In this article I want to show how the behaviour and actions of ex-President Trump, both in and out of office, graphically illustrate the power of the unconscious mind to misdirect us, sometimes disastrously. Trump provides a text-book demonstration of the dark side of the unconscious mind and the havoc it can wreak - as do other ‘populist’ politicians whose talent is to manipulate the emotions of the Electorate, and to trade on people’s fears and desires regardless of reality.
The Trump era is associated with ‘alternative facts’, ‘post truth’ and conspiracy theories. He is the first President ever to face criminal charges - there are currently more than ninety counts against him in four indictments ranging from fraud and purloining classified documents, to conspiracy to overturn the result of the 2020 election. His handling of the Covid-19 pandemic was characterised by macho posturing and denial.
To understand how this could have happened, we need first to explore in more depth the workings of the unconscious mind. Our intuitions and emotions operate in a completely different way from the conscious, rational, thinking minds we inhabit. We apply our conscious minds to an issue. They take things apart, crunch evidence and facts, apply language and numbers and logic. But our unconscious intelligences don’t do any of this – they work holistically, instantly and effortlessly, on the basis of impressions and emotions rather than facts and evidence.
To understand them, we need to go back to our evolutionary origins. Our brains evolved in stages. The emotional – limbic – brain came first; the cognitive, cerebral cortex came afterwards. To survive our distant ancestors needed quickly to recognise opportunities and threats - food and danger – and to react appropriately – ‘approach’ or ‘avoid’. The people who survived to procreate were those whose minds were good at extracting the salient features from situations they encountered, storing them away and recognising similar patterns when they encountered them again: those who recognised instantly that the shadow in the bushes might be a predator, and ran for their lives.
Our unconscious minds still do this. They continue to bridge the gap between an infinitely complex world and the finite processing capacity of our brains by storing simplified models of what we encounter, and looking for matching patterns in our current experience. We don’t live in the real world, but in a simulated world constructed by our unconscious minds. The function of our simulations is to predict what will come next and cue us to react appropriately, which they do by means of intuitions and emotions.
Your personal simulated reality is very sophisticated. It works at all levels of your experience. It captures the essence of the physical world through which you move every day – you know a chair is a chair even when it’s stacked upside down - and your cognitive world of concepts, ideas and problems – you can recognise similarities between superficially different situations. It even reduces your emotional experiences to their essence – particularly the formative events of your childhood – and determines your emotional reactions, in the light of what worked when you were a child. Its networks of models enable you to navigate an infinitely complex reality. It can apply all your experience simultaneously to solve a problem. It can reorganise itself to accommodate new information. It can find a way through complexities your conscious mind simply doesn’t have the processing power to grapple with. It’s helped in this by the emotional charge on its models. When the problem you face has key features in common with something you have encountered and dealt with before, it leads you to the positively charged solution which worked in the past and steers you away from blind alleys. You feel subtle bodily sensations: this feels wrong, but this feels right. I can’t explain why, but I’m certain this won’t work, but that will.
Occasionally you catch a glimpse of it working behind the scenes – when you have a hunch, a sudden insight, or an unexpected emotional reaction. The neuroscientist and therapist Professor Louis Cozolino uses the analogy of a computer operating system. Most of the time, all the continuously scrolling code is hidden from your conscious self; and you are totally unable to imagine what life would be like if you had a different system.
So, your unconscious mind is capable of magic. It’s the originator of the intuitions that guide you instantly to the answer, and the source of new insights and ideas. It’s the seat of the emotions which give you your passions and impel you to follow them, and the means by which you see into and influence other minds. It is hugely influential in your decisions and choices, how you interact with other people, and how you see yourself.
But things can go badly wrong. Most of the time your unconscious guide works well and your feelings and intuitions are reliable. But not always. One of its most striking features is that it is invariably convincing - so it may seriously mislead you without your having any idea that anything’s amiss.
There are a host of ways in which it can lead you astray and undermine your rational engagement with reality. Daniel Kahneman’s masterwork, Thinking Fast and Slow, comprehensively documents how these shortcuts (‘heuristics’) and biases work at cognitive level. The models on which it depends may be distorted or incomplete, so that its pattern matching is unreliable. It’s prone to jumping to conclusions and assembling the available evidence into a coherent story, missing crucial elements. It can’t comprehend the chaos and randomness of reality – it can’t handle concepts like risk and probability which are the products of later, conscious analysis – so it puts human agency – heroes and villains - at the centre of its stories and vastly overstates their, and indeed your, influence on events.
Its operation is bound up with your emotions. It sees the world through rose tinted spectacles and is prone to wishful thinking: we have a species bias towards over-optimism, which may have evolved to protect us from depression and inertia because we know we’re mortal. We are prone to various forms of denial to protect ourselves from overwhelming negative emotions. Perhaps Its most malign effects relate to our deep emotional models of ourselves. If we have experienced adversity during childhood, these may be seriously distorted: we may be insecure, have low self-esteem, make wrong choices and behave in dysfunctional ways.
How does all this explain Trump’s behaviour? His catastrophic refusal to grapple with an unwelcome reality was clearly manifest in his handling of the Covid epidemic. The rational response was to adopt the precautionary principle and plan for the worst; indeed, this strategy could have minimised both the death toll and economic damage. But Trump went with his unconscious promptings. He was concerned that the pandemic would threaten the economy and, more importantly, jeopardise his chances of re-election; he couldn’t countenance this psychologically; so he went into denial, at first suggesting that it was a ‘hoax’, invented by his political opponents, and subsequently that it would just ‘go away’. He refused to instruct state governors to lock down, or to enforce mask wearing (indeed it became a mark of honour for Republicans not to wear masks) and held large election rallies without social distancing – at one of which he himself caught the virus.
His denial contributed to a death toll of 450,000 people by the time he left office, the highest in any developed country, and a figure which, it has been suggested, could have been reduced by 40%, if the Federal Government had provided leadership. (The current inquiry into the UK Government’s response to Covid is of course finding similar deficiencies in preparation for and handling of the pandemic – also the result of the unconscious biases and dysfunctional culture of our authorities – to which I will return.)
The desperate need to protect himself from having to face unpalatable truths is also at the core of Trump’s inability to accept that he had lost the 2020 Election, his insistence that it had been ‘stolen’ from him, and the complex conspiracy he led to overturn the result. Indeed it is fundamental to his personality.
Trump presents as a sufferer from full-blown Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Narcissists appear superficially very confident, but in reality have very low self esteem. They have sought to bury distorted, negative models of themselves acquired in childhood deep in their unconscious by inventing the myth that they are uniquely talented and entitled. They can’t risk the explosion of this myth because it defends them against emotions they can’t bear – the sense of their imperfection and fragility. Trump demonstrates many of the behaviours associated with NPD: he makes grandiose statements about his abilities (he is, apparently, ‘a very stable genius’), is famously thin-skinned (fights back when criticised), lacks empathy (he referred to the Covid death toll as ‘a shame’) and is a habitual liar (his view of himself is, after all, based on a lie).
Trump’s niece, the psychologist Mary Trump, has suggested that as a result of his own insecurities – these distortions often come down the generations – Trump’s father instilled in his son the unconscious conviction that he must be a ‘winner’, and that it was shameful to be a loser (loser is of course one of Trump’s favourite insults to others). Shame acquired in childhood is a very powerful determinant of adult personality and behaviour: people will go to any lengths to avoid confronting the devastating sense of worthlessness at their core. Trump cannot admit to himself that he is ‘a loser’ without doing this.
The lawyers are currently considering whether it is vital to the charge of conspiracy that Trump really knew he had lost the Election. Our unconscious minds seem to be able to plunge us into states of simultaneously knowing and not knowing what’s really going on. Trump told the reporter, Bob Woodward, that he had known from the beginning how serious Covid would be. Justification after the fact, or was he aware at some level that he was deceiving himself when he refused to take the pandemic seriously?
Trump is a frightening example of the power of an unchecked unconscious to wreak chaos. He has an uncanny ability to tune into the desires of a certain section of the US Electorate, who believe themselves victimised and neglected – the fantasy of an all-powerful heroic leader, who understands them and will ‘make America great again’- and ride on the populist wave which feeds his own narcissism. Sadly, there is the real possibility that this pattern could be repeated soon. He has already put forward a frightening manifesto for his second term, much of it driven by his narcissistic compulsion to grab power for himself, and revenge himself on those who have criticised him or held him in check in the past.
In my next article I will look at the relationship between our conscious and unconscious minds – in particular in how we make judgments in complexity and whether we can trust our intuitions. I will come back to the emotional distortions from which most of us suffer to some degree, and to the importance of organisational culture, in later articles.
Sources
Cozolino, Louis Why Therapy Works: Using our Minds to Change our Brains, W W Norton and Company Inc, 2016
Kahneman, Daniel Thinking Fast and Slow, Allen Lane, 2011
Trump, Mary, Too Much and Never Enough, Simon & Schuster, 2020
Woodward, Bob, Rage, Simon & Schuster, 2020