American Extremist

The Psychology of Political Extremism (Imperium Press)

Josh Neal

• Publisher: Imperium Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780648859376
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Nationalisme et patriotisme

In American Extremist, Josh Neal brings the eye of the experienced clinician to bear on extremism both right and left. His rigorous psychoanalysis shines a light on the motivations of violent miscreants, but more to the point, it shines on their more mainstream enablers and cheerleaders. He shows that extremism is at the heart of American culture, offering a glimpse into a subterranean antagonism that erupts into orgiastic violence all too often.

This book also breaks further ground in assessing left wing authoritarianism. Long handwaved away as an empty term, Neal takes it seriously and brings his penetrating insight to bear on this neglected topic alongside right wing authoritarianism. We have here not a cowardly centrism, but a bold affirmation of normality over psychopathy-wherever it is found.

This is a work with the potential to change American political discourse, and a first corrective measure to reconcile the schizophrenic tendencies of what is ultimately a great and noble people.

Book I

Whose Extremism?
Which Ideology?

Expressions of hatred, so vile and putrid,
Hesitate to be spoken, though when shared quite lurid.
Condemnations abound, intent to draw a boundary,
Only to constrain and confine, exposing the contrary.
Betrayed in the first, revealing their truest notion,
The greatest of acts—a complete devotion.

Myth, Mental Illness, and Political Extremism

We will begin this analysis by introducing some familiar concepts, carefully drawing them out so to as extract the greatest evidential power they may have to offer this work. Slowly their interconnectedness will become apparent, and by the end of this work, will hopefully prove irrefutable. I do not suspect that their application will evince much controversy (the very hypothesis of this book provides more than enough of that for the average reader); however there are several strains of contemporary thought which simultaneously deny certain aspects while overemphasizing others in their attempts to explain the relationship between political extremism, personality psychology, and mental illness. For those who are ideologically committed to certain ways of viewing the world and its inhabitants, these ideas shall prove controversial indeed. It is not my intent to discount the works of those who came before, but rather to reshuffle them in such a way that we might think about the problem of political extremism a little differently (and with a bit of luck, more constructively as well).

An unfortunate consequence of the medicalization and naturalization of the mind (and the body) has been to view cognitive dysfunctions and personality disorders almost exclusively in terms of biological causes. Chemical imbalances in the brain are responsible for mood disorders; certain alleles are to blame for intellectual and developmental disorders; irregularities in a given region of the brain provide the cause for condition X, Y, Z, and so on. In this view, material causes require material solutions: pharmaceuticals, surgeries, and a host of other purported remedies are therefore applied to the body. This perspective, while not incorrect, is certainly incomplete.

In those situations where thinkers dare to look beyond the biological, the tendency to consider environmental and even political causes will emerge. So, too, will these theorists turn towards explanations which emphasize various technological and cultural innovations (the omnipresence of visual and auditory stimuli), narcissistic industries (the arts, including fashion, music, and cinema), the nihilism of modernity, and the demands of changing work environments (affecting the individual’s psychomotility, for instance), and the roles they play in contributing to the phenomenon of human dysfunction. To the credit of such thinkers, new disciplines emerged throughout the last century in an attempt to address these problems. Two novel therapeutic methodologies from the 20th century come to mind almost immediately: the Soviet experiment in engineering psychology and ergonomics (a science that would later migrate to the U.S.), which attempted to ease the stress of the worker so he might be more productive, and the work of Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl who developed a style of psychotherapy known as logotherapy to help individuals discover meaning in their lives. Many philosophies of human suffering were born, and just as many methodologies to end human suffering were born in the 20th century. As different as they all were, they shared one thing in common: they all proved insufficient at achieving their stated aim. While each innovation in psychological research and theory promised to transform the world for the better, in the face of these advancements the problem of human suffering has only persisted.

This is not to say that the aforementioned theories (trauma, congenital disturbances of neurobiological processes, evolving technological and environmental demands, and considerations relating to the individual’s political circumstance) are wholly incorrect or insignificant, but should we consider the explosion of mental health problems in industrialized and modernized societies—in particular over the last quarter century—as well as our failure to treat persistent psychiatric conditions, then we must admit that something is awry in our analysis. Thomas Szasz wrote of the myth of mental illness in 1974, but in this work, I would like to discuss myth and mental illness.

The how of human behavior throughout most of our history has been relegated to the domain of religion, in particular through the use of myth and parable to convey truths about our nature, and as such, to provide archetypes or models which we can then internalize and embody in our actions. Throughout our history these archetypes have provided the form for consciousness (we could also call that ‘personality’), and the use of myth and parable has served as a kind of moral and ethical education. Myth and parable are among the oldest cultural technologies (likely second only to language) and have possessed the power to not only shape and order civilizations, but to guide the evolutionary process itself. During the period where religions and myths were held with sincerity, we regarded these societal tools with great care and as such they were not easily dismissed by past regimes; when new mythical systems were adopted, almost always for the purpose of political consolidation and expansion, the most successful societies either retained significant features of the existing system or wiped out any trace of their existence (including the people who held on to them). What we see in our current situation is a covering, an overlaying, of the existing mythic and parabolic foundation upon which America was founded. For all our modern cynicism, our rationalist scientific skepticism, we have not abandoned myth itself. We have merely stripped myth and parable of its higher values (e.g. truth, beauty, and order) and vainly appropriated them for our own power-seeking narcissistic impulses. An analogue to this may be found in Christopher Caldwell’s recent book The Age of Entitlement,1 where he pointed out that America is presently divided between the founding constitutional document and its mid-twentieth century legal replacement (brought about by the civil rights movement); we are not only contending with dueling legal understandings, but dual and incompatible understandings of our own mythical, historical, and parabolic origins.

Stepping afield of the technical and historical implications of that statement and directly to its psychological consequences, we can say that perhaps to a greater extent than people are a product of their race, ethnicity, or geographical origin, they are the result of their mythological and parabolic inheritance. While these materialist origins do reveal a great deal about who we are and whence we came, they reveal nothing about who we can be. They certainly tell us little about how we should be. It is in the stories of our ancestors and our Gods, tales of our victories and our foibles—the very collective autobiography of our people—that we draw our true strength, but more importantly, our true identity. Given this truth, if a people can be ripped from their inherited narratives (which are best understood as a true collective fiction or ideology), or merely have their narratives re-written in a way that is disempowering, then they necessarily become psychologically vulnerable to the slings and arrows of malevolent storytellers and cognitive colonizers. Once these new authors enter the scene, new narratives may then emerge; such freshly adopted tales provide a different set of ethical and moral codes, which, as our present condition plainly evinces, do not foster the development of agency, maturity, and eusocial intimacy. Rather, they engender quite the opposite.

Through this process, victims of this mythological theft become alienated from their own identities, thus producing a kind of false consciousness and the development of an othered self-concept. Natural instincts honed over generations of natural and sexual selection therefore become problematized and confused. Conformity to a set of mythically ordered evolutionary behaviors (themselves finely tuned and highly adaptive) are now indicators of repression, trauma, or worse, fascist tendencies. Seen in this light, mental illness can be understood as the result of a conflict between a dysgenic mythos and the natural psychological tendencies which seek realization within an orderly mental and cultural framework. While it is not ideal to describe the resulting psychological deficits using the language of mental illness (a concept so bound up in pseudo-medical and pseudo-scientific complications as to be unwieldy in helping us to achieve greater clarity), understood in an uncomplicated and layman sense, it does give us a point of discursive origin—the dysfunction of human thought and action. Operating from the insights afforded to us by narrative theory—stated simply, the idea that storytelling is an essential component of human cognition—we would be better served to work with a parabolic and mythological conception of psychological dis-ease. When we consider the problem of political extremism (as this text does), we can now view the issue in a broader sense—one that does not place the responsibility of violence and terror solely on disenfranchised individuals or impersonal biohistorical processes, but on those members of society who possess the power to influence entire civilizations.

In short, the subversion of religious, national, and ethnic mythos grants a tremendous capacity for political and social control. Much of contemporary discourse is itself a fight over the rights to ou...