What I mean is that you can see a picture, and you can also see yourself in a picture. When it comes to regular old perception, you never see yourself in the picture unless, 1.) there’s a mirror, 2.) you have a doppleganger, or 3.) you’re losing your mind. In this sense, seeing yourself in the picture is a stock trope of horror movies and/or a diagnostic criterion for certain serious delusions. On the other hand, we screen films in our head that feature us all the time; this is a normal part of imagination, the medium that allows us to think through a future that features us. That distinction is a way of signposting where the ego should be: absent in the real, present in the imaginary.
Are the law and politics real, or are they imaginary? Both, in a democracy: that’s what makes democratic politics so psychologically difficult. The law is something real that’s also subject to the rule of the imagination. We’re both there and not there. An attractive alternative to maintaining that suspended judgment is just to come down on one side or another. For most of America’s history, the contest has been between progressives, who can hold both ideas in their minds at once, and conservatives, who take the shortcut of equating the law with the real, legal with just.
There’s always been a strong counter-fantasy on the right that frames individual believers as knights in shining armor, defending the law from people who want to revise it. That’s the law-and-order type, basically, inside every one of whom is a tiny James Earl Ray struggling to get out. Only in the 90’s and 2000’s did this counter-fantasy turn into the central tenet of right-wing politics, and since 2016 it’s spread everywhere.
What does this mean, in practice, for how we think about politics? Here’s what it’s meant for me. Instead of thinking about how to make political change happen in a realistic way, with a frequency justified by the lackadaisical pace of electoral politics in the USA, I imagine politics as a debate between me and one or more individuals from the opposite party. Sometimes, violence breaks out. Politics is a film that I star in. Like all mind-movies, this one is hard to stop watching, but it also generates anxiety because of the unresolved tension between what it predicts and what may or may not actually happen.
That’s politics as pure imaginary. You put yourself in a picture where you don’t belong: the accompanying delusion is that you, as an individual, can or should make a difference to the politics of the nation as a whole. For some people, that’s actually true, but you and I know we’re not one of them. So we imagine politics as the kind of contest in which we can make a difference, and, if we’re deeply psychotic, we try to make that dream come true by putting aggressive bumper stickers on our cars, etc.
What’s the solution? Don’t buy bumper stickers, unless you’re supporting Ego Death for President 2020. On a personal level, remember that thinking you matter for politics is a compensatory fantasy for not mattering. The alternative to that fantasy is actually doing things, not by yourself but as part of a collective that actually does matter. The most practical things, like voting and supporting political campaigns, may seem unappealing because you get the opportunity to do them so rarely. But is whatever you’re “doing” in the abstract when you vote and campaign actually something you want to be doing all the time? Every four years, the nation gets a hole ripped in its mind. Why would you want to repeat that multiple times a day?