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| art by Anthony McCall at Serpentine Gallery |
But projection is a big and very powerful part of it. It is particularly powerful when projections are reinforced within a group that defines itself in large measure by asserting the same projections. Moreover, the power increases when the object of the projections is also an identifiable group. Then it becomes Us versus Them.
This is most apparent in wars. The enemy is composed of cold-blooded killers, who have no regard for human life. They hate us. They are so perverse than they aren’t even human. In modern wars, they are like machines without conscience. They murder, rape and torture without a thought. They worship false gods or no gods. They fight to conquer and suppress people. They are nothing but evil.
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| Allies anti-German World War II |
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| North Korean anti-American, Korean War |
Factually, some of our claims about ourselves and about the enemy are true. (But some of their claims about themselves and us are also true.) But defining ourselves as opposites is what allows this projected dynamic: that the enemy is totally evil and we are totally good (when in daily life we hardly ever run into people like that.) The enemy is completely foreign, everything that we aren’t, including not really human. The enemy is the Other.
“The other” is not just a Jungian or even psychological term. (And in this general meaning, it is different from the way French deconstructionists use it.) It simply means people who aren’t us—usually people we don’t have a lot of contact with. We define ourselves partly by who we aren’t, and who we aren’t is The Other.
Basically, projection is defining others— and especially in defining The Other—with what you are afraid you might be capable of. It doesn’t mean others don’t have evil tendencies, but that projection exaggerates those tendencies and defines others by them.
Of course, real enemies exist and defending against aggression may be necessary, but projections go far beyond that. “The real existence of an enemy upon whom one can foist off everything evil is an enormous relief to one’s conscience,” Jung writes. “You can then at least say, without hesitation, who the devil is; you are quite certain that the cause of your misfortune is outside, and not in your own attitude.”
Just how powerful projection is can be suggested by looking at what people say about their enemies in wartime—especially when, not many years later, their enemies have become friends.
Consider what one President called the enemy who is “aiming at the exclusive domination” of the world, “lost in corruption” and with “deep-rooted hatred towards us, hostile to liberty wherever it endeavors to show its head, and the eternal disturber of the peace of the world.”
That was said by President Thomas Jefferson in 1815, of the British. From a geopolitical perspective, there was probably a lot of truth in it. But the language is that of wartime propaganda, which Jung calls the extreme of projection. Even worse was said of the Russians throughout the Cold War, and now we’re trading and security partners, and our astronauts work together on the International Space Station. Ditto the Japanese and the Vietnamese.
The Other is especially easy to define when the physical characteristics of color and race are different. The Japanese in World War II, Koreans, Vietnamese, were all racially stereotyped. The settling of America depended on considering American Indians as the Other, as less than human. Slavery in the West depended on Africans being considered inferior, less than human. Both groups were vile, without conscience, until they were subjugated, and then they were childish dependents. But you have to be careful because they can revert to violence at any time.
Often we don't really know much about the Other. They are strangers, and therefore strange. That makes it easier to project onto them. But human communities have long had a double response to strangers. There is fear of aggression. But there has also always been recognition of benefits. Strangers mean the possibility of trade, new ideas, and help from outside when it is needed. Sustaining peaceful relations with others is deeply embedded in the oldest cultures—in encouraging intermarriage, for instance, or in peaceful competitions, from potlatches to games. The oldest cultures value hospitality to strangers and retain its rituals. In one of many tragic ironies, hospitality to strangers in a particular tradition in Iraq. There is an uneasy tension in these responses, but projections take just one side, and make it everything.
Wartime demonstrates how pervasive and super-heated projections can get--and how hard it becomes to accept that some of the traits that define the Other are demonstrably in Us.
Fear under other circumstances is easy to isolate and exaggerate, and fear of the Other is a chief tool of demagogues throughout history. For Hitler the Others were the Jews and the Slavs, Catholics and homosexuals. Today in America the Others are Muslims, Mexicans and other immigrants, and homosexuals. Politicians of the extreme right compete to demonize these groups.
Projection on The Other is more difficult when you know people in that group—when the Other is in some sense one of us. But that’s not the whole answer. For many years, African Americans have been chief among the Others in America. Whites resisted integration partly because it meant that some projections would no longer be possible. It would no longer be possible to consider the entire race as inhuman and lacking in intelligence. But that doesn’t mean the projections have stopped. They are buried deep in the cultural components of individual psyches.
Those racial projections emerged with the election of Barack Obama. Even before Obama ran, political and cultural observers suggested that racism had not disappeared in America, but only gone underground. It was no longer overt, because racial prejudice against African Americans had become culturally disapproved. Besides, life is more integrated, which short-circuits some projections. So in order to project all manner of evil onto President Obama, it became necessary to define him as Other—as literally foreign.
Demagogues use positive as well as negative projections: that is, defining Us as well as Them. By defining “American” in a restrictive manner, and by making the rest of the world into The Other (which is the outcome of the Right’s definition of American Exceptionalism), everything evil is projected onto Others, allowing the self-image to be of nothing but Good. And anybody who doesn't agree that everything about America has always been and is always Good by definition is of the Other. The only problems are caused by the conspiracy of Others to defile the Good and install Evil. We want our country back.
Political figures have promoted and exploited such projections for a very long time. Today the information environment provides the means for targeting audiences to create and sustain projections that define a group. The Christian Right has been doing this for decades, and talk radio as well as Fox news has created an overlapping Us that feeds off the Christian Right and coopts it. We’ve seen some attempts to use this closed circuit world to sustain a presidential campaign, and we may see a bigger attempt if Sarah Palin declares as a candidate. Rachel Maddow has predicted that she might well restrict her interviews to Fox and extreme right media—to the Us that’s characterized by “grievance, resentment and belonging.”
(Here's a fuller Maddow quote from her program: "FOX News took the Rush Limbaugh formula and adapted it for television in 1996. The FOX News slogan of “fair and balanced” when what they‘re mostly doing is right wing commentary has always seemed to the rest of the world like an affront—fair and balanced? It‘s like a mockery of the terms fair and balanced. But to the FOX audience, it is really the core of what they are offering. You cannot trust anyone else to talk to you. Everyone else is out to get you. Ask somebody who is a FOX News aficionado what they think about the fair and balanced slogan. You will hear them use it without irony and with criticism because they believe that the only place they can get fairness and balance is from FOX, that the rest of the media is biased and only FOX is the truth. They‘re selling their audience grievance, resentment and belonging.")
The sense of grievance, while having real substance that society ignores to its peril, can also be a way to project onto the outside world what one can’t admit or deal with as an individual. It can be motivated by fear, by anger, by guilt and by a convoluted sense of shame, based in part on not measuring up to the positive projections of idealized figures, such as the rich and famous.
In a revealing Rolling Stone piece by Tim Dickinson, author Richard Perlstein makes this point: “What Nixon did—and what [Fox News chief Roger] Ailes does today in the age of Obama—is unravel and rewire one of the most powerful human emotions: shame. He takes the shame of people who feel that they are being looked down on, and he mobilizes it for political purposes. Roger Ailes is a direct link between the Nixonian politics of resentment and Sarah Palin’s politics of resentment. He’s the golden thread.”
The politics of resentment creates a mirror world in which projecting tendencies on others allow those tendencies to be given free reign within the group, ostensibly as self-defense. One new study suggests that white Americans believe discrimination against them has increased (it also suggests that facts can’t compete with projections in political views.) Extreme right whites are convinced that President Obama is taking their tax money to give to black people and brown immigrants. So the extreme right has to be xenophobic and defend themselves, for they are the victims of discrimination on the basis of race. In a larger sense, the restoration of white privilege is what restoring America and American freedoms means to them. You can hear them say this, but they seldom can hear themselves.
The very wealthy have been exploiting the resentment of the very not-wealthy for generations, particularly in the push-button targeting of race. They’ve also used patriotic and religious association to create an idealized all-white version of capitalist America, as opposed to the socialist, welfare state (welfare=freeloading blacks and Latinos) of the Other.
The Us vs. Them of the Cold War (free market vs. Soviet and U.S. Communists) became the Us vs. Them of Reagan conservatives vs. liberals in the 1980s, and now the Other is defined as Obama socialists. Socialism is defined as what would have been regarded as ordinary government functions, at least until the 1980s. This is probably the most dangerous Us vs. Them issue for the future: the demonization of government at the time its role is most needed. (Yet even this is a matter of perception by projection. In many ways, government has become more intrusive in state governments won by Republicans in 2010.)
But not in my lifetime has the polarization of American politics been this extreme. There has always been reflexive political opposition to whatever the other party is for, but not this extreme. The Republican House refused even to honor the Navy Seals team that took out Osama bin Laden, because President Obama is their Commander-in-Chief. That wasn’t on a matter of principle—that’s just one more way of saying that Obama is not the real President, no matter what he does, and that we have a Republican Tea Party Christian Right America plus a conniving cabal of Democrats etc. that happen to live here for the moment. Things like this happen all the time now, things that never would have happened at any time in the past 50 years.
This is what political polarization really is, on the level of the psyche: an Us versus Them world, with some real ideological, political and cultural differences, but made extreme by, among other things, projection. Not much else can account for the extreme right believing what is factually not true, because their media and their heroes always tell the truth, and the media and villains of Them always lie.
“Everyone is entitled to their own opinions,President Obama has said several times, “but not to their own facts.” However, the emotional power of projection makes opinions into facts.
Only the psyche can explain the intense power of this, but “we know nothing about it,” and ignore and disdain it. Reasoned argument on content can only get so far before running up against the resistance of the psyche. Different additional strategies are necessary, beginning with trying to understand the mechanics of denial and projection, but also trying to understand the point of view that adds fuel to the fire.
But before speculations on that subject, one more useful Jungian concept regarding the unconscious. To better understand projections on the Other, there’s another concept introduced next time: the shadow.
Note: This is one of a series of posts under the label Climate Inside. Previous posts were on projection, denial and an introduction.
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