Corrupt Institutions and the Deep-State Fantasy
Trump Tower, Penthouse: The Trump apartment, decorated in 24K gold and marble, was designed by Angelo Donghia in Louis XIV style.
I think it is safe to say that Donald Trump has become, and likely will remain, famous for one thing above all others: corruption. He shamelessly used his office to enrich himself, indeed, for him, enriching himself was the primary purpose of the office to which he was elected. He clearly saw no reason to hide his conviction that, when you are president, and even when you are not, might makes right. He may have been concerned about legal liability for instrumental reasons, but moral liability meant nothing to him.
Small acts of corruption are commonplace in organizations. The corruption exemplified by Trump is another matter. It may indicate the presence of something more than a simple excess of greed and weakness in ethical character. It may indicate the presence of a purpose that goes beyond personal enrichment. And, given the substantial popularity of the corrupt president, there is reason to assume that the purpose built into his corruption represents not simply a personality aberration, but a social-cultural reality of broader scope.
To understand this purpose, we need to consider how the goal of those who are corrupt in this broader sense is not just to get a disproportionate share of the good things, but to corrupt others and, more importantly, to corrupt institutions and what they represent. Corrupting institutions is a way for the corrupt to tell us something about the institutions we value, which is that their seeming virtues hide a dark reality. To get their message across, rather than telling us what they want us to know in so many words, they show us. Instead of telling us that institutions are corrupt, they corrupt them and thereby assure that what they already knew about them is, in fact, true.
The experience conveyed in this way is the experience we associate with being the victim of a con. To be conned is to be persuaded of the truth of something that is not true, to be deceived as a means to gain advantage, to give away something of value under the false pretense that something of greater value will be received in return. Central to the experience of being conned, then, is the opposition between appearance and reality. In the con, something that appears to be good turns out to be bad. Corrupting institutions is intended to overcome the opposition between appearance and reality by destroying the façade of a virtuous world in order to reveal what lies beneath.
What happens when everything is a con? If everything is a con, the good simply ceases to exist; all that appears to be good is not. In a corrupt world, being bad—corrupt—is being good at getting the best of others. So, being good means being better at being bad. This means that the virtue under attack by those who would corrupt our institutions is virtue itself.
Those whose inner worlds are dominated by a corruption fantasy will do what they can to incorporate institutions into that fantasy as the only way they can make sense of them.
In the corrupt world, there is only the struggle over who will gain the advantage by whatever means available. This is the Hobbesian war of every man against every man. In the corrupt world, there is nothing else. This means that, where corruption dominates in the mental lives of individuals, relations among them and the institutions in which they do their work and lead their lives can only be understood as vehicles for the exercise of power.
If we assume that this perception is extreme, though perhaps not altogether wrong, then, to understand it, we need to consider it a construction not of the external world but of the inner world, in other words as fantasy. Those whose inner worlds are dominated by a corruption fantasy will do what they can to incorporate institutions into that fantasy as the only way they can make sense of them. They incorporate institutions into their fantasy in two ways. First, they see in all institutions and the norms associated with them a façade behind which lies the exercise of raw power and the struggle over it. Second, in their conduct they seek to foster the destruction of institutions so far as they are not reducible to vehicles for the exercise of power.
The deep-state fantasy is especially powerful among Trump supporters—the so-called MAGA crowd—and accounts for much of their animosity toward government and their support for Trump’s unrelenting attack on governmental institutions and norms.
Consider, in this connection, the “deep state” fantasy that has come to play a prominent role in fictional depictions of politics in the US and in the rhetoric of some political movements [1,2]. In the deep-state fantasy, the real power over government institutions resides not in the elected office holders who seem to be in charge but in secret networks of unelected government officials and the heads of private corporations who are unknown to citizens and yet exert unlimited power, including the power over life and death. They use their power partly for self-aggrandizement and partly to gain the gratification having power over others affords. The deep-state fantasy is especially powerful among Trump supporters—the so-called MAGA crowd—and accounts for much of their animosity toward government and their support for Trump’s unrelenting attack on governmental institutions and norms.
When you enter into the deep-state fantasy, you do not know who to trust and who intends you harm. You do not know when doing your job protects your country and when it puts your country at risk. You are dominated by feelings of uncertainty linked to confusion about the motives of others and distrust for those on whom you depend. Your main concern is not simply with whether the good will triumph over the bad, but with whether the good are good. Your life is a dark story whose conclusion is likely to be the realization that the world is without virtue and there is nothing you can do about it. In the darkest versions of the story, hope is lost when the good are literally eliminated.
Because it is a fantasy, we can assume that it is shaped out of memories formed early in life.
The deep-state fantasy depicts a world in which there is an especially sharp divergence between reality and appearance. Like all corruption fantasies, it features the effort on the part of heroic individuals to discover and reveal the dark reality hidden behind the appearance. Because it is a fantasy, we can assume that it is shaped out of memories formed early in life. The disparity between appearance and reality that becomes the deep-state fantasy begins, then, with a family experience that fostered significant uncertainty about the goodness of the good object and the truth about the family as a place of safety and the assurance of care.
The failure of the family to provide the child with a safe and caring environment and the formation within the family of the myth that it does take shape internally as a narrative along the lines of the deep-state fantasy. The myth of the family is one of a safe space while the reality is one of subjection to arbitrary rule, which means rule without regard for the child’s wellbeing. In the myth, the child is cared for and safe; in reality, the child is on his or her own in a dangerous world. In the myth, the connection to the family and obedience to the parents assures that you will be deserving of the reward of security and care. In reality, that connection assures the opposite.
The myth is the stated and overt account of family life. The reality is unsaid and therefore unknown. Or, more precisely, it is known not in words but in emotion: it is known as how the child feels about herself and about those responsible for her wellbeing. The myth of the caring family creates confusion and distress when paired with an emotional understanding of the world as an unsafe place. Emotionally, the child is angry and afraid but at the level on which meaning is articulated there is no reason for the child to feel that way.
The deep-state fantasy dissolves confusion by transferring the problem and its cause outside the family onto an emotionally safe target: government and the deep state that controls it.
The deep-state fantasy dissolves confusion by transferring the problem and its cause outside the family onto an emotionally safe target: government and the deep state that controls it. Government, as the locus of political power, is an especially suitable target to represent the arbitrary power within the family, and the hidden quality of the deep state is an especially apt metaphor for the hidden reality of the family. The deep state now represents the hidden and unnamed because unknowable forces within the family, forces driven by malevolent intent. These unknowable forces are internalized by the child as figures in fantasy life. When, to protect the myth of the family, those objects are projected into the world, they become real figures in the world outside. Finding them outside makes engagement with them possible and therefore invites an enactment of a drama of struggle over the power of corruption on terrain other than the terrain on which it originated.
Families are imperfect systems that fail more than any of those living in them would wish they would. This means that the deep-state fantasy has wide resonance. Yet only some people take the step of believing that it depicts the whole of reality or even what is essential about it. For those who become true believers, something special went wrong in the family, something serious enough to make appearance and reality irreconcilable and to turn what might otherwise be normal and tolerable failure into something sinister. What might this something be?
If we consult the evidence offered by the public versions of the deep-state fantasy, the answer becomes clear. There, the something sinister is represented by corporate greed. Within this construct, it is greed that must be purged from the family so the peace and comfort needed there can be restored. Once personified, greed becomes the hidden force, the unknown and unnamed presence, that controls the legitimate governance of the individual himself and the family as the corporate existence of the individual.
There is, however, a problem with thinking about the problem this way, which is that it treats greed as an irreducible reality the inevitable presence of which accounts for a whole range of sometimes complex and multifaceted phenomena. It will prove more useful, I think, to consider greed not an irreducible fact about the personality but a deformation of the individual’s relationship to his or her needs. This will allow us to begin to understand that the term greed simply stands in for the way need itself has come to be interpreted as a hostile factor in the family and then within the personality of the child growing up there.
As I suggest in my last posting, central to the way need comes to be perceived as a hostile force in the family is the moment when the child expresses the need to have needs of his or her own. When the expression of needs rooted in unique presence is treated as a threat, this construct of need as a threat will be internalized, and the child will form an internal prohibition on neediness one expression of which is the confusion of needs of the self with greed. This, then, will make deprivation, taken as a solution to the danger posed by need, a central part of the emotional reality of family life and of the inner life of family members. When this happens, the child has taken the first step in the direction of the deep-state fantasy, which is essentially a fantasy about the power of deprivation in the personality.
When deprivation is internalized as a defense against the presumed destructive power of need, need is intensified and so is the power demanded to keep need in check. The personality is divided into an overpowering and destructive form of need on one side and a rigidly controlling presence on the other tasked with suppressing need. As a result, an apparent indifference to the needs of the self hides the reality of bottomless need. The force needed to maintain this situation takes the form of a power mobilized against the self. This inner conflict is then acted out in the world outside where the opposition between appearance and reality takes the form of actors in a life-and-death political struggle.
[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/5/13/21219164/trump-deep-state-fbi-cia-david-rohde
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4785472/