Are you a good person?

Are you kind to fellow humans—and all creatures great and small?

Do you support worthy charities, help those in need, and do good work?

Or do you have a dark side? Is there part of you that wants to lie and cheat and manipulate situations to your advantage? Are you interested in enriching yourself—even if that comes at a cost to others?

The answer is: All of the above. In the fine words of that great philosopher Paul McCartney: There is good and bad in everyone. Humans are capable of astonishing acts of courage and bravery, but under certain circumstances we might be utterly spineless, cruel, greedy or depraved. To deny these things in you—what Carl Jung called the shadow—is to project them unconsciously onto others.

“I’m a good person,” a client said. But all around her—her husband, her children, siblings, parents, neighbours, immigrants, foreigners—were bad. This construction of the world left her lonely and disengaged, holding on only to her sense of superiority. She came to therapy when it came crashing down.

“I’m the bad guy?” says Michael Douglas at the end of the movie Falling Down. Robert Duvall, the cop aiming his pistol at him on the Santa Monia Pier, nods. 
​
“How’d that happen?”
​
A few weeks ago my therapist sent me a link to an extraordinary song that explores these themes. Hi Ren went live on YouTube on December 15 last year. When I first saw it, it had surpassed 5 million views. Today it’s reached 8.2 million and it's rising super fast. Word of mouth: This is the song of our time; a human anthem.

It starts with Ren, wearing a hospital gown, being wheeled into a semi-derelict room by a man with a pig’s head and a bloodied butcher’s apron. Ren is obviously a patient. He too is perhaps feeling derelict and abandoned—and powerless too in the hands of those charged with his care.

He starts playing the guitar.

It’s beautiful. An acoustic guitar. A pleasing melody. The incongruity of the surroundings. But he’s tugging at the nylon strings a bit hard. A bit twangy. Aggressive considering the sweet Flamenco notes that fill the room.

Then Ren opens his mouth and the melody is joined by a wail of wild, high-pitched half notes. It is otherworldly. It is perhaps something like the human mating call before we learned to speak, or the dawn chorus in Hades. We are drawn to this—we willingly enter his beautiful madness.

And then the rapping starts.

In his famous Red Book Jung attempts to commune with his own soul.

“ ‘My soul, where are you? Do you hear me?' he starts. 'I speak, I call you – are you
there?’ ”

In this piece of work, Ren opens with a salutation from his shadow to his ego.

“Hi there, Ren,” he hisses. “It's been a little while, did you miss me?”

This is the opening salvo in a blistering verbal assault from Ren’s inner critical voice.

Replies Ren:
“I’ve been taking some time to be distant,” he explains.
“I've been taking some time to be still.
“I've been taking some time to be by myself since my therapist told me I'm ill.
“And I've been making some progress lately,
“And I've learnt some new coping skills”

The critical voice is extremely skeptical:
“Ren, you sound more insane than I do,” he says.

He mocks Ren for imagining that some standard course of treatment—take another pill, the sound of white noise, a 10-step program—will make any difference, and ridicules his musical ambitions.

The argument hots up until the critical voice thunders his authority. He is the snake in Eden. Lucifer. Antichrist. Mephistopheles. Satan.
“I am you, Ren, you are me.”

Who is Ren actually, this Keats-with-guitar? Where did this guy come from? You could be excused for imagining he just picked up a guitar one day in a psych ward and discovered his madness instinctively knew how to play and had something to say.

Ren Gill was actually a talented musician in his youth. He started out making beats in his bedroom at 13, then went on to Bath Spa University to study music performance. One day in 2009, busking in his hometown of Brighton, he was spotted by a talent scout and snapped up by Sony Records.

The childhood dream swiftly turned into a nightmare however. Ren woke one morning feeling utterly lethargic, drained, and aching all over. He started having panic attacks. He’d stay in bed. He said: “My life changed overnight, I woke up one morning feeling like I'd been spiked—my personality disappeared.”

He entered the mental health system. He was put on antidepressants. Antipsychotics. It's not hard to imagine the kinds of interpretations psychology offered up for his illness—he was probably told for example that he was depressed, suffering from low self-esteem, bipolar, afraid of success, delusional, paranoid, mad. In some cultures he would be considered possessed, in need of an exorcism.

​The truth, discovered many years later, was that he had a longstanding untreated case of Lyme disease, the complications of which still impact him today. Ren’s health problems were perhaps not manifestations of some inner psychic conflict. He was bitten by a tic.

He has struggled. But perhaps the struggle, the suffering, is integral to his genius.

In the final stanza, Ren refuses to back down, and stands to face his demon:
“I go by many names also,
“Some people know me as hope,
“Some people know me as the voice that you hear when you loosen the noose on the rope.”

I’ve watched Hi Ren countless times now, but this passage, this lone shriek in the cold, silent void of a long and desolate night, this absolute guttural refusal to quit, still reverberates. This is courage. And if you going to live, stand in the fire, sing at the top of your lungs! Ferocious, persistent, immortal! 

The Hollywood movies might leave it there. The good guy narrowly defeats the bad guy, the evil forces are vanquished, and the credit roll as a beautiful melody transports us back to our lives.
 
Critical self
I have worked with many clients whose lives are made wretched by an invisible sargeant major who subjects them to a permanent harangue of negativity. It can come as quite a shock to discover that some of the nicest people are often subject to a totalitarian inner form of government—a brutal, relentless inner monologue that is with them 24 hours a day.

Perhaps it is an internalised strict parent, sibling, school bully, racist, sexist, homophobe, ableist. The child who is abused by a parent may conclude that love and abuse are indivisible. Lorna Smith Benjamin describes masochism as a gift of love to the original abuser.

Perhaps you experienced a traumatic event or time in your life, one that was so terrible it couldn’t be processed so was instead dissociated, divided up into images, sensations, stray thoughts and emotions. You bury these fragments in a deep hole at the far end of the garden, but to your great dismay they keep coming back. The past reverberates in the present. Time in itself does not necessarily heal.

I’ve also met people who might have had perfectly idyllic childhoods yet still berate themselves mercilessly for every bone-headed move, bad-hair day or dumb remark. Perhaps your critical voice starts out by alerting you to where you might have room for improvement, acting in your best interests, but over the years it can become domineering and disempowering. 

Incidentally, if “the voice” is more than a thought or a feeling but is experienced as an actual, heard voice, some people might conclude that you must be mad, possessed and probably dangerous. And while such voices may point to the consideration of psychosis, it does not prove it. Many people hear voices at times for a variety of reasons.
​
Therapy might enable a client to develop a greater awareness and understanding of their inner critic. We might imagine it is an actual person—what age, gender? Remind you of anyone you know? The client might have a conversation with their critical voice. It can be useful to think of humans as being made up of multiple “selves,” lots of disparate strands in the tapestry. They all inhabit our being in a loose confederacy. And the client might find some other sentiments in this “community of selves” that can challenge and counter the inner bully.

The shadow
Sometimes, however, therapy attempts to go too far in expunging any negativity or nastiness. Jung argued we not born pure, but whole. We cannot edit ourselves to be merely good. We can never be untethered from our shadow. In Memories, dreams, reflections, Jung called the shadow—“everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge” about themselves (1995: 418).

Pure goodness becomes insipid. Heaven, with no shade, is no place for humans—a place, as David Byrne sung, where “nothing ever happens.”

Anyone who denies their inner propensity for evil as well as good will find that it manifests itself in unanticipated ways.

To make light—to live—is to cast a shadow. This is a chiaroscuro world. 

Artists, poets, writers, musicians, comedians, people who bring light to the world, must also experience darkness. 

And the shadow, by the way, doesn’t always have to be something bad. You might disavow your own brilliance, or talent, or potential for success. The more a person identifies with and invests in one polarity, the greater the opposite polarity grows in the shadow. 

We don't like bad stuff. The child who has not yet learned to tolerate and accept anger will hand it off, screaming at the grown-up: “Why are so angry with me?"

Any emotions, beliefs or characteristics that don't fit with your carefully-crafted, social media-ready self-image are simply projected onto others. Your partner—that's the easiest place to start. Then there are family members—one sibling is often cast as "the bad one"—neighbours, that asshole at work, men, women, black people, white people, those people over there, others.

The targets for projection and scapegoating are plentiful. Twitter is a very shadowy place indeed.

Writes Robert A. Johnson in Owning your own shadow: “Probably the worst damage is done when parents lay their shadow on their children...If a parent lays his shadow on a young child, that splits the personality of the child and sets the ego-shadow warfare into motion."  (1991: 34).

So how do you find your shadow? Ask yourself: Who do you judge? Your enemies, the people you dislike the most, have much to teach you. For they are you.

Projecting your shadow isn't just bad for others. It's bad for you too. Continues Johnson: “To refuse the dark side in one’s nature is to store up or accumulate the darkness; this is later expressed as a black mood, psychosomatic illness or unconsciously inspired accidents. We are presently dealing with the accumulation of a whole society that has worshipped its light side and refused the dark, and this residue appears as war, economic chaos, strikes, racial intolerance. The front page of any newspaper hurls the collective shadow at us. We must be whole whether we like it or not” (1991: 26).

You want world peace? To start with, stop pointing accusatory fingers every which way, and instead take a look inside.

If we can own our shadow we can develop some conscious control over it, rather than have it unconsciously express itself in disastrous ways. And if we can accept that we are all flawed, vulnerable, insignificant, ignorant, that life is hard but also beautiful, that not one person on this planet knows how or why we are here, then we can perhaps be more empathic, more forgiving, kinder. We can greet each other. The words “human” and “humility” come from the same root, the Latin word “humus,” meaning earth or ground. We are not celestial beings. We return to the earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

”No one can escape the dark side of life,” writes Johnson. ”The balance of dark and light is ultimately possible—and bearable” (1991: 15).

Let's dance 
At the end of Hi Ren, this remarkable young man puts the guitar down, looks right into the camera and delivers a powerful soliloquy.

“It wasn't David versus Goliath,” he says, “it was a pendulum eternally swaying from the dark to the light. And the more intensely that the light shone, the darker the shadow it cast.
​
“It was never really a battle for me to win, it was an eternal dance, and like a dance, the more rigid I became, the harder it got. The more I cursed my clumsy footsteps, the more I struggled. And so I got older and I learned to relax, and I learned to soften, and that dance got easier. It is this eternal dance that separates human beings from angels, from demons, from gods. And I must not forget, we must not forget, that we are human beings.”

In 1949, in thick fog, Ben Hogan had a head-on collision with a Greyhound bus. On Tuesday morning last week, in broad daylight, Tiger Woods collided with himself.  

At the time of his crash, Hogan was 36, and a late starter in a career interrupted by World War Two. Despite or perhaps because of his horrific injuries, his best triumphs lay ahead: In 1953, on shattered legs, he played just 6 tournaments and won 5 of them including the Masters, the US Open and the British Open. 

We don’t know why Tiger Woods spun off the road—no other vehicles were involved. We do know he was late and tired, and driving on a notoriously dangerous stretch of road. We know he is 45, and was a very early starter in a career interrupted by wild women, sex addiction, scandal, divorce, drugs and severe physical damage brought on by too much wear and too much tear: He’s had 5 operations on his back and 5 on his knee, among many other medical decisions and revisions and incisions.

Ben Hogan had a car crash and then the man became a legend.  
Tiger Woods was a legend and then the man became a car crash. 
 
​Hallowed be thy name
Aside from golfing prowess, and a car crash, these two men have this thing in common; Both were shaped by the extremes of the father.

"The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents,” wrote Carl Jung. 

For Hogan this was literally true: He was 9 and in the house, possibly even in the room, when his father took his own life with a pistol. 

​Earl Woods meanwhile was a college baseball player who spent 20 years in the US Army—including tours of duty in Vietnam as a Green Beret Lieutenant Colonel—before finding his true calling: putting his son on the world stage. 

He put a golf club in his hand at the age of one, had him appear on TV—with Bob Hope—at two and turned him into a kind of child soldier of golf. 

As a newly-minted pro, at a dinner in his honour, the father said of the son: “He will bring to the world a humanitarianism which has never been known before…I acknowledge only a small part in that in that I know that I was personally selected by God himself to nurture this young man.”

Later, he said: “Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity.”

Sports Illustrated asked for clarification, suggesting he meant sports history. He surely wasn’t suggesting Tiger would be bigger than, say, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Buddha? Was he?

Yes, he was. He added that Tiger would accomplish miracles and was, in fact, the “Chosen One.”

Mental mastery
We are always hearing about athletes’ physical health in great detail. When the England football team captain David Beckham broke the tiny second metatarsal bone in his left foot in the run-up to the 2002 World Cup, it was practically a national emergency.

But very little is said about their mental health, which is odd when you consider how odd their lives are. Studies show that around 35 percent of elite professional athletes suffer from a mental health crisis, in all the usual time-honoured ways: addiction, drugs, stress, eating disorders, sleep disorders, burnout, depression, anxiety. 

These concerns are increasingly being taken seriously by sports’ governing bodies, with a blueprint provided by the International Olympic Committee’s 2018 Expert Consensus Statement on mental health in elite athletes.

But the athletes themselves rarely speak out about their troubles. One exception is Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, who suffered a Tigeresque career meltdown but lived to tell his story. Two years ago he tweeted: “I struggled with anxiety and depression and questioned whether or not I wanted to be alive anymore. It was when I hit this low that I decided to reach out and ask for the help of a licensed therapist. This decision ultimately helped save my life. You don’t have to wait for things.”

In pro sports, golf is perhaps uniquely challenging. Careers tend to be long, travel is brutal—Gary Player has spent years of his life in aeroplanes. You are on the pitch for hours, day after day, and your failures, injuries and other setbacks are many and often painfully public. It can be a solitary existence; research shows a higher risk of mental ill-health in individual sports than in team sports.

Then there is the culture of golf. You play the ball as it lies. You don’t complain. You accept the bad bounces. And above all, you must maintain the image of golf as good and wholesome, a cure for mental ill-health rather than a cause of it. While other top athletes spit and swear and occasionally break someone’s jaw, golf pros are expected to call penalties on themselves, shake hands with their opponents, donate their winnings to the nearest cancer hospital. It’s good for business.

Any famous golfer must surely struggle at times with their idealized public image as a dominant, fearless but ever-polite superhero, a role model, an exemplar of human potential, especially when beset by feelings of internal turmoil or doubt or murderous rage or the vast emptiness that fame and a life on the road can bestow. The more vaunted the image, the bigger the shadow.

When you consider what Tiger Woods has been through—his childhood, the highest of highs, the lowest of lows, the scandals, injuries, accidents, and not least, throughout it all, the endless death threats, trollings, put-downs and shamings from a largely white sport with a racist history—his comeback in 2018 and 2019 is astonishing.

But as he recovers from his horrific injuries—he surely will—perhaps what comes next is not another comeback to the Tiger of old, but a “go forward” to something new.

The real Tiger Woods is neither the world peace humanitarian he was once made out to be; nor is he a sex-addicted junkie. Like anyone, he’s just trying to play it down the middle.

Jung wrote a pretty good guidebook for this sort of thing, called “Modern Man in Search of a Soul.” He writes: “Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”
​

“I'm just like my country, I'm young, scrappy, and hungry, and I'm not throwing away my shot”
--a rapping Alexander Hamilton in the musical, “Hamilton”
 
In a fractious, divisive America, on the eve of a presidential election, there is at least one thing the Democratic and Republican Parties can actually agree on: the United States should be governed by a really old, white man.

Donald Trump, 74, was the oldest ever president to take office when he won the election four years ago. (Ronald Reagan was the oldest ever president: he was two weeks shy of his 78th birthday on leaving the White House, after two terms in office, in 1989.)

The Democrats had an opportunity to nominate someone “young, scrappy and hungry,” a new JFK to inspire a nation, build bridges instead of walls, and give Trump a simple message: “You’re fired.” Instead they picked someone even older. Joe Biden turns 78 next month. 

​The unseemly first presidential debate between Trump and Biden was like watching footage of a thrashing, groaning fight to the death of the last two dinosaurs on earth. Why must the president be a geriatric patriarch—in a youthful, optimistic, idealistic land of exuberant energy, innovation, creativity, diversity, opportunity, a land where a rallying cry of a generation was once “never trust anyone over 30”?
 
Father hunger
“America is a mistake,” Sigmund Freud told a friend on his return from a trip there. “A giant mistake.”

It was Freud’s sole visit to America—he was invited to introduce psychoanalysis to the New World in a series of lectures in 1909. It wasn’t a happy experience. He didn’t like the food, the informality, the unfamiliar surroundings. He couldn’t sleep. Perhaps he felt ill at ease among “an alien people clutching their gods.” Freud regarded any god as an illusion, a fantasy born of an infantile need for a  father figure. America is an outlier in this regard: In one survey 60.6 percent of Americans said they are certain “God” exists. For the British the figure is 16.8. (Others results include France: 15.5; Norway: 14.8; Denmark: 13.0; Sweden: 10.2; Japan: 4.3.)

Freud would likely see the current presidential race as further evidence that America has daddy issues; specifically a chronic case of “father hunger.”

There is a “father absence crisis in America,” according to the National Fatherhood Initiative. One in every three American children are now growing up in a home without their biological father. According to the US Census Bureau, only 17 percent of custodial parents are fathers. Of the fathers who live apart from their children post-divorce, 27 percent have no contact with those children at all. One study reports that just 17 percent of American men had a positive relationship with their fathers.

In “Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men," Jungian analyst James Hollis writes that when a parent is absent, the child “carries the deficit throughout his life. He longs for something missing, even as he might carry a vitamin deficiency and crave a certain food…all men, whether they know it or not, hunger for their father and grieve over his loss.” 

Father hunger in women causes actual hunger, according to Margo Maine’s book of the same name, giving rise to “unrealistic body image, yo-yo dieting, food fears and disordered eating patterns.”

Americans look for father figures in teachers, preachers and self-help gurus; in famous athletes, tough guy movie stars, eccentric TV detectives. They turn for reassurance to the “founding fathers,” those quasi-dieties who united the early states, freed them from British rule, and wrote the Constitution.

And they look for a father-in-chief in the White House, in men like Bill Clinton, who never met his father, or Barack Obama, who never knew his, or Joe Biden, whose father struggled at times with poverty and unemployment but was a loving, constant father to the boy. Earlier this year, Biden wished his late father a happy Father's Day, saying, “As my father believed, there’s no higher calling for a woman or a man than to be a good mother or a good father." 
​
Or in Donald Trump.

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert cartoons, likened the last election to a choice between mum and dad, and predicted Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton. “The thing about dad is that dad is kind of an a-hole,” Adams told CNN. “But if you need dad to take care of some trouble, he's going to be the one you call. You know, if there's a noise downstairs, you probably are not going to call mom, even if she's awesome. You're probably going to call the biggest person in the room, you're going to call dad. So in our irrational minds, if the world is exploding and we're still talking about nuclear terrorism, I think people are going to say, maybe you want the most dangerous person to protect us.”
 
Psychic mutilation
“What is it with men?” a client said to me recently. Another relationship had ended in disappointment; she was being “ghosted.” Her father vanished years ago. She’s had no contact at all since childhood.

Three-quarters of American men are circumcized, subjected as babies to a barbaric mutilation that belongs in another, more primitive century. The emotional circumcision swiftly follows. Writes bel hooks: “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.”

The Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler argued that men will often overcompensate for their fear of vulnerability with a lurch toward stereotypical male aggression and competition. What Jung called the anima, the feminine, is denied; the animus is embraced. (To be whole, said Jung, both must be integrated.) The boy-man is pure animus—animosity—shorn of anything that might be considered anima—the animating effects of emotion, creativity, compassion, collaboration. The most macho are the most afraid.

Adler called this the “masculine protest” and regarded it as an evil force in history, underlying for instance the rise in fascism in the 20th century. To be taken seriously as a leader one must appear devoutly unempathic, unfeeling, uncompromising, unflinching (this is especially true of women, “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher being the obvious, almost-cartoonish example).

We tell our sons to man up or, in the absence of fathers, father figures or modern-day tribal elders, they are told nothing at all; they feel nothing, say little and become numb, inarticulate loners, expendable cogs in a loveless machine. Men make up 93 percent of American workplace fatalities and 99 percent of American combat fatalities. Men are three times more likely than women to take their own life, three times more likely to have an addiction, and they live shorter lives than women—on average a whopping five years shorter.

In many families, the father (if there is one) is like a shy, possibly mythic woodland creature: sightings are rare, and fleeting. Or they become the hapless chump of the household, the doofus dad who just doesn’t get it and can’t do DIY; the lovable loser who is part of the furniture of the great sitcom that is America. He is neutered, like the family pet. He dreams of making his own declaration of independence—of kicking over the saloon tables and riding off into the sunset, leaving women to clear up the mess. Sometimes, he actually does it.
 
Jung's father
Accompanying Freud on his trip to America was his young Swiss protegé, Carl Jung. Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was something of a father figure to Jung. Jung’s real father had passed away a decade earlier, when Jung was just 21. Paul Jung was a pastor who was plagued by doubts about his faith and was something of a disappointment to his son as a spiritual guide. 

Six weeks after he died, he appeared to Jung in a dream, telling his son that he was better now and was “coming home.”

For Jung the dream was “an unforgettable experience” that forced him “for the first time to think about life after death.” From that night forward, Jung’s relationhip with his father took off. He learned more from him in death than he ever did in life. Death shall have no dominion.

Freud found such magical thinking intolerable. The two men became adversaries. Having discovered his father, Jung no longer needed a surrogate.

New world order
There’s a small but growing number of young female heads of state who manage to combine caring with capitalism, super-smart social democratically-minded pragmatists who are creating fair, functioning societies and by all accounts have done much better job of responding to the coronavirus than the US or UK. People like Jacinda Ardern (New Zealand), Mette Frederiksen (Denmark), Erna Solberg (Norway), Katrín Jakobsdóttir (Iceland) or Sanna Marin (Finland).
​
Perhaps America, too, is ready for such a president of the future rather than a relic of the past, someone smart, tough, fair, ambitious and multicultural—someone like America itself—someone like Biden’s running mate, California senator Kamala Harris, or, the next generation, 30-year-old New York Senator Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a bartender who took on the Establishment and won (see the excellent Netflix documentary “Bringing Down the House").
 
The father within
Father hunger is far from a uniquely American phenomenon. It is perhaps the wheels of capitalism that mostly spirit fathers away from their sons and daughters. We used to work to live; ever since what Polanyi called the “great transformation,” we tend to live to work, enslaved to a rapacious, introjected Faustian machine. Fromm argued that we are now mere robots, compliant cogs in the machine, concluding: “in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.” 

A pre-coronavirus survey in January showed that three–quarters of UK workers felt stressed about work, almost two-thirds complained of feeling they are always on duty and cannot switch off, with 64 per cent reporting that their job had damaged their sleep patterns.

I see plenty of clients who never met their fathers, or never really knew them, or had fathers or stepfathers who they wished had been absent rather than violent, excessively demanding or abusive in other ways.

Many who have done everything they were supposed to do wind up in therapy in midlife because they feel like dead men walking. Success stories on paper, in person they are ghosts. They are absent from their own lives, never mind anyone else’s.

As Hollis points out, what a father cannot access in himself cannot be passed on.

Jung's “father hunger” was not satiated until he found within himself an inner father, an archetypal energy to protect, guide and offer spiritual wisdom. 

Donald Trump is not your father. Nor is Joe Biden. Nor is Boris Johnson (actually he might be: His Wikipedia entry on his children simply says “at least six”).

Your father is you.
​
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart,” wrote Jung. “Without, everything seems discordant; only within does it coalesce into unity.

“Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.”

• RELATED: What can we learn from Donald Trump?

At night, the silence from the deserted streets and boarded-up bars in my neighbourhood in London feels ominous and dangerous. Out there in the darkness, unseen, the Corona virus continues its hideous invasion. It is efficient and unwavering in executing its sole purpose: to infect, to replicate, to spread, to grow.

With astonishing speed, it has taken over our hospitals, our conversations, our news feeds. It has closed our schools and factories, bankrupted businesses, ruined lives. It has made a mockery of our sophisticated systems, our plans, our hopes and dreams. It dominates, controls and threatens our very existence. It is coming for you and coming for me. It lives on death.

Never before has something so large—human civilization—been felled by something so small. Corona is a mini-vampire, sub-microscopic, a life form a hundred times tinier than even bacteria.

The only thing more viral than the virus itself is the fear that it evokes. Fear can divide and diminish us. But when we fight and conquer it together, fear can enlarge us.  The age of Corona: the best of times, the worst of times.

In this way, the human reaction to Corona has similarly been one of extremes: either very small or very large. On the one hand, never before have people been so selfish and stupid, ignoring infection-limiting guidelines, panic-buying loo rolls, even abusing and attacking people suspected of being Chinese. Yet the crisis is also bringing out the best in people. Our doctors and nurses face the daily apocalypse with selfless care, kindness and good cheer. People around the world are volunteering, donating, checking up on the vulnerable, doing what they can.

We are completely alone, quarantined, forced into self-isolation and social distance, yet at the same time perhaps never before have we felt so connected, and in need of each other. Family and community matter more than ever. And increasingly, our family is humans and our community is planet Earth.

We truly are all in this together. However bad we feel today, however afraid, anxious, depressed or bereaved, we are actually not alone.  Instead of “othering” we might focus on “togethering.”  Instead of hating, we can choose to love.  We can reach out and reach in. We can give and receive.

Wouldn’t we expect grown-up leaders to do the same? To share knowledge, ideas, information, best practices, resources? To build bridges, not walls? To unite to fight Corona, not each other?

At such times, nationality recedes. Corona isn’t interested in your country’s borders, its reputation, history or your culture. It doesn’t carry a passport nor respect your own.

Global problems need global solutions.
​
Yet some see this pandemic human tragedy not as an opportunity for solidarity but its opposite. At a time like this, it’s pitiful for governments to blame each other, for the far-right as usual to blame everything on migrants, or for Trump to blame China, Obama, Millennials, the media, and anyone else he can think of. It’s hard to imagine what kind of person responds to the current devastating death toll in Italy with celebratory, deranged Brexiteering.

While politicians prevaricate, bluster and blunder, the virus goes on killing.

History apparently teaches us nothing. The so-called Spanish flu—which probably originated in Kansas—infected a quarter of the world’s population between 1918 and 1920, and killed tens of millions of people—more fatalities than the entire First World War.

Humans and chimpanzees are 96 percent the same, according to DNA studies. How similar then are humans to each other? What is perhaps so striking about our species is not what divides us but what unites us. We are a family. We should act like one. We should respect each other and our planet. We should tackle common problems together. We should care about family members who aren’t doing so well. We might then feel compassion and concern that 70 million of our brothers and sisters are forcibly displaced people, including 26 million refugees, half of them children. We might not feel great about a world where 42 individuals have the same wealth as the poorest half of humanity, 3.7 billion souls.

​In the words of Al Pacino, “Either we heal now, as a team, or we will die as individuals.”

Sometimes, it takes a sickness for healing to happen. ​

Inauguration Day USA.
The time has come for the 45th president, Donald Trump, to take the oath of office. The property developer and reality TV host is one of the richest people in the world and, at 70, the oldest president to be elected.

​But what do we really know about the man beyond the biographical facts and his rather cartoonish public image?
Underneath all the bluster, self-promotion and insatiable hunger for power, wealth and women, is there a sensitive, damaged soul? A conscience? An inner life? Or just the sound of a chill wind whistling through empty, dark chambers of the Trump machine, bereft of emotion, spirit, light or love?
Who is Donald Trump?
What is his psychology?
 
Narcissistic personality
Three prominent American psychiatrists wrote to president Obama in late November stating that Trump suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder and was thus unfit for office.
“Professional standards do not permit us to venture a diagnosis for a public figure whom we have not evaluated personally,” stated the letter, which was made public. “Nevertheless, his widely reported symptoms of mental instability — including grandiosity, impulsivity, hypersensitivity to slights or criticism, and an apparent inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality — lead us to question his fitness for the immense responsibilities of the office.”

The diagnosis of NPD—also the conclusion of five therapists in a story in Vanity Fair—is summarised by the industry standard reference book, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), as: “A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:
1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
3. Believe that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with other special or high-status people (or institutions)
4. Requires excessive admiration
5. Has a sense of entitlement
6. Is interpersonally exploitative
7. Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others
8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.
9. Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.”
 
Worse than Hitler
Others have meanwhile diagnosed Trump as a psychopath. One Oxford professor used a psychometric scale to conclude that Trump is more of a psychopath than Hitler.
Psychopaths, which I have written about previously, are usually not chainsaw-wielding serial killers but are instead the kind of driven, high-functioning, succeed-at-any-cost characters who can be found in all walks of life. In his 1993 book Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, Robert Hare estimated there were at least 2 million psychopaths in North America, and by that measure there are likely 400,000 in the UK.
Hare identified 20 characteristics of psychopaths that are used in his diagnostic test, the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), such as: Glibness/superficial charm; Grandiose sense of self-worth; Pathological lying; Cunning/manipulative; Lack of remorse or guilt; Shallow emotions; Callousness/lack of empathy; Failure to accept responsibility for own actions; Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom; Impulsivity; Early behaviour problems; Promiscuous sexual behaviour. (Take this quiz if you want to find out your level of psychopathy.)
Psychopathy isn’t a recognised disorder in the DSM—it only gets a brief mention in the description of Antisocial Personality Disorder.” ASP is defined as “a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others” and includes ego-centrism; self-esteem derived from personal gain, power, or pleasure; goal-setting based on personal gratification; lack of empathy, incapacty for intimacy; manipulativeness; deceit; callousness; hostility;  disinhibition. Criminal activity is also among its diagnostic indicators (eg. “Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors”).
 
I have met Trump on more than one occasion and in 2014 interviewed him for an hour and a half in his Fifth Avenue Trump Tower office for the American magazine Golf Digest (you can read it here). So as a qualified psychotherapist, what’s my professional opinion: NPD? Or ASP?
Neither.
Why?

Firstly, there’s the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater Rule” which stipulates that its members should not make a diagnosis of someone who they have not examined face-to-face; nor should they publicly discuss the mental health of anyone without their consent.
The rule takes its name from the 1964 election, when Fact magazine reported psychiatrists’ opinions—not “facts”—about the mental health of the Republican nominee Barry Goldwater, describing him as “warped,” “narcissistic,” “impulsive,” a “paranoid schizophrenic,” with much condemnatory armchair speculation as to his psychobiography, motivation and overall mental health. Goldwater lost the presidency but won a lawsuit against Fact for libel.

Many practitioners have broken the Goldwater Rule—desperate times apparently call for desperate measures. And there is no explicit equivalent of the rule to be found among the ethical guidelines of British psychotherapy professional bodies like the UKCP and BACP. But mental health professionals’ urge to diagnose public figures from afar is to be resisted. Anyone is free to have an opinion about a public official and express it, within the bounds of libel law--calling someone for instance a lying, power and money-hungry sexist racist bigot. But using your professional position to label any human being—yes, Trump is human—with a specific clinical diagnosis without their input and consent is an an act of violence to that person and to the absolutely vital notion of confidentiality which underlies the profession.

For me, however, a bigger concern with branding Trump as an NPD or an ASP is with the validity of such diagnostic labels.
There is an obsession in western psychiatry with attempting to apply a medical model to mental health, as if all psychological distress can be divided up into a textbook of discrete, objectively-measurable, uniform conditions, as if terms like “depressed” or “schizophrenic” or “narcissist” were something more than broad adjectives that mask vast individual differences, experiences and meanings.
This return to a reductive conception of mental illness has been driven by political and economic forces. There is much commerce in pathologising aspects of the human experience that are deemed problematic, itemising them according to their supposedly reliable patterns of symptoms, ascribing biological causes to those symptoms, then prescribing drugs which promise to reduce or eradicate them.
The DSM is a kind of license to medicate. By 2005 for instance, facilitated by enormous amounts of sponsored “research” and marketing, one in 10 Americans had a prescription for an antidepressant. “Shyness” is now considered an unacceptable sickness. The diagnosis of “bipolar” has risen by 4,000 percent since the mid-1990s.
This is not to say that mental illness is a myth, a mere social construction, a form of political control, as the “antipsychiatrists” like Laing and Szasz claimed.
Nor is it to say that there is no place for medications and biological considerations of the psychological, or that the DSM has no value—it does provide a framework and a language; a shorthand that facilitates communication among colleagues, and clues about treatment direction.

But to pretend that there is such a uniform, distinct condition like NPD or ASP that descends on the unwitting, passive recipient as might measles or tuberculosis, is ridiculous. Our psychology affects how we live our lives, and how we live our lives affects our psychology, leading to an infinite branching of the tree of function and dysfunction. The complexity of humans and the diversity of their distresses defy neat pigeonholing.

So what can we say about Trump?
The most accurate “diagnosis” of the new president is that he has a very extreme case of being Donald Trump. Society has richly rewarded him for that. He represents a kind of extrapolation of the laws of the jungle, a quintessence of capitalism, where there is no place for doubt or indecision or self-reflection; no let up. Like a hungry shark, Trump is always swimming, alone, and everything else in the ocean is viewed solely in terms of opportunity and threat. In his get-rich, self-help, self-homage book Think Big, he writes: “The world is a vicious and brutal place. We think we’re civilised. In truth, it’s a cruel world and people are ruthless. They act nice to your face, but underneath they’re out to kill you.” 

A psychologist in the magazine The Atlantic last year concluded: “It is always Donald Trump playing Donald Trump, fighting to win, but never knowing why.”

New Yorker writer Mark Singer memorably described Trump’s life as “an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.”

In my interview with him, I concluded by asking Trump if there was ever a pause in the relentless self-promotion and salesmanship:
Q: Does it ever stop? Do you ever switch off?
A: Um, probably, but... not too often.
Trump looks puzzled, as if this notion had never occurred to him. He laughs.
Q: Yeah.
A: I don't know.
Q: What would happen if you did?
A: I don't know. It might be a disaster. I think it could be a disaster.

One of the tropes of a certain brand of conservative media outlet is that Christmas is under threat. The usual suspects are rounded up: The EU, Muslims, immigrants.

Dame Louise Casey, the government’s “integration tsar,” cited Christmas in a report in September, saying: “I have become convinced that it is only the upholding of our core British laws, cultures, values and traditions that will offer us the route map through the different and complex challenge of creating a cohesive society.”

Laws of the land are one thing; British culture and traditions quite another. For the latter, apparently the “integration tsar” doesn’t believe in integration. Shouldn’t she be called the “assimilation tsar”—or perhaps even the “re-education tsar”?

As Santa Claus might say: Ho ho ho.
• A lot of Christmas traditions, like so much of British culture, came from elsewhere. To name a few: Christmas trees were likely a German idea originally; panto came from the Italian tradition of commedia dell’arte; mulled wine from the Ancient Greeks. The jolly, rotund image of Santa famously began in a 1931 Coca-Cola ad.
• “British values” are often described as religious, Christian values. But for the majority of Britons, Christmas doesn’t have much or anything to do with Christ any more. People of no religion now outnumber Christians in England and Wales, and this year the number of people attending Church of England services each week for the first time dropped below 1 million, accounting for less than 2 percent of the population. Non-Christian Britons are no less British.
• Having some sort of celebration in the dead of winter has long been appealing to many people whether religious or not. It was something people did long before the idea was co-opted by Christianity—and long before any politician uttered the phrase “British values.”
• One longstanding Christmas “tradition” is that for many, it’s a terrible time of year. If you are not living the soft-focus, pastel-hued fantasy life depicted in department store Christmas ads, you feel guilty, a failure, literally and metaphorically missing out on the party. Instead of this being a time of light, warmth, food, gifts, singing, laughing and good company, for many it is instead one of darkness, cold, hunger, loss, silence, tears and loneliness. Clients complain of the stress and expense of Christmas, and the pressure to be happy. The Samaritans volunteers are especially busy at this time of year.

No.5: REUNIFICATION
 
The new client, United Kingdom, shuffles into the room and slumps down uncomfortably in the chair. There is no eye contact. We sit in silence. Finally there is a cough and a muffled voice, a sort of low growl: “Don’t really need to be here. Just been feeling a bit down lately.” Another silence. A tear rolls down from Scotland and lands somewhere near Darlington.

Yes, if countries were people, the UK might be looking for a therapist right about now.

It has been having a hard time of late. It was a summer of discontent. Before the Brexit referendum, this was a largely peaceful, united land that prided itself on never losing its great sense of humour, come what may—the land of Monty Python, Alan Partridge, the Office, Mr Bean. A nation that believed in fair play. A creative, resilient, quirky place that didn’t just tolerate difference and eccentricity but embraced it. The land of Churchill (half American), fish and chips (brought here by Spanish jews), beer (probably middle Eastern), sliced bread (American), England’s St. George (from Cappadocia, never visited our islands), Morris dancing (originally “Moorish”), the Queen (at least a little but German). The country whose two favourite dishes are chicken tikka masala and Chinese stir fry. The country that fought fascism and won.
We used to be mostly in the middle, proud of our patchwork cultural history, a big-tent bell curve of British decency, tea and sympathy.
Post-referendum, the bell curve has been turned on its head. The centre has been vacated, and you’re either jeering from the terraces on the star-spangled blue side, shouting “You idiots—what have you done to our future?” or you’re on the other side, amid a sea of red-and-white-painted faces, chanting “Get over it, we won.” With added swear words from both sides, obviously.
 
The UK is at war with itself. When a person feels like that, in crisis, the old ways of doing things no longer work, and nothing seems to make sense any more. Time to take stock—with the help of a therapist, ideally—turn the spotlight on you and your life and, fortified by knowledge and love, make some changes.

​With a bit of luck, the breakdown turns into a breakthrough.

The root of the problem
It can be a small thing that triggers such a crisis. Someone inexplicably bursts into tears getting dressed for work, or their boss finds an empty vodka miniature in their desk, or they shout at a little old lady fumbling in the checkout queue, and their world unravels. It of course can be a big thing, too: illness, redundancy, divorce, trauma, bereavement.
The UK’s problem—manifested by the referendum—began as a squabble within the Conservative Party. Since World War Two, there has been a growing chorus of Tory backbenchers—big and small “c” conservatives—who decry the rise of the European Union. They have tended to see Britain in heroic, benighted terms, as a proud, fiercely-independent land, in living memory the supposedly-magnanimous, beating heart of the biggest empire the world has even seen, shining the light of civilisation into the dark corners of the world and teaching them how to play cricket. The idea of being told what to do by the French, or the Germans, was beyond the pale. Who won the war anyhow? These nostalgic, elegiac chords were played at full volume by the likes of Enoch Powell, Margaret Thatcher and ... Nigel Farage.

When traditional Tory voters began to flee to UKIP, the eurosceptic harrumphs turned into howls.

PM and former PR man David Cameron was facing a mutiny. He hoped to quash it by calling the rebels’ bluff. He called for backup; he took it to the nation, gambling his job, career and the nation’s future.
 
The referendum took on a life of its own. It grew. It turned into a referendum on everything.
• Was it about the EU? Yes, although three recent consecutive eurosceptic Conservative Party leaders, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, failed to gain any traction among voters on the issue. And in the immediate aftermath of the vote, an awful lot of people in the UK Googled “What is the EU?”
• Was it about democracy? Yes, although shouldn’t Brexiteers also therefore be tirelessly campaigning to end the monarchy, abolish the House of Lords, the cronyism of the honours system, the influence of the City on domestic policy, and of Washington DC on foreign policy?
• Was it about immigration? Yes, although overall immigrants are net positive contributors to the British economy, and since the days of the Normans, the Saxons, the Danes and the Hugenots, Britain, British culture and British people have been forged from outside influences.
 
Perhaps what the referendum mostly was about was dissatisfaction with the status quo. As with the unfortunate American embrace of Donald Trump, Brexit was a protest vote against hard times and the struggle of life—exacerbated by a government policy of austerity that crippled poorer parts of the nation—with the finger of blame pointing every whichway: at politicians, the EU, immigrants, refugees, Muslims, “experts,” the Establishment, the media, old people, young people, rich people, poor people.

Let’s hope the sunlit uplands of prosperity that the Brexiteers voted for come to pass. Regrettably, however, it seems more likely that there will instead be much more dissatisfaction to come.

Cameron didn’t expect to lose. There was no plan. More than two months later, there seemingly still isn’t. No one seems to know how or when Brexit will happen or what it will look like. But hey, great news: our passports are going to be blue!
​
The person in charge of implementing Brexit—the unelected pro-Remain Theresa May—has to get on with it now, directing enormous time and resources to extricating the UK from the EU and disentangling decades of legislation, and trying to set up new trade deals around the world with countries for whom the post-Brexit UK is, according to some, something of a laughing stock, and who are in the strong bargaining positioning of knowing, and knowing that we know, they we need them more than they need us. The PM also has to deal with all the domestic fallout: the possible disintegration of the UK, businesses threatening to make their own Brexit and head to the Continent, a tanking pound, the rise of racism.

We might spend years at the side of the road, wiping all the mud off our weary old boots while other countries sprint by in new hi-tech gear that was probably made in China.
​

Consider these points (from an earlier post: Does your government make you happy?):
• The Scandinavian system or “Nordic model” of government features high taxes, a large, well-run welfare state, a high standard of free education and healthcare, and low levels of inequality. The machine works for betterment of the people, not the other way round. (In John Rawls “A Theory of Justice,” he demonstrates through his “original position” experiment that if people don’t know how they will end up in an imaginary society, they will generally opt for a fair, redistributive political and economic system that treats all fairly, maximising the prospects of the least well-off.) The Nordic model is a system that appears to make people happy: Denmark and its close cousin Iceland, plus Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Netherlands, are all in the top-8 happiest nations in the world. Why isn’t such a superior form of governance the rule rather than the exception? (“Yes,” people say, “but these are countries with small populations and low immigration”—as though water, sunlight and soil were only good for some trees but not others.)
 
• According to the World Happiness Report: “66% of respondents in the Netherlands and 61% in Sweden answered that most people can be trusted, compared with just 35% in the US and 28% in Russia. Moreover, comparing the extent of trust in the 1981-84 sampling period with the recent period, trust rose in Sweden (from 57 to 61%), while it declined in the United States (from 45 to 35%).”
 
• Scandinavian cities tend to do well in the famous “lost wallet” experiments in which full wallets are left lying around to see how many get returned or handed in.
 
• The happiest nation, Switzerland, meanwhile, is the closest state in the world to a direct democracy. There are referendums on town, city, district and national level. They don’t just scrawl an X on a ballot paper once every 5 years. The Swiss really have a say in how their country is run. They are invested in their government, and vice versa.
 
The times they are a’changing. Donald Trump’s fearmongering, xenophobia, and foghorn declarations about the virtues of greed are like the terminal groans and expirations of a witless dinosaur, ignorant of his impending extinction.
 
Whether you are a Leaver or Remainer, Brexit showed that the British are hungry for democracy. We want to be heard. Brexit was a crack in the walls of the house that was built on the old order of patronage, privilege and politics as usual—a crack that lets in the light.

Primitive societies kill people, then evolve to enslaving them, then to giving them the vote. The next stage is to listen to them.

After a few months of hearing all the differing viewpoints and “standing in the spaces” between them, the client, our dear old friend UK, started to feel much better. The therapy came to a natural end. “It’s all about considering all the different views, and being fair,” said Scotland, speaking for the whole person, who now was sitting tall and proud and relaxed. “The more we listen to all the voices, the better we feel.”

The cure for a sick democracy, it turns out, is more democracy.

No. 4: POLARISATION
 
The nation is feverish. It is infected with a new plague—the first recorded case of Brexitosis.
 
Before the affliction, Britain was a largely peaceable nation. If they thought about the European Union at all, most Brits could probably agree that it was a bit meddlesome. And who were these people anyway? Yes—bossy, interfering, undemocratic and in need of reform. A union with you Europeans, fine, but we’d rather not have an “ever-closer union” thank you very much. We’ll shake hands with you, our neighbours, but no hugging or kissing if you please. What’s that you say? You’d like us to give up our 12-centuries-old currency for the brightly-coloured banknotes of the Euro? Gosh is that the time? We really must be going. Awfully nice to see you!
 
But then, suddenly, the supposed British tolerance and reserve were reversed. In an attempt to quell an uprising in the backbenches of the Conservative Party, David Cameron’s call-my-bluff referendum happened. A complex issue was reduced to an in-or-out, yes-or-no, old-Etonian-Dave-or-Old-Etonian-Boris choice and served up to nation of people starved of a voice. And how we all shouted! The veneer of politeness was stripped away, and long dormant furies and humiliations and aggressions were unleashed. Living rooms, public places and internet forums burned with acidic invective.

Britain started to be at war with itself. Its very name—the “United” Kingdom—came to sound ironic. We were no longer one people but two. We retreated from each other, to opposite corners of the ring. Leavers vs Remainers is a fight that took on a tribal quality, akin to Cavaliers vs Roundheads, Mods vs Rockers, United vs City.
 
The Remainers portrayed the Leavers as all kinds of things, but mostly as a bunch of stupid and/or old racists.
The Leavers characterised the Remainers as all kinds of things, too, but mostly as a naive, deluded, out-of-touch or uncaring urban elite that looked down on the working class.

Simultaneously, the Remainers suddenly cast aside any prior reservations about the EU and anointed Jean-Claude Juncker as some kind of beatified visionary. For the Leavers, the EU was no longer a mere bumbling bureaucracy but a sinister, power-crazed, fascistic regime.
 
The media stuck to their predictable, flame-fanning “we-good-they-bad” scripts.
Stories about the rise in racist attacks across the country after the vote, or the Brexit voters who regretted their choice, or the parallels between Brexit voters and Donald Trump supporters across the Atlantic seemed to further the redneck stereotype.
On the other side, one typical pro-Leave column described Remainers as “rich, metropolitan types” who “fear for their second homes in Tuscany and the south of France” and “fear they might no longer get dirt-cheap nannies and au pairs from Eastern Europe.”

​On a recent Sunday, two consecutive stories appeared on a Facebook news feed on my phone:
• “Britain just got its first concrete sign that Brexit will destroy the economy” (Independent)
• “IMF 'clowns' forced to admit Britain’s economy is GROWING despite predicting Brexit doom” (Sunday Express)
In the tabloid world, what Nietzsche wrote in 1887 is true: “It is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations.”
 
Research and polls generally suggested that these factors tended to correlate more with a Leave vote: being older, less educated, unemployed or retired, white, English or Welsh.
And these factors tended to correlate more with a Remain vote: being young, educated, employed, not white, Scottish or Irish.
 
But these are very loose, broad brushstrokes and anyway, as we know, correlation is not the same as causality. (There are innumerable absurd examples of this; there is for instance a very strong correlation between margarine use and divorce in Maine, or US highway fatalities and the volume of lemons imported from Mexico.)
But the need to stereotype “the other”—the enemy—is strong. When I wrote on the World of Therapy Facebook page that people who voted Leave aren't any one type; nor are people who voted Remain, one person responded: “We ARE two different groups of people. WE, are Patriots and believe in democracy. Whereas remainers are a bunch of bitter and twisted, racist traitors who don't believe in democracy. We don't need a discussion because we've had it and we won. So suck it up buttercup WE ARE OUT.”
 
Whose side are you on?
Human life falls neatly into binaries: male or female, night or day, yin or yang, good or evil, yes or no, here or there, this or that, crunchy peanut butter or smooth.
Philosophers through the ages have extolled progress through the resolution of two conflicting ideas. Dialectic exchange, or Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis model, goes something like this:
Person 1: “I think X.”
Person 2: “Oh yeah? Well, I think the exact opposite. I think Y.”
Person 1: “Y? You’ve got to be kidding me!”
Person 2: “Are you calling me a Nazi?”
After a debate—or the building of walls, invading countries, ethnic cleansing, war—A and B find a way to integrate and resolve their positions: They agree on Z!
Person 1: “Yes of course—Z. It seems so obvious now.”
Person 2: “Remember when we used to fight about X and Y?”
Person 1: “It seems so silly now!”
Person 3: “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but overhear you talking about Z. Have you ever considered A instead?”
Persons 1 and 2: “Oh f*** off!”
 
How do we make choices? Why do some people gravitate to X while others fall for Y?
Humans like to regard themselves as rational and logical, able to make conscious optimal choices. In practice, however, we are often more like wild animals. Heidegger said we discover our intentions through our actions rather than the other way round, and neuroscientific studies have reinforced that. Our first response to situations often is an immediate, unconscious, emotional one, occurring in a part of the brain called the amygdala—two little almond-shaped lumps that play a key role in the animal/mammalian brain. The human, thinking part, the cerebral cortex, then quickly has to come up with a rationalisation, like a PR manager left to explain why his rock star client trashed the hotel room. Neuroboffin Antonio Damasio says: “We are always hopelessly late for consciousness.”
There have been some lovely experiments to illustrate how we retrofit our thoughts to accommodate or justify our inexplicable actions. In Festinger and Carlsmith’s 1959 research project, people were made to do a really boring task, then for a very small fee invited to lie about how interesting it was to new recruits—they happily did so. Surely they weren’t the kind of people that could be bought so easily; to resolve their “cognitive dissonance” they decided the task had actually been quite interesting after all.
To be at the mercy of the immediate, instinctive gut reaction—the emotional traffic light—is often to make irrational, definitive, ill-considered responses. Sometimes they can work in our favour. But sometimes not. By the time the cerebral cortex arrives on the scene, the damage might have already been done: you’ve tipped the salad bowl over the nasty lady’s head or run a red light or signed up for the pointless extended warranty scheme. Ideally the grey matter sketches in some shades of grey before it’s too late, allowing for more tempered, nuanced responses.
That primal, visceral first impression allows us to make snap judgments and decisions, navigate a complex world, and stave off the unbearable uncertainty of our existence. It can powerfully bind us—to a religion, a political party, a celebrity, a brand. It is not generally diminished by reason or logic. It can be a kind of love. It can also be a kind of hate for “the other.” Hate at first sight.
Christopher Hitchens, who saw all religions as incapable of standing up to any kind of rational scrutiny, wrote in “Letters to a Young Contrarian”: “It will very often be found that people are highly attached to illusions or prejudices, and are not just the sullen victims of dogma or orthodoxy. If you have ever argued with a religious devotee, for example, you will have noticed that his self-esteem and pride are involved in the dispute and that you are asking him to give up something more than a point in argument. The same is true of visceral patriots, and admirers of monarchy and aristocracy. Allegiance is a powerful force in human affairs; it will not do to treat someone as a mental serf if he is convinced that his thralldom is honorable and voluntary.”

Western foreign policy since World War Two has a pretty dismal track record, dropping bombs on dozens of countries, invading distant lands overtly and covertly, doing deals with dictators one minute then demonising them the next--embracing Saddam Hussein, say, or calling Nelson Mandela a terrorist—buying or selling arms or anything else to or from practically anyone or doing or saying practically anything if it serves the dollar, with very little regard to decency or morality or honesty.
It’s not clear if this quote attributed to wartime US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt about the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasia Samoza was ever actually uttered, but it sums up American foreign policy: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” And Britain blindly follows America in its misadventures, as the Chilcot report showed, with a few notable exceptions like Vietnam (thank you Harold Wilson).
People who write books or publish newspapers or lead political or religious movements that promote xenophobia and division, often invoking as inevitable a “clash of civilizations”—eg. in Somalia, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia—are guilty of inciting violence and hatred and are responsible for much suffering. Can’t we give these eighth century, eight-year-old you’re-an-infidel/barbarian-no-I’m-not-you-are arguments the contempt they deserve? Are the Scots and the English suddenly to remember, I don’t know, the Battle of Flodden? And take up arms again?
This war of words has been going on between Muslims and Europeans ever since they first came into contact, in 732, each side denouncing the other as a means of justifying exclusion, discrimination and attack. Edward Said calls this “Orientalism,” a system of thought by which dominant powers establish versions of “knowledge” and “truth” about both themselves and those over whom they wish to exert power, creating a “drastically polarized geography dividing the world into two unequal parts.” The West and “the Orient” are constructed in the West as polar opposites, the former as rational, developed, humane and superior, the latter, a monolithic, homogenous “other”—barbaric, inferior, backward, aberrant, unchanging. The “other” is to be feared, contained, controlled or destroyed.

Western Islamophobes like to cite barbaric bits of the Quran as “evidence” of some kind of inherent barbarism despite their own religion’s sacred texts being filled with equally primitive imperatives that are just as comically irrelevant to today. In Britain, Christians often assert “Christian values”—these presumably no longer include a biblical call to cut off people’s hands or stone people to death or otherwise punish people who work on a Sunday, or have sex with someone they’re not married to, or have parents who aren’t married, or who are women who have had sex, or who talk in church, or defend their husbands, or who actually are just women, or people who are gay or disabled or who masturbate or eat bacon.
Those who regard ”Muslims”—1.6 billion people, almost a quarter of humanity—as a fixed, homogenous, united group of people who speak with one voice or think with one mind, need to get out more.
​As the saying goes, blaming all Muslims for appalling acts of terrorism by Islamic extremists is like blaming all musicians for Kanye West.
It’s frightening how easily people can buy into loud, simplistic, aggressive, finger-pointing explanations as to why life is hard, especially when the finger points down, to the powerless, rather than up, to the powerful.
The best response to trumped up men—it is usually men—who try to peddle fear and xenophobia, whether they are a US president-to-be, a zealot with a cellphone and a megaphone, or the racist next door, is to hold up your hand and say, no, I disagree, I believe you are mistaken.
Carl Jung said that when we identify with one end of a continuum, we project the other end: I am good, right, well; you are bad, wrong, ill. But the bad bits are in us too. They are our shadow. The shadow keeps us grounded.
 
What happens next?
There are four possible outcomes in a conflict characterized by polarised postions, according to Wood and Petriglieri in “Transcending Polarization: Beyond Binary Thinking”:
1) a complete split or dissociation of the opposing positions, that is, the end of a connection or relationship;
2) a complete overcoming of the opposition, essentially, annihilation of one position by the other;
3) the possibility that no significant change takes place and the positions remain in a more or less stable relationship of continued strife;
4) synthesis, which is identical to neither of the two original conflicting positions but emerges from the tension and includes elements from both.
 
How will the Leavers and Remainers ever be friends again? Is there a cure for Brexitosis? Will the patient recover?
 
NEXT TIME: No. 5: Reunification

No. 3. MISINFORMATION
 
The EU referendum campaigns were marked by a catalogue of fibs, porkies and whoppers.

On the Leave side (“Take Back Control”), campaigners promised that the £350 million a week that the UK supposedly paid the EU would go instead to the NHS (it was even emblazoned on the side of their tour bus); that the divorce from the EU would be swift and painless; that we could still set up better trade deals with EU nations while slashing immigration from them; that there was a plan; that there were sunlit meadows ahead.

While the Leavers were accentuating the positive, the Remain team (“Better Together”) were full of gloom and doom; their campaign was dubbed “Project Fear." They predicted a dire economic downturn; panic wiping trillions off global financial markets; the pound plummetting to record lows; a surge in popularity of the far right and a dramatic increase in hate crime. Ridiculous scaremongering...
Except that after the Leavers unexpectedly won the referendum, all that actually did happen (respectively here, here, here, here and here).
The Brexiteers became a swiftly-diminishing peleton moving in reverse, with much backpedalling: here, here, here, here and here, to cite a few examples. There was little celebration. No one was in charge. No one wanted to be (“you take control—you touched it last”). Nausea and unease swept the land, along with a new bitter-tasting phenomenon, especially keenly felt in Wales: “bregret.”

But it’s early days. Let’s see how Theresa May, the new unelected PM who doesn’t believe in Brexit and voted against it, gets on with implementing it.

​Pathological liars
Appearing to support something you disagree with, of course, is what politicians habitually do for a living, and why they are so unpopular. They rarely speak their mind—they’re trying to speak yours. You can tell when they’re lying, the joke goes—their lips are moving. Nixon didn’t know about the Watergate Hotel break-in. Clinton did not have sex with “that woman.” Blair thought there were WMDs. All governments lie, as rebel American journalist I. F. Stone observed.
An archetype of the species, or perhaps a parody, is would-be US president Donald Trump. He doesn’t exactly lie; he simply regards it as irrelevant whether or not something is actually true and speaks instead like a defiant 10-year-old: I am the best, I didn’t do that, it’s not my fault, they did it, I didn’t take it, it was broken when I took it, I’m not a liar you are, you’re ugly, a dog, a fat pig....” And so on.
Pathological lying is not regarded as a clinical condition in its own right. But it is a common feature of many people who suffer with some kind of psychological illness. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) includes a number of “personality disorders” which might describe the kind of inner world that could give rise to lying: the “borderline” might lie to avoid abandonment; the “histrionic” to be the centre of attention; the “narcissistic” to preserve a grandiose self-image. Perhaps the best-fitting DSM label for liars is “antisocial personality disorder”—the closest thing to what the layman might call a “psychopath”—which includes among its diagnostic criteria: “Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure.”

Lies about immigration
One of the things politicians lie about in Britain, a lot, is immigration, a key issue of the referendum. They know it’s good for the economy—if the goal was just to maximise GDP, a purist neoliberal would feed the market with free movement of goods and services, capital—and workers. Such a person would advocate completely open borders.
But politicians know too that pandering to people’s fears and appearing “tough on immigration” is a sure vote-winner (as discussed in Part 2, Britain is a nation built on discrimination). So they play a peculiar game: with one hand, they hold up a stop sign—especially when the cameras are on. With the other, new arrivals are discreetly beckoned with a nod and a wink.
Governments similarly rarely counter the arguments against immigration, either. For example:
• Immigrants are a drain on the economy. Actually they tend to be young, fit and keen to work—they respond to demand, relieve skill shortages, and create new jobs. They are known to be net positive contributors to the British economy (one study showed a contribution of £4.4 billion between 1995-2011). Without them the demographic crunch caused by declining fertility rates and increasing longevity would be even more acute. Benefit cheats? If immigration stops, you’ll be cheated out of your most important benefit: your pension.
• Britain is “full up.” Really? Have you ever taken a train from London to Edinburgh and looked out of the window? Only about 1 percent on our land has been built on. Britain ranks 51st in population density, slightly ahead of Germany and Italy, well behind the likes of Belgium, the Netherlands, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan.
• Immigrants are taking over. The public’s average guess at what proportion of the UK is foreign-born is 31 percent. The real number? 13 percent. And while about three-quarters thought immigration was a problem in Britain, only about a quarter thought it was a problem in their own local area.
• British culture is under attack. It always has been, shaped by outside forces for centuries. But it is large enough and robust enough to take what it likes and discard the rest. Culture is democracy. If chicken tikka masala is indeed Britain’s national dish, it’s because people like it. Of the immigrants to the UK in 2001, the leading country of origin was Australia, yet there was no debate over Britain being “swamped” or “flooded” by Australian culture.

Tabloid tales
On referendum day, the Daily Mail ran a lead article (“Day of Truth”) that lamented “a campaign characterised by mendacity.” What does it have to say about its own mendacity? The endless sensational stories over the years about supposedly idiotic EU regulations that were either very exaggerated or completely false? Did it report the analysis in The Economist that revealed the Daily Mail to be the clear leader in publishing stories about the EU that weren’t true? Such as Euro banknotes being responsible for impotence; or the EU demanding that cows wear nappies; or that the Latin name be used for “cod” instead of fish and chips; or that corgis be banned; or the one about EU immigrants being convicted of 700 crimes a week? (This of course is just a very small sample. And it’s not just the Mail. All the tabloids tell tall tales of asylum seekers stealing royal swans or donkeys from London parks and barbecuing them or councils banning hot cross buns from being served at Easter in favour of naan bread.)
In the 1930s, the Daily Mail was owned by Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, reportedly a keen prewar admirer and supporter of Adolf Hitler and his annexation of Czechoslovakia; he wrote in the newspaper in praise of fascism, Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, too. How much of the discriminatory editorial content, politics and tone of today’s Mail is a reflection of the beliefs of the current owner, great-grandson of Harold, Jonathan Harold Esmond Vere Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere? We don’t know, but wealthy press barons have a history of explaining away the problem of gross inequality with a simple message: blame the poorest, most desperate, most foreign.

Rivers of racism
​Is one of the Mail’s former reporters, Brendan Montague, correct when he says in a 2012 article in The New Yorker that there is institutional racism at the Mail? There is certainly in its pages endlessly repetitive, disparaging, stereotyped negative characterisations of immigrant groups, asylum seekers and refugees—using words like “criminals”; “scroungers”; “dirty”; “barbaric”; “violent”: “cruel”; “deviant.” Isn’t demonizing faceless foreigners with an ever-flowing stream of cruel rhetoric by definition racist? Papers like the Mail and the Daily Express have been doing this for a century—articles about Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany used the same denigrating words as articles about refugees today.
There is much hyperbole, metaphor and repetition to convey a sense of threat. Stories that conform to the negative stereotype—“British holidaymaker burgled in Bulgaria!”—get published. Those that don’t get spiked. People ask: where are the moderate Muslims denouncing acts of Islamic terrorism? They are online, in cafes, mosques, in demonstrations—yet mysteriously absent from the Daily Mail. The moderate voices are muzzled—on both sides of the playground, only the loudest, most cartoonish, most offensive voices are heard.
Governments have been known to manipulate media coverage for their own propaganda purposes. A century ago  American journalist Walter Lippmann wrote that society consists of two groups, a small, powerful, educated elite, and the rest, which he called the “bewildered herd.” And to keep democracy ticking over, in Lippmann’s view, the bewildered herd must be kept complacent, pliant and distracted by things like sports, soap operas, the fantasy of salvation through material goods. Occasionally, the bewildered herd needs to be sold on an unpopular action, invasion or war—with a highly sophisticated propaganda apparatus to demonize a supposed enemy and their supposed evil intentions. Writes Noam Chomsky: “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”
The influence surely occurs in the opposite direction, too. Newspapers can frame a debate, or make or break a policy or a politician. Hence all the cosy chats with that guardian of British culture, Rupert Murdoch, the octogenarian Australian-turned-American overseer of an alleged phone-hacking, police-bribing empire that publishes The Sun and The Times. Murdoch might have more influence on the tabloids’ beloved “British way of life”—whatever that means—than EU figurehead/straw man Jean-Claude Juncker, yet this outside influence goes uncontested.
The tabloids have found that stories of fear and loathing are good for business. Why? As a species we have survived by being hypervigilant to danger and the British tabloid press overflows with a daily diet of things we should supposedly worry about: ebola, sars, swine flu, zika, the flesh-eating virus, killer food bugs, MMR, HPV, benefit cheats, hoodies, paedophiles, new age travellers, terrorists and a litany of other “moral panics,” the leading one being, of course: foreigners. Without a hint or irony or shame, the same pro-Leave newspapers that slammed “Project Fear” now join in the fearmongering about a post-Brexit world. If a tabloid newspaper were a person, he or she would be terribly, terribly worried about the world today, and probably never venture out into it very much.
The media and the government seem to be locked in a desperate dance, a series of pitiful vicious circles—a race to the bottom that assumes and panders to the idea that the public is inherently racist. The results are self-fulfilling.
The news today: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
No thank you. I’d prefer to live.

The Brexit referendum, ostensibly about the UK’s relationship with the European Union, about sovereignty, democracy, the economy, also unleashed a fierce national debate about something else: the hot button-issue of immigration. For some, the word "Leave" was an instruction not just to the UK but to foreigners within it, too; a message to new arrivals, a giant metaphorical sign to be hung at ports and airports around this sceptered isle. Theirs was a protest vote; their internal rallying cry was: There are too many of “them” coming over “here” and “we” don’t like it (ironic fact: the U.K. has more citizens living abroad than any other EU country). The objections were primarily economic or cultural. If you live in a neglected, underfunded town with scarce resources, and your job has gone to someone from another country, or you can't get a doctor's appointment or a school place, and your home town feels crowded and different, your choice is obvious—it's a matter of survival.

Most people who voted Leave did not do so out of racism. But no opinion poll is needed to hazard a guess at the voting preference of those who are unabashed racists. Regardless, the Leave vote sparked a resurgence of racism across the land. There was a 5-fold increase in hate crime within a week. Synagogues, mosques, schools and community centres were vandalised. People were attacked and verbally abused in the street. Racists stood outside multicultural schools flicking victory signs and telling people who didn’t look like them to “go home.” Sinister notes—and worse—were pushed through letterboxes. Suddenly closet racists were out and proud, emboldened in their everyday conversations, not even bothering with the standard prefix of “I’m not a racist but....”

Not that racism was dormant prior to June 23. According to the Home Office, 52,528 hate crimes were reported in 2014-2015, over 80 percent of them racially motivated, and that was an 18 percent rise in a year. In general black Britons are chronically under-represented in the professions, and over-represented in the prisons. In the field of mental health, young black men are far more likely to be referred to secure psychiatric settings via the courts than their white counterparts; black people of African and Caribbean heritage are six times more likely to be sectioned than white people. In therapy consulting rooms, clients tell shocking stories of violence, oppression and abuse.

5. Racism: part of human psychology?
There isn’t a great deal of writing or research on the psychology of racism, perhaps because it is such an emotive issue. But there is an argument that prejudice is a part of being human. Our survival has depended on a certain level of anxiety, vigilance and distrust towards the unknown, and an affiliation with the safety of the known. Malcolm Gladwell says we navigate through life with the help of “thin-slicing,” in which we use our senses, our experience and our beliefs to process a given situation very quickly, largely unconsciously, and take action.
Sometimes thin-slicing can be completely wrong, with disastrous consequences, such as when white policemen gun down an innocent nonwhite civilian like Jean Charles De Menezes. Last year in America, young black men were nine times more likely to be killed by police, with a total of 1,134 such deaths.
A number of studies have shown just how easy it is to create “in-groups” and “out-groups” based on the most meaningless of differences, and the hostility towards the out-group can escalate with depressing ease. Examples are the Lord of the Flies-like Robbers Cave experiment with two arbitrary groups of 12-year-old boys, Jane Elliott’s classic schoolroom blue eye brown eye exercise, or Saturday afternoon tribal violence between people who support different football teams.
Using the power of projection, the out-group is demonised: “we” are good; “they” are bad—deviant, dangerous, dirty, lazy (and any number of other aspersions). The more unknown “they” are, the easier it is to imagine them as devils. Racism—and concerns over national identity—are strongest in the least diverse parts of Britain.
This crude scapegoating of people from foreign fields, or “othering,” is vigorously and cynically exploited by poisonous politicians (Farage, Donald Trump, far rightists like Marine Le Pen), newspapers (the Daily Mail has been peddling xenophobia for a century), apartheid regimes (South Africa), dictators inciting genocide (Somalia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia), or western governments seeking to justify illegal overseas interventions (Iraq, Afghanistan).
The message used to be that the Russians were the primitive barbarians who want to take over the world. Now it is Muslims (the idea that 1.6 billion people—more than a fifth of humanity—speak with one voice or think with one mind is patently foolish).
Writes Mark Salter: “The ‘barbarian’ represents a rhetorical well from which politicians have drawn throughout the twentieth century and from which they still draw.”
 
“Race” is a construction: There is no basis for making sweeping assumptions about groups of people—positive or negative—based on skin colour. Farhad Dalal defines racism as: “The manufacture and use of the notion of race.”
​
But racist stereotypes are nevertheless hard to escape from; they are embedded in our culture. We unwittingly enact them, reinforce them, and hand them down. They are part of our social unconscious. They can be made conscious, and the othering, denigrating stereotypes and those who promote them can be treated with the contempt they deserve. But the history remains. No amount of whitewash will change that.
 
NEXT TIME: No. 3. Misinformation