How the Left and Right are Screaming at Each Other Like Angry Toddlers, and the Rest of us are Trapped in the Middle
There are many of us, I think, who look around today’s sociopolitical landscape — the ruinous state of our societies, politics, culture — and hold our heads in disbelief. Everywhere you look, it seems as if people have become toddlers throwing tantrums. If you feel that way, you’re not wrong. We live in an age of infantilization. Infantile regression has become a trend defining now.
Infantilism is easiest to see on the right. The right — what was left of it — got taken over by a new sect, called the alt right. And the alt right’s solution to everything was…to seek the safety and security of a strong daddy figure, who was fetishized and idealized as something between a messiah, a saviour, and a father protector.
It’s often noted that “you can’t argue with a Trumpist [Brexiter, etc].” That observation is perfectly correct. But it mystifies many. The reason, though, is straightforward. Such people are not thinking with adult minds. They don’t, in many ways, have functioning adult minds left. What do they have? A bond with a parent figure, which is to be protected at all costs. If that bond is broken, they are left at the mercy of a world which feels hostile and unforgiving. And so such people respond with the most bizarre inversions and perversions of logic. The father protector must be obeyed, must be believed, must be cherished, above all things. Including minor inconveniences like reality, democracy, civilization, progress, and truth. What do those matter?
That is the missing link between psychology and politics: as people regressed to infantile states, they sought the protection of father figures. Hence, a new wave of demagogues arose — who formed a bond with their flock that baffled everyone else. Why did these people believe such obvious lies? Why wouldn’t they listen to reason? Why didn’t they seem able to employ common sense? The answer to all those questions is the same: their adults had stopped working, and still don’t work.
Exacerbating the situation was technology. Demagogues — right back to the days of Athens — have always been expert at exploiting new technologies. In the 1930s, the Nazis learned to use then-new mass media as weapons of social mass destruction, to propagandize through radio and film and TV. In the 2000, demagogues learned to use “social” media as a weapon of social mass destruction. If you’d regressed to an infantile state, incapable of using your adult mind, if you were desperately seeking a strong father figure, a protector, to shield you from the vicissitudes of an unlivable, desperate life…what could be better one that having one in the palm of your hand? Who’d whisper sweet nothings to you “on demand”? Just swipe right. Press play. Like, favourite, follow. Bang! You’d feel…
What were these people really seeking, anyways — the regressed? What every infant seeks, really — especially one feeling a sense of danger and threat. Safety. Security. Protection. Comfort, soothing, someone telling you that it will all be OK. Someone reassuring you that you were always The Best, Number One, the One Who Mattered Most. You were special and singular and especially wonderful. Better than all the rest. The infantile mind is seeking meaning, identity, security, protection.
It’s crucial to understand just how important all that is. Because if we don’t have those things, my friends, our minds begin to collapse. And collapsing minds take societies with them.
In other words, the infantile mind seeks what psychologists call “narcissistic supply” — a steady supply of praise, reassurance, validation, warmth, safety. Now, the adult needs it too — but not to the extent, nearly, that the infant does. Especially not the stressed infant. The stressed infant is in the untenable position of not being able to provide such a supply of validation and warmth and identity and belonging for themselves — and having no one to supply it, either. They therefore turn to whomever will. That is, all too often, how cycles of abuse emerge in early life.
Now let me come back to politics.
Regression isn’t just something that you see on the right — broken, defeated minds seeking safety and protection from demagogues acting as father figures, with whom they’ve formed unbreakable bonds. Quite the opposite — you can see it on the left, too. And here it’s just as toxic, damaging, and surreal.
Like the right, the left got taken over by a new movement — the alt left. Where the old left was concerned with what we might call mature, adult struggles, of great vision, astonishing depth, astounding breadth — things like world peace, an end to violence, an end to war forever, eliminating global poverty and hunger, and so forth — this new left, the alt left, seemed to be obsessed with only one thing: identity.
Soon enough, by the late 2010s, many self-described “leftists” would take the absurd, bizarre, head-spinning position that gender pronouns mattered more than actual genocides. That the pain of being misgendered was greater than the suffering of a war orphan. That the anguish of losing your whole family to war was nothing compared to not being able to use the right bathroom. That Captain America’s intersectionality matters more than a billion people on Earth without food to eat. What on earth?
People mostly kept silent — people who disagreed with all this absurdity, even on the center and the left. Because if you voiced your opinion in public — that all this was somewhere between ludicrous and asinine — you’d get, well, not just attacked…but pilloried. Soon enough, a Twitter mob would land on your doorstep, baying for blood, hounding you, digging up dirt on you, chasing and pursuing you until you finally either relented, or folded. What the? The left was by now alienating and destroying itself, by pillorying its own movement…in the name of a kind of bizarre ideological purity over gender pronouns, comic books, and what to call whose private parts when.
What on earth was all this really about? Infantile regression, all over again. Let me put it a little rudely, and it’ll soon become clear. Mommy, I want my own special name! And if they don’t call me my special name, mommy, they’re the worst! Get them!! I won’t play with them and they’re not my friends and I hate them! I HATE them!! Mommy!!
Beginning to make a little sense?
Let’s go back to narcissistic supply. What the alt-left was and is really after is the very same thing, ironically, that the alt-right is: an infantile narcissistic supply. It needs to be told it’s super duper special, that it’s Number One, the Best — and it needs to be told in the terms it wants to be told — all those special names — and if you don’t tell it that, it…absolutely, completely, totally freaks out. It loses it. It begins to genuinely hate you and call you all kinds of absurd names. It will say that you not calling it the special name it wants is “hate speech” and “violence” and so on. Hello, violence? That’s women having acid thrown on them. It’s war orphans. It’s a billion people around the world who still starve? But that’s the difference between the adult mind and the infantile mind.
The infantile mind — especially the threatened one — can’t brook the belief that it’s not the center of Mommy’s world. It lashes out. It throws tantrums. It destroys it’s own toys and cradle and room. It will tell you it “hates you forever!!” Sound a little bit like the alt-left to you? It does to me.
There’s one key difference between the alt-left and the alt-right. Have you picked up on it already? The alt-right wanted a Daddy — so much so, that many on the alt-right (LOL) call Trump “daddy.” It wants a father protector, a figure who will do extreme and terrible violence in the name of protecting the little fragile ones. But the alt-left wants a Mommy — someone who will hold it close and nourish it and tell it it’s safe and protected and warm and special. It wants to be the one lashing out in violence when someone threatens to take Mommy away. This difference — wanting a Mommy and a Daddy — is the key to understanding how the psychologies of the alt-left and alt-right differ. Why does the alt-left form Twitter mobs, that attack it’s own — whereas the alt-right expects it’s father protector to do the dirty work? It’s the difference between protecting Mommy, and being protected by Daddy.
Am I “gendering” too much for your taste? Good, good. I think such language — such an idea — is futile and foolish. In my little family, I’m the mommy — me, the vampire, the guy whom the light can kill… that wears Cuban heeled boots and leather jeans. I’m not exactly your textbook Mom — or Dad. I’m just…me. I read a paper the other day which suggested that what I wear would make me a “heterosexual queer.” Cool, I’m happy to be one. But — and this is the point — I could literally care less about such labels. That’s because I’m not seeking a Daddy to be protected by, or a Mommy who’ll nourish me, that I have to protect at all costs. I’m too busy trying to just take care of my little family. It’s hard work. I don’t have time for narcissism. Anymore — though there are certainly days I wish I did.
That brings me back to the point: how did all this infantile regression, so self-evident on both right and left, come to be? The answer’s pretty obvious, if you think about it. We regress to our infantile selves when reality becomes unbearable, dangerous, hostile, threatening — in profound, chronic, systemic ways. Regression is our last defense mechanism — it’s what we resort to when all the rest, denial, reaction, projection, and so forth, fail. Fail at what? To keep the terrible thoughts at bay. My God! How will I live? How will I pay the bills? Who’s going to take care of my family, when I can’t? What am I supposed to do, when nothing I ever do seems to work out? Maybe I should just give up on everything. How did my life end up this way?
Sound like a pretty regular set of thoughts to have these days? It should, because it is. Be honest — I’d bet you have those thoughts most days. It’s OK — I’m not judging or condemning you. We live in failed societies — and that’s what they do: produce panic, anxiety, dread, fear. But when people come to think thoughts like the above over and over and over and over again,…every single day…they are going to regress right back to their infantile selves. Because having to think such thoughts shatters all our everyday defense mechanisms. To really allay the terrible anxieties and fears produced by such thoughts needs stronger medicine. A perfect Daddy, ready to do extreme violence for you. A perfect Mommy, who’ll always tell you you’re the most special one. That kind of medicine.
That is how our cultures and politics went “alt” — both alt left and alt right. Broken societies produced broken minds, which, in the grip of infantile regression, craved intensely narcissistic kinds of validation, reassurance, and comforting — that is the only thing that could keep the terrible truths of social collapse at bay. Such narcissism could create good feelings, where encountering reality only created bad ones. But those good feelings, because they were infantile, had a price: they stopped adult minds working.
For the rest of us seeing a society turn viciously, suddenly, wholly infantile has been head-spinning and jaw dropping. On the one side, you have a tribe of authoritarian-fascists, who are quite happy putting kids in actual concentration camps…and on the other, you have a tribe who thinks gender pronouns and what to call who has sex with whom matter more than concentration camps…or hunger, disease, poverty, thirst, despair, ruin, democracy, reality, truth, and so on. For those of us who find both these sides pathetic and absurd, the middle ground has vanished. If I’m to say to on Twitter, for example, “I think gender pronouns come a distant second to, say, a billion people on earth still starving, four billion without decent sanitation, and so forth”…it’ll be a matter of minutes before I’m pilloried. So mostly, like you, I keep silent.
Most of us don’t speak our minds about this bizarre situation of being trapped dead in the middle of two giant tribes of perpetually bickering, shouting, screaming, raging infants, throwing endless tantrums, over special names and private parts and whether or not Daddy’s perfect or Mommy will give you another kiss because you’re the best one of all, whose pain matters most. Those of us who are still sane — mostly, we retreat. Who wants to be mobbed by angry babies in adult form? Who needs that kind of noise, abuse, hostility, aggression? Who needs even more anger and rage added to their lives — by extremists of both sides, over issues that seem to ignore and elide the more real and pressing and urgent ones? Nobody does. The adults have left the room, my friends. And the children have taken over. Not just healthy, sane, positive, joyous ones — but hurt, wounded, terrified, desperate ones.
February 2020
