Bannon’s Academy for the Judeo-Christian West’s “Gladiator School” is precisely that—using political psychology under the cloak of academic political studies, i.e., populism refined and made palatable for “smart” people. When we really listen to individuals, we can influence the groups into which they subsume themselves. Information theory tells us—and studies have proven this true even in as polarized a nation as we are currently living in. Individuals who have subscribed to conspiracy theories and other weaponized social media can, if they are exposed for long enough to reliably-sourced news and information, have their minds changed. A 60-70% drop in beliefs in Trump’s election story was recently reported. It occurred when individuals were exposed to verifiable news sources consistently for a period of three weeks. The results are not lasting. As soon as the individuals were re-exposed to “fake news,” the seeming triumph of reason evaporated. These are individuals with no fully formed identity. They are pre-fed and do not know how to navigate the world of information on their own. They have no sense of subjectivity in which to house a sense of their own objectivity.
Mentalization-Based Treatment [define MBT] allows us to access our own mind as a mind in interaction with the mind of another. It is not assimilation, which requires the rejection of authentic identity with the replacement of a new one—even as a given individual might believe they virtue issue has embraced some truer more authentic version of the self that was stifled. When we map and diagram the object relations, the inter-relations, and the patterns and the patient recognize themselves in the visual, we’ve got our foot in the door. When they say yes to the structures that we’ve elaborated with them, they can see where else it exists in their lives and in the lives of those they associate with. It de-pathologizes them to themselves and defangs the power of the shame that is activated when they try to individuate from the all-good representation proffered by the dangerous seductions of authoritarianism. It is in this way that individual psychotherapy becomes a tool for political reasoning.
There is not much point in national analysis if the only people we are speaking to are other academics or theorists. Refugees like Fromm, Arendt, Canetti, Alice Miller and a list too long have codified the structures for us already. Fear activates attachment and creates binary, reductive emotional responses. Those who orchestrate populist mass movements know this and rely on it. The issue is how the Fascists of today utilize it and why the Left, which relies on nuance and the ability of the individual to make informed choices, shies away from applying these trued and true techniques.
We don’t know what Stone and Bannon really believe, but they are no dummies. The right instills and is free to create a frenzy of irrational choices, in which loyalty to the leader becomes the prime means of psychological survival. The Left sits around discussing philosophy and having internal disputes over shades of gray. The right shuts down the possibility of thought, while the left insists on thought as a virtue. Conversely, loyalty to the leader is the highest virtue of the totalitarian state.
If independent rational political thought in our current climate requires the ability to reflect and self-reflect, then the only way to combat mass populism is through the propagation of widely applicable models of the self in society. In other words, some sort of populist individual psychology is created. The 70s was notorious for having translated the models bequeathed by Europe’s refugees into “pop” models of psychological health that ultimately led to the “me” generation—and the almost sociopathic excesses of the 1980s.
