The US is infantile at best

In which I consider our country's developmental stage based on the evidence from last week's attack on the Capitol.

I just finished listening to The Gist with Mike Pesca, the episode called We Are Who We Are. In it, Pesca claims that, despite innumerable statements by innumerable luminaries of “This is not who we are,” this is in fact who we are. If this weren’t who we are, he states, the attack on the Capitol would never have happened.

This is as far as Pesca goes in his podcast other than sharing two questions from two of his colleagues at the Slate: (1) Who is “we”? and (2) What is “this”? I want to attempt answers to these crucial questions using the point of view I’ll bring to this newsletter — fresh and new in the year 2021! — that helps me unpack emotions, relationships, and everyday human behavior with the aim of being better. Better parents. Better teachers. Better spouses. Better partners. Better friends. Better bosses. Better politicians. Better citizens. Better people.

The point of view I bring is, simply put, psychodynamics.

“Psycho” meaning psychoanalytic. (Based directly on psychoanalytic theory.)

“Dynamic” meaning interactive. (Based on complexity and living systems theories.)

So here I go, answering Mike Pesca’s colleagues’ questions:

I’ll start with an analogy. Let’s say I’m a mom with a son who goes next door and trashes our neighbor’s house. Breaks windows. Throws shit around inside. Takes a selfie with his feet up on the priest’s desk. (We live next to a priest.) Let’s say the police come and my son throws a fire hydrant at an officer’s head. Let’s say — improbable as it is! — my son somehow escapes, comes back home, crawls into bed, sleeps until 2 p.m., and comes downstairs crowing about his escapades the night before.

What would I do? Feel sorry for him? Protect him from suffering the consequences of his behaviors? Celebrate him? Beat the shit out of him?

The answers have to do with the kind of holding environment I (and, one hopes, my domestic partner) co-create at home. This is a psychoanalytic concept: “holding environment.” It is the environment in which people grow and develop. Healthy holding environments facilitate healthy development. Unhealthy holding environments foster unhealthy development.

What constitutes an unhealthy holding environment? One where there are no reliable limits, no believable rules, no consistently experienced consequences. An unhealthy holding environment is headed up by adults who either cave to their children’s demands — just shut up and give in — or one-up their children by acting out their rage when their children cross them. An unhealthy holding environment is one where reality is relative; nay, where reality is defined by the children, not by the adults, where normal narcissistic tendencies are inflated rather than curtailed and children grow up thinking they rule the world. Because that’s how they were raised.

I would like the US to be a healthy holding environment. Where our parents are our President and members of Congress and judges. Where limits and rules are laws and consistent consequences include holding people accountable for their actions. Where our leaders refuse to cave to attempts at omnipotence by their children — attempts that are normal, by the way, for frickin’ two-year-olds — and survive the inevitable angry pushback from those children when they are forced to deal with reality. Which doesn’t always go their way. Even if they’re white. Even if they’re white men. Where people feel safe because they feel held, contained, by reasonable, brave, caring, mature adults who can and will handle complexity. Where this containment is not viewed, short-sightedly and, frankly, incorrectly, as restrictive but rather as liberatory, as providing the conditions within which freedom can be enacted.

Unfortunately, the US is not a healthy holding environment. It is a demonstrably unhealthy holding environment. (See the description of an unhealthy holding environment above.)

So, according to the psychodynamic point of view, who is “we”?

It is the whole frickin’ American family. Our leaders who cave to the President because they are self-serving narcissists themselves. Our citizens (and leaders!) who are behaving like two-year-olds: that is, who are insisting that they are omnipotent, that reality is whatever the hell they say it is, and that they get to do whatever the hell they want, that “NO” does not apply to them but, rather, to everybody else. “We” is the older siblings who are watching our parents fail at holding us and who become increasingly exhausted by our impotence (while our younger siblings get away with their omnipotence). “We” is Donald Trump, who is a two-year-old who has been pushed up into our parents’ chair, his feet dangling, the floor around him littered with the shit he’s throwing around while he tantrums.

And what is “this”? “This” is the ultimate enactment of grown-up toddlers who have been given free rein by terrible parents: Gleefully and self-righteously overrunning our house, wreaking willful havoc, hurting people because, when you’re omnipotent, no one exists but you. “This” is the baby sandwich we’re living in: reasonable human beings smashed between a raging narcissist (our freaking President) and his infantile followers in the government and in the citizenry. “This” is the predictable result of our leaders’ appalling failure to hold the line as responsible, responsive, caring, wise, transformative adults. “This” is people’s refusal to live within a multi-dimensional reality, which is that laws and norms do matter, that difference is enriching, that peaceful co-existence with each other and the planet is essential, that constraints of civilization should encourage growth and development, that growth and development are expected of people even when those people don’t want to grow or develop. “This” is the chaos of an unhealthy — hell, a self-righteously hurtful — holding environment.

“This” is the zenith of privilege that white people and particularly white men have felt entitled to for generations upon generations upon generations. “This” is the can of worms of white supremacy, whose stability is threatened, which in turn brings out the worst in its adherents: regression and uncontained hatred and violence and laser-focused, unabashed, unapologetic, terrified self-interest.

I hate it, but I believe it is true: This is indeed who we are right now.

But — and this is the core belief of the publication I’m starting here — we can be better.