of a commonplace political conviction regarding the role of government, we can also understand it as an expression of certain key elements of the grandiose fantasy to which I have just referred. At the conscious level, the fantasy runs something like this:5 In the past, the organization, the industry in which it functions, and even the larger society, have fallen under the control of those who would prevent the organization from accomplishing its mission. Through regulation, the vitality of the organization and the industry has been depleted in the interests of those without a creative vision and the will to realize it. The policy of deregulation involves a rejection of the past as that exerts control over the present through institutions, norms, and policies. If we consider deregulation an attack on norms, then the message is that the norms are corrupt. When corruption has become the norm, the struggle against corruption is a struggle against the norms, which for Enron became not a struggle to replace an older set of norms with a newer and better one, but a struggle to eliminate norms and replace them with unregulated, which is to say unlimited, activity by society’s smartest and most creative members. For the leaders of Enron, we can say, then, that the virtue that had been lost and which they sought to regain is the virtue of creativity realized by empowering the best and the brightest (“the smartest guys in the room”). The way of thinking that fuelled the attack on government regulation also fuelled what became the driving idea at Enron, which is the idea that real products (natural gas pipelines) could be treated as, indeed transformed into, financial assets. Rather than conceiving its business as producing and delivering a product, Enron thought of its business as buying and selling. In the words of COO Skilling, Enron was in the business of monetizing assets (37, 126). Of course, the goal of doing this was to make money, and lots of it. But the goal was also to free the company from limits. Real assets represent the limits past decisions place on what can be done in the present. In this, they act somewhat analogously to regulations. Like deregulation,

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turning real assets into financial assets frees the future from the past. Enron’s preoccupation with both strategies suggests how deeply ingrained in its mentality was the impulse to deny limits. They believed that “an elegant idea [was] profits in the bank” (285), that they could provide videos on demand to households even though the required technology for doing so did not exist, that, with no relevant experience, they could become “the global leader in the water industry” (247). This denial of limits can be considered an expression of greed, and the damaging consequence of corruption the result of the operation of a greed associated with hope for the ultimate fulfillment. The damaging consequences of greed call into question the argument, attributed by Albert Hirschman to Montesquieu and the early political economist Sir James Steuart, that greed works against corruption when commercial interest curbs the “willfulness, the disastrous lust for glory, and, in general, the passionate excesses of the powerful” (1977: 70). Clearly this mechanism failed in the Enron case, where greed intensified impulses toward willfulness and passionate excess. This suggests a flaw in the thesis explored by Hirschman. The flaw lies, I think, in the assumption that all greed can be considered among what he terms the “more innocuous” passions. While this judgment may apply to forms of greed that involve a kind of lustful desire, a wanting more, it does not apply to those forms of greed linked to pursuit of the ultimate fulfillment. Where this goal is active, we cannot place greed among the innocuous passions, nor assume that it will moderate rather than intensifying the pressure toward corruption. And, while pursuit of the ultimate fulfillment can drive creativity and impose limits on the willful exercise of governmental power, it can also have the opposite effect. * *

*

Deceit at Enron expressed arrogance and contempt for others (187, 241). It was prompted by a fantasy of omnipotence and a desperate fear that omnipotence was nothing more than a fantasy. Specifically, the deceit, at least for some of those involved,

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was rooted in belief in a kind of omnipotence linked to their being the smartest guys in the room. The denial of limits, as exemplified by some of the undertakings indicated at the end of the last section, suggests to what degree the leaders of Enron were the victims of their own deceit. At the center of this deceit was the conviction that an idea could be made real without the kind of work that alters reality in the direction of that idea. At Enron, rather than realizing an idea through work, there prevailed a conviction that making an idea real was an act of will: “[w]e almost believed that you could create a market by sheer force of will. . . . If I want it to happen, it will happen” (225). The implied contempt for creativity through work suggests an underlying sense of doubt about the capacity to do work. The inability to do work of the kind that produces a real product was not limited to Enron, but also evident at such companies as ImClone and WorldCom.6 Unable to work in reality, the heads of these companies attempted to do what one CEO brought in to run a company after fraud had been exposed described as using accounting “to try to manufacture a reality that wasn’t there” (Streitfeld 2002: 120). Unable to manufacture products in reality, they turned to the manufacture of reality most notably by use of questionable accounting practices that supported the appearance of profitability when, in reality, the firm was losing money (Tonge, Greer, and Lawton 2003). But, attempting to create reality by an act of will is something profoundly different from creating reality by the application of skill and expertise to a real object. Thus, the conviction that reality is made up of our perceptions of it ruled the response on the part of Enron’s leadership to the organization’s inexorable collapse, which, in a remarkable example of projection, they attributed to misperceptions of the company on the part of those hostile to it. Thus to the bitter end, Ken Lay insisted that there was nothing wrong with Enron, that their difficulties were essentially public relations problems, finally commenting: “Just like America is under attack by terrorism, I think we’re under attack” (375, 379, 384). From the standpoint of the businessman, what Enron sought to hide through deceptive practices were losses on investments that might devalue its stock in the eyes of investors (Culpan

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and Trussel 2005). The strategy was to keep losses off balance sheets so that the Enron accounts were sure to show quarterly profits equal to or exceeding their targets. But, this same profit and loss calculation had a meaning on another level, which is that of psychic experience. On that level, business profits and losses stood as nothing more than metaphors for a calculation of substantially greater import. This is the calculation of the worthiness or lack thereof of the organization and those who lead it. What was kept off balance sheets in this other calculation was the unworthy self, or at least the evidence supporting the judgment that the self was unworthy (see Morrison 1986). The frantic effort to keep losses off balance sheets acted as a metaphoric struggle to keep the evidence of the unworthy self out of awareness not only, or primarily, for those outsiders who might judge Enron, but for those within the organization itself. Thus, for many of Enron’s leaders, the belief persisted that current losses were not real since they would be offset by gains in the future, when the decisions that led to those losses would prove out (189). The balance sheet in this other reality would not be judged on Wall Street, but in the psyches of Enron’s leadership.7 There, the whole point was to prove that they were worthy, and the whole question must be: worthy of what? In answering this question, it will help to return to the idea of an ultimate narcissistic fulfillment, and more specifically to the idea of an object defined as having the capacity to provide that fulfillment. *

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The charge of corruption places the individual or organization in a moral universe. The corrupt have lost their moral standing; they are morally bad. In religious language, the corrupt do the devil’s work, and seek to draw others away from God. In the language of psychic life, the corrupt give up their hope to identify with the good object, and embrace instead their identification with the bad. Since there will be no identification with

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the good object, there will be no love in their lives, and none of the gratification associated with loving and being loved. Yet, however we insist on viewing Enron as the site of corruption, the organization’s leadership will not easily be subsumed into the category of those who have given up hope they will be favored by God. On the contrary, what they did seemed, in their minds at least, a seeking after proofs that they were chosen by God.8 This sought-after relationship with God is the ultimate fulfillment. Viewed in this way, we can say that those in leadership positions at Enron were deluded by the very intensity of their convictions about their standing in the eyes of God and the intensity of their passion for the ultimate fulfillment. The considerable sadism embedded in their manner of work expressed the fact that to prove their worthiness meant to prove others unworthy. They could not imagine a world in which God favored more than one: more than one organization among the many competing organizations, and more than one of the competing leaders and groups within that organization. In their minds, so long as God was seen to favor others, he had rejected them. If this was corruption, it was not the corruption of those who have given up hope for God’s love, but of those who cannot share God’s love with others and still have enough for themselves, or imagine that, if God favors them, anyone else could possibly matter. In the words of Jeff Skilling, “[w]e’re up here— and everybody else is down there” (241). One could well argue that this is not corruption at all, but something importantly different, and that, by calling it corruption, we seek to distance ourselves from its true meaning by confusing the problem with the solution. Thus, we imagine that moral training will protect against corruption, when it is the moral vision that creates the problem in the first place. The leaders of Enron were not, by and large, morally corrupt in the strict sense of the term so much as they were victims of morality. At the height of the disaster, Ken Lay told the pastor of the First Methodist Church of Houston that “he could save Enron, and he wanted to do it ‘God’s way’ ” (385).

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Enron’s God was, by and large, a secularized God, which is to say one called by another name and hidden from awareness. Theirs was the God of the market, or rather the God immanent in the market, which is the God of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Theirs was a God nonetheless. How else can we account for the remarkable conviction that all bets, including the most unlikely, would be won (and, at Enron, “betting was a way of life” [217]), that the price of Enron stock would rise without limit, that all problems created in the present would be made to disappear in the future?9 Neither fact nor reason supported this conviction. Because the conviction is accountable to neither fact nor reason, it can only be accountable to one thing: faith. What we understand as corruption was, then, an excess of faith in an organization that had defined itself as the moral center of a moral universe. Like all intensely moral actors, it had taken the biggest gamble of all, the gamble that it was favored by God. In the end, the leaders of Enron lost their bet. *

* *

Use of the language of corruption to judge organizations and those in them tends to make ethical failure appear to result from greed understood as a more or less original impulse. In this construction, law and morality act as defenses against greed by offering the individual an external force to mobilize against his or her impulses. Without this force, the individual cannot act in ways that embody regard for others and for organizational ends distinct from those of personal satisfaction through acquisition and consumption. Because greed is driven by the prospect of a primitive satisfaction in possessing and consuming rather than the more mature satisfaction in work, it fosters conduct that can be detrimental to the real tasks to which the organization is ostensibly devoted. When dominated by greed, the leaders of an organization tend to use it as a vehicle for selfaggrandizement. While doing so may at times work to benefit the organization, at other times greed can drive a wedge between the interests of management and those of employees

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and shareholders. When it does so, greed promotes the ethical failure we associate with corruption. Yet, while greed may attack morality, the two can also operate on the same plane. This is the plane on which the world is divided into good and bad, and our motivation is to assure that we are good. The language of corruption, by pointing us toward greed also points us toward moral thinking. But, it does so without acknowledging that greed can be defined within rather than in opposition to a moral world. Because of this, the language of corruption obscures the nature and meaning of, as well as the possible solutions to, the problem it is concerned to solve. For those who focus attention on corruption, the moral claims of the corrupt will always seem a paradox. Thus, the head of Adelphia, who shamelessly pillaged the company to satisfy personal needs, is described by those who knew him as someone who “believed in small-town values: strong families, hard work, church on Sunday” (Leonard 2002). This seeming contradiction disappears when we bear in mind that the CEO did not conceive the company as something separate from his self, which is to say, he could not conceive a reality independent of his subjective experience and hope-invested fantasies. Because these hope-invested fantasies were fantasies about being identified with the good, they operated in a moral universe. The fantasized identification of the self with the good, or the fantasized realization of hope, meant that the personal good was the good, and what appeared from outside as self-aggrandizement was no more than the reward for being good. The problem to which the language of corruption directs our attention is not the problem of moral failure, but the problem of the failure to develop beyond primitive moral thinking to a more mature attitude, one that makes possible an attachment to work as something other than the pursuit of the ultimate fulfillment, and an attachment to the organization as a reality outside the self. This means that the problem to which the language of corruption directs us is the problem of morality, and not the problem for which morality is the solution.10

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Underlying many phenomena identified as corruption is hope for the ultimate fulfillment. So long as institutions are set up both to do work and to sustain this hope, conflict must develop of the kind typically referred to in the language of corruption. In the case of Enron and organizations like it, this conflict has been interpreted as conflict between the interests of those who own the corporation and those who manage it.11 Yet, the real underlying conflict arises because the organization has been made from the outset both to do a job and to nurture the hope to which I have just referred. It could hardly be otherwise so long as the larger culture is one organized around this hope, which, for many in it, is nurtured by their earliest formative experiences. In this regard, it is useful to bear in mind that the hope that led to the destruction of Enron is not so different from the hope of many of the shareholders who lost substantial savings invested in it. If there is a culprit, it is not simply the greedy managers or the greedy shareholders, but the special hope they all shared. That this hope is widely shared suggests that we cannot account for it simply by reference to its intrapsychic meaning and origin in primitive emotional development. We need also to consider how the shaping of emotional life around the hope for the ultimate fulfillment becomes a societal and cultural reality such that the dominance in culture of the hope mirrors and is mirrored by its dominance in the individual’s psychic life. So long as this hope remains a significant force, neither regulation nor moral education can prevent the sacrifice of work to the pursuit of the ultimate narcissistic fulfillment. *

* *

If corruption means acting on the hope for the ultimate fulfillment, then, in a society where that hope becomes a constituting element of the psychic life of members, corruption must itself become a norm. In such a society, members expect their leaders (whether in the private or public sectors) to be corrupt, since they require that those leaders lead the society

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as a whole, and each member individually, to the ultimate fulfillment. But, this task of leading society toward the ultimate fulfillment mobilizes powerful fears, especially those rooted in the destructive power attributed to greed, including its power to destroy the self by transforming it into a servant of greed. To be consumed by greed is to lose your soul. Because of this, the leaders become not only the repositories of hope, but also the targets of fear, since they are made to contain the projected greed of the members of society. Because leaders are experienced as the containers for projected greed, corruption in the sense of the abuse of office becomes the expected expression of their position and purpose in society’s psychic landscape. Thus, when we seek to punish our leaders for corrupt behavior, we are engaged in the work of controlling our externalized greedy selves.12 This conclusion holds with special force when we consider the place of the private corporation in society’s psychosocial landscape. This is because the private for-profit corporation is, among other things, the repository of society’s greed. It is the repository of greed in two senses. First it is designed to be the means for pursuing wealth without limit; and, second, it is viewed as a danger to society precisely because within it greed is sanctioned as an end. Thus we both desire and fear the corporation, wanting the riches it promises, and fearing the liberation of greed it represents. By treating the corporation as the repository of our greed, we can disavow our own greediness by attacking it in the form it adopts in our economic institutions. We keep alive our hope for the ultimate fulfillment, while still seeking to separate ourselves from it and contain its destructive powers.

Part IV

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11

An Imperfect World

T

he hallmark of greed is the impulse to appropriate the world, and especially the good in it, and in so doing to exclude others from the good and the world of good things. By having all that is good, the greedy seek to make themselves good, and by excluding others they seek to make them bad. This is what makes the greedy so illiberal, intolerant, and ultimately hateful: their aggressive refusal to share the world of the good with others. For the greedy, any world that must be shared is not good; it is imperfect and therefore bad. The end of the greedy then is to make the world perfect. We have seen how the promise of freedom and its instantiation into institutions can produce not a place for the self to come alive, but a playground of greed and envy. The problem is that, to an extent greater than we might like to admit, those very institutions that incorporate freedom and facilitate creative living also facilitate the expression of greed and envy. This outcome challenges the hope that institutional change and policy making can resolve the social problems caused by the free play of two of the more destructive forms of human emotional life. When we admit this, we acknowledge the limits to what we can have and do, limits our greed encourages us to dismiss. Accepting those limits challenges the hope that greed sponsors in us, and for this reason is vigorously resisted by those who envision a world where appropriate institutions eliminate the influence of destructive human emotions. We can see this hope operating in those who find the liberal ideal unappealing precisely because it both facilitates human freedom and empowers

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greed and envy. And, because the liberal idea limits the control institutions exert over conduct and relating, it offers a weak support for the hope that we can make our world perfect. Greed deforms the liberal ideal to serve its ends by making the freedom that is the defining term in that ideal the know-no-limits freedom suited to greed. This is the freedom of the unregulated market. Yet, the alternative of repressing greed in the interest of the community or group, however effective it may have been in the past, is no longer a viable option. The problem then is not to revive the repression of greed favored in the older order, but to foster the separation of self-interest from greed, or, perhaps more realistically, to reduce the influence of greed over self-interest so that real self-interest can emerge and become the basis for conduct. This separation of greed from self-interest fosters a new reality of the self, which brings with it a new way of relating to others. The power that the equation of greed with self-interest has over our thinking expresses a deeply held conviction that interest in the self precludes concern for others. But, of course, any real concern for the well-being of others must begin with a concern for their opportunity and capacity to live a life in which doing expresses being, which can only happen where our concern for others means respect for the self in other. The greedy do not respect the self in other for two related reasons. The first is their profoundly impaired ability to invest value in their selves, and the second is their tendency to see value in the self only in proportion to the devaluation of the other. We can say, then, that it is the denigration of the self that turns it into a destructive force and threatens to turn society into an arena for a struggle over who will bear the denigrated self and whose self will receive the honor and approbation that Hobbes understands to be the goal of social intercourse. Yet, when we equate self-interest with greed and thus judge it a destructive force our natural impulse is to see in the repression of the self the path toward a less destructive and conflictual world. In thinking this way we align ourselves with those forces both internal to the individual and in the larger world of social interaction responsible for the self-denigration that causes the problem in the first place. In other words, we attack the very idea of the self as a

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means to alleviate problems caused by self-denigration, which is of course the expression within the individual psyche of the attack on the self. Our solution simply reinforces the problem it is meant to solve. Once we understand, as in his way Hobbes did, that the self becomes a predatory and destructive force only as a means to protect itself from its own destruction, we will also understand that the solution to the problem is not to repress self-interest on the grounds that the self is the problem, but to fulfill the original promise of liberalism, which is to value the self and in so doing make it a creative force in the world. The liberal ideal and the idea of self-determination that is its foundation face two significant dangers. The first comes from the illiberal mood of a people uncomfortable with life outside the shared group identity that can replace the obligations of autonomy in a world of independent citizens each responsible for shaping an individual identity and way of life. On this side, liberalism is challenged by identity-based politics, insistence on the inculcation of national, or possibly local, value systems, and the powerful impulse to reshape the world so that it is consistent with the ultimate fulfillment. The second danger comes from the domination of greed over self-interest, and the resulting unconstrained pursuit of greed’s end without regard to the harm done to others, and to the ideal of freedom. On this side, the opposition of greed to freedom makes greed the enemy of the liberal ideal. Yet, as I suggest above, the attack on self-interest embedded in the first danger and fostered by the harm done by greed simply encourages greed by feeding the denigration of the self that is the origin of greed. Indeed, the only way to protect the liberal ideal from greed is to defend self-determination and therefore the pursuit of a self-interest freed so far as possible from domination by greed. Paradoxically, the task ahead is the affirmation of self-interest, which is the only path to moderating the influence of greed. * *

*

The less greed takes on its destructive form, the more it can enhance our lives rather than drain them of meaning. Without

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access to our infantile greed, the lust for life never fully satisfied, never ending, we have no real access to our original vitality. As Joan Riviere tells us, greed “represents an aspect of the desire to live. . . . By its very nature it is endless and never assuaged; and being a form of the impulse to live, it ceases only with death” (1964: 26–27). And, indeed, the death of greed is the death of life. The deformation of greed that has been my main concern in this book is as much a danger to the “impulse to live” as our original greediness is an expression of it. To reduce the danger destructive greed poses for freedom, we will need not to repress greed, but to conceive a less greedy liberalism. To do so, we will need to imagine ourselves enlivened by our greed to seek real work, to form connections with others, and to live a life expressive of our original vitality.

Notes

PART I 1. Introduction 1. For a fuller discussion see Levine (2008), Chapter 6.

2. Reason, Desire, and the Self 1. Hobbes also considers power to be desire’s end when he insists that honor, riches and knowledge “are but several sorts of power” (1958: 68). 2. Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, Second Edition, 1989). 3. See Winnicott (1971: 86–94); on the connection between Winnicott’s formulation and Hegel, see Benjamin (1988). 4. On the relationship between empathy and recognition, see Levine (2008), Chapter 7. 5. On psychoanalytic object relations theory, see Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) and Summers (1994). 6. On this see Loewald (1973).

PART II 3. The Flight from Reason 1. Oxford English Dictionary (1989). 2. Nova (1997: 219–20).

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4. Family Values 1. George W. Bush, Progress of Democracy in the Middle East, speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, November 6, 2003, in Gottlieb (2004, 97). 2. For a fuller discussion, see Levine (1999). 3. Bush, Progress of Democracy in the Middle East in Gottlieb (2004: 91). 4. For a fuller discussion, see Lazar (2004). 5. Lakoff (2004a). 6. Oxford English Dictionary (1989). 7. Bush, Progress of Democracy in the Middle East, in Gottlieb (2004: 92). 8. George W. Bush, State of the Union Address 2004, in Gottlieb (2004: 118).

5. Moral Renewal 1. George W. Bush, 2003 State of the Union Address, in Gottlieb (2004: 59). 2. George W. Bush, 2002 State of the Union Address, in Gottlieb (2004: 31). 3. George W. Bush, We Did Not Charge Only to Retreat, November 19, 2003, in Gottlieb (2004: 100). 4. George W. Bush, We Fight for a Just Peace, West Point Commencement Address, June 1, 2002, in Gottlieb (2004: 39). 5. Bush, We Fight for a Just Peace; Major Combat in Iraq Has Ended, May 1, 2003; We Did not Charge Only to Retreat; in Gottlieb (2004: 38, 85, 99). 6. George W. Bush, Progress of Democracy in the Middle East, in Gottlieb (2004, 91, 97); and Bush Visits Lancaster Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Discusses S-CHIP, October 3, 2007, available at: www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/10/ print/20071003-3.html, accessed April 29, 2008. 7. George W. Bush, 2004 State of the Union Address, in Gottlieb (2004: 117).

6. Deception 1. This example is based on a personal communication from Dean Baker.

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2. “ . . . when we act, we create our own reality.” Quoted in Suskind (2004). 3. On the faith-based presidency, see Suskind (2004). 4. Oxford English Dictionary (1989).

PART III 8. The Ultimate Fulfillment 1. Melanie Klein quoted in Kaplan (1991: 513).

9. Greed, Morality, and Corruption 1. Both quotations are from the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, New Edition, 2002). 2. Morality therefore means adaptation in conduct to an external rule. By using the term moral in this restricted sense, I limit it to only one of the stages of moral development as Lawrence Kohlberg defines them (1971), rather than considering all the different modes of judgment alternative forms of moral thinking. 3. The choice referred to here may not be a conscious one. Identification is not merely the conscious patterning after a model, it is also the automatic and unconscious shaping of our selves to replicate the model, or aspects of it. 4. For a fuller account of the attack on government, see Levine (2004).

10. Corporate Corruption 1. Where not otherwise indicated references are to McLean and Elkind (2003). 2. The Washington Post, January 14, 2004. 3. The Denver Post, July 9, 2004. 4. This corruption also underlies the inauthenticity typical of organizations that have failed to meet a standard of ethical conduct (Diamond and Adams 1999). 5. The conscious fantasy can be connected to an unconscious fantasy linked to Oedipal dynamics in the family. For a discussion of Oedipal dynamics in relation to corruption, see Sapochnik (2003).

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6. Two students of the WorldCom collapse describe the company’s CEO in the following terms: “Other people could run companies. Bernard J. Ebbers liked to buy them. . . . ” When it became necessary to make money by running a company he already owned, it “proved beyond him.” Ebbers considered this inability a strength observing that the “thing that has helped me personally is that I don’t understand a lot of what goes on in this industry” (Goodman and Merle 2002). 7. In psychoanalytic language, judging the ego and punishing the ego for failure to live up to its ideal is the work of the “superego” (see Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, 435–38). 8. This was only true of some of the leadership of Enron. There were others, however, for whom God’s work did not seem to figure strongly in the equation. 9. Their work, and they worked with the intensity and devotion worthy of a calling, was, like that of the Calvinist, done not to create their salvation, but to create the conviction of it (Weber 1992: 115). 10. On this distinction and for a further discussion of the problem of morality, see Levine (1999). 11. See the articles collected in Surowiecki (2002), Part III. 12. For this, there could hardly be a better example than Martha Stewart, who rose from the humblest background to become the leader and symbol of good living, and who joined the world of the rich and famous, where greed’s object is imagined to find its gratification. She then became a suitable target for the societal impulse to control greed in its symbolic container by punishing her for being what society made her.

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Index

abortion 85–6 Adams, G. 195 aggression 64–6; and desire 87 al-Qa’ida 45 anxiety 54–5 Aquinas, T. 142 arrogance 177 Baker, D. 194 belief 8, 55–6, 58, 94; in God 103; in the goodness of the people 95 Benjamin, J. 23–4, 193 Berger, P. 17 Biden, J. 110 Bion, W. 72, 104, 157 Bollas, C. 72 Borris, H. 134, 135 Bush, G.W. 40–3, 49–50, 55, 57, 62, 65, 74, 86, 87, 91, 93, 97–107, 160–1, 164–5, 194 capital: accumulation of 124–5 chaos 91, 109, 111 Clark, J. 123–4 Clinton, W. 160 Columbus, C. 122 community 51, 55–6, 71–2, 156–7, 190; and the state 167

competition 120, 130–1, 145–9 complexity 53–4, 105 concepts 61 containment 65 corporation: as repository of greed 186 corruption 161–5, 169–86; greed and 116–17; unconscious aspect of 170, 175–6 creativity 20–1 deceit 88, 97–111, 174, 175–6, 179–80 Denby, D. 118–21, 142 dependence 108–11 deregulation 171–2, 178 desire 9; confused with greed 88, 91; and destruction 8, 13–30, 33, 82–3, 87, 91, 111, 130; object of 26–7; and the self 29, 30–5 Diamond, M. 195 difference 35–6, 51, 54, 160–1 dignity 17 discipline 67–8, 79–82 Dobson, J. 79–83 Dole, R. 49 doubt 28, 34–6, 41–2, 102

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duty: substituted for love Dworkin, R. 5

88

Ebbers, B. 175–6 Elkind, P. 195 emotional development 62–3, 70–1 Enron 170–83 envy 18–19, 33, 120, 143, 146, 154 equality 16–17, 75 evil 46–7, 50 experience 48–50 facilitating environment 72–3 Fairbairn, R. 67 Fairlie, H. 159 faith 86, 103, 183; exclusion of from public life 83–5 family drama 92 fantasy xi, 26; grandiose 100–1, 137, 176–7 Fastow, A. 171 Fitzgerald, F. 54 fortune 119–20 freedom: desire for 93; of markets 6–7, 149; as test of will 74–5 Freud, S. 52, 58, 81–2, 167 Friedman, M. 168 Friedrich, C. 163 Glasser, M. 8, 136 good 5, 9, 59, 127; devotion to 102; object 29; and right 6; self 30 Goodman, P. 196 governance 165–8 government: distrust of 166; greediness of 90, 115–16, 166–7

Gray, J. 5, 6, 16 greed 11–12, 18–19, 30, 33, 87, 91, 111; adult and child distinguished 127, 133–4, 154; and competition 120; conflict with morality 152; and contempt for the self 155; and death 131–2; and deprivation 130–1; and desire’s object 135–7; and governance 165–8; and instinct for life 128, 129, 192; and loss 118–19, 147; for moral virtue 176; and morality 184; and poverty 143–4; and pride 128; and self-interest 90; ultimate goal of 124; and work 117–18 Greenberg, J. 193 happiness 118, 131 hate 47, 50–1, 53, 88, 111, 130 Hegel, G.W.F. 19–22, 25 Hirschman, A. 123, 146, 165, 179 Hobbes, T. 13–18, 138, 146, 190–1, 193 Honneth, A. 23 honor 15–17, 30, 193 hope 55, 156–7, 160, 185–6, 189–90 ideas x–xi identification 58, 59–60, 62, 71–2, 89, 152, 156, 195; indiscriminate 139–42; politics of 62, 73–4,

INDEX

75–6, 78, 98, 101, 191; and thinking 103 individual 6 instinct 102–7, 117 justice: as revenge 44 Kaplan, H. 133–4 Kernberg, O. 30, 137–8, 175 Klein, M. 135, 139, 195 knowing 53, 103–7 Kohlberg, L. 195 Kohut, H. 140 Lakoff, G. 40, 57, 68–9, 76–7, 106, 109, 194 Laplanche, J. 196 Lay, K. 180, 182, 191 Lazar, R. 194 leadership 109–10, 186 Levin, C. 105 Levine, D. 193, 194, 195, 196 Lewis, M. 123–4, 126 liberal ideal 4–6, 7–8, 74–5; and greed 115, 166, 189–92 liberal society 156–7 limits: denial of 178–9 Locke, J. 6, 7 Loewald, H. 193 loss 54–6, 60, 84, 145–9 loyalty 105, 164–5 Manent, P. 6, 31 Marcuse, H. 36 Marx, K. 121–3, 124–5, 142–3, 144–5 McLean, B. 195 merger fantasy 156–7, 160 Merle, R. 196 Mitchell, S. 193

205

money 121–6, 142–3 moral defense 67, 82–3, 85–6, 95; and deception 106–7; and identification 89 moral order 122, 151–65 morality 59, 62, 68–9, 73–4, 83, 117, 182–3; and compliance 151–2, 169, 195; greedy quality of 152–3, 170, 184; in politics 88; renewal of 79–96; tendency toward extremes 170 narcissism 137–8, 175 nation: goodness of 99; as metaphor for family 92 norms 151, 161, 169, 172–3, 178 Nova, C. 193 nurturing 70–1 object: internalization of 25–9 object relations theory 24–30 Oedipal dynamics 195 organization: and ultimate fulfillment 174 people: goodness of 95, 99 perfect world 8–9, 19, 33–4, 189–92 political economy 117, 144–5 politics of identification; see identification Pontalis, J. 196 Potamianou, A. 145 power 15, 128–9, 130, 193; and authority 164; of government 167–8 pride 128–9, 154 psychic reality 94 Puritanism 158–9

206

INDEX

reality: denial of 100; see also psychic reality reason 8, 30–6, 41, 61, 71, 77, 106; finitude of 56; and instinct 102–3; and passion 31 recognition 21–4, 27 Reed, R. 79, 84, 90, 93–4 religion 103 repression 66, 87, 88; gratification in 88–9 responsibility: taking of 28–9, 33–4, 74 right 6; and need 84 rightness: conviction of 102 Riviere, J. 125–6, 127, 148, 192 rule 163 rules 173 sadism 88–90, 177 Sandel, M. 32 Sapochnik, C. 195 scarcity 13–14, 16, 146 Schimmel, S. 128, 129 Segal, H. 61 self 17, 19–21, 23–4, 28, 32; and aggression 66; ambivalence about 8; bad 67; collective and individual 9–10; command 31–2; denigration of 30, 190; desire to be 29, 32–3; equated with policy 102; hate of 66; individual and group 156–7; judgment 34; one true 8, 18, 137, 139; potential and real 139, 140–1; surrogate 141; true 89, 125;

unworthy 181; value invested in 17, 27, 125–6, 136, 137–8 self-interest 138; and greed 155, 158, 190; new morality of 169; and primitive need 162 sex 81–2; repression of 89 shame 43–4, 55, 143–4 sin 128, 153–4 Skilling, J. 171–2, 178, 182 Smith, A. 31, 134, 144–5 social defenses 173 Steuart, J. 165 Stewart, M. 196 Summers, F. 193 Surowiecki, J. 196 Suskind, R. 195 symbolic equation 61–2 Tawney, R.H. 157, 158–9 Taylor, C. 27 terrorism: war against 92–3 thinking 41–6, 49–50, 53–4, 58, 103; prevention of 3, 102, 106–7; and thoughts 104–5 thrift 158 Tickle, P. 128, 153, 157–8 Trump, D. 116–18, 123, 130–2 ultimate fulfillment 8, 133–49, 157, 167, 174, 179, 181–2, 184–6, 191 understanding: and identification 47, 53 unruly child 81–2 value: of things 125 values 48–51, 56, 57–78 victims 74

INDEX

virtue 163–4 Volkan, V. 4, 47 wealth accumulation 10 Weber, M. 138, 157–8, 196 will 74–5, 158–9

207

Winnicott, D. 20–1, 73, 89, 193 words: use of 60–2 work 117, 125, 130, 139, 180, 184, 196 World Trade Center 43 wrong 106–7