Thought and MAGA

I read that N. Scott Momaday has died at the age of 89 years. Sometime in the early 1990s I had read his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The House Made of Dawn. I was then reading a bit in Native American literature for a study group I was to lead organized by the town librarian. I was wondering how the Native American tradition of storytelling would translate into the Western novel-tradition. I was curious.

The death of Momaday subtracts another from the world in which I have grown. I have lost aesthetic touch of the contemporary world and wish the political world were beyond my hearing, and I am not overly familiar with many of the names and places that grace the pages of popular magazines. Once at the hair stylist or dentist office I would catch up on celebrity gossip in People magazine, but now I don’t recognize the people highlighted in People until someone of my era dies and there is a report of the life with a display of photos.. Now while I’m having my hair styled rather than reading the gossip mags I enter into conversation with the hair stylist. This conversation troubles me slightly me because I believe she should be attending to my head and her work with it and be not distracted by my talk. But Amanda is a wonderful stylist and a good conversationalist. To continue with the decline, I am averse to much contemporary fiction. What I have read in this literature doesn’t seem to scratch very many of my itches, and I have taken to rereading tomes from the 19^th and early 20^th centuries—Henry James, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens and George Eliot, and studying works by a Portuguese Nobel laureate, José Saramajo and an English writer W.G. Sebald whose deaths (2010 and 2001 respectively) and lives I do not recall reading about in People magazine. Though the peopled world I know shrinks apace, both writers have been during the past year or two new to me, and so at least my imaginative world has exponentially grown. My imagination has expanded. Oh, and I also consume a whole shelfful of detective novels.

But I want to think about something else. Melanie Klein suggests that thought developed as a way of testing reality. What I think that this means requires some explanation, first, of course, to me.  Phantasy, Klein says, is the mental expression of instincts: we are hungry and we phantasize the breast or, perhaps, a chocolate chip cookie.  When there is a good enough mother the breast appears and the infant phantazises it has created it. Later, when the breast doesn’t appear, the child, frustrated and not happy, will have to negotiate with reality to discover satisfaction for its hunger: hence, the cookie. Hopefully it will exist in the pantry. Google search will suggest that there are four, seven or eleven basic instincts. Whatever. In any case, we start with unconscious phantasy that appears through the medium of the ego, itself composed of internalized good and bad part-objects, and is built, as it were, on phantasies about these objects. Phantasy, Klein avers, is the mental expression of instincts and is composed of objects and part objects. Now, phantasy is not an escape from reality but a constant and inevitable accompaniment of real experiences. Hanna Segal writes “that an infant going to sleep, contentedly making sucking noises and movements with his mouth or sucking his own fingers, phantasies that he is actually sucking or incorporating the breast and goes to sleep with a phantasy of having the milk-giving breast actually inside himself.” Libidinal instincts phantasize a partner with whom to satisfy those sexual urges. When I was younger I went out to the bar scene, but now I beg. However, unconscious phantasy remains inarticulate and requires reality to be visible. There has to be the possibility of an actual breast or partner in order for the phantasy to become evident. Infants are born with unconscious fantasies that help the infant make sense of the world. 

Now, Klein’s phantasy seems identical to my sense of Desire: that force that sends us out into the world seeking. Desire, unconscious and inarticulate, requires reality to be realized, though as Winnicott says, reality is always an insult and it does not exactly meet our phantasy. Klein suggests that the reality principle is only the pleasure principle modified by reality testing. We seek that which pleasures us, but perhaps not fully. Language offers that developing ego resource for expression, but words must come from that which has been made already available in reality. Here is the point to which I have headed: Klein says that the depth and accuracy of a person’s thinking will depend on the quality and malleability of his unconscious phantasy life to the things available and the individual’s capacity to subject that phantasy to reality testing. Thought was developed in the service of reality testing and as a means of sustaining tension and delaying satisfaction. Language can be the avenue for thought. 

Makes me wonder. Sustaining tension and delaying satisfaction are both anathema to the pleasure principle in the absence of reality aspires to instant gratification. The hungry screaming infant wants the breast and it wants it now! And so I am wondering how this theory might help me understand the MAGA phenomenon that ontinues to baffle and alarm me. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they refuse to accept the results of the last election; they continue to hold to conspiracy theories no matter how weird and even impossible I think of Marjorie Taylor Greene who posted in 2018 absurd accusations implying that a company owned by the Rothschilds, the wealthy Jewish banking family, had started a California wildfire from space using laser beams. She and Lauren Boebert screamed obscenities at President Biden during his State of the Union Speech in language they would never suffer from their own children or those others about them. From their seats in Congress and on national television they acted without testing reality. They were not employing thought. Or I consider Donald Trump who continues to deny any complicity in the events of January 6 when he incited the mob to storm the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power and maintain his office in the presidency. His repeated assertion after election day that the election despite all evidence to the contrary that the election was stolen from him, despite innumerable court cases refusing to overturn a single vote in a single state, were all lies that incited the MAGA base to march on the Capitol to demand that they not certify the legally elected candidate. His behavior was hardly the operation of thought but rather the product of phantasy. And the adherence of the MAGA base to his lies and violent rhetoric did not occur because the mod was engaged in thought. Absolutely no evidence has been found to support the illusory claims. I consider that the MAGA mob who without thought accept whatever they are told by the foundation that supports the MAGA spectacle. Kleinian psychology suggests that these people aren’t thinking: irregardless of reality they refuse to postpone satisfaction. They act on unconscious and untested phantasy. Like the child, they want the breast and they want it now. 

Reality might be an insult but it must be acknowledged as inevitable. Thought allows phantasy to confront reality by allowing the individual not to reach for the chocolate chip cookie or the lie until reality will be tested against it and a relatively informed course of action can be taken. Winnicott will say that creative action will result from this event. What I am saying is that the MAGA crowds are not employing thought. They are not thinking. Listening to Trump and his minions continue to espouse lies and accusations that fly in the face of all reality belies Trump’s and his sycophants’ competences to govern. Or to even stand for office. The violent assault on the Capitol was an action inspired by instinct and unconscious phantasy but was not a result of thought. The mob attempted to reduce tension and gain instant satisfaction. They were destructive and resistant to reality-testing. The MAGA mob continues to avoid thought for the pleasure of phantasy.