A Pleasant Fiction

 In his Reflections on War and Death, Sigmund Freud writes at one point of the "feeling of strangeness in a world which used to seem so beautiful and familiar to us," which he and many of his contemporaries experienced at the outbreak of World War I. (Brill/Kuttner trans. throughout.)

The feeling, he said, came from a sense of "disappointment" or disenchantment at the spectacle of the way so-called "civilized" societies had descended into barbarism. The governments that had set themselves up as the embodiments and enforcers of morality internally were now behaving with crude brutality and dishonesty in their relations to other states. 

The state of the First World War period, Freud writes, "absolves itself from guarantees and treaties by which it was bound to other states, makes unabashed confession of its greed and aspiration to power, which the individual is then supposed to sanction out of patriotism." 

Many Europeans (and other people around the world) are feeling that same sense of "strangeness" this week—as they behold the United States—which until recently had set itself up as the guarantor of the "rules-based order"—suddenly proclaiming itself, under Trump's rule, as an imperialist rogue state of naked aggression and greed. 

Seemingly overnight, our government has begun to claim a "right" to seize the sovereign territory of other nations; to show a frank willingness to violate the NATO treaty on a whim; to display an appetite even to betray and humiliate the very allies who fought and died on our behalf in Afghanistan just a few years before. 

Trump has variously stated his desire to annex the territory of Greenland and Canada. Absurdly, he has now claimed the right to steal Denmark's land in part because the United States had helped liberate it from the Nazis. 

Trump appears to have missed the irony behind his own historical comparison: the last nation to threaten Denmark's sovereign territory in an act of unprovoked aggression was indeed Nazi Germany. Which puts Trump in the role of Hitler. 

Some Europeans have undoubtedly experienced temptation in dark moments to consider sacrificing the Greenlanders to appease Trump. But then—they ask—what would he demand next? Iceland? (It never just ends with the Sudetenland, after all—as the European powers learned to their detriment after 1938.)

Mere hours after news reports quoted people speculating that even if Trump gained Greenland, he would next turn his sights on Iceland (see yesterday's edition of the New York Times, e.g.)—Trump himself repeatedly substituted "Iceland" for Greenland in public remarks. 

I suspect this "slip" may not have been entirely accidental—but rather a message to the world that his ambitions for territorial conquest and subjugation are essentially limitless. 

One can only feel intense disappointment at such a spectacle. We are forced to grapple—as Freud described it—with the realization that the values of supposed "civilization" and morality never penetrated as deeply in many of our contemporaries as we had hoped or imagined. 

But this disappointment "[s]triclty speaking [...] is not justified," Freud writes, "for it consists in the destruction of an illusion." 

This seemed to be Canadian PM Mark Carney's point yesterday, when he spoke of the loss of a "pleasant fiction" by which the world used to live. For some years at least, the global community had indeed been able to pretend to itself that it was founded on rules. But the threat of force from "the stronger" was always hovering in the background. 

And now, the "stronger" nations—the "powers"—have dropped all pretense of playing fairly. They lie, cheat, betray, attack, and steal openly. Maybe they always did as much; but now they do so brazenly, without apology. 

Freud believed the reason for this behavior was that civilization was always a rather thin veneer anyways. It was, as the poet John Berryman once put it, "only a phase/ through which we threaded, coming out at the other end/ to the true light again of savagery."

Many people, in Freud's telling, accepted the requirements of civilized morality only because of external compulsion. Civilization, he writes, is essentially a matter of repressing our impulses for instinctual gratification. 

Unless people internalize these checks, therefore, they will revert to a state of barbarism and immediate gratification as soon as people in power tell them it's okay to do so. 

This, for Freud, explains why World War I unleashed forces of such brutality and butchery in a continent that had—just a few months earlier—appeared to have reached a high water mark of peace and mutual respect between nations. 

Many people, in his view, secretly welcomed the chance to indulge their instinctual urges again for violence and hate, which had been stifled in the atmosphere of 19th century moralism. 

I've written before that much of the Trump phenomenon can be explained in a similar way. People love Trump not because he's right; but because he's wrong. He represents the antithesis of all they have been told to regard as moral—so no wonder many people see him as offering freedom for their instinctual urges.

Richard Rorty writes in one of his works that all the rules of social etiquette that were denounced in the '90s as "political correctness" really amounted merely to an increase in civilization. 

Something similar could be said for the so-called "wokeness" of the 2020 period, which could be described as a kind of political correctness 2.0.

These oft-deried and oft-resisted phenomena may have been motivated in part by virtue-signaling; they may have asked too much of mere flesh and blood. But it cannot be denied that they also represented an advance of civilization—in Freud's sense of the term.

They were about heightening the social checks and compulsions of conscience, in order to respect the dignity and equality of a broader set of the human population. 

If 2020 represented the tightening of the screws of the cultural conscience, then—in the interests of inclusivity and egalitarianism—the Trump era has proclaimed the liberation of the political Id from all of these restraints.  

A veritable pandaemonium—a Walpurgisnacht of all previously-repressed political evils—greed, war, imperialism, racism, misogyny, brutality, torture, kidnapping, murder, delight in the pain and humiliation of others—has come pouring out in response. 

People saw that their government—which mere months before had depicted itself (always semi-hypocritically, to be sure, yet with some element of justice) as an upholder of moral standards—now appearing in the role of kidnapper, butcher, warmonger, and settler of petty vindictive personal scores. 

"The fact that states [...] abolished their [...] ethical restrictions not unnaturally inclined them to withdraw for a time from the existing pressure of civilization," as Freud puts it, "and to sanction a passing gratification of their suppressed impulses." 

This accounts—as I wrote in November 2024—for the strange atmosphere of giddiness that greeted Trump's second election. People heralded his second coming as what D.H. Lawrence called a "revolution for fun"—a relaxation of all civilized constraints and a resurgence of all libidinous urges. 

They were ready to "kick [their] heels like jolly escaped asses"—as Lawrence put it. 

Perhaps civilization was indeed, then, merely "a phase" we passed through—as Berryman put it—before we emerged once more into "the true light again of savagery." 

Now, Trump's behavior has gotten so crassly, blatantly evil that any criticism or satire is rendered superfluous. 

Emmanuel Macron of France seemed for a moment yesterday to suggest that Trump's threats to Europe were motivated by nothing more noble or admirable than a desire for phallic compensation and libidinous dominance. 

"Let’s not be divided, let’s not accept the global order which will be decided by those who claim to have the bigger voice, or the bigger teeth, or the bigger... I don’t know," he reportedly said. 

He suggested, in short, that all this bullying about Greenland really amounted to was a dick-measuring contest. 

I'm reminded of Harold Pinter's poem about the Bush administration's warmongering: 

There's no escape.
The big pricks are out.
They'll fuck everything in sight.
Watch your back.

Pinter saw, in short, that U.S. imperialism and aggression was really about seeking an outlet for the political libido—the Id—for the repressed violence and psychosexual rage and sadism that had writhed beneath the mask of civilization. 

The difference now, though, is that Trump does not even pretend he is up to anything nobler than that. His own Secretary of Defense posts memes in which Trump's tie doubles as a phallic image. 

If anything, I feel this administration might miss the point entirely of Pinter's satire, if they were confronted with it—and simply view it as a compliment that anyone would imply their "pricks" were "big." 

The "pleasant fiction" Mark Carney referred to—of a civilized "rules-based" world order—has indeed been dropped. Freud's "illusion" is no more. 

And this does indeed account for that "feeling of strangeness" we all now feel in a world that, until just a year ago, had "seem[ed] so beautiful and familiar." 

... for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.