Postado em 22 de janeiro de 2017 por Richard Willmsen
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Creio que, ao invés de esmagar nossas próprias casas de vidro em pedaços no ato de destruir a Presidência de Donald Trump, precisamos estar conscientes de nosso Trunfo interno, refletir sobre nossas próprias tendências de pensar e comportar-se em formas catastróficamente imaturas, venais e inseguras . Eu, portanto, oferecer esta breve descrição do meu próprio desenvolvimento emocional pessoal e, em seguida, explicar por que eu acho que ajuda a explicar por que Trump está indo para uma colapso muito, muito em breve.
Eu costumava sofrer de uma insegurança bastante incapacitante, particularmente quando se tratava de coisas como ser criativo e formar relacionamentos com outras pessoas. Fiquei melhor, em parte por viver e estudar Portugal, aprendendo sobre a tendência do seu povo de balançar entre momentos de auto-engrandecimento e auto-abnegação, de "somos grandes" a "não somos nada". Aprendi também sobre meu próprio hábito de projetar meus próprios sentimentos sobre os outros, pessoas e países. O trabalho do poeta português Fernando Pessoa mostrou-me que todos nós somos personagens num palco desempenhando papéis diferentes, e que tudo bem. Eu me identifiquei fortemente com o diagnóstico do filósofo Eduardo Lourenço de que os portugueses tendem a sofrer de assumir demasiadas identidades, e tomei uma enorme inspiração, consolo e orientação de suas idéias de que Portugal é "maravilhosamente imperfeito", "não pior nem melhor do que ninguém Senão ", e que o progresso vem de aceitar as limitações.
Viver na China me ensinou a aceitar a existência de outras percepções da minha própria identidade, mesmo que eu me sinta envergonhada, especialmente em termos da minha identidade nacional. Todo mundo tem um e eu não posso deixar o fato de meus ingleses ou ingleses me inibir indevidamente. Escrever sobre meus mal-entendidos da sociedade chinesa e sobre o meu papel lá me ajudou a aceitar que eu, como todo mundo, tenho um ego, e também que posso usar a escrita como um veículo para estabelecer conexões entre as coisas e ajudar a encontrar pessoas que já notaram As mesmas coisas, que compartilham minha perspectiva. Passar tempo com um psicanalista lacaniano em Londres me ajudou a desenvolver a confiança em minha própria voz enquanto também me ensinava sobre as fraquezas da minha tendência a pensar demais. Eu fiquei melhor (embora não necessariamente bom) em identificar e cultivar amizades com outras pessoas. Conheci a mulher que mais tarde se tornou minha esposa, que me ama por quem eu sou e não por quem eu finjo ser. Através do meu trabalho eu me tornei melhor em ouvir as pessoas e mais aceitar dos outros e de mim mesmo. Aprendi que a auto-reflexão honesta é um meio mais eficaz para o desenvolvimento pessoal do que o álcool. Através da aquisição de outras línguas descobri que a aprendizagem é uma das coisas que mais gosto e valor sobre estar vivo.
Eu ainda estropeio, como todos nós, mas eu aceito que fazer isso é parte da vida, e quando eu faço ou recebo algo errado eu tento pedir desculpas sem medo ou recriminação. Eu sei que não estou louco em nenhum sentido significativo. Eu aceito que eu tenho alguma capacidade de escrever divertida e perspicaz, e eu tenho menos medo do que eu fiz antes de dizer o que eu quero dizer. Eu tenho um editor maravilhoso em minha esposa e eu aceito que eu às vezes falto coisas e expor talvez algumas partes de mim mesmo ao criticism e ao ridicule. Eu sei que o que eu escrevo não tem e não tem que agradar a todos. Eu aceito que todo mundo é falível, e que é preciso muito trabalho para produzir a escrita de qualidade. Às vezes eu não coloco em bastante trabalho duro, e isso é culpa minha. Procuro não depender emocionalmente das respostas ou da falta de respostas ao que escrevo. Em poucas palavras, eu amadureci, até o ponto em que agora eu posso enfrentar a perspectiva de se tornar um pai, algo que, digamos, há 15 anos era (por assim dizer) inconcebível.
Tudo isso significa que eu entendo algo da fragilidade do ego de Donald Trump. Tendo lutado para manter as amizades no passado, posso ver como Trump pode chegar a um ponto onde ele tem, de acordo com uma peça na Newsweek com base em vários meses passados em torno dele, sem amigos próximos. Como eu já reconheci antes, é essencial para nós ter a humildade de reconhecer que não temos a capacidade de diagnosticar Trump à distância. Mas que há algo do manchild sobre ele é inescapável.
Esses dois primeiros dias de sua 'Presidência' viram tweets paranóicos e recriminatórios, um discurso à CIA, no qual ele criticou amargamente os relatos da mídia de sua coroação e seu porta-voz da imprensa foi enviado para entregar outro discurso paranóico auto-piedoso. As pessoas estão impiedosamente tirando a xixi do piss-pobre comparecimento a sua inauguração lamentável, e Trump parece estar acompanhando cada um deles no Twitter. Está claro para mim que qualquer coisa que ele tenha usado para sobreviver até este ponto não vai funcionar em seu novo papel. Há simplesmente muito escrutínio e ridículo, e está indo muito fundo. Ele é um narcisista raso demais para ignorá-lo.
Donald Trump is going to snap very soon, and here is how I know
I believe that rather than smashing
our own glass houses to pieces in the act of destroying Donald Trump’s
Presidency, we need to be aware of our own inner Trump, to reflect on
our own tendencies to think and behave in catastrophically immature,
venal and insecure ways. I therefore offer up this short account of my
own personal emotional development, and then explain why I think it
helps explain why Trump is heading for a breakdown very, very soon.
I used to suffer from a quite
disabling insecurity, particularly when it came to things like being
creative and forming relationships with other people. I got better,
partly by virtue of living in and studying Portugal,
learning about its people’s tendency to swing between moments of
self-aggrandisement and self-abnegation, from ‘we are great’ to ‘we are
nothing’. I also learnt about my own habit of projecting my own feelings
onto others, both people and countries. The work of the Portuguese poet
Fernando Pessoa showed me that we’re all characters on a stage acting
out different roles, and that that is okay. I identified strongly with
the philosopher Eduardo Lourenço’s
diagnosis that Portuguese people tend to suffer from taking on too many
identities, and I took enormous inspiration, consolation and guidance
from his insights that Portugal is ‘marvelously imperfect’, ‘no worse
and no better than anyone else’, and that progress comes from accepting
one’s limitations.
Living in China
taught me to accept the existence of other perceptions of my own
identity, even if I feel embarrassed about it, particularly in terms of
my national identity. Everyone has one and I can’t let the fact of my
British or Englishness inhibit me unduly. Writing about my
misunderstandings of Chinese society and about my role there helped me
accept that I, like everyone else, have an ego, and also that I can use
writing as a vehicle for making connections between things and to help
find people who’ve noticed the same things, who share my perspective.
Spending time with a Lacanian psychoanalyst in London helped me develop
confidence in my own voice while also teaching me about the foibles of
my tendency to overthink. I got better (although not necessarily good)
at identifying and cultivating friendships with other people. I met the
woman who later became my wife, who loves me for who I am rather than
who I pretend to be. Through my job I became better at listening to
people and more accepting of others and myself. I learnt that honest
self-reflection is a more effective medium for personal development than
alcohol is. Through acquiring other languages I discovered that
learning is one of the things I most enjoy and value about being alive.
I still screw up, as we all do, but I
accept that doing so is part of life, and when I do or get something
wrong I try to apologise without fear or recrimination. I know that I’m
not mad in any meaningful sense. I accept that I have some ability to
write entertainingly and insightfully, and I have less fear than I did
before of saying what I want to say. I have a wonderful editor in my
wife and I accept that I sometimes miss things and perhaps expose some
parts of myself to criticism and ridicule. I know that what I write
doesn’t and doesn’t have to please everyone. I accept that everyone is
fallible, and that it takes hard work to produce writing of quality.
Sometimes I don’t put in enough hard work, and that’s my fault. I try
hard not to depend emotionally on the responses or lack of responses to
what I write. In a nutshell, I’ve matured, to the point where I can now
face the prospect of becoming a father, something which, say, 15 years
ago was (so to speak) inconceivable.
All this means that I understand
something of the fragility of Donald Trump’s ego. Having struggled to
maintain friendships in the past, I can see how Trump can get to a point
where he has, according to a piece in Newsweek based on several months spent around him, no close friends. As I’ve acknowledged before,
it’s essential for us to have the humility to recognise that we don’t
have the ability to diagnose Trump at a distance. But that there’s
something of the manchild about him is inescapable.
These first two days of his
‘Presidency’ saw paranoid and recriminatory tweets, a speech to the CIA
in which he ranted bitterly about media reports of his coronation, and
his press spokesperson being sent out to deliver another paranoid
self-pitying rant. People are mercilessly taking the piss out of the
piss-poor attendance at his pitiable inauguration, and Trump appears to
be following every single one of them on Twitter. It’s clear to me that
whatever means he’s used to survive up until this point aren’t going to
work in his new role. There’s simply too much scrutiny and ridicule, and
it’s going too deep. He’s too much of a shallow narcissist to ignore
it. Trump is going to learn the wisdom of Jacques Lacan: “the madman is
not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he
is a king”. Whatever monster he has buried in his mind is going to rise
up to bite off huge chunks of him from within.
Trump is famously hostile
to the notion of learning: no-one has anything to teach him. He was
born rich, and that means he’s a genius and that everyone must respect
him. He appears to have no ability for self-reflection. The mirrors he
has in his mansion may be framed in gold, but he’s never been able to
bring himself to look into them for more than a few seconds. Instead
he’s surrounded himself with people who tell him what he wants to hear,
who repeat back to him his inner mantra: you’re the richest, the best,
the greatest writer, builder, statesman, etc etc etc. But it’s his inner
voices that are the problem, the ones that tell him that he’s nothing, a
failure, that everyone sees him as a joke. The ones that (presumably)
sound a lot like his father.
His tweets in particular reveal that
at some level he knows that his self-aggrandising self-image is hollow
and brittle. So he lashes out, including physically. And it’s getting
worse. People are laughing louder. He’s now put himself in a position
where the entire world knows that he is venal, insecure, stupid and
deluded.
He’s become in two days the paranoid
and deluded ruler of so many novels by Latin American and African
writers. Usually this point is reached after several decades of rule and
the imposition of terror and a cult of personality. He’s the kind of
leader that the U.S. has imposed on so many other countries; there is an
element of chickens coming home to roost. He obviously took enormous
consolation from his media image, the idea that he was ‘America’s CEO’.
He believed this and seems to have internalised it, but is also taunted
by a nagging awareness that it was little more than a joke, a stupid
slogan to sell a TV show. His supporters may not know that, but some
will learn. He’s already starting to turn some of them against him. As
he attacks their standard of living and doesn’t have the political
skills necessary to calm their anger, they will see through him to the
delusion, insecurity and vanity within. He’ll have no more defences and
will be unable to hide from the stark fact that his flatterers don’t
respect him. Putin in particular is evil but not stupid. He knows that
Trump is an absolute moron. And he can’t control that smirk of his.
Lacan said that what matters in
psychoanalysis is not so much what the client says, but what falls out
of his pockets while speaking. Trump appears to have absolutely no idea
what he has in his pockets, and now everyone on the planet is picking up
things, inspecting them and telling him what they are. They are
teaching him things about himself that he cannot bear to learn. He also
knows that he is President in name only, and that’s not enough to
sustain his ego.
He will snap very, very soon.
Our job is to increase the tension.
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