“The purpose of the state is ‘so to free each man [sic] from fear that he may live and act with full security and without injury to himself or his neighbor.’”
“Hey Donald, I have a great idea. Why don’t we switch jobs”? said Arnold Schwarzenegger in a video response to Donald Trump posted on Twitter. In February, the president had mocked Schwarzenegger for the sliding ratings of Celebrity Apprentice, the show he then hosted. “You take over TV because you’re such an expert on ratings, and I take over your job, so then people can finally sleep comfortably again.”
Schwarzenegger was onto something: go back to reality TV, Trump, and let those of us deeply unsettled by your actions as president get some rest.
In spite of America’s new obsession with sleep—noted in several recent New York Times articles, such as “The Purpose of Sleep, To Forget, Scientists Say” (February 2, 2017)—many I speak with seem to be having a hard time getting to sleep and staying asleep. Perhaps some of us are too wired from the daily insults to our legal system to fall asleep, or we wake obsessively to check our computers and phones to see what new abomination was dreamed up while we tossed in bed. Some of us jump up at ungodly hours hoping to find a chink in the already tatty armor, something to give us hope that this government will soon be deposed. But all we find is the alarmingly destructive narrative coming from the Oval Office, which, in tone and content, is threatening to rip the country apart and rupture relations with our allies around the world.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud warns of the “difficulty” of trying to perform collective psychoanalysis.2 But, at this time in U.S. history, collective analyses seem unavoidable, just as they did in Freud’s pre–World War II era. Every day, polls tell us that many feel there is something deeply wrong with the country’s leadership. A recent GenForward poll found that most young people see Trump’s presidency as illegitimate.3 For many, such recognitions create a pervasive ontological insecurity—a primal sense of instability––that could be characterized as collective anxiety.
Since the inauguration, it is as if we are living with an angry, alcoholic father whose behavior defies prediction. We never know what we’ll find when we get home. His crazed tweeting and irrational fixations create a sense of precariousness, as if we’re watching a boulder teetering on the edge of a cliff, and his “to hell with it” attitude about vital concerns is as incomprehensible as it is frightening: To hell with clean air and water. To hell with the Paris Accords and our promises to allies. To hell with the estimated 24 million people who will lose health insurance in the next decade. To hell with those students who can no longer attend school in the United States and those already here who cannot visit their home countries for fear they might never be able to return. To hell with families broken apart by deportation and immigration bans.
Hatred, lust for power, and vindictiveness rule the day. The State, as Spinoza tells us, is supposed to make us feel “secure.” Our present condition under this appalling government does just the opposite.
Anxiety—always rooted in an unspecified fear without cause—is probably at the core of the psychic disruption keeping many awake. An amalgam of factors contribute to this condition, but surely one is primary: the collective recognition that someone who has shown “alarming signs of mental instability”4 is at the helm of our national ship, someone who has the power to dictate orders that could start a war to end all wars or annihilate the planet with a flick of a switch. The fear of “exterminating one another to the last man” is exactly the same fear that motivated Freud, in 1930, to write that humans were suffering “unrest,” “unhappiness,” and “anxiety.”5
Two well-known psychiatrists have expressed alarm about this president who seems unable to “distinguish between reality and fantasy,” who engages in “outbursts of rage when his fantasies are contradicted,” and who “repeatedly resorts to paranoid claims of conspiracy.”6 Dr. Judith Herman and Dr. Robert Jay Lifton—experts in their fields—surely understand all too well that the consequences of such behavior, manifested in one of the most powerful people in the world, is potentially very “dangerous.”
In The Meaning of Anxiety, Rollo May wrote that, in laboratory experiments, the behavior of an agitated animal kept in a constant and “unrelieved state of vigilance” soon becomes frantic, disordered, and neurotic. This response, May noted, is “parallel to what happens when human beings break down under the burden of severe and constant anxiety.”7 Our sleeplessness is our collective “unrelieved state of vigilance.” Our anxiety is exacerbated by our sense of imminent threat, by our persistent fear that all that we imagine the United States stands for is being destroyed.
Nonetheless there is good news: anxiety manifests most powerfully when there is a deep conflict in cultural values, when individuals are painfully torn between what they have been educated to believe and what is actually occurring in their lives and in society. Naturalized citizens and citizens raised in the United States have, through countless repetitions, internalized the Pledge of Allegiance: “one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” These are the country’s core values. When they are violated at the societal or individual level, the result, for citizens of conscience, is an internal conflict that cannot easily be resolved. Such conflict is generating our collective anxiety.
As long as there is anxiety, there is hope, because anxiety—unlike depression—often does motivate us to resolve our suffering. We will not watch silently or peacefully as democracy slides into the ocean like a glacier calving, but we cannot stay vigilantly awake for four more years. If we were to succumb to this demagogic regime, we would no longer suffer anxiety; rather, we would sleep the deep sleep of resignation. That day has not yet come. Not even close. Our anxiety (and our sleepless nights) prove that the fight is on.
Carol Becker is Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts and the author of the recently reissued The Invisible Drama: Women and the Anxiety of Change.
NOTES
Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 11.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 110–112.
“Most U.S. Young Adults See Donald Trump Presidency as Illegitimate,” The Guardian, March 18, 2017, [Link]
Judith L. Herman and Robert Jay Lifton, letter to the editor, New York Times, March 8, 2017, [Link]
Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 112.
Herman and Lifton, letter to the editor.
May, The Meaning of Anxiety, 91