Free speech — a psychological perspective
Trump is a symptom of something far deeper and impossible to ban: the shadow.
The recent banning of Donald Trump from Twitter has reignited the culture war over the merits of free speech. It is a subject that can be appraised from many perspectives but is rarely thought about psychologically. I will leave the problem as to where repression must go in a closed system (it returns, as Sigmund Freud insisted) and focus on what, I would argue, is the real danger when facing demagoguery: the unconsciousness of the audience.
A veteran investigative journalist, Allan Nairn, remarked some time ago: “Trump has, like other demagogues, this ability to reach inside the soul of many people and pull out the worst.” His observation brings to mind Carl Jung’s self-investigation in The Black Books: “Why have you been seized by this thought? Truly only because something in you came to meet it. What came to meet it?”
What is deep inside the soul? What is the worst in the depths? Who is it that comes to meet Trump? This is the crux of the matter. It is not free speech in itself, but the relative autonomy of what Jungians call the shadow that is perilous , particularly, when it is assumed not to exist and is all the more powerful. Americans and the West don’t do coups?
The dialectic of othering is a complex topic — suffice it to say that beyond our personal shadows there is the collective or archetypal shadow, which leads us into the bloody history of our species, albeit dissembled in talk of economic revival, or national pride, or zeal for the Prince of Peace, et cetera. With different emphasis Freud wrote about this, too, in Civilisation and Its Discontents:
As a rule this cruel aggressiveness waits for some provocation or puts itself at the service of some other purpose [but] [i]n circumstances that are favourable to it, when the mental counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action, it also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien.
We are, with the whole QAnon conspiracy phenomenon, in some disturbingly ur-territory. The claim that Trump stands against a cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles reinstates the Middle Ages libel when, supposedly, lamias and strixes, monsters who were at the same time neighbours, abducted children in the dead of night. Something terrifying has awoken in the collective psyche. Perhaps we face existential threats so dire that our inchoate fears have summoned ancient spectres of abandonment. Or maybe it bespeaks the darkest deficit on the other side of the myth of American innocence. Most certainly, evil now stalks the imaginary of a critical digital mass. (“The algorithms, by responding to actual behaviour, are picking up on user desires, which may not even be known to the user. They are digitalising the unconscious,” writes the perceptive critic Richard Seymour.)
For those of us who, like Hillary Rodham Clinton, might think we are above the fray: what is it that we find “deplorable” in these people, and what must it be like to have that gavel fall on your head? Then there is the unequally distributed shadow of despair born of the weakening of social bonds through the greed of C.S. Lewis’s “quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices”.
I contend that we ought to be the difference between words and their consequences (in this rests all responsibility), yet, without awareness of figural ground and shadow impulses (the question being, who is it that speaks?) free speech, mixed in with strong emotions, risks aggression and destruction. Even so, Silicon Valley can ban Trump and his fellow travellers, but it cannot cancel Thanatos any more than it can inferiority or narcissism. When you come down to it, speech remains our only hope for insight into toxic solidarities. The alternative is what exactly? More repression? More disassociation? Reinforcing defence systems would burden the future with even darker energies; driven into wagon forts on the dark web, extremists would become more extreme.
Jung’s radical move was, as James Hillman has pointed out, an act of demonology. Unlike Jesus who in one of the earliest recorded acts of “no-platforming” did not permit the demons to speak (Mark 1:34), Jung does the opposite: he suffers what they say and in doing brings fragments of darkness into the light; in the long haul, this demonological hermeneutic allows for dialogue with opposite poles of moral judgement, differentiation of consciousness and, potentially, realignment. Get in front of me, Satan. Or to cite a Jewish civil liberties lawyer who defended neo-Nazis: “If there are Nazis in the room, I want to know who they are so that I can keep an eye on them.”
If wisdom can ever be realised politically it will be agonistic roads that get us there. The best one can say about speech is what is also worst about it: it forces us to confront what we would rather not.
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular ~ C.G. Jung, CW 13, par. 335