The leftist mentality fascinates me and I’ve been trying to figure it out. A most interesting case is that of the estimable Chris Hedges. I’ll begin by repeating some good things I said about him in 2012, and then refer you to his recent Substack articles. You tell me what’s going on in his head.
Hedges on Pornography
There are some half-way decent leftists. Having listened to a good chunk of a three-hour C-SPAN 2 interview of Chris Hedges on 7 January 2012, I would say he is a good example of one. On some issues he agrees with conservatives, pornography being one of them. Both leftists and libertarians have to lot to answer for on this score. That the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment could be so tortured as to justify pornography shows their lack of common sense and basic moral sense. This is made worse by the absurd interpretation they put upon the Establishment Clause of the same amendment which they take as sanctioning the complete expulsion of religion from the public square when it is religion that delivers in popular form the morality the absence of which allows the spread of soul-destroying pornography. If it weren’t for religion would ‘the people’ be able to think in moral categories at all? Would they have any moral sense? You can’t make a person moral by giving him courses in ethics at age 20. He must already be (unreflectively) moral for those courses to do him any good, just as he must already be (unreflectively) logical for courses in logic to do him any good.
Hedges has the good sense, uncommon on the Left, to understand that the spread of pornography is a major factor in our decline as a nation. The Victims of Pornography is a an excerpt from his book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. (What a great title!)
And if leftists care about women, how can they defend pornography? Apparently they care only up to the point where it would cost them some agreement with conservatives whom they hate more than they love women. Similarly, leftists are all for women, so long as they are not conservative women, as witness the unspeakably vicious attacks on Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann. Ed Schultz the other night was mocking Michelle Bachmann and gloating over her withdrawal from the presidential race. If he had an ounce of decency he would have praised her for being in the arena and participating courageously in the grueling process while respectfully disagreeing with her positions. But respect and decency are what you cannot expect from his ilk. [The link I supplied documenting the Schultz’s viciousness has gone bad.]
For a taste of Hedges today, take a gander at his Substack article Imperial Boomerang, which I reproduce in full:
The murders of unarmed civilians on the streets of Minneapolis, including the killing today of the intensive-care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti, would not come as a shock to Iraqis in Fallujah or Afghans in Helmand province. They were terrorized by heavily armed American execution squads for decades. It would not come as a shock to any of the students I teach in prison. Militarized police in poor urban neighborhoods kick down doors without warrants and kill with the same impunity and lack of accountability. What the rest of us are facing now, is what Aimé Césaire called imperial boomerang. Empires, when they decay, employ the savage forms of control on those they subjugate abroad, or those demonized by the wider society in the name of law and order, on the homeland. The tyranny Athens imposed on others, Thucydides noted, it finally, with the collapse of Athenian democracy, imposed on itself. But before we became the victims of state terror, we were accomplices. Before we expressed moral outrage at the indiscriminate taking of innocent lives, we tolerated, and often celebrated, the same Gestapo tactics, as long as they were directed at those who lived in the nations we occupied or poor people of color. We sowed the wind, now we will reap the whirlwind. The machinery of terror, perfected on those we abandoned and betrayed, including the Palestinians in Gaza, is ready for us.
I have time for only one response. Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed but not murdered. They brought about their own deaths by their illegal and imprudent behavior. Their killing was both morally and legally justified as self-defense. The ICE agent who shot Renee Good reasonably believed that she was about to commit vehicular homicide.
Bill,
“The leftist mentality fascinates man and I’ve been trying to figure it out.”
It also “fascinates me,” as is evident from my comments on your post, “The Role of Politics in the Life of a Leftist.” There, I spoke very generally of the role of the shadow in fueling TDS. Seeking to be brief, I avoided a more detailed discussion of the marriage or alliance of the shadow and the anima, the unconscious feminine archetype within the male psyche, but the long quotation from Hedges’ “Imperial Boomerang” is so evidently an instance of this phenomenon that I would like to speak of these Jungian concepts so as to understand better the psyche that produced it.
For Jung, “The anima [the unconscious feminine archetype] is a personification of all feminine psychological tendencies in a man’s psyche, such as vague feelings and moods, prophetic hunches, receptiveness to the irrational, capacity for personal love, feeling for nature, and—last but not least—his relation to the unconscious.” * And, as with the shadow, “The anima… has two aspects, benevolent or malefic (negative).” ** The “benevolent” is found in a man who has consciously integrated the anima with the ego, a process which requires first a proper balancing of persona and (personal) shadow. Here, such qualities of the feminine as intuition, emotional depth, empathy, relational sensitivity, feeling, etc. become part of the conscious identity, which results in emotional maturity and depth, heightened creativity, greater vitality, enhanced intuition, and better relationships. However, the “malefic” aspect of the anima emerges in a man who has not adequality accomplished such integration, meaning that the anima remains unconscious and is principally projected outward or results in states of possession in which it floods the conscious ego, in undifferentiated, overwhelming ways: an emotionality that is intense and moody, one characterized by mood swings, sentimentality, and moral absolutism that circumvents pragmatic and rational reasoning.
Applied to the leftist mentality as reflected in the quotation from Hedges, this anima projection and possession is very evident. First and most fundamentally, we have the unconscious projection of anima qualities onto the illegal alien/migrant (feminine) figure, who is seen as vulnerable, suffering, and in need of protection; this results in an irrational pull to save or welcome this figure, regardless of the illegality of his entry into the nation, and, as in most of the cases arrested by ICE, of his actual criminality, both before and after entry. In the anima possessed leftist male, especially those who have rejected traditional masculine norms, the arrest or deportation of such a figure seems like a betrayal of one’s own soul, which explains the hysterical reactions to borders and enforcement. Here, we have an exaggerated empathy, in which compassion supersedes concerns about facts, *** order, economic reality, or cultural cohesion. Finally, we see among these male leftists the marriage or alliance of the shadow (repressed aggression, resentment) and the unintegrated anima. **** Hence, the righteous fury against those who represent strong masculinity that imposes boundaries, traditionally moral or legal, such as ICE agents and conservative, nationalistic men. Political or policy disagreements turn into deeply personal, anima possessed moral confrontations.
Vito
*Jung, Man and His Symbols, p. 173
**Ibid., p. 174.
*** “Murder of unarmed civilians,” rather than a woman who drives a car straight at an ICE agent or a man who carries a gun.
****Thus, the irrationality of Pretti, who brings a gun and two clips of ammunition to confront ICE officers.
Let me see if I can sum up your Jungian analysis in my own way. The anima in a man is his ‘inner woman’ which he may or may not get consciously in touch with. A man who becomes conscious of his inner woman has integrated features of his inner woman with his ego. Some of these features are benevolent and some are malefic. Among the benevolent features: compassion, concern for others, sensitivity to their feelings, etc. You don’t mention any malefic features, but I suppose you mean irrationality, arbitrarity, vindictiveness, tendency to gossip and back bite, deceitfulness/underhandedness (e.g., the deceitfulness of a woman who, unable to physically repel a physically abusive husband, or just because she wants to get rid of him to score a life insurance payout, makes a special cocktail for him on his birthday laced with engine coolant.) These malefic features, to the extent that they are not recognized or admitted by the ego and are kept un/subconscious, make up the man’s shadow. Is that right?
A man who is fully integrated or whole is one who has become conscious of both the benevolent and the malefic/malevolent attributes and tendencies of his anima or inner woman. Such a man, having become conscious of them in himself, does not unconsciously project them into others. So he does not project vulnerability and harmlessness into illegal aliens in such a way as to blind himself to the fact that many of them are the opposite of vulnerable and harmless, but are human traffickers, gun runners, narco smugglers, etc.
And such a man does not unconsciously project into ICE agents negative female attributes such as irrationality and arbitrarity in a way that blinds him to the fact that the vast majority of the ICE agents are decent citizens doing a difficult and dangerous job, at low pay, of upholding the rule of law for the good of the entire community.
Is this an accurate summary of your Jungian analysis?
Vito,
Permit me a pedantic quibble. It is incorrect to refer to a magazine –‘mag’ for short — as a clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGWDajIRjLs
A good video, except that he conflates bullets with rounds/cartridges. The bullet is the projectile, and thus a proper part of a cartridge.
Vito,
What we are trying to explain is the aberrant psychology of people like Hedges, Robert Reiner, Robert Reich, Robert de Niro, et al. who are otherwise quite sane. We are of course presupposing that they have indeed ‘gone off the rails’ psychologically. But then so has about half of the U. S. population. This fact threatens to make the explanatory problem insoluble. Our friend Malcolm is deeply pessimistic: https://malcolmpollack.com/2026/01/16/one-screen-two-movies/
Bill,
Thanks for you thoughtful comment.
“Is this an accurate summary of your Jungian analysis?”
No, my analysis of the anima is not dualistic.
For Jung, the anima is essential for a man’s psychological wholeness and a soul guide into the rich life of the unconscious; she is the force that animates existence, giving it vitality and meaning. As with the other structural components of the psyche, a self-regulating system, the anima operates under the law of compensation. If the psyche of a man is balanced, he has integrated the feminine aspect of the psyche into his consciousness, through a process in which the ego learns to see the anima not as an undesirable stranger but as an essential part of its own personality; her benevolent features are now made part of a more malleable, authentic persona. However, in an unbalanced psyche, one in which the ego rejects and represses the anima and identifies with a rigid persona, these benevolent features turn malefic: empathy turns to moodiness and sulking; creativity to compulsive fantasy; vitality to meaninglessness. So, I am not describing an archetype with a dualist nature, at once benevolent and malefic, but rather a structural component, an archetype, that is morally neutral, that assumes a positive or negative expression depending on the stance of the ego to it.
“These malefic features, to the extent that they are not recognized or admitted by the ego and are kept un/subconscious, make up the man’s shadow. Is that right?”
No, they are separate entities, but often work together and contaminate each other when repressed. The shadow consists of rejected personal traits, while the anima is the atypical other.
Vito
Bill,
In relation to political phenomena, we have to remember that Jung makes a distinction between the individual shadow, which arises out personal experience and traumas and which is made up of the individual’s repressed feelings, desires, and memories; and the collective shadow, which arises from society’s values/anathemas and the universal archetypes and which are expressed as shared prejudices and group traumas. The line between the two is not neat, since the personal shadow often includes aspects of society’s collective shadow, as, for example, if society judges certain traits as undesirable. In periods of rapid change or crisis, such as that of the last quarter century, when the stability of society breaks down the collective shadow gains in power, and the moral boundaries (personal shadow) of the individual, while not effaced, can be overawed by the archetypical contents of the collective shadow, expressed as aggression, verbal and physical; destructive impulses; and archaic instincts (irrationality, emotionality, etc.). For instance, a progressive / leftist personal identity bonds with the archetypical self-image of moral purity: the ego, now inflated, identifies with an archetype (Savior/Just Judge), and parades about the world as the opponent of systematic evil and the supporter of justice and equality, rather than recognizing and accepting its human limitations, cognitive and moral. The more inflated the ego, the more repressed and darker the shadow, which becomes aggressive, dominance seeking, exclusionary, sadistic, etc. Since these traits are repulsive to the conscious persona of so many on the Left, they are hence projected onto their political opponents, who are seen and termed as “nazis,” “fascists,” “deplorables,” and so on.
I offer this rough, necessarily partial snapshot of Jung’s system not to insist that it is without flaws, but merely to suggest one means by which to understand the shared, aggressive, irrational, and destructive psychology of the contemporary American Left. Needless to say, the same sort of analysis could be applied to extreme, violent groups or parties on the Right, such as the Nazis or Italian Fascists.
Vito