Election deception, dream interpretation, and the cracks in consensus reality.
TRANSCRIPT
The other day, after dropping my son off at the bus stop, I heard a radio news story about the upcoming presidential election in Brazil. The story discussed how the current president of Brazil, in responding to polls suggesting that public opinion favored his opponent, made statements about the election being rigged against him. With the American 2020 election and all its aftermath being a mere two years ago, this scenario, of course, sounded quite familiar.
Thinking about the nature that elections have taken on in recent years, they seem to be just one more reminder of how being alive means existing in a world of seemingly contending opposites… elections are added to the list of male vs. female; early bird vs. night owl; and Coke vs Pepsi. And of course, we use oppositional language - such as “battleground states” - to describe our electoral culture. Indeed we have heard the term battleground state or swing state as they are also called increasingly more over the last 30 years, while 50 years ago we barely heard the term at all; and if we did, it meant that the state was more of an indicator of how the election would go, rather than a scene set for political conquest or victory.
There is an old idea that says that the health of the King or Queen of a given territory is the defining factor of the health of the territory itself. The King and Queen archetypes are entities of order, located at the symbolic center of a territory as well as the culture they represent. In look at how we elect a King type leader in America, political analysts suggest that the election of 1976 marks a certain turning point in our relationship to the electoral system. This is the year that Jimmy Carter won over the incumbent Gerald Ford, who interestingly enough, was the only president who was never elected as president or vice president. During that election (and for much of the century prior) there were a number of states that were considered “up for grabs” between the two major political parties - as many as 15 or 20. But by the time 2020 rolled around, many experts would say that the election would depend on only three states.
As the number of so-called battleground states has decreased, the sense of political conflict has increased. In looking at job approval ratings of US presidents since Gerald Ford, it is interesting to note that while job approval and disapproval ratings have bounced around with no obvious correlation to time or party affiliation, the percentage of citizens who have no opinion about presidential job performance has consistently decreased, with 15% feeling neutral towards Ford and only 4% feeling neutral towards presidents Obama and Trump.
There’s an old idea that says that during critical times, the mythic world and the real world intersect. Symbolically speaking, the diminishing rate of American citizens with no opinion about presidential job performance seems to say that the country is orienting more and more around the archetype of the King, whether for or against whoever happens to occupy the role. The mythic world is also the world of our dreams, and depending on a person’s orientation, they might have felt that recent presidencies were either a dream come true or a nightmare. So as a thought experiment, what if we read the current political situation - specifically the Brazil election and its similarity to American Trumpism - the way we might interpret a dream?
One way to do this is to look at the overall themes that the situation brings up. As far as the elections are concerned, deception seems to be a core theme. There are accusations of deception coming from both sides of the political spectrum, indicating what many are now calling the breakdown of consensus reality. With increasing polarization around how to interpret what is happening in the world, it makes me think again about the idea of battle and how there always seems to be a Battle to be fought in life. With how the Trump presidency and the 2020 election seem to signify a major shift in the socio-political landscape in America (along with other shifts in national leadership around the world, including that of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil), it seems to me that the object of the Battle is also shifting.
For the last couple hundred years, I would argue that the Battle has been for what is Right. Wars for national independence were fought because it no longer seemed right for a people to be ruled by a leader they had no say in choosing. In the last two hundred years, we have seen movements for workers’ rights, children’s rights, civil rights, women's rights, and animal rights. While in many of those situations there was disagreement about what was right, there still seemed to be a shared understanding of what was happening. In contrast, in the present situation, coming to any agreement about what is Right seems nearly impossible due to the fact that different groups of people are holding to different and often conflicting narratives about what is happening in the world. In other words, the Battle is now becoming a battle for what is True.
One thing that seems to be true, is that it’s getting harder and harder for people to agree on what is true; and as democratic elections are a powerful symbol for and manifestation of consensus reality, it makes sense - however troubling it might be - that the smooth execution of our elections would seemingly fall apart at the same time that consensus reality seems to be breaking down.
Another way to approach a dream is to play around with the language overtly stated in the dream or suggested by the images in the dream. In the case of a central figure such as former president Trump, I personally get curious about the etymological meaning of the person’s name. The name Donald comes from Celtic words meaning “world” and “power” or “rule”. The word trump comes with a rich associative history. Perhaps most dramatic is the biblical, end-of-days image known as the final trump, when one world comes to an end and another world is born into being. Of course, these name meanings seem to echo the major shift in world powers that has been coinciding with Trumpism.
In the playing of card games, to “break trump” means to open up play of the most powerful suit in the game, and this can only happen when the individual playing a trump card is lacking any cards of the suit already on the table; this, too, marks a significant shift in the power dynamics of the game. ‘To trump’ can also mean to deceive, derived from the Old French word tromper, which apparently was used most commonly in a phrase referring to deceptive street vendors who would blow a loud horn in the marketplace to get everyone’s attention before convincing people to buy what they were selling.
As we are experiencing right now, living in a world of fragmenting reality can be very unsettling. But I also want to suggest that the present situation might be trying to direct our attention towards an important opportunity as well. And that brings me to one more way to approach a dream. In depth psychology, there is an idea that suggests that the psyche of an individual is always moving towards expansion of consciousness and the integration of forgotten or ignored parts of the psyche towards a greater sense of wholeness. When an unconscious part of the psyche wants to integrate, it may show up in a dream as a person with an attitude in conflict with the attitude of what we call the ‘dream ego’, or in other words the conscious point of view of the individual who is dreaming. If the individual continues to ignore this opposing stance within their own psyche, it could become more and more insistent, even to the point of creating psychological or even physical troubles for the individual.
To continue with this thought experiment, we have to look at the entire citizenry of the country as a single individual, with the various ideological groups within it analogous to the way depth psychology views the individual psyche having different aspects that may or may not be in agreement with one another. And since, when looking at the job rating of former president Trump, it seem that the majority opinion was in disapproval of his job performance, I am going to cast this anti-Trump attitude as the conscious dream ego attitude, with the pro-Trump stance showing up in our simulated dream as the new oppositional attitude.
When trying to get at what a dream might be pointing to, depth psychology suggests that the attitude of the dream ego should be considered as the least dependable. To be clear, I am not saying that those disapproving of Trumpism are holding an unreliable stance. Remember, we are attempting to interpret a dream - trying to ascertain whether it has something new for us to consider - and to do this, we need to suspend our belief that we are simply living a fixed reality with a clear sense of right and wrong.
Those who have been appalled by the actions of Trump and/or Bolsonaro may have a hard time doing this. And I want to be clear that I am not condoning the actions of Trump or Bolsonaro or those who follow them; nor should my mythic musings about the threat to democratic elections be seen as me shrugging off the importance of the right to vote. While I’ve been holding off on making any statements of personal judgment or bias towards the situation we’re discussing, for the sake of those who find this thought experiment difficult for that reason, I’ll share this: When I read about and remembered the horribly egregious misogyny demonstrated by Trump and Bolsonaro, I myself was so appalled that I decided I just couldn’t produce this episode. Then I remembered the old idea that an individual’s gifts in life are often found right next to their wounds, the very wounds that make it difficult for an individual to truly own and use their gifts. In other words, the destructive behavior we are seeing now (which to be fair, I must say that I have seen exhibited on either side of the Trumpian divide), is perhaps pointing to a great gift that we just haven’t taken hold of yet… and if the new stance in the dream is saying that we are having a problem with deception and misogyny, then the gifts we are looking for must be Truth and a sense of healing and balance between the Masculine and Feminine energies in the world, because indeed, these energies are truly two sides of the same coin, and we cannot lift up the Feminine without also lifting up healthy, mature masculinity.
If we already knew all we needed to know about Truth and the balance of the Masculine and Feminine, we wouldn’t be having the dream. And so I would suggest that there is one more thing to be taken from the idea that our hypothetical dream ego has something to hear and learn from the opposing attitude in our hypothetical dream. And it’s this: what if the pre-existing consensus reality is the thing that’s holding us back from taking hold of the emerging Truth we are meant to discover in this moment?
Consensus reality creates stability within the structures of society, which, of course, is important; without that stability, civilisations couldn’t exist. However, the assumptions and compromises necessary for consensus reality to take shape also create nooks and crannies in our collective worldview that provide safe-harbor for systemic oppression and deeply seeded prejudice. These are the aspects of our society that we’d rather not see, but that we consent to by not seeing. So, with an uncanny sense of paradox, Trumpism has been a representation of the darker parts of our consensus reality - racism, xenophobia, the degrading and devaluing of the Feminine, the conflation of masculinity and toxic masculinity, grand-scale deception, and cut-throat competitiveness - and while it has brought these shadowy forces back into view, it has also been the focal point of the effort to pry open (or pry apart) consensus reality, which may allow us to finally face and deal with these problematic patterns.
Coming back one last time to the idea of battle, I’m reminded of a quote attributed to Plato; it says: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” It seems to me that Plato means to say that the real Battle is fought at a personal level - within a person - and we are to be kind, because that personal battle is hard enough without having to battle with one another as well.
So, perhaps what we see taking shape in our battleground states is (at least on some level) a dream-like experience meant to draw our attention to the Battle for Truth that exists within each one of us. In addition to creating order, another function of the archetypal King is to give blessing to others, and the old idea of blessing means to affirm whatever is True about another person at a deep, soul level. And that brings me to one last image with which to wrap up this hypothetical dreamplay.
Having started with the news story about the election in Brazil - and having already dug into the meanings behind the names of the former US president - I was also curious to see what might lie behind the name of the Brazilian incumbent. The name Bolsonaro traces back to an Italian word meaning “battering ram”, which seems fitting to describe some of the president’s political tactics, as well as his social tact. However, the Italian word is spelled with a ‘z’, not an ‘s’; and by coincidence of this change in spelling, I find something more hopeful hidden inside the name. Inside the word Bolsonaro is the word sonar, which of course, is a tool used to find objects in deep water like a lake or ocean; and the prefix Bol- means ‘to send out’. Deep water is often interpreted as a symbol of the deep Self - the depths of the soul. The name Jair means ‘he who shines’. Another thing about consensus reality is that to some degree, it requires conformity. And conformity can be a form of self-deception or self-denial. In other words, to be sure we come across as agreeable with societal norms, it at times might require us to neglect certain Truthful parts of ourselves; and it is at such times of upheaval like the time we are all currently experiencing, that those overlooked and forgotten parts of ourselves become critical for imagining what comes next.
So, I see - in the name of the current Brazilian president (I’ll say current, because we don’t know what will happen with this weekend’s election)... I see in the name - an urge to send out signals like sonar into the depths of our individual souls in search of a shining Self that perhaps had been forgotten about in the course of living the routines of life prior to the current uncertainty and mayhem we are now experiencing. And by finding that which is True within ourselves and acknowledging it, we also evoke our own inner, personal King who can provide the order and blessing we all seem to be craving so much.
NOTES
Trump etymology: https://www.etymonline.com/word/trump
Presidential approval ratings: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/final-presidential-job-approval-ratings
History of ‘swing states"‘: https://time.com/5906415/swing-states-history/
Photo by Michael Carruth on Unsplash