MAGA As The Liberal Shadow
Be careful with what you reject...
Things sure are messy out there. Trump is behaving exactly as the worst Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferers predicted, showing that perhaps they were not so deranged after all. And Scott Alexander is literally predicting the end of the world.1
When the world is topsy-turvy, lucidity and calmness become especially valuable, and I believe I can render a service to these by explaining the root cause of MAGA, the insane cult of personality that wants to rule America.
Some of the things I’m going to say are going to sound quite harsh to liberals, but there’s the following to consider. As an upholder of the Giving What We Can Pledge, that is, as someone who gives 10% of their income to the world’s poor, Elon Musk’s cut of PEPFAR and USAID2 was so upsetting that I can only handle it by not thinking about it too much. So the other day, recently, when a colleague of mine revealed he’s a huge fan of Musk, I have to admit that that made me uncomfortable.3
This must mean that I am somehow a liberal too.
And so I’m a member of the ingroup and you have to listen to me. But first:
What is the shadow?
The shadow is a concept of Carl Jung’s and I have a feeling it was the thing he was most correct on. The shadow is the not-you: all the things that you say you are not. The thing is that humans are immensely complex and multifaceted beings - all sorts of traits are present in them, even traits they wish were not there, perhaps so badly that they have become repressed and now they’re no longer even aware that they are there.
I’ll give you an example from my own shadow. I was bullied growing up, experienced a lot of relational aggression and exclusion. In my conscious self, I think I could never be cruel to another person, become like those who bullied me.4
But one consequence of spiritual development is that you become aware of more. And one thing that I started to become aware of, is that whenever someone blabs at me for more than 30 seconds, I will pretty reliably get an urge to punch them in the face. A fleeting impulse really, what is called a velleity.5
I had no idea what do about this. But I’ve been putting myself out there, trying to meet more people, women in particular. It has loosened my inhibitions. And that urge started to manifest itself in an acceptable way: by teasing people or being willing to be confrontational, being edgy in general. Previously, I never, ever did that sort of thing. But I started, my pent up aggressive tendencies found an outlet, and now, I no longer feel the urge to punch people in the face.6
That’s what successful shadow work looks like, a previously disowned, split off part of the self, gets reabsorbed into the greater whole, both the part and the conscious self changing in the process.
The collective shadow
I read a really cool book mentioned to me by a really cool guy called Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, written by Erich Neumann. It’s about the collective shadow, which is literally just the shadow, but for an entire collective.
It’s something every society has, since every society affirms some values, with the result that every facet of a people that doesn’t fit with those values gets suppressed or repressed. Suppression is supposedly what the elite of a society does, as they embody the societies values most consciously, and therefore consciously handle the aspects of themselves that don’t fit those values. Here, we’re only dealing with repression, which is when those unsavory bits drift off into the unconscious.
Repression is not forever, neither for the individual or the collective. For example, for me, my latent aggressive tendencies could come out against my brother, when we got into political debates which I would suddenly turn into quite harsh personal attacks. That’s how undigested shadow works, it pops out from time to time.
It’s the same with the collective shadow. Last year, on 4chan (a playground for the shadow if I ever saw one), before Trump was president, I saw a debate arise between a fascist, a proper fascist, who knew the philosophy, and everyone else.7
At a certain point, fascist anon dropped this bombshell:
Fascism, real fascism, is like lava. It’s right under the surface, ready to erupt at any time.
At the time I thought he was a loon engaging in wishful thinking. Trump isn’t really the same as Hitler, as he just doesn’t have the ideological fervor of Hitler, but he sure does rhyme.
Lava is a great descriptor for the shadow as well. It’s no coincidence that fascism, with its collectivist impulse, its glorification of hierarchy and violence, is the negation of liberalism.
It, and MAGA, are the shadow of liberalism. The coalescence of every aspect of humanity that liberalism rejected.
I know something of this lava the fascist described: I feel it in me too. I perceive liberalism as a largely inhibitory force, ironically, an eternal no, all these unspoken rules of what a person should be, against which my natural proclivities and emotions chafe quite uncomfortably, especially when it comes to women. So many men struggle in dating now, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen actionable dating advice that is compatible with the strictures of feminism. I have pretty bad approach anxiety, I am able to overcome it at times, but I am only able to do it if I can overcome the inner liberal telling me its a terrible catastrophe if a girl is uncomfortable for 5 seconds. I don’t think my approaches are that clumsy as to get that outcome more often than not, especially now, but I feel that is always a possibility in any approach.
It’s no wonder that I feel liberalism as the source of this eternal no: it is liberals who define the collective values of our culture, as it is the cities that produce culture, and the cities are liberal. So the voice of the collective in my head, is a liberal. My little liberal thought cop, living in my head.
4chan is great because you get to see what happens when someone evicts the liberal cop, the shadow run rampant. Sure, all sorts of very naughty emotions get expressed, and it is quite a toxic place, but it’s like a great sigh, finally, you can unwind, and say whatever the fuck you want, without having to take anyone else’s feelings into account.
Wow, I had to really tap into my own shadow to write that out.
I was for Trump back in 20168, when I was a regular on 4chan. The energy levels were off the charts. Chaotic, and even magical. I think it was different from MAGA now: we knew that, more than anything, we were on the side of chaos. Part of the convoluted meme lore at the time was that the Trump campaign was powered by Kuk, the ancient Egyptian god of darkness.9
I’m not going to judge myself for that, I think I already do that too much as it is. And the shadow has its own logic anyway.
Affirm equality, and you end up with a cult of personality.
Be a citizen of the world, and you get inflexible nativism.
You want to tear down the patriarchy, and you get Andrew Tate. And Trump. The masculinity they embody is a distortion of true masculinity, like every shadow energy, but even true masculinity, with its don’t give a fuck energy, its desire to be a king, is something liberalism wishes wasn’t there.
That last is actually a big one, I really do think there is something fundamentally effeminate about the liberal worldview, and that drives a lot of the resistance to it. Too much emphasis on politeness and all the little obnoxious unspoken rules of society. You’re welcome to name a masculine liberal if you disagree.10
I love how a rationalist pointed out that you have to be duplicitous to function in a liberal consensus:
“Men and women are the same” is what’s on the surface, and you have to be decently neurotypical to see that that is a white lie and not actually true.
There’s another sense in which MAGA is the shadow of liberalism: vitality. MAGA is just brainless vitality at this point, while the most vital thing the left does is something that is totally exhausted, like protest.
It’s like the leftist narrative is completely spent, unable to fire a majority up. It needs a new angle, something that hasn’t been tried before. What Krishnamurti would call “a thought untainted by time”.
Which would mean the left has to pick up what it has rejected, take it into itself. Every liberal should read Bronze Age Mindset to be part of that process. I haven’t, but then, I was a 4chan lurker for a long time: I don’t really need to. I saw excerpts passed around, and it seemed pretty funny. I also heard that in the end, it’s just Nietzsche, but intelligible.
A Greek warrior is a better human ideal than whatever the left offers instead as the standard, which appears to me to define being totally harmless instead as the goal. There is a Sufi story that is very relevant here:
What a Bird Should Look Like
Nasrudin found a weary falcon sitting one day on his window-sill.
He had never seen a bird of this kind before.
‘You poor thing,’ he said, ‘how ever were you allowed to get into this state?’
He clipped the falcon’s talons and cut its beak straight, and trimmed its feathers.
‘Now you look more like a bird,’ said Nasrudin.
– The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, by Idries Shah
This is what it means to reject the shadow. It’s equivalent to pruning a falcon. Sanding off all your rough edges out of fear or convention. And I bet humans are in the end, closer to falcon than to dove. We did after all, evolve in tightly knit tribes that sometimes went on wars of extermination with each other. The upper body strength human males have is not something that can deal with animal strength, but it becomes very relevant when the task is to kill another man. Civilization, especially the present civilization, is something very different from the ancestral environment that our biological hardware is adapted to.
I do see the left, or liberalism offering a human ideal that is frankly dove like. Maybe that even fits a lot of people. I definitely know it doesn’t fit me. I can’t access my inherent falconness that easily, but I’m beginning to. I always had a vague sense that liberalism is all bullshit, I guess because I always knew I would never fit within its paradigm.
The left did start with universal pretensions that I feel have never been wholly abandoned. It’s not good to offer as a universal ideal something that is fairly procrustean.
The left, more than the right, has the potential to evolve into something that is truly universal, if only because it has more IQ. What happens to the left if it absorbs Bronze Age Mindset? I have no idea, but I am certain the outcome will be interesting.
The AI 2027 Forecast. For those who don’t know, Scott Alexander is one of the leading lights of the rationalists, a group of people (well, men by and large) who want to be able to understand the world and make accurate predictions about it. A notable achievement is that they knew COVID would be a big deal in December 2019, making them one of the first groups of people who saw it coming.
This group was always worried about AI, and now Scott Alexander is predicting significant odds of species extinction by 2030. He has never made a prediction as extravagant as that, and after reading him for many years, he’s also just about the only person whose doom prophecy I’m inclined to believe.
PEPFAR in particular was an incredibly effective altruistic intervention, saving around 25 millions lives throughout its lifespan.
I derive significant satisfaction from the fact this colleague is non-technical, which means he’s an idiot, while the smartest developer we have, a guy who squeezed 3 uses out of a single boolean (booleans are just true or false, you should only be able to do 2 things with a boolean), hates Musk.
Ghosting severely pisses me off for that reason, I feel like the recipient of ghosting is being treated like they are nothing. I never ghost anyone, and am capable of simply rejecting people directly if it becomes necessary. That should be the equilibrium and not this ghosting nonsense.
Another velleity, but one that I’ve always had, is that whenever I’m at a great height, I feel an urge to jump to my death. Hmm, but recently I was up on the roof of my apartment building and I didn’t get that. I must like myself more! Spiritual development!
For the most part.
This was on /lit/, 4chan’s literature board. Yes, it has a literature board. It can be fun, this place where a bunch of weirdoes are in a race to believe the strangest thing (aside from the literature discussion). It’s where I came across the closest thing I have to a guru, René Guénon, and my favorite scripture, the Ashtavakra Gita.
For what that’s worth, it’s not like I can vote here.
This is when Pepe the frog became a symbol of the alt right, and Kuk is a frog headed god, while Kek! had become our replacement for lol. Meme magic makes the connection. We were all in on occultism then, pointing out strange synchronicities, and believing our memes were altering the fabric of reality.
I don’t see even Obama as masculine. Too civilized.
There are a couple of things here that I think are inverted----and notably, that folks on 4chan likely also have not notice is inverted.
First, grassroots-left and establishment-liberal aren't equivalent, so it's inaccurate to frame a collective shadow of the two. More, the fighting spirit of grassroots movements (which is especially prevalent right now, but always has been), is pushed out of establishment-liberal politics in favor of incremental change (sometimes this is good and more sustainable, sometimes it isn't). This fighting spirit that is the shadow is held across the political spectrum. Where the difference lies is that the grassroots-left had already directed some of this during the Civil Rights movement (or done some of the shadow work), so it's more difficult for a demagogue to highjack it. And Trump TRIED, his 2000 presidential campaign included pro-gay, universal healthcare, and anti-nazi sentiment. He was not successful at convincing these folks that authoritarian solutions were what they needed, so he gave up and went shadow-right instead, eventually creating MAGA. He does not believe a word out of his own mouth.
Second, western culture has been framing masculinity as a shadow of femininity since at least Victorian London (likely much longer); it predates our current political dynamic. Girls are taught to be women, and boys are taught to not be women. Don't wear women's clothes, don't be gentle, don't be too emotional, don't hug other men, don't bake, don't be submissive, etc. When asked to define masculinity without any negatives, it's difficult to answer.
Here we see grassroots-left may demonize this shadow-masculinity (whether sardonically via the John-ceiling or strictly with no balance between positive heterosocial interactions & objectification). Whereas establishment-liberalism leans more towards rebuilding masculinity and femininity simultaneously. (Let men cry and women make mistakes, reduce violence and loneliness, again, small incremental changes.) While there is a stark difference here in response to masculinity, these are both responses--not the original act of suppression. Men in the past did this to us by introducing policing of femininity to centralize power--->controlling the court behavior of women to control their heirs in England, demonizing women to justify jailing them and giving their land to a landlord during the witch trials, breaking established gender protections to force women to marry in Norway, etc. The more femininity was defined and policed, the more masculinity became a shadow.
I don't think anyone really of any significance or influence claims that men and women are biologically the same. That seems like a strawman, repeated ad nauseum.