A Facebook friend understandably posted the following observation this morning:
“Never in my life would I have guessed that I would have to compete against TWO impeachment trials of the President in the same year: but that is a consequence of electing a person who put his own interests ahead of the country, who refused to tell the truth about the election and caused chaos in our own house.”
I’ve picked out the phrase, “a person who put his own interests ahead of the country,” to comment upon.
Stephen Holmes* has helped us appreciate a notion of “self-interests” that had a rational and indispensable role to play in the history of Liberal democratic thought and politics. Today, as Holmes points out, the notion of self-interest has often been reduced by those hostile to Liberalism as a political philosophy of cool if not cruel calculation, “niggling selfishness, and indifference to spiritual values and the common good.” And to make matters worse, conceptions of interest and self-interest in both every day and intellectual discourse (e.g., in economics, psychology, and politics) have a wide range of connotations that frequently make it difficult to understand its precise meaning apart from its specific communicative context and social setting, among other things. That said, I think we can justifiably claim that unless we choose to use the term in a wholly pejorative sense, to speak of or refer to Trump’s “own interests” in the above manner fails to do his motivations and related actions justice. Before explaining why, permit me to say a few things about the notion of interest in Holmes’ book in the chapter, “The Secret History of Self-Interest.”
Holmes reminds us that, “Bentham aside,” classical Liberals such as Locke, J.S. Mill, Adam Smith, and Madison “all assumed, quite realistically, that passions crowd out interests.” These authors, representative of a larger class of writers, held to a conception of self-interest that was largely rational in a broad sense. It was fashioned in opposition to the “aristocratic ideal of glory” and “disenchantment with the Christian dogma of original sin.” Finally, and ambiguously, “the postulate of universal self-interest, although logically incompatible with insight in to the rich variety of human motives [17th and 18th century Liberal thinkers like Smith and Hume in fact ‘analyzed the human psyche’ with ‘considerable finesse], first rose to cultural prominence because of its unmistakably egalitarian and democratic implications.” Mankind is prone to being moved by a richly diverse and often contradictory list of motives, and self-interest, oddly enough (particularly in light of how often it is invoked), is often quite elusive, trumped by other sub-rational, irrational, non-rational or even allegedly supra-rational motivations.
For this reason alone, I would say it’s at least arguable that Trump placed “his own interests ahead of the country.” That is far too innocuous or anodyne a description of what motivated and moved Trump. After Hume and with Holmes, “we can construct a … list of the sub-rational motivations to which seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers contrasted the calculating pursuit of private advantage [in our case: Trump’s ‘own interests’]. Here is Hume’s catalog […]: the intolerant adherence to abstract principle [not something we need worry about with Trump!], inherited animosity, love of imitation, psychological infatuation with a leader [as with members of Trump’s cult, but also Trump’s narcissistic love of himself], and psychological identification with a group. To these motives, he also adds a craving for approval, anger, envy, fear, grief, shame, depression, melancholy, and anxiety.” Smith had a similar yet distinct list of dangerous passions, which intriguingly included “[i]rrational ‘obsequiousness’ toward the rich and the powerful … the flip side of libido dominandi. These unsocial motivational passions make, to put it mildly, “reasoning difficult,” and those “in the thrall of such unsocial passions [like Trump and his militant sycophantic followers] do not act from rational self-interest….”
To be more precise with regard to Trump’s motives and corresponding behavior (here I depart from those who refuse the attempt to ‘read Trump’s mind’ as it were, as if his motivations are hidden and opaque and cannot be reasonably inferred from his words and actions), I would argue that what Trump placed ahead of sworn duties to his oath of office and the country are not “his own interests” (his transparent inability to engage in self-examination and self-reflection rule out the capacity to comprehend just what those are) but rather a frightening or disturbing motley of dangerous passions and vices, megalomaniacal narcissistic needs, perverse desires, delusional will and phantasies, all of which are immeasurably worsened by his “unbridled and extreme present hedonism” and a dispositional penchant for psychopathy and sociopathy. Psychiatrists are now willing to publicly state that they think Trump has a “delusional disorder,” one of whom describes this illness as “unique among psychiatric conditions in that the area of dysfunction can be highly circumscribed. An individual with this disorder often has a single fixed delusion and otherwise functions normally.” However, I do not think this is “highly circumscribed” in Trump’s case or that he “otherwise functions normally,” given his malignant narcissism and “unbridled and extreme present hedonism” (which is a twisted take on the spiritual admonition to ‘be here now,’ the presentism in this case ongoing, sans self-reflection or self-examination ‘looking backwards,’ as well as an inability to have (consistent, coherent, and reasonable) goals, aims, and plans that are by definition ‘looking forward’).
* See his Passions & Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 1995). In The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton University Press, 1977), Albert O. Hirschman has a nuanced historical and conceptual discussion of the notion of “interests” which Holmes largely treats with favor although he concludes his analysis with three pointed criticisms.
Comments