![]() (We may come back to Doctor Fauci and the ethical association of moral vocabulary with public image.) So, yes, the superego may also wear the kind, prophetic face of Doctor Fauci.īut that’s not the superego’s main face or even the superego’s real face. Even as the stock market rises to absolutely new heights while the coronavirus temporarily tamps down the rate of growth in the density of Earth’s atmospheric thermal blanket as a result of an economic meltdown for the poor and hundreds of thousands of people are dead by epidemic disease-even as it’s superego that’s given credit for the warp-speed vaccine that’ll not only protect us from sickness and death but will enable a rocket-speed recovery of the consumerist economy once COVID’s in the bag. The id gets righteously hammered as a matter of conventional moral reflex, but it’s the superego that’s killing us. It’s the instantaneous electronic cloud of Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere. But id is not to be understood, it probably can’t be understood, without its binary opposite-which is the superego. Or of what his elusive revolutionary reality might consist. Mao probably needed twenty meditative years in a Buddhist monastery in order to work through his understanding of id. But he obviously felt a tremendous impulse to find that revolutionary reality, to drive it out of hiding, to force it to be real. He didn’t know how to build into revolutionary reality the feeling of historical liberation that apparently filled his soul. So Mao provoked a monstrous thing-the Cultural Revolution-in an effort to turn rags into. But peasants never get to run civilized forms of governance. He led a revolutionary movement that, by virtue of who signed up, was a peasant. This is the moral perspective not only of professional moralists but also of public intellectuals whose moral consciousness floats in the same multi-generational moral pool. Id requires superego’s surveillance and powers of suppression and detention. We are sinful (perhaps wild) creatures in need of external control. This perspective, this view, this vocabulary, certainly conforms, in a broad moral bandwidth, with Christianity’s Original Sin. The worst of unleashed nastiness-its moral causation-is adorned to the shaggy head of pagan id. Orthodox psychoanalysis teaches that the id is nasty or easily becomes nasty. The id of orthodoxy conforms to the Western view of what’s right and what’s wrong, of who’s inclined to sin and who’s not. ![]() ![]() Well, it’s both psychoanalytical and political, and their bothness is related.Ī major flaw in psychoanalytic ontology-and therefore the language and moral vocabulary of that flawed ontology-shapes, or is at a minimum consistent with, the up/down binary moral escalator of orthodox religious and conventional political discourse. This is less a problem with psychoanalytical thought than it is political. He puts the usual demonic spin on the worst human behavior of the Cultural Revolution (or any revolution), and that devil has a name. In his essay on Mao (“Struggle Sessions”)-well, it’s not only on Mao-Pankaj Mishra commits the conventional orthodox Western sin of hammering the id. Sessions,” in The New Yorker (February 1, 2021), page 62 The monsters and demons,’ gave people license to unleash their id.” Pankaj Mishra, “Struggle “Mao’s decrees, faithfully amplified by the People’s Daily, which exhorted readers to ‘sweep away
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