Donald Trump and America’s Death Wish

Freud wrote that mankind is controlled by two drives: Eros, the life instinct, and Thanatos, the death instinct. Let us observe how our collective death instinct may apply to our selection of Donald Trump as the 45^th President of the United States. The world seems bewildered by the selection of Donald Trump, a man with no obvious political motivation, a stunning array of conflicts of interest, no experience in politics, and a tendency to bully and insult. How could the American people choose a man whose most notable characteristics are that he likes to tweet, loves the art of the deal, adores television, has impulse control problems, no moral compass, and a tendency to present false facts and claim they are true? Let us take a leap into our spiritus mundi and see what we can discover hidden beneath.

Anomie and the Disillusionment of the American Soul

Émile Durkheim coined the term “anomie,” which he described as a state of widespread disillusionment, disappointment, and instability resulting from a breakdown of standards, values, purposes, or ideals (Suicide, 1897). Durkheim believed an over-

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identification with the state and under-identification with local community leaves individuals without sufficient social feedback, thus they fall back upon self-interest, greed, narcissism, isolation, and despair. Anomie was the term he used for this state of mind and unwittingly he was an astute predictor of the growing problem of narcissism in America. It is an apt description of the current state of mind in America. The nation is filled with disillusionment, disappointment, and a startling lack of beliefs with the exception of being able to achieve conspicuous consumption.

A Weakening of the Moral Code

Hannah Arendt coined the term “the banality of evil,” describing the mental state of having no ability to self-reflect and thus becoming an instrument of evil for the state. Adolf Eichmann was her prime example. Picking up on the idea of the banality of evil, Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University conducted prison experiments in 1972, where he demonstrated how people showed a profound lack of morality by willingly inflicting pain on others when instructed to do so. Zimbardo called this the Lucifer Effect. Zimbardo’s work supported Stanley Milgram’s findings at Yale University in the 1960s, which verified people’s apparent lack of moral compass as they freely shocked others when instructed to do so. This body of work articulated the weakness of the American hold on morality in the face of direction by authority.

The Underlying Anger and Self-Punishment in America

Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism (1979) also described how morality had been apparently weakened in our culture of narcissism because of the media’s destruction of role models to emulate. Lasch posited that as the country lost a sense of role models and conscience, it would be replaced by a far darker and more primitive superego.

York University Professor Don Carveth in his book The Still Small Voice: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt and Conscience (2013) pointed out that psychoanalysis has failed to focus on guilt and superego function. He went on to say, much as Lasch did in 1979, that when conscience evaporates, the superego does not disappear but rather sinks deeply into the unconscious, whereupon it becomes even more harsh, primitive, and self-punishing.

The Tragic Imperative that Looms

The most recent discussion of morality, guilt, and our death wish is seen in Walter Davis’ book Death’s Dream Kingdom: The

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American Psyche Since 9-11 (2006). Professor Davis is Professor Emeritus at Ohio State University and suggests that embedded within the American psyche is unresolved and deadly guilt over the unnecessary use of two atomic bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which incinerated over 100,000 Japanese within seconds. Dr. Davis posits that America is trapped in a repetition compulsion based upon this American guilt and unless we face our own traumatic guilt, we are destined to repeat this atrocity with self-inflected wounds. He cites the provocation of the Middle East, which resulted in 9/11, as an example of our repetition compulsion.

Enter the President

This brief review of America’s psyche takes us to the election of Donald Trump as our 45^th President. A recent skit on Saturday Night Live may prove enlightening. Alec Baldwin, playing Donald Trump, is in the Oval Office with an actor playing Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist. Bannon is dressed as the Grim Reaper and is urging President Trump to call various heads of state, insult them, and then threaten to go to war. This fantasy of the angel of death may be closer to the truth than one wants to admit. At the time of this writing we see provocation by Russia, Iran, and North Korea, which have the potential to escalate into all-out war. In his documentary film Generation Zero (2010), Steve Bannon has openly stated his belief that global conflagration is inevitable—fortunately, Bannon’s role in the White House now appears to have diminished.

It was noteworthy to me that Trump’s campaign commonly played the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” which recounts the devil’s control over human existence. By the way, the Stones were not asked permission to use this song. The President’s frequently unconscionable behavior, his flagrant conflicts of interest, as well as his daily insults leveled against the judiciary system, both branches of Congress, the free press, and allies such as Mexico and Australia, plus his cozy relationship with Russia, have served to alarm many in the U.S. and elsewhere. If Durkheim, Arendt, Lasch, Carveth, and Davis are correct, their hypothesis is that we are now under the sway of a massive death wish.

The sense of despair in the American psyche comes from many places, five of which I will explore below. One, wages have stagnated over the last 35 years for the majority of Americans and income inequality is at an all-time high. As Trump articulated many times, the American dream is dead. No one really believes

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that the underlying issues that caused the 2008 economic collapse have been resolved. Many if not most Americans feel left out and left behind. Two, constant exposure to images of smiling, happy, successful people on TV has produced feelings of shame and anger, as John Berger pointed out in his book Ways of Seeing (1972). Three, unbridled consumerism produces profound feelings of emptiness. One of the most popular rock and roll songs in history is “Satisfaction,” written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and the lyrics scream that satisfaction is not ours. Four, Harvard professor Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone (2000), and James Kunstler, author of Geography of Nowhere (1993), both describe an America with no sense of community and that we are left with chronic feelings of estrangement, paranoia, psychosomatic illnesses, and depression. There are an estimated 30,000 suicides per year in America. Five, the most discernible value for most Americans consists of either making or spending money. Two of the most popular film quotes of the last 30 years are Michael Douglas in the film Wall Street (1987) saying that “greed is good” and Cuba Gooding Jr. shouting “Show me the money” in the film Jerry Maguire (1996).

Glen Gabbard felt we can surmise much about the American psyche by studying our favorite films. Let us observe the popularity of zombie or walking dead films and TV shows. One of the most popular television series is called The Walking Dead (2010-). Two of Hollywood’s big blockbusters were I Am Legend (2007) with Will Smith and World War Z (2013) with Brad Pitt. Both films were about a world filled with humans who were walking dead. I suggest that this genre reveals a sign of deep despair, anxiety, and deadness at the center of the American soul.

Nihilism in America

America’s wish to die may stem from our anomie, as Durkheim foretold. Perhaps our death wish is due to a regressed and primitive superego as Carveth, Lasch, and David Lotto suggest (“The Problem of Regression,” Clio’s Psyche, Vol. 23, No. 2, Winter 2017). Davis tells us it is due to tragic guilt of dropping the atomic bomb. Robert Putnam and William Kunstler tell us that failure to establish a genuine sense of community produces a sense of despair and paranoia; we are given the Great Wall of Trump as the ludicrous answer to all these woes.

Freud explained that the two human drives, Eros and Thanatos, are always in battle. Eros in America is now dominated by

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 Thanatos. We are absorbed by competition, anger, and a desire to win at all costs. Trump’s much repeated campaign promise was to help America win again. He took this message from the darkest part of the American soul. The golden age of neo-capitalism has arrived and we elected a businessman to run things and finally get them right. However, we do well to remember what Joel Bakan, Professor of Law, filmmaker, and Rhodes Scholar, said about the mindset of all corporations. In his award-winning documentary The Corporation (2003), he described the personality of successful corporations as purely sociopathic and how they exist to do one thing: to make profit for the shareholders. But it seems patently obvious that government is not a business and exists to run a country, not a company. A democratic government has the job of upholding arcane things like ethics, freedom, stability, safety, compassion, rule of law, freedom of the press, a moral code, propriety, mores, politesse, and altruism. It is not in the job of profit making or profit sharing. But a choice has been made and the people have selected a president who gave voice to the anguished American soul.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was a professor of physics at Princeton and Berkeley and the creator of the atomic bomb, watched the first mushroom cloud and uttered the words from Hindu scripture, “I am become Death, the destroyer of Worlds.” He warned that a time would come when all mankind would curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.

The Rough Beast has arrived at the gate, but I keep wanting to imagine the end of the Federico Fellini masterpiece 8½ (1963), when the crew and the cast of the film got together, held hands, and danced around the ring as the circus band played on. Such are the solutions that artistic geniuses come up with. I am prompted to send President Trump a copy of this film and suggest to him that he watch it at least once a week.

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