Inner Politics
by Roland Barphe, director of media studies at the Polyvalente de St-Tite, founder of l'Organisation Uni du Film Original Québécois (l'OUFOq), and editor of Excressences,
and Wentworth Sutton, assistant vice-principal, Mitchell Hepburn Collegiate Institute, Don Mills, and president emeritus, Semiologico-Hermeneutic Institute of Toronto.
We live in a society which claims to be devoted to the self. We all strive for self-esteem and for self-actualization.
How strange, then, that in discussing social issues, this same society always avoids talking about the role that one's self plays in them. All of a sudden the self is no longer part of society! A stunning example of this refusal to acknowledge the self is the current Canadian election campaign.
As the feature articles of the last two weeks have shown, elections are conceived of as being about issues, or about ideas, or about promises. These are things which exist outside the voter – even the ideas, which are other people's. This externality is accentuated by the refusal of candidates and voters to use their own internal resources to deal with these external phenomena. Except for the commentators on this site, no one is actually using his own personal intellect to examine the issues, ideas, or promises which are the ostensible subjects of electoral discourse. And yet the entire nation is seething over the "issues" they haven't even thought about. Hmmm. Could that possibly mean that our electoral discourse is actually determined by psychological factors, by personality types, by our unconscious responses to highly emotive and unexamined symbolism?
It is difficult to think of our electoral discourse in any other way, and indeed it would be deeply insulting to the Canadian people to assert that their handling of electoral issues was representative of their ratiocinative abilities. The election is in fact a nationwide Rorschach test, not only for the voters but also for candidates.
The psychological underpinnings of the Bloc Québécois have been outlined by one of us in another article here. In brief, Quebec nationalism is founded on the idea of purity. The purity of French language and culture in Canada must be protected against contamination by English language and culture. Such feelings are not unnatural among members of a linguistic and cultural minority, but Quebec has carried them to extremes. Spanish language and culture have less protection in the United States, but the Hispanic people of the American Southwest are not demanding a return to the linguistic and cultural state of affairs which prevailed before the Mexican War.
The carrying to extremes in Quebec may be due to the dominance of the ultramontane variety of Roman Catholicism in Quebec for many years. Ultramontane clergy taught Quebecers that their variety of Catholicism was purer than all others and had to be protected against contamination from outside, especially from those anglophone Protestants. How natural to transfer this idea to cultural matters, and how useful to those who wanted to protect their religion against the English. And in fact it was transferred. It is no accident that the leading nationalist organization in Quebec is named for St. John the Baptist!
Turning to the other party that has no hope of forming a government – minority, majority, or revolutionary – the fundamental psychological mechanism of the New Democratic Party is a classic defence mechanism. The NDP is the party of the nice people, those unassumingly but tastefully dressed and earnest people who surround Jack Layton in the NDP commercials, the people who want so much to help.
As we know, however, niceness is usually a defence mechanism, in particular the defence mechanism of denial. Seething with rage against the world, the nice cope with the rage by denying it – to themselves – and covering it with a veneer of benevolence. However, the rage is still there. It is there in the vicious attacks on Stephen Harper and Paul Martin which in some of the NDP's commercials precede Jack Layton's claim that he's running a positive campaign.
And it was certainly there in the actions of the NDP government of Ontario in the early 1990s. We remember how Bob Rae started his term with a love-in at Convocation Hall where he sang (yes – if you're not from Ontario we'll confirm for you that he actually sang) about the Canadian socialist myth of the co-operative commonwealth (discussed in the article about the Romanow report). We would, Mr. Rae warbled, all be getting along together. The workers would benefit, and the poor. Not long after, though, the Raeites could contain their rage no longer. It broke through their socialist pieties as they cut welfare payments and tried to destroy the institution of public sector collective bargaining, an institution previously treated by the NDP as a sacred cow.
And this exercise of rage and violation of party principle was explained as being for everyone else's good. Because the NDP promotes the good. Because it's nice.
Funny how that sort of breakdown happens with every NDP provincial government, even though they're all so nice.
Our current frontrunners, the Conservative Party of Canada, represent another psychological type, the obsessive-compulsive. In particular, they represent what is often called the anal-retentive personality. While the Bloquistes are obsessed with ethnic purity, the Conservatives are obsessed with personal purity and with control – the result of severe toilet training, you know. The obsession with purity is seen in the Conservatives' most frequent commercial, in which Stephen Harper claims personal moral standards that make most of the saints look a bit dubious. One suspects that Mr. Harper even believes that he is a moral exemplar, a thought that doesn't cross too many saints' minds very often. You may recall that the last Conservative prime minister of Canada also played on his moral purity. Some of you are laughing now, but Brian Mulroney vaulted into office after boldly comparing his own pristine moral condition to John Turner's degenerate depravity in the leaders' debate in 1984. How soon we want to forget.
The perennial appeal of the Conservatives rests on the persistence of harsh toilet training in both English and French Canadian culture. The Conservatives appeal to those who see every new element in society as a threat to the spotless, orderly social conditions they must have to feel secure. The poor – they're so slovenly. Immigrants – they're so raucous. Liberals – they're so liberal! I mean, liberal means free! If we let everyone run around being free, why soon there'd be no end of a mess to clean up!
Because of their fear of personal contamination, Conservatives seek control. They like censor boards, and welfare police, and snitch lines. They like big, big armies, and big, big navies, and big, big air forces. They like long, long; long, long, long, long, long, long prison sentences, and they like the ultimate act of control, capital punishment. They're not just going to clean up society, they're going to sanitize it!
Which brings us to the Liberals, who are founded on a personality disorder. Yes, since 1968 the Liberal Party has been the party of narcissism, the party of grandiose plans demonstrating the brilliance of a charismatic leader. Grandiose plans which, true to narcissistic form, screw up. Consider Pierre Trudeau's plans to strengthen national unity, which ended by alienating the West and Quebec still further. Consider those replacements for the Sea King helicopters. Consider the gun registry.
And consider Paul Martin. His plan for the campaign seems to have been to bask in the ardent adoration of the Canadian people for six weeks before being swept back into power. When that plan quickly failed he chose the two traditional narcissistic options, floundering and trying to hurt whoever is frustrating his glorious plan, which means the evil Stephen Harper, whom Liberal commercials now depict as a vicious anti-Canadian trying to stab the country in the back (we have our own doubts about Mr. Harper, but we are sure that in true obsessive-compulsive fashion, and in accordance with the precedents established by other Conservative prime ministers, he would stab the country in the front, neatly).
Well, is it any wonder people hate politicians? They're deviant! But wait a minute. Where do these deviants come from?
Do they drop from the skies?
No.
Do they spring full blown from the brow of the Governor General?
No.
We'll tell you where they come from. We elect them!
And why do we elect them? Because in this society obsessed with the self, everything becomes an extension of the self. As we noted, no one talks about the self during elections, but the self is what elections are about. The electors carefully consider the candidates with the intention of choosing the one who is as squirrelly as they are.
Why do we not talk about the self during elections? Well, there's an easy answer to that question. We don't talk about the self because then we'd have to admit that we are not the model citizens we flatter ourselves we are. And that would shatter our self-esteem.
Better to elect someone who feeds our neuroses and then, when he or she fails to live up to our own neurotic expectations, feed our self-esteem even more by telling ourselves how superior we are to politicians.
We can't lose.
Posted on June 17, 2004Inner Politics © Coolth, 2004
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