“When you blame others, you give up your power to change.” — Robert Anthony
Lacking a Sense of Virtue
Insecurity, guilt, and shame are powerful personal and political weapons. Once an opponent is accused of these, they are on the defensive. Once a point of view has been tainted as guilty or shameful, it is difficult to defend.
The reason these emotional manipulations are powerful is that emotion always overpowers reason. Emotion so overpowers reason that it’s an emotion connection that gives a person persuasive power, not reason or intellect. The general term for being emotionally overpowered is seduction, a combination of satisfying your emotional wants and neutralizing your reasonable powers.
A psychological ploy used in political or personal discourse applies these “tools” to defeat an opponent. This involves accusing another person of insecurity, guilt, and shame which, when done skillfully, undermines their certitude and virtue. For those people who are guided by emotion, which is most of us, appeals to emotion overwhelm reason.
This is what Trumpian politics has normalized with negative labeling, such as “sleepy Joe,” “half Whitmer,” “Crooked Hillary,” “Crazy Bernie,” “Marjorie Traitor Green,” and many others. By attaching simple epithets of flaw and failure Trump implants these ideas in the minds of simple listeners.
This is not charisma, it is emotional seduction. It leads insecure people back to the emotions of their adolescence to accept simple truths. The Pied Piper is the appropriate fable of manipulation and collective failure. According to this fable, the Piper’s retribution of stealing away the children is the result of the town’s reneging on their agreement to pay him for removing the rats. The children are never recovered.
The Devil
To further defeat your opponent, the ultimate explanation for their failure is that the Devil made them do it. If you cannot convince people that your opponent is stupid, then call them evil. Trump is doing this in his new war with Iran. He doesn’t call them stupid, as he does his domestic opponents, he calls them evil.
An odd use of The Devil is as an excuse for your own failure. You would think that admitting yourself evil would damn your efforts, but religion offers a pass. By admitting your failure and renouncing your allegiance you can be absolved. In any event, it’s a last resort.
While the Inquisition murdered the accused heretics whether or not they recanted, modern absolution is safe. It provides a full pardon, and only requires a donation and a pledge of subservience.
Accepting the institution’s greater power comes with the implication that you are of less value. The institution is more virtuous and your obeisance is expected. We see this in the MAGA movement, which is a movement of capitulation that ultimately loses whatever power it originally claimed for itself. This was also evident in my doctoral program, where the prerequisite for being awarded a PhD was accepting the judgements of the academy.
The Devil provides an ever-ready reason to indict an opponent and exonerate yourself. Having these handy rationales is why people are drawn to judgmental religions in the first place. Sanctifying the virtuous while overriding your opponent’s explanations.
Relying on some higher power means you don’t have to argue your point; you don’t have to know anything. You are right by virtue of your allegiance and affiliation. Not only is no skill required, relinquishing any claim to skill is demanded!
The Institution
The Devil is ever-present; always explaining moral failures and motivating emotional responses. Abrahamic religions are more concerned with castigating failure than expanding virtue. This is evident in the structure of institutions in general: they have the power and you do not. The Devil is really a front in the way that the Wizard of Oz was a front. The real power is the institution.
And why is The Devil a “he”? The answer seems to be because the institution is a he: these are patriarchal institutions just as they are patriarchal religions. All the power-holders are male, even the evil ones.
There are evil female figures, witches and sirens, but they are usually agents of action rather than divine forces. The male remains the god; the female is the agent. So it is with the vampire, the werewolf, the hero, and the warrior: all males.
In the fables the witch is killed, but the Devil never is. Contrast this with the panoply of Greek and Hindu gods in which there is greater gender equality, at least with regard to their endurance and rank. But while the gods’ genders may be equally distributed, the human heroes are all male.
Hell
The after-life has become an after-thought. Hell, the realm of the bedeviled, is irrelevant these days. That’s partly because we’ve become so material that we’re only concerned with what we have, and partly because there is so much hell on earth that it’s a joke to claim that hell is somewhere else.
To the extent that there is a sense of hell to be avoided, it’s in living an immoral life. However, there is a broad trend toward rewarding immorality to the super rich, the authoritarian, the MAGA movement, and others with similar antisocial behaviors.
But what happens to those who live an immoral life and whom the Devil abandons? This is another mythic theme: the Devil will claim his due, but he will never fulfill his promise. You are just a tool for spreading moral decay and, as Donald Trump demonstrates, when you have served your purpose you will be discarded.
You will be abandoned, left to feel guilty and ashamed. The trick of this is that we all are somewhat insecure, as uncertainty is what keeps us careful. We are both easily seduced and aware of our powerlessness. Institutions that offer protection, power, and absolution attract us, and offer the Faustian bargain. As a result, we are intellectually and creatively emasculated.
The bloviating, malignant, narcissist is always in the right. Their sense of virtue only increases with their crimes. Donald Trump’s devilish attraction is that he absolves from evil all who support him, which is exactly what he’s done. This is the leverage of evil and the vulnerability of many. There will always be a Devil as long as there are selfish, needy people who lack a sense of virtue.
Paradise
No tour would be complete without paradise. Fables must come full circle in order to have sticking power. Dante’s paradise was not memorable, it was hardly even describable. Maybe that was because the concept was inconceivable in the grim life of his time, though I doubt people’s personalities were much different.
I enable people who work with me to see the world more positively, if only because I ask them to imagine it. I also work with people who cannot get out of purgatory, but they were never committed to leaving it in the first place.
There’s a lot of nonsense about what it takes to advance oneself. Simple religions and material cultures don’t offer a path to virtue, they offer comfort. Virtue requires vision, courage, and commitment. You must have some direction, the willingness to move into unknown territory, and the resilience to learn through failure. Failure is the path to paradise, it teaches you how wrong you were.
Counseling
A good counselor is just a guide, but the profession of counseling requires addicted customers, and addiction requires repeated satisfaction. Counselors are trained to sell satisfaction, which stabilizes the counseling profession as it stabilizes others.
Effective counseling encourages you to learn by taking responsibility. You have to take risks. Rather than insulating yourself, take responsibility for as much as possible. The best a counselor can do is show you a clearer truth. This has nothing to do with satisfaction.
I had a client who wanted me to help solve his relationship problems with his wife, but he refused to be honest with her. This was a person who was in the process of destroying his family yet who refused to take responsibility. His counseling was paid for by his insurance, and when his coverage ran out, he abandoned the project.
We deflect responsibility by rationalizing that we’re doing the right thing. Avoiding blame is a natural reflex designed for stability. But if change is the goal then it’s better to take responsibility, even if you don’t know what you’re taking responsibility for.
Heaven is as much of a fiction as hell, but both have a functional truth. Hell is the process of learning the full scope of your errors. Hell is seeing your failure in the context of the chaos you have caused.
Heaven is being responsible for the balance of things; knowing the truth and your role in it. You get from one to the other by taking responsibility, taking risks, and taking action. The original and authentic meaning of hell is a place where you learn virtue.
People are attached to their purgatory because it’s where they have learned how to prevail in the struggles that define them. From the vantage point of tumultuous purgatory heaven is boring. Worse than that, living a balanced life requires discarding the pride and power that defines your ego. This requires more than just throwing away your trophies, it requires that you realize they never meant anything.
Entering a state of balance requires learning the value of truth. This is what counseling boils down to: seeing the truth. This comes with a price but only you can pay it. Everyone has the power to do this, but few people do.
