Who should do the heavy lifting? Preferably someone else other than yourself, it seems, when you look at how people generally are willing to give up thinking for themselves and buying into whatever seeming authorities tend to sell them.

I had touched on that issue in yesterday’s musing about one of Remedios Varo‘s most famous paintings, The Juggler (The Magician), 1956. Longing for enlightenment, or just simple instructions of how life should be handled, as a matter of fact, could lead the masses to become enchanted with a charlatan, and willingly give up personal identity to do so.

Today I want to turn to a specific case, one of existential importance for all of us: the acceptance of millions of people of Trump’s pandemic response. (You are getting the summary argument of a long and informative essay by James Hamblin in The Atlantic, that can be found here.)

I will not go into statistics of the disease, I’d rather try to stick to the psychological mechanisms that make us fall for the kind of false promises, outright lies and suggested solutions that ask for unthinkable sacrifice, all presented by a President who saw the pandemic as more threatening to his economical fortunes tied to re-election than to the fate of the nation.

His claims about the virus and the ways to attack it were not just false and/or self-serving. They were accepted or even approved by millions of voters who did not punish him for the failures that are responsible now for a system break-down. The nature of the claims, not rooted in science and fabricated out of wishful thinking, are similar to those that we see in faith healers, cult- and authoritarian leaders. What makes us buy into them?

When we feel threatened, we tend to accept promises of relief, clinging to wishful thinking. When authorities disagree (science: it takes time and it’s complicated – charlatan: do this now and simply don’t worry) we are persuaded by the more attractive option of help, now. The disease is not that bad! You can’t get easily infected! If you don’t believe me and go with the science crowd, your jobs are in jeopardy! We’ll have a vaccine soon! Who does not want to hear that?

There is, however, another element at play as well, the possibility of identity fusion, when you subsume your personal identity under something larger, a social group, or the person of a charismatic leader. This kind of alignment allows you to improve your sense of self, providing a feeling that the leader’s or the group’s good fortunes extend to yourself. It also allows you to work less hard on thinking for yourself or doing the work of critical analysis, since the word of the leader is good enough for you, in all its glowing conviction.

And when is a positive sense of self particularly needed? In times of doubt, of threat, of fear, whether in regards to a concrete present danger, like Covid-19, or a longer-term sense of deprivation, be it economic decline, or status loss in a society that does no longer grant you special privileges with changing population compositions. Fusion, importantly, is not just blind fellowship. It is an engaged process in which you adopt the values laid out to you, no longer evaluating your own, because it makes you feel valued, important, and belonging. And so you buy quackery hook, line and sinker.

How can we turn things around? Hamblin says it most eloquently:

“There are ways to serve as a confident, optimistic leader without making up nonsensical promises. Hope can be conferred with promises to take care of people, and to be there for them. Reassurance can be offered by guaranteeing that no one will go into debt because they had to go to the hospital, and that people will have paid sick leave and job security so they can stay at home when necessary. If the public-health community does not do more to give people hope and reassurance in the face of this disaster, it will see people defect to those who will—even when they know the promises are too good to be true.”

Varo had a solution as well, not surprisingly for a woman whose life had been touched by fascism, forcing her to flee France when the Nazis invaded and prohibiting her from retuning to her native Spain ruled by Generalissimo Franco. In her 1960 painting Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst we see a woman outside the dark corner office tagged Dr. FJA (Freud, Jung, Adler) approaching a courtyard well. An ominous sky threatens to descend and whispers of fog on the bottom seem to cling to her leg, not ready to let go.

In one hand she holds a basket with psychological detritus (thread, a key, a pair of glasses and a clock – I leave the game of interpretation within the context of the therapeutic session to you…) in the other hand she holds the head of a patriarch by the long beard, about to drop him like a discarded condom into the depth of the well. A father figure, a ruler, an autocrat, a charlatan, off and away with his head, now that she can see clearly.

The part of her long cloak that covered her face has slipped down, after all, the blinding mask just dangling. The hair freed – oh, that hair! – forming horns becoming any old Pan…

One promise of much of analytic therapy is, of course, that you discover your true identity, a sense of self no longer ruled, through unconscious mechanisms, by authority figures or our relation to them. (In)sight arrived! Independence it shall be!

Now just be willing to think independently as well, to do the work of informed choice. You might just stay healthy.

Photographs are from the San Francisco Bay waterfront at the newly opened Crane Cove park.

Music presents many of Varo’s paintings. I swear, I’ll be a painter in my next life….