The Orange Wotan

What if the explanation isn't rational?

Disclaimer: This image was generated by the AI tool DeepAI.

“The impressive thing about the German phenomenon is that one man, who is obviously ‘possessed,’ has infected a whole nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion and has started rolling on its course towards perdition.” Carl Jung, On Wotan (1936)

Americans are in the midst of a historic upheaval. A revolution by another name. It’s particularly difficult for many of us because we believed this could never happen in our country. Even those of us who acknowledge America has always been less than perfect had faith the American project was never finished. Like Martin Luther King Junior, we thought America’s sin was never living up to her ideals.

We are now desperate to understand what went wrong and how we came to the present moment. As I’m typing these words, it’s the morning before American troops march through Washington, D.C. on the President’s birthday. In Minnesota, a Democratic lawmaker and her husband were shot dead, and two others were wounded. The assassin wore a police uniform, and is therefore indistinguishable from the masked federal agents engaged in warrantless searches across our country. There are 700 U.S. Marines deployed to the streets of Los Angeles.

We ask ourselves what is wrong with the 40 percent of Americans who still approve of President Trump. How they cheer for the imprisonment of humans without due process in foreign gulags. How they nod in approval as elected leaders and judges are detained and arrested.

To understand, we seek historical parallels. The most frequent comparison is to Nazi Germany. Historians have long researched the economic, political, and social conditions of the Weimar Republic to help explain Hitler’s rise to power in the hopes of discovering a vaccine to inoculate our societies from unspeakable evil. There is one theorist whose work in this regard is rarely discussed, Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875 to 1961). Jung lived through two world wars and treated its victims in his private practice. As a result, he thought deeply about the same questions we now ask ourselves.

If you are unfamiliar with Jung, he came to renown as Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) heir apparent. Jung eventually broke from Freud and his psychoanalysis method to found his own school, which became known as analytical psychology. Both men studied consciousness, but whereas Freud saw one’s psychology rooted in childhood experiences and repressed sexual and aggressive drives buried within the subconscious, Jung thought Freud’s theories reflected Freud’s own psychology. Freud, he believed, was unable to conceive of a mind divergent from his own. Jung championed a more expansive view of how different psychological functions (both conscious and unconscious) determined an individual’s personality. He also believed one’s psychological development was a lifelong journey, a process he called individuation.

Jung, while considered one of the most influential psychologists of all time, is better thought of as a philosopher, in my opinion, who happened to heal broken people. Jung existed in two worlds. He was pre-modern and modern at once. His life spanned the invention of the telephone to the nuclear and space age. He could not map the brain with an MRI or crunch vast datasets with the push of a button. Thus, he was forced to look elsewhere for answers. Moreover, psychology was only established as a scientific discipline independent of philosophy in 1879.

His work bridged these gaps, and refused to dismiss the importance of humans finding meaning and spirituality in their lives, which he believed were a central psychological necessity. Jung’s work steadfastly resisted pure biological explanations of psychological phenomena.

His insights were multidisciplinary and derived from both observation and a classical education. As a result, he and his work are not without controversy, none more so than his associations with Nazi Germany.

Jung’s behavior during the Nazi regime is much scrutinized and debated. He was a Swiss national who, throughout the 1930s, was the president of an international psychoanalytic society based in, and dominated by, Germany. At the time, the field of psychology was dominated by Jewish men and seen in some quarters as a Jewish science. The Nazis elevated Jung over his Jewish contemporaries because doing so fit their plans for the Nazification of German society. Jung seemed eager to use his new position to advance his school of analytical psychology.

Ironically, Freud shared the same concern about the state of psychology as the Nazis. Before their split, Freud wrote to a Jewish colleague that Jung, “as a Christian and a pastor’s son finds his way to me against great inner resistances. His association with us is the more valuable for that.” In Jung, Freud saw a vehicle for his ideas to gain wider acceptance among gentiles.

As the 1930s wore on, Jung acquiesced to Nazi demands for changes in the society, such as limiting Jewish membership. The Nazis were also keen on his theory of psychological types. They had a kink for ranking people, after all, and in Jung, they found a respectable thinker who had created a system of classification they could bend to their ends. Jung never ranked the psychological types, but once a typology is created, it’s human nature to wonder if certain categories are more desirable than others. Jung later defended himself, saying, “It is, I frankly admit, a highly unfortunate and disconcerting coincidence that my scientific program should, without any assistance of mine and against my express wish, have been linked up with a political manifesto.”

There is also a view of Jung as a kind of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who sheltered Jewish citizens in his factories that supplied military goods (he was the subject of Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List). Similarly, Jung helped individual Jews with money and other support and interceded with Nazi authorities to protect Jewish psychologists in his institute, albeit in a way that never aggravated the Germans.

I will skip over other evidence Jung’s critics point to, such as the connection between his work on collective consciousness and nationalism, and his discussions on the difference between Jewish and Aryan psychology. In the same vein, I’m not going to spend time articulating the views of his defenders. At the risk of sounding like an apologist, these are hotly debated topics and, as with all things Jung, there is a high risk of oversimplification.

What is true is that Jung operated as a spy for the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA) during World War II. He was called "Agent 488" and his handler, Allen W. Dulles (who later became the founding Director of the CIA), remarked, “Nobody will probably ever know how much Prof Jung contributed to the allied cause during the war.” Jung helped the OSS create psychological profiles of fascist leaders and analyzed propaganda. Dulles said that Jung, “[understood] the characteristics of the sinister leaders of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. His judgment on these leaders and on their likely reactions to passing events was of real help to me in gauging the political situation. His deep antipathy to what Nazism and Fascism stood for was clearly evidenced in these conversations.” Jung's analysis, written in 1945, of how best to get the German population to accept defeat was also widely read, including by Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower.

It’s in this context, I suggest we look to Jung’s work on psychosis. Jung was no stranger to psychosis, both of an individual and collective nature.

What follows are excerpts from After the Catastrophe (1945), The Fight with the Shadow (1946), and On Wotan (1936), which can be found in Volume 10 of Jung’s Collected Works. I have arranged and edited the excerpts to stitch together an abbreviated version of Jung’s observations on Hitler’s ability to co-opt the German people. The passages begin with a description of Hitler’s own psychological disposition, followed by that of the German people. See if you can spot the parallels to current events.

“All [Hitler’s] pathological features—complete lack of insight into one’s own character, auto-erotic self-admiration and self-extenuation, denigration and terrorization of one’s fellow men (how contemptuously Hitler spoke of his own people!), projection of the shadow, lying, falsification of reality, determination to impress by fair means or foul, bluffing and double-crossing—all these were united in [Hitler] who was diagnosed clinically as an hysteric, and whom a strange fate chose to be the political, moral, and religious spokesman of Germany for twelve years. Is this pure chance?

[…] For a short spell, such people usually meet with astounding success, and for that reason are socially dangerous…Hitler’s theatrical, obviously hysterical gestures struck all foreigners (with a few amazing exceptions) as purely ridiculous. When I saw him with my own eyes, he suggested a psychic scarecrow (with a broomstick for an outstretched arm) rather than a human being. It is also difficult to understand how his ranting speeches, delivered in shrill, grating, womanish tones, could have made such an impression. But the German people would never have been taken in and carried away so completely if this figure had not been a reflected image of the collective German hysteria. A sorry lack of education, conceit that bordered on madness, a very mediocre intelligence combined with the hysteric’s cunning and the power fantasies of an adolescent, were written all over this demagogue’s face. His gesticulations were all put on, devised by an hysterical mind intent only on making an impression. He behaved in public like a man living in his own biography, in this case as the sombre, daemonic ‘man of iron’ of popular fiction, the ideal of an infantile public whose knowledge of the world is derived from the deified heroes of trashy films.

[…]

The phenomenon we have witnessed in Germany was nothing less than the first outbreak of epidemic insanity, an irruption of the unconscious into what seemed to be a tolerably well-ordered world…It was certainly not the healthy elements in the German nation that led to the triumph of these pathological fantasies on a scale never known before. The weakness of the German character…proved to be fertile soil for hysterical fantasies…” After the Catastrophe

“Thanks to industrialization, large portions of the population were uprooted and were herded together in large centres. This new form of existence—with its mass psychology and social dependence on the fluctuation of markets and wages—produced an individual who was unstable, insecure, and suggestible. He was aware that his life depended on boards of directors and captains of industry, and he supposed, rightly or wrongly, that they were chiefly motivated by financial interests. He knew that, no matter how conscientiously he worked, he could still fall a victim at any moment to economic changes which were utterly beyond his control. And there was nothing else for him to rely on.

[…]

The individual’s feeling of weakness, indeed of non-existence, was thus compensated by the eruption of hitherto unknown desires for power. It was the revolt of the powerless…

[…]

Hitler was the exponent of a “new order,” and that is the real reason why practically every German fell for him. The Germans wanted order, but they made the fatal mistake of choosing the principal victim of disorder and unchecked greed for their leader. Their individual attitude remained unchanged: just as they were greedy for power, so they were greedy for order. Like the rest of the world, they did not understand wherein Hitler’s significance lay, that he symbolized something in every individual. He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody’s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.” The Fight with the Shadow

The above excerpts were written in 1945, after Hitler was dead and Germany defeated. But Jung addressed Hitler’s rise in 1936, three years after he became Chancellor of Germany and three years before the invasion of Poland. In On Wotan, he compared Hitler to the character Wotan in Richard Wagner's opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. Wotan was inspired by the Norse and Germanic god Odin:

“[Wotan] is the god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle; moreover he is a superlative magician and artist in illusion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature.

[…]

Could the Germans who were adults in 1914 have foreseen what they would be today? Such amazing transformations are the effect of the god of wind, that ‘bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, nor whither it goeth.’ It seizes everything in its path and overthrows everything that is not firmly rooted. When the wind blows it shakes everything that is insecure, whether without or within.

[…]

Our mania for rational explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always hostile brothers. Hence, anything unexpected that approaches us from the dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and, therefore, as real, or else as an hallucination and, therefore, not true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on contemporary man.” On Wotan

It’s hard for critics of President Trump to view him in such terms. Trump strikes me as boorish, absurd, and undisciplined. Thus, it’s difficult to accept him as a supernatural force, a man who is both storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions, a superlative magician. Yet, Jung was a contemporary of Hitler and described him as a woefully uneducated, conceited man in the throes of adolescent power fantasies, and remarked it was plain for all to see. At some point, us critics have to wrap our minds around the fact that a man we despise on every level has managed to be elected President twice and is making mince meat of 250-year-old democratic institutions. He possesses the same low cunning Jung attributed to Hitler.

Maybe, this Jung guy knows something we don’t. Perhaps, scientific progress and knowledge have blinded us to how irrational human beings truly are at the core, which leaves us incapable of understanding the Orange Wotan and his grip on America.

Blake

PS — Pop-culture versions of Jung’s theories persist to this day. Many musicians credit him or allude to Jungian theories, especially those who enjoy a good acid trip. But none has endured quite like his work on psychological types. In “Psychological Types” (the English translation was released in 1923), Jung articulated his theories.

Reading “Psychological Types” is not for the faint of heart. The copy sitting on my bookshelf is over 500 pages of small type font. More to the point, his writing style is challenging. He uses complex sentences and argues his points with expansive discussions on theology, philosophy, art, culture, and history. For example, chapter five is 75 pages on “The Type Problem in Poetry” and includes a discussion on “The Brahmanic Conception of the Problem of Opposites.”

To help illustrate my point, I just flipped “Psychological Types” open to a random page, closed my eyes and pointed. Here’s the sentence my finger landed on: “The rapid recovery of the primary function produces a higher reactivity, extensive rather than intensive, leading to a prompt grasp of the immediate present in its superficial aspects, though not of its deeper meanings.”

When I read the book several years ago, I trudged through page after page with little idea what he was talking about. Only by the time I read the 50th page would the concepts described on the second page start to make sense. (I have a masochistic side)

Into the often incomprehensible world of Jung stepped the mother and daughter team of Myers and Briggs. They wanted to popularize Jung’s theories and knew few people would be willing to sift through his dense prose. Their solution was to devise simple definitions of Jung’s psychological types and assign numerical values. After further development by American academics, Jung’s theory reached the masses in the form of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

I’m assuming many readers have taken the MBTI or a similar personality test at some point. They are popular at corporate team building events, with career coaches, and in professional education settings. For years now, businesses and HR consultants have used the MBTI to hire and promote people.

If you’re not familiar, the MBTI scores personality along four different psychological lines: introversion vs. extroversion, intuition vs. observation, thinking vs. feeling, and judging vs. prospecting. The MBTI asks you to answer a series of questions about your preferences in different situations. For example, would you rather spend your Friday night reading a book or at a club spraying bottles of champagne on your friends? From these questions, a personality preference emerges and is assigned one of 16 different combinations, or types.

I am an INTJ, which stands for introverted, intuitive, thinking, judging. 2.6 percent of people are estimated to share this type, which is known as the “Architect” personality. INTJs are said to be highly analytical, creative, logical, and independent but also single-minded, insensitive, and emotionally disconnected. This result places me high on any HR department’s watch list.

My personality type is associated with Machiavellian characters like Othello’s Iago, Breaking Bad’s Walter White, Little Finger from Game of Thrones, and Elon Musk. Switch the I to an E for extroversion, and you go from the shadowy, power behind the throne, whispering into the king’s ear bad guy to a “Commander” like George Washington, Winston Churchill, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Alternatively, change the T to a F for feeling, and you get the “Advocate” personality, the rarest of them all. Think Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela, and To Kill a Mockingbird’s Atticus Fitch.

Fortunately, the MBTI is all pseudoscience. It doesn’t hold up under serious scrutiny. Critics argue the test relies on vague and general descriptions that could apply to a broad range of people, similar to a horoscope. It has been likened to a complicated fortune cookie.

There is an astrology vibe to the whole thing as well. People use their four letter personality type to determine what careers they should pursue and for match making. Likewise, bosses are tempted to use types to design project teams or diffuse interpersonal conflicts.

I don’t think Jung would be offended by these criticisms of the MBTI. Jung said surprisingly little about the work of Myers and Briggs, but did express mild annoyance. For example, Jung refused to help a PhD student, who contacted him to ask for comments on his MBTI research, saying this type of work did not align with the content of his book. In the only piece of correspondence between Jung and Myers, Jung (most likely Jung’s secretary of 18 years, as the letter’s rhetorical style is not typical of Jung) politely blows her off. He writes to her to say the subject of personality types no longer interests him, and concocts a reason he will be indisposed at the time of her stay in Switzerland.

PPS — If you want to play around with MBTI and find your very own four letter personality type, head over to 16Personalities.com and take the test. Just don’t use the results to find love or plan a career move.

One last PS — Sadly, President Trump has never shared his MBTI results. He did, however, let everyone know he aced the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a test designed to detect cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease: