"'Tis all coherence gone", as John Donne once said
But at least we have our "universal obsessional neurosis" about Trump to avoid facing up to it
I watched the stock market tank – again – on Monday before it rebounded weirdly in almost the precise same measure it had plummeted 24 hours earlier.
No biggie. I cashed out the stocks in my retirement account two weeks ago. If the market stabilizes – a doubtful proposition – it’s easy to get right back into it.
Then there’s Harvard, my doctoral alma mater, deciding the past week to take one in grandiloquent style for the whole higher education team.
Meditating profoundly about this headlines grabbing gesture on Good Friday, I couldn’t quite bring myself to see Harvard with its $53 billion endowment performing a truly Christlike act of self-sacrifice to take on the totality of the sins of higher education.
Nonetheless, I was reminded of the memorable words of Dickens’ hero Sydney Carton as he nobly took the place of his friend Charles Darnay in going before the guillotine in the concluding lines of A Tale of Two Cities: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known”.
Resquiat in pace our twenty-first century’s Great American Degree Hustle.
Oops. Forgot about all the DOGE meanies, who today seem unfortunately to be so yesterday.
Elon is on his way out. He says he’s not really exiting stage right, but really he is, sort of.
And for all his blitzkrieg tactics that during February and March at least threatened to dragoon most residents of Fairfax County, Virginia into lines at soup kitchens, Business Insider says he hasn’t really fired that many overpaid and underperforming government workers, or even saved any real money.
The Götterdämmerung of the Professional Managerial Class along with the cushy careers of all those Ivy League public policy majors appears to have been postponed indefinitely.
And let’s forget the tariffs. A week ago the world economy seemed to be, as hedge fund honcho and Harvard scold Bill Ackman pithily put it, on the verge of “nuclear winter”.
But it was only an unseasonally early Arctic blast.
This week the market looks as if it might be emulating Dr. Strangelove, insofar as it has “learned to stop worrying and love” that “most beautiful word” in Trump world – the “T-word” investors dare not enunciate.
Did Trump “blink”? Or was it just another “raise and call” strategic bluff to compel some microscopic minikin of change in the global (im)balance of trade?
Did the President finally see the light and acknowledge the irrefragable wisdom of the Wall Street Journal’s fusillade of editorials against his tariff policy?
Or did Trump finally “meet his match”, as Meredith McGraw surmises, in going up against the one force of nature he can’t seem to control – the markets.
Like Scrooge, who had a change of heart after a visitation by the ghost of Christmas past, was Trump somehow spooked all the way down to his undies by the hideous, untimely specter of Friedrich Hayek?
McGraw writes:
Since returning to Washington three months ago, Trump has toppled federal agencies, consolidated executive power, challenged global alliances and reconfigured America’s economic relationships around the globe. His moves have been met with protests, court challenges, dipping poll numbers and political opposition. Yet so far, the only force that has reliably prompted him to back down is Wall Street.
To answer every one of the foregoing questions: “it depends”.
The one thing we can say for sure is that what has come to be known as the “neoliberal” world order is fracturing massively and ubiquitously. It was destined to self-destruct even if there had been no global populist movement to trigger its demise.
The rub, of course, is that whatever is actually meant by the seductive expression “world order”, Trump has succeeded marvelously in making it all about himself. And he has been decisively aided and abetted by Trump lovers and Trump haters alike.
Yet in Trump’s defense let me say minus even a murmur of irony that Trump himself had very little to do (other than be Trump) with our “universal obsessional neurosis” regarding Trump, as Freud would have called it.
It should be noted Freud was talking about religion, not Trump, but let’s not go there at the moment.
Freud’s student Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst who inspired almost all of those dastardly French postmodernist theorists that were all the rage in academia until “The Great Awokening” swept them away, pointed out that such obsessions – or “psychoses” - arise when the patient is overwhelmed by a seemingly indecipherable omnibus perception, when everything points in every possible direction.
According to Lacan, we only make sense of the world and in our own place within it when we use language, when we can put our feelings and thoughts into words. Lacan, in other words, placed what Freud termed “the talking cure” at the forefront of his psychotherapeutic method.
If we can name the demons, in short, we can conquer them.
However, saying out load what we really are aiming for is a hopeless task, Lacan stresses. We want what is impossible in a “symbolic order” that is unraveling before our eyes with lightning velocity.
So we fixate on an object, a meme, an icon, or a person which we fantasize will either rescue us from the accelerating chaos, or on which we can confer total blame for it.
Lacan came up with the term “quilting point”, a metaphor from upholstery. The “quilting point” is the figure we conjure up in order to prevent the symbolic order from coming apart at the seams.
Like a button that secures fabric to a piece of furniture, it is the node at which the disparate threads of signification in speech come together.
It stops the interminable slippage of meaning as discourse unfolds. It conjures up the illusion of a stable, unified field of language.
That is the vital function President Trump performs these days for those of us who can’t admit that we have brought it somehowall on ourselves.
He is the “quilting point” for both our rage against what the poet John Donne called “all coherence gone”, not to mention our desperate desire to have it all go away.
The corollary, of course, is that instead of passivity, sulking, whining, and mindless blame-gaming, we can take concrete steps that will create space for some kind of new and unprecedented global order to emerge.
Most big solutions first require taking tiny first steps. The greatest of these is something called “humility”. It is a willingness to dial back our instinctive political hubris and recognize that no matter whom we elect to be our world leaders, none of them can truly save us from ourselves.
To save ourselves we need to be honest with ourselves about how we have been totally dishonest in the past about the way in which we have failed to abide by our own preferred moral and political rules.
If we want a “rules-based world order”, then we have both to respect and to observe the rules, as well as hold those who don’t accountable. If we don’t hold the rule-breakers accountable, then the rule breakers will become the rule.
Think China.
And someone with executive power, therefore, will seem to be forced to break the rules in order to make the rules work once more.
Why, for instance, is Trump’s “bending the law” about “due process” for a minority of undocumented immigrants of dubious character so heinous when the previous administration simply disregarded immigration law in the first place?
Or why is Trump’s use of “lawfare” against his perceived political enemies so ignominious when his enemies routinely used it against him?
As the ancient saw goes, “two wrongs do not make a right”, but that only seems plausible if you don’t admit the first wrong was absolutely wrong to begin with.
Unfortunately, we don’t.
Our toxic hyper-partisanship proliferates occasions for both acting and thinking in accordance with invidious double standards.
That is what is killing us softly indeed nowadays.
I, therefore, end this reflection with a quote from the celebrated theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: “ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people, but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.”
We don’t merely need to get a grip. We must learn to discern more deeply.