Make America Great Again: A Modern Mythological Incarnation of Self and Shadow

The dynamism of the MAGA psycho-spiritual Self: All the energy and governing principles spiral out from a belief in the reality, power, and renewal of an American Self or god-image as defined by Trump and MAGA . In some ways, the image brings us much closer to the lived experience of this level of reality than we can achieve with words.

MAGA’s Vision of the Self

Many of us have had an impossible time understanding how Trump and his MAGA vision have taken hold of so many of our fellow citizens. Have aliens from another planet landed on earth? We try to apprehend the MAGA point of view with our reason and it makes little sense—even when we do our best to take into account economic, sociological, historical, and cultural factors that have contributed to a profound sense of injury, fragmentation, threat to status, and anger both on the right and the left. Although we fail to comprehend MAGA, it is essential that we do our best to understand what has made half our voting population feel like aliens to those of us who have not joined with them. It is easy enough to think of MAGA as a “cult” that is following a messianic guru, but a pejorative label dismissing so many as a lunatic fringe hardly helps us appreciate the magnetic power of Trump as a charismatic leader that brings him into such a powerful, almost mystical bond with his followers. The fact is that the relationship between Trump and MAGA is far more powerful than our reason can apprehend as it defies all rationality, including the reasoned approach of the law and its precedents.

It is not that I see MAGA as a positive movement. In fact, I view it as the most dangerous development in the last seventy-five years of American history. It is precisely because I don’t want to underestimate its unquestioned dynamic energy to move people that I think it is imperative that we continue to inquire about “why” Trump and MAGA are so compelling. I have come to see MAGA’s enormous energy originating in (forgive the following mouthful) an activated collective image of the central archetype of the Self, a psycho-spiritual reality that Jung explored and which for the most part we only have occasional glimpses in our daily, waking consciousness.[1] Although unseen, it is very present and active in the MAGA psyche, in the inner life of its individual members and in the shared inner life of the MAGA group faithful. This largely unrecognized source of dynamic energy operates like a nuclear reactor and I imagine it as serving as the driving center and heart of the MAGA psyche --far more potent in its capacity to generate emotion, ideology and behavior than reason. At its core this experience of the Self participates in divinity and has the power to move and organize the psyche in depth. We can even imagine that all policies related to the economy, education, health care, foreign affairs, the judicial system and everything else can be seen as flowing from that central organizing dynamism or energy field of the MAGA Self. More generally, we can think of the Self as an indwelling god image in human beings. The energy of the MAGA Self emanates and circulates around a central vision of a halcyon America restored to a primal oneness in which life will once again be good and simple with a strong father god, Trump, at its center. It renews the belief in a golden age when people knew what sex they were and were white and lived a good life—like the Leave it to Beaver TV show of the 1950’s, a fantasy of imagined decency, and well-being among a dominant white population. Placing Trump in the center of this world also represents a restoration of an old, original model of kingship when the King was believed to be God’s representative on Earth. Stated another way, it is the archetype of the Self as a divine King that gives the earthly king such power. Trump is not just king, but in the kingship archetype he is the embodiment of God on earth. We might do well to say to ourselves as a way of recognizing the psycho-spiritual forces at play to say that Trump is indeed the incarnation of a mad king/God. And why has this backward looking psycho-spiritual force become so powerful? Perhaps because so many Americans all across the political and cultural spectrum have felt that their lives and their country are broken, fragmented and that the increasing emphasis on diversity and multiplicity whether it be in ethnicity, sexuality, or identity contributed exponentially to that fragmentation. Of course, the idea that we can lay all the blame for our fragmented world on the shoulders of increasing diversity and multiplicity in our land is absurd. But, an especially vulnerable group to this increasing sense of fragmentation and loss has been white men and now men of many ethnicities. The enemy is multiplicity. The good is homogeneity. In a time when so many among us have felt deeply challenged by and increasingly vulnerable to the rapid changes in the world with which we can hardly keep up there is a yearning for the One to rule over the Many, for Trump to rule over the Courts, the Congress, the FBI, the CIA, etc. etc. It is in just such a crisis of uncertainty that an inner image of the divine, or the Self, or of a central organizing vision can take possession of a population as with Naziism in Germany. Jung put it this way:

The life of the individual as a member of society and particularly as part of the State may be regulated like a canal, but the life of nations is a great rushing river which is utterly beyond human control . . . The life of nations rolls on unchecked, without guidance, unconscious of where it is going, like a rock crashing down the side of a hill, until it is stopped by an obstacle stronger than itself. Political events move from one impasse to the next, like a torrent caught in gullies, creeks and marshes. All human control comes to an end when the individual is caught up in a mass movement. Then the archetypes begin to function, as happens also in the lives of individuals when they are confronted with situations that cannot be dealt with in any of the familiar ways.”

Out of this crisis of fragmentation, an idealized time before things got broken and divided into multiplicity and diversity has emerged as a central longing. Nativism and America first and an all-powerful authority are all consequences of the felt brokenness and fragmentation, of everything moving too fast and out of control. The image of a pristine Oneness—MAGA—is fundamentally a psycho-spiritual image with a yearning to return everything, including off-shore industries and ourselves to a neglected American Garden of Eden that is crying out for healing. Everything contained within that Garden is good and everything foreign to the Garden should be expelled as evil. All the energy and governing principles of MAGA spiral out from a belief in the restoration of that American Self or god-image. A different set of rules than those of our traditional law and reason-based society flow from that MAGA vision of primal oneness. Everything emanates from it--its energy, its emotional power, its certainty—all spiral out from the ruling power of a megalomaniacal Donald Trump who stands at the symbolic center of the non-rational MAGA creation.

The Divine Kingship Motif of the MAGA Self Image

Jung and Unidentified Flying Objects

The power of this central, unifying force or energy field from which everything flows reminds me of an essay that C.G. Jung wrote about flying saucers in 1958: Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1958). In this work, Jung approached UFOs as a psychologist, analyzing them as a cultural and psychological phenomenon. Jung was interested in why there were so many sitings of flying saucers. He speculated that it might represent a psychological projection of a vision of a unifying spiritual force that in various cultures has been experienced as Jesus or Moses or Buddha. These historical figures and the spiritual reality that they symbolize fulfill a deep human need for meaning and the hope for transformation or salvation during times of great uncertainty. Jung’s notion was that a renewed yearning for contact with this reality in the mid twentieth century expressed itself in the projection of flying saucers arriving from outer space, promising contact with that meaning-giving reality.

Unidentified Flying Objects as Mandala Self Images Parallel Musk’s Vision of Space Flight to Mars

Jung associated the circular shape of UFOs with the archetype of the mandala, a symbol of totality and the self. He proposed that flying saucers could represent an unconscious striving for wholeness, especially in a time of heightened societal anxiety such as the Cold War era. He believed UFOs emerged in popular consciousness as a response to deep-seated fears and hopes. During times of crisis, people often look to the skies for salvation, whether in the form of gods, angels, or extraterrestrial visitors. It is ironic that people in the 1950’s were looking to the skies for signs of extraterrestrials that might bring renewal to humanity, just as today Elon Musk looks to Mars for the salvation of mankind. Musk may be expressing a similar yearning in his wish to go to Mars as a place that will provide salvation from the impending doom of Earth.

The Shadow of MAGA’s Vision of The Self: How MAGA Looks to Those Not in Its Orbit

While this huge, mostly unconscious dynamism of the MAGA Self takes hold of the psyche of many in America, those of us not caught up in its orbit see the earthly reality of what is in fact being done in the name of that potent longing to restore an original wholeness of the American Way of Life. What is in fact being enacted in the name of that vision appears to have a more shadowy reality. I will present a few AI generated images that depict a far less idealized picture of what may actually be motivating the MAGA leadership in the name of the MAGA Self.

The following images appear to be set in a fictional or symbolic setting rather than a specific historical era. However, the clothing, props (such as scepters, military insignias, and ornate maps), and the overall atmosphere suggest a mix of 18th to early 20th-century European aesthetics—evoking imagery from imperial or colonial eras to which we seem to be returning. These images are more allegorical than historically precise, designed to emphasize themes of arrogance, ambition, self-satisfaction, conquest, greed, and power.

1. Self-Righteous, Self-Satisfied Arrogance

The first image portrays the self-satisfied, self-righteous arrogance of a powerful leadership team as it might have appeared in earlier generations breaking up the world into pieces both at home and abroad that can be devoured for profit and power. We can see manifestations of these attitudes in Trump’s approach to Ukraine/Russia and Palestine/Israel. Our current MAGA leadership is tearing apart everything that has been done in the name of the public good in order to increase the wealth and power of an emerging oligarchy—all under the guise of restoring America to a time of fantasized original greatness and primal wholeness where diversity and multiplicity were not given any value. The current reality of dismantling and destroying the existing world order is executed in the name of a new disruptive vision of society that is simultaneously falling back into an old patriarchal order buoyed up by new technology and its promise to make less corrupt and more efficient a way of life that will eventually take us to Mars.

2. Greed

Even more disturbing is the self-dealing, conflict of interest, and greed that appears to be motivating those currently holding the reins of power.

3. Power

Finally, there seems to be an inexorable progression already unfolding in the second Trump administration in which the leadership of MAGA has become totally possessed by an overwhelming drive to consolidate power, shifting from just a preoccupation with accumulating wealth to total domination over every part of the realm—from all government agencies, to as many sources of public information as possible, to neighboring landmasses that fall into our would be-sphere of influence. This urge to total domination is a familiar recurring theme in history and most often ends in totalitarian rule and suppression of all human freedoms and basic human rights. Ultimately the drive to power consumes whatever humanity remains.

CONCLUSION

MAGA has remained a mystery to those of us who are not part of it or fear it or abhor it. Part of the mystery may be that we are wrestling with an underlying, psycho-spiritual force, the emotional energy of which gives fuel and fervor to the true believers who are willing to destroy our society and government as we know it in the name of this MAGA god or Self- image incarnated in Donald Trump. We underestimate the psycho-spiritual aspect of this phenomenon at our own great peril. We are not just up against a political movement. It is also a spiritual movement in which the urge to experience a central meaning and a unifying, organizing principle in life has become fundamental.

Central to this image of divinity fused with American greatness is that it excludes everything that is not in its own image. And it goes about this exclusion with a vengeance that portrays everything that is “other” as being corrupt and evil. What is defined as “other” both at home and abroad is rejected as alien to American innocence, goodness, greatness, and divinity. The divine or Self-image that is fueling this madness makes it impenetrable, until it isn’t.

At its core, the dynamic energy of the relationship between Trump and MAGA flows from the projection of the Self. It is based on the wish to return to a magical state of oneness, a fantasized past in which everything good was embodied in the nation and everything bad was located outside of America. Even more than that, this primal state of Oneness, of American greatness, is itself a fantasized God-image. They are all the same: Oneness, Greatness, America, God. And this great, one America of the imagined past happens to be mostly white and mostly male. When we don’t recognize the unconscious God-image at the core of the MAGA experience, we are missing its driving, compelling force—why it is so powerful, why it defies reason, and why it can so handily reject the law and the Constitution as the ultimate source of authority in the land. This Self is a higher source of authority, a law unto itself. So many of Trump’s early executive orders are about expelling from this Self, this primal oneness of the Great America he seeks to recreate, those elements that are seen as foreign—anything that expresses the positive value of non-whites, diversity, multiplicity, or even, it seems, anything that expresses a spirit of generosity or philanthropy to our own people, much less other nations. Indeed, the only nation to whom our traditional generosity has been extended has been Russia. In a way, this brings us full circle in our exploration of “Make America Great Again: A Modern Mythological Incarnation of Self and Shadow” with Trump’s shift of policy towards Russia. It is as if all the deepest yearnings of Trump and Putin to make themselves and the Selves of Russia and America Great Again have embraced in an unholy marriage of Self and Shadow, a monstrous coming together of a sense of divinely ordained destiny with self-righteousness, arrogance, violence, greed and the desire for world power and domination. And this unholy marriage of Self and Shadow between America and Russia undermines every democratic value we have stood for since World War Two, reaching back to our very origins in the American Revolution.

Footnote

[i] I have a very wise mentor who gently reminds me that the less we use the technical words of our chosen tradition in our writing, the better it is for everyone. My children have certainly been telling me this for years as they can hardly read what I write, although recently they have been a bit more receptive because I am using fewer Jungian terms which quickly become jargon and make things less rather than more comprehensible. For that reason, I kept stumbling in writing this essay because I could not avoid using Jung’s notion of the Self. It is not so easily understood as it has many layers of meaning. It points to an ineffable reality, a presence one can know deeply without being able to see it. Here is a good synopsis from AI of the multiple layers of meaning and use of Self. In my understanding of the Self, it can be applied to the psyche of an individual and to the psyche of a group.

In Jungian psychology, the "Self" represents the unified, whole psyche, encompassing both conscious and unconscious aspects, and is the ultimate goal of the individuation process, which involves integrating various personality aspects.

Here's a more detailed explanation:

• The Self as a Unifying Force:

  Jung viewed the Self as the central organizing principle of the psyche, striving for wholeness and integration.

• Individuation:

  The process of individuation, or becoming an "in-dividual," is the journey towards realizing the Self.

• Archetype of Wholeness:

  The Self is an archetype, a universal, inherited pattern of thought and behavior, representing the totality of the psyche.

• Transcends the Ego:

  While the ego is the center of consciousness, the Self is the center of the entire personality, encompassing both conscious and unconscious aspects.

• Symbols of the Self:

  Jung often used symbols like the circle, square, or mandala to represent the Self, as these shapes symbolize wholeness and totality.

• Goal of Psychic Development:

  Jung believed that the goal of psychic development is to realize the Self, a process of integrating the conscious and unconscious aspects of personality.

• "God Within":

  Jung sometimes referred to the Self as "the God within us," emphasizing its transcendent and spiritual nature.