The Archetypal/Psychological Explanation for Trump

We have called forth the gods. Or, one in particular.

I like it.

What dreadful forces are being summoned this time? Tremors ripple through the noosphere. Can you feel them? It’s eerie, as though the dogs have all stopped barking at once, the birds have flown away together to parts unknown, and the sky has turned green.

The strangeness of the moment exceeds the descriptive capacity of what passes for civil discourse. Even the people who are right on the particulars are wrong on the whole. What’s worse, any attempt to explain Trump’s popular ascent is doomed because these events cannot be explained in the empirical fashion to which modern people are accustomed. The election is nothing less than a psychogenic storm. As such it can only be discussed in metaphysical terms that sober, prudent, smartphone-having people are unwilling to countenance.

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The key to understanding this election cycle—and its energetic locus, Trump—is to accept that we are not dealing with an ordinary man, bound by the rules of decorum and the presupposition of coherence. I have another idea. I propose that Donald Trump is the personification of a Norse god named Loki.

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Crucially, [famed psychoanalyst Carl] Jung argued [in the 30s] that modern people could not accept the reality of any manifestation of the unconscious; and that is what caused all sorts of problems. This is as true today as it was eighty years ago—perhaps more so, in this tech-obsessed time of data journalism, STEM supremacy, and quantitative hegemony. The more adamantly people deny the influence of unseen forces—that is to say, unconscious impulses—over their own behavior, the more power those forces exhibit.

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[Y]ou might be thinking that it’s unfair to attribute disagreeable voter behavior to mass psychosis. To which I say, keep watching the news. Is it really so far-fetched to suggest that America has literally gone mad? And if it indeed may be the case that the nation, or a large part of it, has lost its mind, then how do we even begin to talk about it? This is where armchair psychomythology becomes useful.

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The only contemporary observers who fail to grasp how dire economic circumstances might inspire irrational and destructive impulses in wide swaths of the public are the fortunate few who’ve managed to avoid job loss, eviction, a health crisis, or any other potentially life-destroying random event over the duration of what has amounted to an eight-year depression. Such lucky bastards abound within the ranks of the clueless political press corps and the establishmentarian loyalists in both major parties.

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[T]he mysterious alchemy of the unconscious mind remains fundamental to the one profession that is indispensable to the American political process: advertising. [...] The cynical construction of political persona and “narratives” that exploit unconscious anxieties may entail a great deal of obnoxious mumbo-jumbo, but that’s no proof it doesn’t work.

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Like Hitler, Trump has promised a restoration of past greatness through racial purity and has invoked as a scapegoat a supposedly sinister and back-stabbing minority that is actually vulnerable and victimized. But there are differences to be considered between the two men. Hitler’s paramilitary brownshirts were far better organized than the goons who stalk Trump rallies looking for protesters and dark-skinned people to beat up. For his part, Trump has done Hitler one better by promising terrifying purges and concentration camps from the very get-go, rather than waiting until after his election to reveal the full scope of his vicious designs.

But the most profound commonality is in the indisputable psychic power wielded over supporters and opponents alike.

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Just as Hitler was not known to crack wise from the podium, Trump’s stump speeches do not call to mind “storm and frenzy.” Trump is no [Odin - the god Jung argued was personified in Hitler], no berserker—he is a wisecracker, adept in the cool medium of television. He represents an entirely different Jungian archetype—namely, the pan-cultural mythological figure of “the trickster,” who arrives at moments of uncertainty to bring change, often of the bad kind. In the Norse pantheon, the shape-shifting trickster character is Odin’s blood brother, Loki, god of mischief and lies.

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If further proof is required that Trump the Insult Comic Candidate is a manifestation of the Norse trickster deity, it must be noted that Loki is a master maligner who, in one epic roast, delivered cutting put-downs to the other major lords of Asgard in a sort of Viking version of the 2016 presidential debates.

To complete this reprisal of Jung’s analysis, we must revisit the fraught matter of national character. I submit that if [Odin] summed up the Furor Teutonicus, then the quintessentially American deity must be Loki.

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Is it really so shocking that a racist, misogynist, mafia-connected, serially fraudulent boor could find a successful place in American life—especially in this age of misinformation and artifice? Loki has awoken. He walks among us, gaining strength, and he doesn’t need your stupid vote, loser.

  The Baffler

Joseph Campbell might well agree.

So that's what that hair is hiding.

Yes.

And check this out:  How to win an election...



Says the guy who helped put W Bush in the White House - twice.

And, if you still have time on your hands, Guardian readers explain why they will be voting for Trump.  Guardian readers.  Not your typical American redneck.

Still have time?  How about another "god"?  The Devil:  American crossroads: Reagan, Trump and the devil down south