Pol-Psych | Political neurotics: Longing for a place we can never go
From the Soviet Union to the Caliphate and the castles of old Europe — we know everything will be better when we get there.
Neurosis is no longer a popular term – if you’ve watched a few Woody Allen films you may think that neurosis was a rare nasal infection that afflicted wealthy intellectuals in 1970s New York.
Today we prefer to talk about autism, and spend our money not on analysts but ever more elaborate pills — or the modern descendants of Marcus Aurelius.
“This too will pass…”
And so it will.
What is neurosis? Neurosis is the gap our mind creates between a shared experience of reality and what we hope it will be, or what we believe once was.
Writers are usually neurotic, since the whole purpose of writing is to capture experience on the page.
And have you noticed how experience is always melting away in front of you? The flowers are little more decayed today. Your child lost her first tooth — or was it her third? That building where you used to have lunch was knocked down.
Look, there’s just air where you used to sit eating a sandwich. A bird flew through the space where your body used to be.
People who pay attention to these details are liable to become neurotic.
Since writers —and artists more generally — wish to capture reality through observation and representation, writers tend to be neurotic.
An artist is always aware of the slipping away, of what may come, and — sickly sweetest of all — the past that cannot be changed.
Those who choose to live too much in the future world of expectation are neurotically disappointed at the present.
They want to be president of the company, and they can picture what that will be like ever so well. But they can’t quite manage to arrive on time, or meet the most basic sales quota.
And so they feel stressed, overburdened, not just with their workload, but with the fantastic future — the cars, cigars, and bars — that should, by right, be theirs.
After all, if one can imagine it so vividly why should it not be?
Those more neurotically inclined to the past have finessed that day at school they had to wear a blouse because their mother did not have the white shirt required for the class photograph into a magnificent, ornate memory.
“Are you wearing…a blouse?”” asked the incredulous maths teacher.
That one moment, honed, has become a needle for the psyche. How can I ever get over it? The humiliation! I even remember the lines on his face as he laughed!
And the same will go for every rejection at the hands of the opposite sex, every flunked job, and every argument with a parent. The result is often an inability to act in the present without non-stop cavilling or procrastination.
Psychoanalysis — contrary to popular belief — does not really aim to cure people. It will not make a patient feel better about the blouse, or what they said to their boss ten years ago — nor does it aim to provide ways to cope with those feelings.
Rather, the goal is for the patient to experience that what happened as it happened so that the present is the present; if the patient must feel shame about what happened at school twenty years ago then feel shame they must, but there is no need to become neurotically tied to that experience.
This is all rather easier said than done. And much treasure and tears has been spilt trying to make this system work.
But aside from our personal lives, there is always a neurotic current in politics.
Politics can be quotidian; it’s probably best when it is so, an urgent discussion over drain covers is preferably to deciding if ethnic group X or ethnic group Y is going to be beaten to death with old hammers in a shallow trench.
When politics is quotidian it is rarely neurotic, but when it is grandiose it usually contains a large neurotic element.
Communism, Nazism, fascism, Islamism, and — in its way — liberalism are all politically neurotic.
The divide between left and right manifests itself in political neurosis in the divide between those who long for a utopian future political settlement, and those who believe that the utopian settlement existed in the past.
There are, of course, degrees of neurosis: the Islamic State and diehard communists are extremely neurotic whereas the Labour Party and the Republicans are less so.
But all are neurotic to a greater or lesser degree.
After all, if one asks people why they became involved in politics they will usually reply, ‘I wanted to change something.’
Whether or not this reply has become insincere with the years, or if what they wanted to change was the fact that everything kept changing — the change to come was what mattered.
Neurotic states are most terrifying are those where the neurosis is imposed by force. A state like North Korea or the Soviet Union under Stalin is fearful because the society itself has become neurotic.
All efforts are put towards fulfilling the grandiose plans of the leadership. “One more push, comrades! One more push towards communism! Twenty years to go until full communism!”
While society itself is falling apart in famine, disease, and moral decrepitude, the propaganda apparatus tells the people that the country is taking great strides forward.
Never before have people lived so well! And anyway, if there are shortfalls these are temporary stumbling blocks to full communism.
Stumbling blocks that have become temporarily permanent.
Citizens in these states live in a forced denial of reality. Those who assert reality quickly disappear.
Cuban visa official: And why do you wish to leave Cuba for the US? Aren’t our supermarkets fantastic?
Citizen: I can’t complain.
Official: Our roads are well maintained. Public transport is quick and efficient.
Citizen: I can’t complain.
Official: You have a job here with a good salary.
Citizen: I can’t complain.
Official: You have a flat and education for your children.
Citizen: I can’t complain.
Official: Well, why do you want to move to the US then?
Citizen: Because there I can complain.
The difference between communism and capitalism is not so much to be found in the quality of living or the particular justice of each system, but in the ability one has to moan under capitalism — even when the system is run in an authoritarian way.
The situation may be terrible, but at least one can point it out, crack a joke, and bitch about it.

The left has a greater capacity for neuroticism because its project is inherently forward looking. The leftist thinks about the just world to come and not the problems before him.
Leftism is also more intellectual than rightist political thought. Leftists enjoy the abstract, neurotic world of ideas. Rightists are sceptical about ‘thinkers’, and prefer a man of action.
Leftists adore Marx and Sartre — men who spun elaborate, logical models of reality but were impractical in everyday affairs.
The difference is also illustrated in the tension between President Obama and President Trump. President Obama is perceived to be ‘smart’, which is to say — as Trump would — ‘book smart’. President Trump fancies himself as ‘street smart’.
The sticker above shows leftist humour in poking fun at the more extravagant claims of the world to come under socialism and communism.
But the very existence of the joke indicates that leftist expectations are over the top. Full communism will bring not only material abundance for all and an end to racial and national tensions, but also larger chocolate!
Leftist neuroticism is also evident in the old claim that communism has never really been tried. This appears to be a variation on the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy, but it also reflect leftist neuroticism. For the leftist, ‘communism’ is a fantasy of complete fulfilment and harmony. After all, Marx said that communism would eliminate social alienation and would allow us to sink into a warm, womb-like, and harmonious gestalt.
This fantasy is so warm, so total, that no actual blood-flecked reality can intrude on it. The fantasy to come must be preserved above all. And so communism has never really been tried.
This is not to say that capitalism does not produce neuroticism. Indeed, capitalism contributes to our immediate neurotic state far more than socialism or communism — every advert is an invitation to neuroticism.
We are all told by the advertising-industrial complex that one more purchase — a house, a car, a hairdryer — will bring us eternal contentment.
But it never does, though enough people break themselves on this wheel.
Rightist utopias lie in the past. The rightist believes in eternal values, and that our society has fallen away from these values and lost its glory.
And so the rightist becomes neurotic about history, sometimes in an arbitrary and nonsensical way.
There is an instinctive, gut conservatism that laments the ‘modern’ in an arbitrary way. This approach does not consider that modern architecture may still embody eternal values of beauty, but instead decides that every building constructed after a certain point is ‘ugly’ whereas all architecture before this point is ‘beautiful’.
This is naïve conservatism, which is likely to lead to an adoration of a period in the past that one has a subjective affection for. We see this in the contemporary reactionary and conservative movements.
In these movements, there are those that lionise the 1950s as a high point for the nuclear family and ‘sensible’ morality. But others will find affection for the mid-Victorian period. And others still the Renaissance or Mediaeval period.
And for the most reactionary of all it has all been a catastrophe since Ancient Greece — or the start of civilization itself.
But there are large differences between the mores, customs, and technology of each of these periods. The fetish is neurotic.
Whatever problems the naïve rightist confronts today simply did not exist in 1856 — or so they believe.
Further, the contemporary media environment allows the rightist a much richer neurotic fantasy life than the leftist.
The rightist may access paintings, films, and other media produced in the past. The paintings, films, and art of communism to come do not exist — though, if a leftist can buy the Soviet model, they may exercise leftist nostalgia over Soviet artistic and technological productions.
A rightist can lose themselves in films from the 1950s. He forgets that these are merely representations from Hollywood, and not ‘the 1950s’.
Contemporary mainstream Hollywood films feature homes and apartments that are nothing like the homes and apartments people inhabit in every day life. A typical character in a contemporary film appears to live in a section of Ikea where the price tags have been removed.
There are no chipped glasses, cups to be washed up, or carpets soaked with cat urine in Hollywood films — and there never have been.
The rightist — who in the past was the anti-utopian — has his utopia on the screen, and he can wistfully look at pictures of chastely dressed Victorian ladies while lamenting current standards in sexual morality — as if there were never ladies of the night in Victorian times!
Television series and films that cater to rightist neuroticism include Game of Thrones and the Lord of the Rings. I have not seen the former, but the fantasy world seems consistent. Fantasy films offer audiences a world where hierarchy (kings & knights), heroism, essential sex roles, honour, religion and magic are all celebrated.
I believe that the popularity of these films reflects the absence of these values in contemporary societies where the thrust is towards egalitarianism, utilitarianism, collectivism, science, and fluid sex roles.
There are eternal verities in these fantasy series, but all we have now are changing customs and what science has established to be correct — for now.
There is great pathos in the popularity of these films. The technology we use to watch these legendary adventures is what destroyed the life world that allowed us to believe in fairies behind the rocks, knights good and true — and eternity.
But for the rightist mind, these fantasy films merely represent an other neurotic retreat — a means to have a fantasy about the rightist values that no longer exist in our world.
Islamism is a rightist movement within Islamic civilisation, and so it exhibits similarly neurotic concerns. Sayyid Qutb, an influential Islamist thinker, though his views are less significant for groups such as the Islamic State, thought that Islam could recapture its leading role in the world through Muslims returning to the purity of thought and action found in the first generation to encounter the Qur’an.
And so his neurotic concern was getting all the details right for the return to that first generation. One sees this view in online forums and Saudi clerical pronouncements on topics as diverse as trainers, satellite TV, and Pokémon Go.
This probably represents the most complete reactionary movement in the world today, a movement that matches communism in its desire to escape to a place beyond now: the place we all want to go, but can never reach.
The neurotic position is partly what makes life possible and impels societies towards,well, towards the ‘beautiful future’. The beautiful future will never arrive, of course — even if a society approaches the ideal there will be a revolt, and we will decide that what was once ideal is now hell on Earth.
Without the tension, without the belief that life will be better with the right partner, the right job, the right house, the right city, and the right political system we would probably lapse into stasis.
The trick is to puncture this fantasies as often as possible, and not overwork the fantasy to such a degree that the present seems dead and the people living within it disposable.
I’ll conclude with a song about hobo utopia — a place that nobody has attempted to build yet, though I hear that any day now…
‘…In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
There’s a land that’s fair and bright,
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night.Where the boxcars all are empty
And the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees
And the cigarette trees
The lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggsThe farmers’ trees are full of fruit
And the barns are full of hay
Oh I’m bound to go
Where there ain’t no snow
Where the rain don’t fall
The winds don’t blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol
Come trickling down the rocks…’
