Psycho-Politics: Jordan Peterson and the Frankfurt School
Psychoanalysis and collectivism.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna is chosen by God to receive the highest spiritual teachings. The relationship between Arjuna and Krishna is that of student and teacher or disciple and guru. In the Jewish tradition, the defining feature of Abraham, Jacob, and Moses is their personal submission to God.
Abraham receives visions and messages from God directly. Moses receives signs from the burning bush, and the nation of Israel is accompanied by a pillar of fire. Moses also received commandments from atop a mountain. This theme of a prophet going to a mountaintop to receive a new religious revelation is also present in the image of Jesus's Sermon on the Mount. Jesus presents himself as the son of God, with God remaining in the position of master, and Jesus fully submitting himself. At the same time, Jesus also becomes the master to his disciples, and those disciples become the apostles who founded the new priest class of Christianity.
Outside of the Vedic and Abrahamic traditions, the structure of student and teacher is implicit in the relationship between father and son, or older brother and younger brother. Animals also learn from each other and teach each other through observation, display, mimicry, and communication. Although the conscious mind perceives other people and judges them, choosing who to follow and who to reject, the subconscious and unconscious mind cannot help but mimic and adopt the attitudes, habits, and perceptions of other people. In this sense, we become most like those we spend time with. A therapist attempts to teach people about themselves and reveal their true nature. The therapist is the teacher, and the client is the student.
Hidden Religion
Religion is a secular and scientific term. Fanatic Christians reject religion as an obstacle to a personal relationship with Jesus. Followers of Sanatana Dharma claim to be liberated from any particular sect, instead following the universal path. The term religion is used to dissect, analyze, categorize, and deconstruct. "True believers" do not necessarily call themselves religious, including political fanatics.
The paradox of religion is that once it is understood objectively, it ceases to have the power to compel faith — it loses its mystery. Religion operates like sexuality, which requires a suspension of conscious thought in order to engage with deeper instinctual and animalistic urges. The moment we understand sexuality objectively is the moment we cease to be sexual. There is no greater proof of this than the collapse of sexual activity among the so-called liberated generations, who are obsessed with dissecting and understanding "sexual identity" while being more anxious and alienated from the act itself.
Animals are sexual, yet they have no “knowledge” of sexuality. On the other hand, sex education suppresses sexuality. Sexuality precedes sexual understanding, and stands outside it, in opposition to it. Similarly, rational and logical religious education destroys the actual religious experience. This is not to say that there are not highly educated religious people or theologians, but that the ecstatic experience at the heart of religion is more likely to be found in a Pentacostal highschool dropout than an intelligent Catholic nerd.
Religion, like sexuality, is a structure of mind. Sexuality is not merely a one-dimensional attraction, like the need for food or water. Sexuality is a mythological structure of aesthetics, gender, power, hierarchy, kinesthetics, and social economy. Religious structures are similar to sexual structures. They compete for the same head-space. Religion is either an attempt to control, increase, direct, suppress, or eradicate sexuality, and it does this by interacting with all of the same complex, mythic structures that sexuality engages with.
Sexuality is a shadow on a piece of paper. This shadow contains a map of the human mind, with different areas for self-conception, identification, othering, love, hatred, kinesthetics, emotional amplitude, as well as emotional acceleration or oscillation. Above this shadow on the piece of paper hovers a more complex three dimensional object. This is religion, dealing the same structures from a larger social or super-egoic perspective, including tribe, nation, church, community, fellowship, purpose, self-sacrifice, and family. The relationship between the "shadow" on the paper and the three dimensional object is not one-way, in terms of causation. Sexuality creates religion, as much as religion creates the mythology in which sexuality operates.
Understanding ones own sexuality is a religious activity. Modern theories of homosexuality or transsexuality are all religious in nature. If sexuality is the root of all life, religion is our tool, like the eye, through which we understand ourselves. The concept of a "non-religious understanding" of something implies that we can remove that thing from the religious impulse. The attempt to "secularize" sexuality, or to make it understandable apart from religion, always reaches a point either of paradox, deception, or eradication.
This is simple to prove. Sexuality is governed as if it were a violent force. Sexual assault, sexual harassment, and sexual trauma can result from images, or speech, or ideas. The "pacification" or "secularization" of sexuality has not resulted in less sexual conflict. Instead, adherents of “secular sexuality” (feminism) are more neurotic, more anxious, and more guilty. They ran away from religion, but put the Catholics and Puritans to shame with their fanatical attacks on rape culture, the male gaze, heteronormativity, and the violence of misgendering. There is no more extreme form of sexual policing than feminism.
The left recognizes, through accident or wisdom, that the popular religious paradigms are not stable. The drive toward "science" is a religious impulse. Science seeks a new set of gurus known as "scientists" to administer the church, the "college." Christians are less religious than leftists, because in general, Christians are attracted to religion on the basis of social stability or familiarity. Yet like sexuality, the purpose of religion is not stability or familiarity, but ecstasy and revelation. When religion loses its ecstatic and revelatory core, it maintains only a husk of stable familiarity. It becomes, as Jesus said, an old wine skin, unsuitable for wine.
All self knowledge is linguistic, and all language is collective. We cannot understand ourselves without language. Socrates1 states that the highest form of power is the power to create language, because this is what creates people (demiourgos).
The individual is part of a larger collective. Self knowledge cannot be obtained in a vacuum. The task of self understanding is not, as popularized by modern psychology, an act of "focusing on yourself." Truly understanding the self involves the human organism in totality, and seeing the self through this universal lens.
Psycho-Politics
Mainstream academic therapists reject collectivism. But this is not a flaw of the left. The radical left understands that social hierarchies cannot be separated from individual self development. The right, represented by Jordan Peterson, which claims that politics has no place in therapy. The goal of Peterson is "individualism," a liberation from the political, where man becomes his own hero, divorced from tribalism. Peterson attacks the ideologies of the 20th century as genocidal collectivism. He seeks to transcend these. In Peterson’s individualism, there can be no "us" or "them," but merely a sea of idiosyncratic and eclectic individuals.
A more effective approach to self-understanding integrates political theory and theology with psychology, viewing them all through an inter-disciplinary lens. Rather than being three "contradictory" fields of study, they are utilized as three inter-dependent structures revolving around the same axis of identity.
Psychoanalytic politics, as practiced both by Peterson and the Frankfurt school, pathologizes political ideologies (fascism in the case of the Frankfurt school, fascism and communism in the case of Peterson) and relate them to poor mental health or psychotic personality traits, such as sociopathy, borderline personality disorder, or narcissism. For Peterson, any desire for political collectivism stems from resentment or low self esteem. For the Frankfurt school, political authoritarianism is the result of child abuse, abandonment, neglect, or violence. For both Peterson and Adorno, political evils are the result of personality disorders, which refuse to look inward and be self critical. Instead, the political fanatic attempts to solve their own personal problems by persecuting others. In Adorno’s view, the fascist persecutes minorities and the poor to avoid dealing with closeted homosexuality. In Peterson’s view, communists persecute the successful or wealthy to avoid making their bed and cleaning their room.
The psychoanalytic pathology of politics attempts to establish a relationship between politics and the emotional life of the individual. The inverse is that politics effects the emotional lives of individuals. Rather than psychoanalyze politics, we can politicize psychology. Political psychology would state that political life is the foundation for psychological health. This has been critiqued as an excuse or projection, an externalization of internal problems: "You're not alienated from capitalism, you're just lazy," or, "You're not alienated by mass immigration, you're just a loser. You're not a radical traditionalist, you just can't get a girlfriend."
In this view, personal problems are purely personal, and never a result of political conditions. To suggest anything else is a leap of faith, scapegoating, conspiracy theory, or magical thinking. Personal problems are a result of childhood experiences and genetic defects, and nothing more. In such a view, communism produces as many depressives as capitalism or fascism. The labels change, but losers live under every ideology. Or they will claim that democracy is a truly “neutral” system, which cannot affect psychology, even if communism or fascism could. Thus, democracy is the “best of all possible worlds,” and if you’re still depressed, that’s a you problem.
There is a great deal of truth in this scheme, which stands in opposition to a Jungian, quantum, relativistic, post-modern understanding of the collective self. What the individualists fail to recognize is that the most effective therapy is talk therapy. The goal of most talk therapy is to alter self talk, self-identification, and self-labeling. If talk therapy cannot address the political perception of personal problems (or the personal perception of political problems) then it cannot change individuals trapped within that paradigm.
Individualist psychology has the same flaws as the "scientific view of sexuality." It fails to produce the ecstatic or revelatory experience sought after in the religious experience. It is easy to dismiss ecstatic, revelatory experiences as "outside the scope of therapy," as distractions, or as unscientific.
Individualist, apolitical, universal, or secular psychology sidesteps the emotional needs of its clients. This is rooted in the liberal, capitalistic, and transactional nature of secular psychology. No one is forced to go to therapy, and thus, it is "consensual." This is the sexual regime: "consent." "Consent" is antithetical to a genuine sexual experience, which is "irresistible," and is antithetical to the ecstatic or revelatory experience, "without consent." No prophet received a vision of God "by consent." Consent implies a willing fore-knowledge of the experience. Consent cannot be given without fore-knowledge, and a sober mind, and a full intellectual understanding of the experience. If you cannot describe the experience, you cannot consent. Therefore, the necessity of consent precludes an encounter with God. Transactional therapy, as a "consensual process," is anti-sexual and anti-religious.
Transactional therapists laud themselves for being "professional" for keeping their heads out of religion, out of politics, and out of anything Dionysion, controversial, unscientific, disreputable, or of low social standing. This Apollonian separation is the Levitic priesthood which prohibits the mixing of meat and milk. They cannot stand anything messy.
The demand that humans be "clean" is neurotic. Transactional therapists are neurotic, and if you do not maintain their separation of cotton from wool, they will label you pathological (unclean) and put you in a menstruation hut (psych ward). Shame and humiliation are their means of control.
The distinction between the ecstatic, revelatory experience and the husk of stability and familiarity is the opposition between spirituality and religion. The path to ecstactic or revelatory experience is not by directly seeking it out (in the same way that happiness is not achieved through its pursuit), but rather by clearing aside the distractions and lies which exist in the husk of familiarity and stability. Some balance may be obtained, where ecstatic revelation exists in a cooperative tension with familiarity and stability. That tension, if possible, is the "steady state" of genuine religion.
The goals of Psycho-Politics are as follows:
Recognize the religious structures implicit in secular politics and the "scientific" worldview.
Question and deconstruct these structures using their own methods (post-modernism).
Discover the instinctual, phenomenological experience of ecstatic revelation and its parallels to the sexual experience.
Recontextualize this experience within a new set of religious boundaries, with the stability and familiarity needed to exist in a social order.
Plato’s Cratylus.