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This was my Quote of the Day on January 8th 2021, quoting Timothy Snyder who had appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show the previous night, in a discussion about the insurrection that took place by invading the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.
One of the basic principles of psychoanalysis is the promotion of individual responsibility ... Individual responsibility does not mean that you blame yourself for everything. Rather, it means awareness of the extent of one's role in everything, the unconscious mechanisms that prevent that awareness, and the role of the absence of that awareness in the continuation of suffering and its compulsive recreation in relationships with the "other".
I would like to share some reflections I had that were stimulated by Snyder's quote.
What Snyder appears to mean by the "big lie" is the delusion that an authoritarian promotes and is seized by his followers as a truth that must be defended and supported and, by necessity, its disbelievers deemed as enemies, with no regard to proven actualities and irrefutable facts.
The word of the authoritarian is sufficient for the belief in that delusion, as long as others with whom the believer identifies are wrapped around that authoritarian. So the lie becomes the membership card of that group's club, and gradually turns into an integral part of the individual's identity. And what follows from that is that a threat to that delusion is a threat to self-cohesion...
Rejection of any evidence proving the falsehood of that delusion becomes necessary to ward off the threat of disintegration of the self. Therefore, I propose, and this is merely an attempt to develop a perspective that may just as likely to be mistaken as it may be on target, that there is a deficiency in the ability of those in that circle to assume the responsibility of ascertaining what they believe and exposing it to the rules of logic and in their natural inclination to be skeptical and reluctant to accept an opinion or statement without adequate weighing of its pros and cons.
The degree of this deficiency, in my opinion, depends on the coherence of the individual's personality formation (which is influenced by developmental experiences and the nature of pivotal relationships), the extent to which the components of the individual's identity are cohesive and the extent of their identity's dependence on the variables around the individual and in the circles of social belonging in which they lie...
Whether these circles of belonging are familial, cultural, ethnic, racial, linguistic, tribal, regional, religious, ideological, or political. The personality of the followed leader becomes here the crucible in which all the burdens of individual responsibility are cast ...
Here, the individual relinquishes their responsibility as if unconsciously wanting to hit two birds with one stone: Neutralizing one's conscience while preserving the illusory coherence of their fragile sense of identity. Therefore, when such an individual feels that they are exercising their freedom to defend that delusion, the big lie, that feeling is not only an illusion, but is also a "collective unconscious" mechanism for creation of the herd.
These were just reflections, and I invite you to be skeptical and to be reluctant to accept my opinion...
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(This was my translation of a series of tweets, later turned into a blog post in Arabic, that followed the quote mentioned at the top of this entry).
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