Ep. 383: Freud on Love and the Primal Horde (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 383, part 2. Finishing up our treatment of Sigmund Freud's group psychology and the analysis of the ego. We pretty much spent our whole time last time talking about one chapter, chapter eight, on being in love and hypnosis. And in Fact didn't really talk about the hypnosis part. And I think we wrapped up kind of thinking about what it is to be a self. And is the idea that we've talked about in past episodes of having a circle of concern, a circle of ethical concern, so that in a broad sense, anything I care about is part of myself, but we understand that it's in a broad sense, so that, you know, my identifications implicate things in the outside world.

I think that's a form of self understanding that now I'm thinking of it during our break is completely compatible with Freud's. Oh well, you know, you could still ask why you've extended your self concern. You could still on some level talk about the thing that you care about being literally yourself as being an extension of your libido, an extension of your ego or something. But he's just talking about something sort of under the hood, whereas our self understanding is just a different thing. So I don't think that Freud's talk necessarily has to obscure or cloud the waters of the other kinds of self understanding that we've talked about on this podcast.

1:30 Wes: In many other cases, there's two questions. Does one think that there might be an objection to depth psychology in general? Does one want to think about the unconscious or about identity in this way or developmental processes and it all becomes very, very speculative? Or the more narrow question is that does Freud have it right? And Freud would admit, as he does many times, the more you read Freud, he's constantly saying, you know, this is probably wrong, it's provisional. Or he's saying, hey, back in this paper, I was wrong. He's just speculating to the best of his ability about this stuff.

And then there's a more than a hundred years of people amending his point of view and trying to make it, trying to get it, to sharpen it. And so there's a lot of things to be said about everything he' saying here in that hundred year conversation that follows. So, and it's a very interesting to me, it's a very interesting conversation. So it's both the case that I don't. Right. Freud has a very, very. This is the beginning of a fleshing out of a picture of the human psyche. This is the very beginning of that project. So it's very incomplete and it's missing a lot.

And you, you can see that just even where he's listing all the different kinds of identification, it's a big idea and it covers so much ground. Right. It's the basis of Depression, but it's also the basis of normal development. And in both cases we give up love objects in a way or we are disappointed by love objects. It's the basis of neurosis, it's the basis of this, it's the basis of that. So it's this huge idea and he's doing a little taxonomy at this point. He doesn't have a rigorous picture of what it is. He's just thinking out loud. And I.

His writing is really about thinking out loud. So. And I actually really, really like that. For me it's a pleasure to read. So that's another, that's a third question. Is it pleasurable to actually read the type of writing that Freud is doing? But yeah, I would say I find this connects to philosophy in very interesting ways. It connects especially to the concept of recognition and Thomas. And then if you think about what Korsgaard was saying about identity and its relationship to normativity, there's a lot of interesting cross pollination for me, but it is all very speculative.

3:38 Mark: Any other preliminary remarks before we get to the. The herd and the horde, I think was the main topic we had not yet covered.

3:45 Seth: I'm ready to go.

3:47 Mark: So yeah, chapter nine is a short one on the herd where he's mostly talking about this other guy, Trotter, Instincts of the herd in peace and war. Who is a guy that just says, you know, basically what Aristotle says, We're social animals. There's no further explanation that is needed or available. Just we like to be around other people. And Trotter points to like little kids there, they feel dread when they're abandoned, when they're alone. And Freud points out, actually they want their parents if they see a stranger, if they merely want to be in a herd, then a stranger would be at least okay. Where. No, actually the dread gets worse when they see a stranger. So Freud is calling on Trotter.

4:29 Wes: Yeah, I mean he, he does think they develop, right. Children as, as you know, children become less shy as time goes on and they are more adapted to having positive feelings towards strangers and not being as anxious around strangers. And, and that kind of lines up with Freud's idea. Yeah, this is a developmental process and group feeling is something that, that develops with time. It's not just instinctual. We don't, we don't have, have it in its final form right out of the womb. And again, he thinks that the developmental process is one of identification. That's what explains how we get there with our relationships to other members of the group. And including other children, if we're children.

5:11 Seth: But yeah, yeah, I mean, I know Freud has his own. His objection right on page 85. But I also questioned when I read this, you know, characterizing us as herd animals, does that really apply to primates and predators? Like, are we herd animals? Because he, he, I, I don't know Greek. But doesn't he make on the page before. What is it, Politicon?

5:36 Wes: We're not herd animals technically, but it's a pejorative that was in the air at the time, via Nietzsche. Right. Nietzsche makes fun of our sociality. We're social beings, we're political beings fundamentally. But if you look at that from a negative point of view, as did Nietzsche, you could call that an impulse to conformity.

5:54 Seth: Yeah, well, in any case, it doesn't matter because Freud says it's not right

5:58 Wes: or disagrees, but you could say, is there a fundamental social instinct that explains. Right. So, so we, the idea is that we would feel anxiety when we're not around others. We have a natural longing to be a part of a group and we have anxiety being separated from it. And yeah, this isn't clear to me. Like, we might have irreducible social ties to others that are not. Right. Derived from libido. And I'm not sure that we know very well. So. Right. There could be a lot of innate stuff to our social existence that we could parse out in a very, very granular way. So what comes from development and what's there from the beginning. I think that's a very, very tricky subject, actually.

6:43 Seth: Yeah, I think the challenge for me is just that the idea that human beings are social animals, political animals, whatever, obviously has been around for a long, long, long, long time. And notwithstanding Nietzsche's description or use of the term herd, I'm not sure that it's. I was pleased when Freud said, you know, we're not really herd. I think horde is a better way of describing it because, you know, what. Why Herd animals or what herd instincts are for are not herd. Animals don't herd because they hate being alone and they long for connection and, you know, companionship and that sort of thing and sociability.

They herd because they have herd characteristics, because they're prey, and herding together is a way that they protect themselves and perpetuate their species and so forth. So I, I didn't find the whole thing useful to begin with when, you know, Nietzsche's using it pejoratively. Right. He's talking about herd is kind of a stand in for group mentality that same dynamic that we were talking about. Talking about earlier. But anyway, I think Freud's point is that herds don't have leaders, or at least he thinks they don't. I'm not sure that's true.

And so as an explanatory tool, it's not. It doesn't have a lot of utility in this context.

8:03 Wes: Yeah. So the question of what's innate and what's not. I think there's a lot that's innate. I just want to point out. And this is part of what the way Freud, I think, gets amended by later theorists. Like if you remember our episode on fonagy, there's a lot that's happening between mother and infant that is really. It's more about Hegel recognition stuff. The infant needs to be mirrored even to develop a theory of mind and to develop language. And a lot of what we look for others is this mirroring recognition function, which is deeply tied to identification and identity and all the stuff that Freud is talking about.

And I would say that that is going on very early in development. And in a way it's an instinctual innate thing. Right. I would be more inclined to say that. That there's some seed of it there from the beginning, even if it has to be developed, this need to be seen by another and the relationship between that and the development of self consciousness and language and capacity for joint attention, blah, blah, blah. But anyway, not to get us bogged down in that, but yeah, Freud doesn't like the herd instinct. And yeah, when I think about herds

9:09 Dylan: and whores and people who are. So that there's the aspect of people following along what everybody else is doing. And there's something related. But it does seem distinct when we're talking about. When I think of hordes, I think more of like, of I'll call it mob mentality or like especially violent actions that are associated with groups of people that often seem basically leaderless, certainly in any kind of extended way. There might be a kind of a local leader, but that there's a combination of individual people going along with activities that either they disagree with or they participate at a level, you know, they go out and they're.

They're on the prowl for traitors. And so they, they haul them out of their houses and are beating them up or killing them. But then there's the underlying part of that that seems to be coming from individuals which is some kind of dominance activity. Right. It's not the horde that is leading to people being pulled out of their houses. It's individual people's desires that seem to be getting amplified in some way that might also enable a kind of. This was talked about earlier, a kind of safety, kind of strength in numbers that comes along that enables those individual actions to be brought out.

Right. But it's not the horde that is grabbing somebody by the ankles, dragging them out of their house and beating somebody to death. It's an individual or two people together or whatever that are somehow acting on their own psychological impulses.

10:46 Wes: Yeah. But Freud thinks that their relationship to a group or to an identity or to.

10:51 Dylan: It's critical to that.

10:52 Wes: Yeah. Is to. They've integrated it into themselves. They've internalized all this stuff. So, yeah, they can act alone once they've done that. But it's. We, in a way, we bring the group into ourselves, into our own mind when we develop a superego. But the controversial thing he says in this section, and it kind of leads into the whole horde thing, is that when we develop altruistic ethical impulses towards other people, those are actually rooted in hostility and envy. He's not the first person to say it. Right. So Nietzsche, it's all will to power.

Morality is constructed out of will to power, up to power. Manitz does it in this deflationary, reductive way. Or Hegel. Right. Master slave dynamics lead to reciprocity, which is the ethical. So we start out always in this more sinister power struggle mode, and then it has to get stabilized into something ethical. And here Freud is making a very similar type of claim, which is that there's a developmental process which takes these negative, hostile feelings, a kind of psychological state of nature, if you will. And he's going to get into the group version of that in the next chapter with the primal horde, which is really his state of nature theory, psychological state of nature, which through identification through a tender tie to a leader.

Right. Through an affectionate tie to some leader or leading idea, leads to identification with peers and settles down that natural hostility and envy between people. And we see in groups, we can put aside a lot of our irritations that we might otherwise have and say, well, yeah, I'm an American or I'm a human, or I'm this, I'm that. My identity. Right. And they are too. And therefore I'm not just simply going to react to them as if they're objects of frustration.

12:40 Mark: So it sounds like we need to just get the primal horde story out in full. You're inching into there, Wes. Right. So the Totem and Taboo, which is a book that we've never Covered officially. We might have brought up parts of it in our, the Civilization and Its Discontents discussion. But he actually attributes to Darwin the idea that primitive society is a horde ruled despotically. So, and I think that is the starting point of Hegel as well. Right. That contra the social contract theorists, the first society is somebody bashing somebody else over the head.

Like that's how we get things going. So it's the. You've got a primal father who's actually sort of has no judgments on him, no superego, no, you know, completely is, is the Nietzschean ubermensch as Freud characterizes it, and rules right. Without limitation over all of the rest of his family. So the kids. In fact, he prohibits sexual activity. You know, all the women are mine, so my sons can have none of them. So they have to have this aim inhibited love for each other. They develop fellow feeling, you know, through this identification with this subservience to the father.

And eventually the band of brothers will get together and kill the father and feel bad about that and that'll be the origins of conscience. Yeah, fill in the blanks there.

13:57 Wes: Yeah. So yeah, this is very speculative and it is like a state of nature social contract account. But the idea is that there's, you know, I kind of think of it in terms of. I don't know if how much, how many nature documentaries or things you've read about the social organization of chimpanzees, but it's pretty bleak with the alpha male dominating and everyone else is on the outs and, and that's what this reminds me of. So there's an alpha male that monopolizes all the sexual opportunities and ultimately once he gets old enough, one of the younger males, as they get mature enough that is going to do battle with him and depose him and then become the alpha, the one, the despotic primal horde leader who's.

Who rules everything. And the theory here is that we gotta. Right, we can speculate. And Freud understands, by the way, this is an extremely speculative thought experiment. It's not meant to be taken literally, but it's a model for understanding how historically this might have happened. And I think we would have to think about it in terms of evolutionary. Like how a transition from a. An ancestor who was more like the chimpanzee or you know, it's a common ancestor with the chimpanzee and the kind of social relations that that creature had and then our type of social relations which has somehow evolved out of that.

So it involves, I think, you know, we gotta permanently Depose the despot to become a community. Our group can't simply be ruled by this despotic figure. But then how do we get there?

15:33 Mark: And he does have this idea of. And this is laid out explicitly in Civilization and Its Discontents, that the primal structures continue to exist in us alongside the modern variations. So he talks about it like, you know, when you're walking through modern Rome and like, oh, hey, there's a pillar, there's the Colosseum. These things that are just left from another time. And that's the way that the mind is that. So if there are. So you could say this is speculative, but, you know, it's based on these. His guests during. When he's treating patients of like, oh, it looks like there's this ancient structure that you're. We. I can only explain why you're doing this really irrational thing by saying, oh, you've stumbled on some ancient structure there. So it's actually not that far from, you know, Jung's collective unconscious kind of thing. You know, he's got some.

16:26 Dylan: Or just evolutionary psychology.

16:27 Mark: Yes, exactly.

16:29 Dylan: It also gets. I mean, I think of someone like Tomasello again here because the notion that we have as part of our onboard capabilities and landscape of possibility, the social interactions of chimpanzees is part of it. That makes a lot of sense and that ends up being part of the landscape of possibility. But it also makes a lot of sense to not just. Well, what I find myself reacting against is a little bit like that is the notion that somehow that's what we are, are just chimpanzees. That also just seems to be. To be wrong.

17:06 Wes: Yeah, we're worse than chimpanzees.

17:07 Dylan: Just kidding. Well, maybe there's something to.

17:15 Wes: Now we got a few million years on the chimps, a few million years of evolution.

17:20 Dylan: I mean, for me, I think of it as genuinely more complicated and I think, you know, even though you're. I think you're saying it sort of sardonically, Wes. But there is something that is sort of frightening about the level of possibility that we have socially amongst people. And it's impossible to deny that there are impulses and activities and there are times and places and ways in which there's super amount of effectiveness of the way in which somebody might act, just as if our social interactions are like chimpanzee social interactions.

17:58 Wes: So I think the general idea is in chimpanzees, it's not like there's much of a developed moral code. For instance, there's. There is a culture. I would Say, and I think if you look at these documentaries, there's very interesting ways in which there is a kind of culture and even different cultures between different groups of chimpanzees. And one could say there are norms, but it's very, very undeveloped. And I think the idea here is that the normativity lies in general in despotic male. It's his way or the highway. And as we develop evolutionarily and socially, the moral code gets outsourced into a structure, into something which isn't just in any particular one figure.

So in that sense, we have to kill off the despot as the locus of the moral code in order to locate it within the community in some structural way as something more abstract. And that gets almost like a virus or a DNA code that, right. That gets transmitted from one generation to the next and infects us, right, by way of identification, we incorporate these values. So this larger discursive process becomes the authority figure. And that seems to me to be roughly right and must be part of what happens. It's not like we lose the authority because values can be pretty despotic.

Like Freud thought the sexual values of his times were pretty despotic. And people can have despotic conscience, bad conscience, as Nietzsche would put it, a very harsh superego, and that they persecute themselves with, which is almost like the despotic male leader living on within us. But I think this type of explanation that he's giving, again, very speculative, and we can't really accept it on a literal, literal level. I think the part of the appeal here is he's trying to. At the end of this section, he's trying to get out, what is it? But that gives us a quote unquote passion for authority or a thirst for obedience.

In some way. We can regress in a group and love the strong men, love the Hitler, love the Mussolini, love whoever else you might want to put in that category politically. What is it? Yeah, why do we suddenly get into this mode of, ooh, I want to be obedient to this super powerful leader and screw democracy.

20:14 Dylan: So this is interesting, the notion that there's a kind of hierarchy of influence in. I end up thinking of it primitive sort of primitive psychology kinds of things, is thinking of it evolutionarily. So if you say the further back you go in the layers of our evolutionary abilities, the older ones are somehow stronger in a sense that there would be a tendency to regress back to them. You know, sort of a lizard brain kind of thinking. And, you know, you have the Same kind of understanding of what are the wheels and the mechanics of our psychology or our physiology, you know, that are partly at work.

I don't know how you confirm, you know, I guess there's just the observation that it seems to happen and the speculation that the reason for under certain circumstances there being a power in the despot for individuals is that it is somehow activating a ancient psychological pathway for us, either as being a despot or as being party to despotism.

21:22 Wes: Yeah, I'm not sure this is right either because in a way it's more advanced. It's really confusing because identification capacity for identification is much more advanced than what can occur in other animals. And so one might look at.

21:37 Seth: I would say, yeah, it's not just much more advanced. I'd say it can occur in other animals.

21:42 Dylan: What can?

21:42 Seth: Cannot identification.

21:44 Wes: You're saying it can't.

21:45 Seth: Can't occur at all in other animals. It's not just much more advanced. I would say the whole idea, the whole act of identification, the way Freud describes it, I feel like is a strictly human phenomenon, but it doesn't matter. Keep going.

21:58 Wes: Well, so the reason why I put in that kind of caveat is because when mirror neurons, for instance, neuroscience is showing that in a sense, acts of, of proto identification are part of perception, especially of social phenomenon. So, so one monkey can look at another performing a purposive task and understand it's purposive. And they do that. They. If you look at what's going on neurobiologically, they're putting themselves in the place of that other monkey. It's a. To understand what that monkey is doing. It's that they're imagining and maybe not even consciously, but they have a way of putting themselves in the place of another monkey. So I think identification, again, is this big term that has all kinds of levels, but the way we do it. Yeah, I think, Seth, you're right. Once we get to the more socially advanced stuff, of course animals can't do that.

22:45 Seth: So one thing that's interesting about, and forgive me if he brings this up earlier, but because the postscript was the most recent thing I read and it's quite a nice. Got a, quite a nice little summary, by the way, at the end, and is itself basically a kind of summary. Freud does something interesting here with this speculative thought experiment about the leader in the horde in that he shifts the order of the family as an organizational or a group unit in, let's call it the development of human grouping or quote, unquote, history. Right. And he also acknowledges his.

The parricide of the horde leader at the beginning makes possible an era of matriarchal organization in society. And it's kind of like again, I'm sure this is much more explained in much more detail someplace else. But for all of the social contract theory and Hegelian things and all the stuff we've looked at, when we've looked at history and organization, the Chinese philosophy, the family unit is the fundamental structure for human organization and it forms the basis. And the father as the head of the family is kind of taken as the model. Right.

For and for Freud, there's this stage ahead of that before that that, you know, has to do that we essentially have to go through. And then there's this period of leaderless society until there's this development of, you know, through the heroic poet of the narrative of the dead father and all this other kind of stuff. But I thought that was particularly interesting, especially in the context of he. These sort of comments he has dropped here and there about the sexual impulse and the idea that that's one on one versus versus group and that the evolution of love, let's call it feelings of tenderness or a higher order of love above the sexual urgent that he says probably wasn't there to begin with, that we only form those emotional bonds later.

It's a remarkably complex picture that is really at odds with a lot of the other stuff that we've read. I thought that was interesting.

25:03 Mark: Cleaned up the bit about hypnosis we didn't really talk about in the previous. But here he's. Oh, we've actually given the answer here that this situation that's sort of written by evolution, by this primal experience into our psyches that. But, you know, whereas some other theorists might have thought that the power of suggestion is just a basic thing. And so actually hypnosis ends up explaining some of what group psychology is here. No, it's the primal horde is why hypnosis is possible. Because it's like you're saying, hey, you know, focus on my little swinging watch here.

Block out all of the social. You know, he said you can't even under hypnosis really just, okay, go kill your friend. Like you can have him cluck like a chicken. But like, clearly they're maintaining some sor. Sort of conscience and they're. It's going to break them out of this. But you're at least in a very light way. If you're not challenging them to do anything too out of character, it's very easy for them to just Consider the hypnotist, like the primal Father, that now I will obey your commands.

26:03 Wes: How does he me give this phrase here? The archaic idea of a paramount and dangerous personality towards whom only a passive, masochistic attitude is possible, to whom one's will has to be surrendered. I just love that. Love that line. But the idea is, right. It's a dominant. The theory is that hypnosis is a dominance submission phenomenon. And we know this is hardwired into the brain.

26:27 Mark: Right.

26:27 Wes: The hypothalamus governs dominance and submission behavior. It's very, very deeply ingrained at a biological level. And is he right? I'm not sure. But it seems possible that we could understand hypnosis in terms of social hierarchy and dominance and submission.

26:44 Mark: Would the rock be a better hypnotist than somebody? Yeah, you know, somebody who's Has a force of character and is physically imposing. I don't know. I hadn't really thought of that as. Not that I think about hypnotism much at all, but had not thought of it as a dominance game.

27:00 Wes: Well, yeah. I mean, what is it that happens when people are. I'm not even sure it's real. I mean, I don't know. I guess it is, but I've always been. Do you guys think it's real? I don't know. When people get on stage and act like a chicken, are they just playing along or are they hypnotized or is the line too blurry? Right. But it seems like they do want to submit in some way.

27:21 Dylan: Yeah, I read a little bit about this because I find myself super skeptical about the implications of the manifestation. And the stuff I read indicated that there are people who are, quote, unquote, very suggestible. But there is a submission activity that's going on.

27:38 Wes: Right.

27:39 Dylan: They're sort of letting themselves into it and that they may be more capable of that kind of submission, which probably aligns with a big chunk of what Freud is talking about. That just the notion of giving yourself over to something where you are basically interrupting yourself in the middle. I don't want to use the word ego or superego or ego ideal because I'm not sure I'm using them correctly. But there's a kind of short interrupting of a reflective self in the middle of that submission. Right. And giving yourself over to it. So you're just. You're just following directions. You're just doing what you're. You said. And that people vary in their submissive mischaracteristics.

28:20 Wes: And I think I like the application to Ideals and elite leading ideas and leaders. Because even if we don't think of ourselves as having experienced it that much in relationships to a leader. Right. We're not into the strong men. We might say, well, I love, you know, I think maybe with like St. John's for instance. I love liberal arts. Liberal arts is the. It's the most important thing in the world. It helps make us. Give us freedom of thought and is politically so important and blah, blah, blah. And I think there is an attitude of submission in that there's a desire to be. To submit oneself to a higher ideal. Something that isn't simply a matter of my own pleasure and self interest, even though I get a lot of pleasure out of it. But. But it's not simply self interested. I want to submit to something else as the authority.

29:13 Seth: I went to a hypnotist years back to help with I chew my fingernails. I have since I came out of the womb. I tried everything else to try to stop it. And my experience of the hypnotic process, if you will, is that it's really. At least in my case it was just a very deep state of relaxation, sort of like meditation almost. And I guess part of that process is to get you into a state of suggestibility or maybe where you'll be more receptive or the things will land more, you know, whatever, so you're not preoccupied with other thoughts or you're not kind of counteracting the suggestions with immediate denials or so forth like any of the typical psychological defense mechanisms you might have.

And I actually learned a really, really useful technique for recreating that state outside of the. But. And now maybe it's because my hypnotist was not trying to make me cluck like a chicken or whatever the cliche is that, that I didn't do it. But I also kind of don't feel like even when I was in that state, if she said get up and take your shirt off or something, that I would have done it. I was still very fully present and aware of what was going on. I was just so relaxed.

30:38 Dylan: Yeah. So if somebody walked into the room and she said, okay, go beat this person with the baseball bat. I'm handing you that.

30:46 Seth: I wouldn't have been capable. I wouldn't have react. I wouldn't have reacted, but I wouldn't have even been capable. I mean, the biggest thing I was in danger of doing was falling asleep.

30:57 Wes: Did you stop biting your nails?

30:59 Seth: No.

30:59 Mark: Yeah. That's why I was thinking, you know, it doesn't seem like it's Dominance, because it is lulling you, so it's seductive. It's somehow, you know, it's interfering with your will, but not in, like, the brute force. My will is greater than your will.

31:13 Seth: Yeah. I have to say this. I mean, have you guys seen this guy? He's been around for a long time. Derren Brown. You ever heard of Derren Brown?

31:23 Dylan: Okay.

31:24 Seth: Listeners look him up on YouTube or whatever, and you guys should check him out. He's, you know, I think they call him Mentalist. He might have been one of the ones that came up with that. And he has had television shows and specials and stuff like that. He's English, but he can get people to do things I don't want to say against their will. I'll say unwittingly, and to reveal things that they're trying to conceal. And it's like whatever he does, like, is real. It's not magic, but it is real magic. Like, it's phenomenal.

32:02 Mark: Sure.

32:03 Dylan: But I mean, so one of the things about Mentalism is there is being able to read people and stuff like that. My whole take on that would be he's really good at picking people who are suggestible. And then also part of being suggestible is you could also. I'm going to pick people are suggestible who are also exhibitionists. Right. And he's very, very good at finding those people and then going from there. I mean, that's how I would read that kind of thing. Okay.

32:32 Seth: I can't dispute that. I can't say that he doesn't do that. But what I can say is that what you learn about people watching what he does is how suggestible we actually are. He can literally make people make choices without them having any awareness that they're doing it. Because he set the stage to do this.

32:54 Dylan: That's how all the Mentalist magic works, is by having been very skillful at the whole thing with the audience. Penn and Teller, they're making something happen in all of the envelopes and all that stuff. It's all very astute manipulation of people.

33:11 Seth: Absolutely. But my point is that's a proof point for suggestibility.

33:16 Dylan: This is why Conning works.

33:18 Seth: Yeah. But it's just kind of phenomenal to me. And I don't believe that I would be an exception to that rule if I was in that same situation. But again, here, back to our conversation. I think the question is, or a question is, what puts a lot of stock in the leadership, the leader of the group or the leader of the Horde thing like that? Having an individual. And I Know, Wes, that we started off talking about how you could substitute an idea for a leader. And I wonder if it isn't the idea for the leader. Makes more sense once a group has reached an organizational phase or reached a level of organization that's more mature.

34:03 Wes: I don't think so, because I think nationalism is a real phenomenon and it doesn't require an organized group like an army or a religion.

34:12 Seth: That's interesting.

34:13 Wes: And I do think. I think it's usually an ideal or an idea. I think people are much more right. There's more of that going on with people than with actual charismatic leaders at this point. We have more of these types of relationships to. To values and. And ideals where we're in love with them and we submit to them. We're hypnotized by them. So norms.

34:36 Mark: Yeah. So the whole. Again, the arc. Love is like you're being entranced by an individual. They've taken over your superego. You're really focused on them. Hypnotism, sort of like that, but temporary, that being dominated. You're being set back to the experience of being a member of the primal horde, and you're going to. But likewise, at least for some temporary purposes, the hypnotist is taking over the role of the superego. Do we want to then say, along with Freud, that, yes, leadership. Because that does point at it being more effective, like the Le Bon.

Like the actual being in a mob with a leader right there who's saying, everybody, let's get them. And you know, as we were talking about in our last week, when you get more. When you're not talking about, like an actual gathering of people, but you're talking like, like about a group identification, like nationalism, it seems harder for that analogy of somebody that is immediately exerting their will on you, you know, to happen over the Internet, for instance, even putting aside these technological things, that we have such more dispersed groups than Freud could have possibly dream of, do we feel like he is right, or am I missing something in drawing this analogy, drawing this direct line between love, hypnosis, leadership of a group.

Do you buy it? Because all you're saying, Wes, about. Well, actually, it's more common for it to be a leading idea. This seems to be a disanalogy, or maybe it's just more evolution.

36:08 Wes: Why is it a disanalogy?

36:10 Mark: Because there's not a person there that there's an idea standing in for the person. So the idea of Christ.

36:17 Wes: Well, it's not standing in for a person.

36:19 Dylan: Person.

36:19 Wes: You can have a person as a leader, but you can also have an idea as a leader.

36:22 Mark: I just thought that for Freud, he wants to say that the person is the primary thing. And, okay, we can explain how, for instance, the idea of Christianity would take over from the person of Christ who was never actually the leader in the first place. It was Paul, who is the guy who was actually gathering people and saying, do the. You know, whoever your church, there are active representatives of the leadership. But there's not. I mean, I guess there is in. In George Washington becomes nationalism or something.

36:54 Wes: So this is page 53. We should consider whether groups with leaders may or may not be more primitive and complete. Whether in others an idea and abstraction may be substituted for the leader. Whether a common tendency, a wish in which a number of people can share may not in some way serve as a substitute. So my interpretation is that he doesn't want us to take leader literally to be a person necessarily, and that a leading idea is not just left over from some particular person like Christ. It can just be the primary thing. And that, you know, even if he's not saying that, that.

That to me is the right account. Not to underestimate the power of a strong man and that type of effect, but I think, think that's just more obvious. And I think we can all comfort ourselves and say, well, I'm not like that person who wants to submit to the strong men and do terrible things, right? Because really the subject of this book is why people commit atrocities, even though it's not explicit. Why do people do terrible things in the context of a group? And the answer is that the conscience has to be replaced by something. And it can be replaced by this hypnotic, powerful leader to which we want to submit.

But I think it can also be replaced by an idea. So if a German. So if you look at. I've read a lot about Nazis, Better for worse. You know, if you look at what's going on in the Nazi party In World War II Germany, is there Hitler worship? Yes. Does every Nazi love Hitler? No. Especially not in the beginning when there's a lot of power struggles within the Nazi party. What do they love, though? Germany. What do they love? The Aryan, you know, Völkisch movement. They love the idea, you know, this idea that there's a pure German character that's been corrupted by Jews and others that to me is more powerful.

And that movement precedes Hitler, you know, now did. To really execute it in the worst way possible, do you need a charismatic figure like Hitler? Maybe. But what's more important to me, is that the conscience, the kind of thing that might prevent you from killing innocent people, can get replaced by this attachment. You know, this is like Beauvoir Serious Men, really, when it comes down to it. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but that to me, is what he's saying. And if he's not, that would be the more powerful account for him.

39:14 Mark: So that sounds reasonable. But does that undermine his emphasis here in the climax of the book on the horde? Because it just doesn't sound like you're describing the horde anymore when you're saying it's a powerful idea.

39:26 Wes: Well, right. That's the primitive situation, though, to which we might regress. I mean, that's right.

39:31 Mark: That.

39:31 Wes: To me, I was suggesting that we think of that as this kind of transitional space between our. We. Right. Before authority can be vested in norms or in ideals, it's vested in a personage at some primitive level historically or, you know, in this kind of state of nature thought experiment. But that's not necessarily. It doesn't. Right. We're much different now than we were in that primal horde situation. And again, I don't even think we're human at the point where there's a primal horde. He's getting this out of Darwin. He thinks, and I think this would be a pre human, quasi human, you know, type of creature.

40:11 Dylan: To me, think about individuals. This is where you, you know, somebody who is just deeply overcome by substance addiction. When we talk about, you know, we'll use language like, they're not even acting like a human being. And part of that to me is you're saying is that. That's a correct observation, but they're not acting like a human being. Has to do with their physiomechanics. Is being regressed.

40:39 Seth: I wonder. So, Wes, you're using the example of Nazi Germany, the things that came together to make the ground fertile for the rise of the Nazi party. And Weimar Germany had started in the previous century. Right. I mean, there were books written and. Yeah, well, you had Bismarck and nationalism and all these things. And then you had the First World War and the economic reparations which were imposed upon. And then I think about that and contrast that maybe to Stalinism. You would want to say, like, is Stalinism actually. Like, there's a part of me that wants to say, did people worship him and was it a Stalinist state similar in its kind of conviction to the Nazi state?

41:26 Dylan: Did Stalin ever have the kind of public support that was part of. Maybe he did early on, before he. You know, sent 20 million people to gulags.

41:36 Seth: That's exactly my question. Is that. Is that maybe an example of. Well, here you have a leader, but we don't have a party or a group. I mean, you do obviously have a Communist party.

41:47 Wes: Yeah, this is an example more of a. The ideal being the having a leading idea, which was communism. People were, I think, much more animated by communism, but. Than by Stalin in particular.

41:59 Seth: Yeah. So, I mean, I think maybe what it means is that like you say that Freud's trying to make something out of the need for a leader because of. He wants to have this genealogy of totem and taboo and all that sort of thing. But I think you're right in pointing out, like, the motivations of people in these groups can be complicated and can be. Be widespread and deep rooted. And the leader, you know, the leader can embody values, can also champion ideals, can simply be a focus point around which, like. Right. Sometimes it takes just one person who's willing to step up and say something that many people think, but people are afraid to say. And so it's not really about any virtues that they have or anything that they represent, but their willingness to. To point to something or to say something. So I think there's. It's a complex.

42:54 Wes: No, I think this is a really good point because in a way, they have to. If we're talking about a person now, they do get idealized, but they get idealized by way of representing an ideal, I think, usually. So why are people fascinated with Trump, who in a way is a grotesque figure? Freud makes this point. You don't need someone who's virtuous in some obvious sense, but you do need someone whose characteristics are exaggerated and salient in that sense, someone. So being grotesque in character and physically as well, is actually. Can be very helpful, but rather than hurting you.

But what is it that they read into that? What does he become a signifier for? You know, a whole constellation of ideas, especially about the. These alien others polluting our society. You know, just like with the Nazis, frankly. Right. Immigrants, in this case, with the idea that America is under threat, under threat from within. It has to be purified. These are all very typical nationalist ideas, and I think these are the animating force. And a particular leader just becomes a cipher for them.

43:56 Dylan: And you're making me think about the past episode where we brought up the notion of leaders knowing how this works, whether intuitively or learning it, but knowingly exploiting the ways in which people act and behave in these ways. And so, Wes, you brought this up that there's a kind of exploitation of group psychology thinking in Mein Kampf. And for someone who's super charismatic, I think it goes to saying that when we say somebody's really charismatic or they're very, really good at the politics of groups and those interactions, they very least have a kind of intuitive feel about it.

44:38 Wes: It.

44:39 Dylan: Whether they studied it, they studied how people act and then exploit it, or whether they know it and know how to exploit it, that that's happening. And that's the kind of thing that I would say has been characteristic of someone like Trump is he's able to. He hones in on those kinds of things.

44:58 Mark: So we haven't related the Trump situation back to the old canard. You know, we're talking about Trump and Freud. Oh, Trump is America's id. Trump lets people channel their id. It lets that there's something more nihilistic than Hitler or somebody like that and cynical and so that I gotta believe that even some of these people that are making, you know, Trump embracing Jesus memes and things like that are being silly about it, like that they are trolling such that, you know, it is, ah, everything is disgusting. Everybody is worthless. You know, at least this guy is going to be honest with you about it.

So is he actually doing anything? I mean, the way we described it, the leader becomes the superego. Well, this is a leader, you know, a super ego that's more pleasant to have than traditional morality because it lets you sort of do whatever you want. Yeah. Any thoughts about is he different than other leaders in channeling more of the id, or is that just, just. No, that's the way Hitler did it. That's the way, you know, all these powerful leaders seduce you by giving you something that is more fun to follow than the traditional superego.

46:10 Seth: Yeah.

46:10 Wes: Your ID is unleashed in relation to some out out group and that's the other political party and it's the whatever scapegoat you've got going, Jews or immigrants or others. So. And again, I think we see that with Trump. I don't know that it's very different. Right. We just. We replace our conscience with endorsement of violent impulses towards others because they're the bad ones, you know, and it's necessary to get rid of them or to dominate them.

46:42 Mark: But this is not all that people are referring to when they say that Trump is the id, Right. It's his lack of manners. It's his, you know, that you can say words that are really.

46:53 Wes: Well, the importance of that is he models the will Right. Will to power.

46:57 Dylan: Power.

46:57 Wes: And it's not just an accident that the Nazis were into that, because this is all about unleashing the will. So any of these leaders, right, it's not morality that's important anymore. It's the pure will becomes the imperative. That is the moral imperative that we all be able to impose our will, especially on those who are going to destroy us otherwise.

47:17 Dylan: Well, I mean, in this case it seems to be, it isn't a we all need to be able to impose our will will, it's that I need to be able to impose my will. Right. And you might get it dressed up like, well, it's a dog eat dog fight. It's all about imposing my will. And I'm going to impose my will because. And I'm going to win. And the only way you're going to be able to depose me is by taking me out, that kind of thing. But it does seem to me that there is a lot of modeling of an explicit just activity of the imposition of will for its own sake as its own gratification and its own demonstration of attempted demonstration of dominance.

And to me, what it becomes kind of just sort of surprisingly sort of comical in sort of not understanding the limits of their own will. You know, even when it's also already dangerous. There's just comically can think that. Well, just because I say it's true, it's true. And it becomes just sort of. There's a lot of this just sort of buffoonery. And what's interesting to me about Trump is I tend to think that lots of people think he's a buffoon, including people who explicitly routinely support him or routinely go along with him. And I don't know how much of it is on their part, you know, calculated to.

He's managing to get things done that I want him to get done, but he's a buffoon. Or is it? He's is explicitly threatening and dangerous to people and wrecking their lives and trying to do bad things to people. I think it's probably a combination of those.

48:56 Wes: Yeah, he's a buffoon, but he's strong willed. And in many cases his buffoonery illustrates his strong will. So when he says something stupid and false, many of us will react in horror to that and others will just think it's true. But there might be middle ground. You know, there's a lot of double think going on here too. People might think it's true and not true at the same time, symbolically true, but there's A middle domain where someone could say, yeah, I get that he's a buffoon, but it's what the buffoonery signifies. And this is the point I was trying to make.

It signifies an unleashing of will. Will is not subject even to truth, subject to nothing. And there's a special delight in that. And I don't, don't necessarily get to do that myself, but I get to identify with it in someone else. And I might get to do it myself if I'm engaged in a pogrom or if I'm on social media and I get to, you know, do it in fantasy and do hateful stuff on social media. That's where I get to put aside my conscience. Right. But it's, for the most part, I have to rely on identifying with Trump or with the institutions that he's creating or corrupting.

And this is Orwell's right theory of nationalism as well. I identify with this group superiority or leader superiority, because I feel generally powerless in my own life and society. And I want to borrow that feeling of power from identification.

50:19 Mark: Yes. And it might be that we, the Trumpians, see Trump more as one of them than as their leader. Yes, there sometimes is oh, Daddy's home, but not necessarily that they think that Trump is this so much smarter than that. In fact, the whole thing is like, at least, you know, he's not one of these elites that is pretending to be smarter than I am. He is with us in this struggle. So even if they, you know, so it is America or whatever the idea, even though we talk about it as the cult of Trump, it's not really the cult of Trump that he is, is presenting himself or, you know, is successful because he is perceived as a new way of being with rather than.

So it might be related to the primal horde, but he's not showing up as the daddy to whom we all, you know, can regress and worship. Like, it's not that thing. It is an anti worship sort of mentality, which in some ways makes it healthier than something that is truly a cult of personality and worship. But in other ways, it makes it worse.

51:18 Wes: I don't know. I do think a lot of people are very worshipful of him, from what I've seen. But yeah, I mean, I think the central point that you're making is important, which is that it's maga. It's the ideal is the thing, is the bigger leader making America great again. Trump attached himself to a winning ideal, and that's the despot.

51:38 Mark: All right. Any other final Thoughts, Seth, do you have a closing or anything?

51:42 Seth: I think if we were going to have another 10 minutes of conversation, I would return one last time to trying to understand the mechanism of how tender feelings, you know, the ability to love without sexuality or sexual interest. I'm sure there's a more technical way to say it without treating somebody as a sexual object, that that is a derivative form of libidinal relationship that involves the suppression or repression of sexual feelings. Because in the postscript he talks about how it's rare or impossible to have a great, amazing purely sexual relationship with somebody that blossoms out of which comes feelings of love.

Whereas you can have feelings of love for somebody and have that kind of relationship and it can lead to sexuality, to a sexual relationship, so to speak. And again, I don't know, we could probably talk for a long time about what that looks like in the individual and group dynamic and how that might play out. And it's a very rich and, no pun intended, suggestive idea that I could spend more time on if we were going to. But like I said, I like a lot of things about this. I just, like I said, I struggle when we get kind of deep into aspects of his theory that I'm sure he explicates in more detail and justifies.

I hope a lot of these things just sound like bald assertions of fact without any justification, which is difficult. But I didn't get hostile to him that way because as Wes told us, this is kind of like his greatest hits. So I'm glad we did a second episode.

53:24 Mark: You've made me Google books about Agape of Love. You know, like C.S. lewis, the Four Loves, Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, one I've never heard of, Charles Sanders Peirce's Evolutionary Love. Anyway, there's room for more discussion in this area. Next time we're turning to something totally different. It's Object Oriented Ontology, A New Theory of Everything, the 2018 book by Graham Harman. So we're going to talk about that. And then the following episode. Graham Harman himself is at least right now scheduled to be on with us talking about his new book.

So we're going to have a twofer to introduce folks to this important current philosopher talking about something completely different than Freud. You can reach out to us, tell us what you want us to read about agape or metaphysics or anything else. Pel partiallyexaminedlife.com or comment on the blog post associated with this episode@partiallyexaminedlife.com or you can reach us through Facebook through Twitter, through Instagram. Thanks, everybody, and good night.

54:21 Seth: Good night.

54:22 Dylan: Good night.