We now have the Trickster Donald Trump mythic-reality show four weeks out from the U.S. Presidential Election. We should be alert to the hint Jung gives us that Trump sees himself as a savior. We already heard Trump stating that “only I can solve U.S. problems, I knows more that U.S. Generals, the yesterday that the RNC does not know how to win, I can teach them” – this is a savior complex, a Messiah complex with “symptoms of someone suffering from delusions of grandeur, often reported in someone suffering from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia” (Wikipedia). Or as someone suggested, someone snorting cocaine.
This is a given, the US electorate has a wounded republican candidate and there is nothing that can be done about him, a trickster leads the Republican Party, some think over a cliff and others into the promise land. Trump just announced his shackles have been removed and the immediate public concern was what can this mean – “how more unshackled could Trump get”, Jimmy Kimble asked. At the end of Dark Knight Rises, the Police Commissioner asks a police officer if he will continue working for the force and his response “structure has become shackles”; Trump is now unshackling himself from the Republican Party structure – first on his hit-list was Paul Ryan.
However, we need to look deeper! Jung gives us such a lens suggesting that “at the end of the trickster cycle some calamity has happened and been consciously understood.” What is this calamity that has already happened and is understood by Trump, who is now preparing a joke to trick voters into believing he is the only one to lead the US out of the disaster? Jung suggests that this calamity rises from our “recognition and unavoidable integration of the shadow”, which exposes “a tangled web of fate”. Almost sounds like the Manchurian Candidate, Enemy of the State, and Dark Knight Rises movies all rolled into one. Thinking… of a movie title for a Spielberg movie are we? Yes, and it will mirror Batman: The Killing Joke. Maybe this title, Trump: The Killing Trick – well… okay not so original.
You can read about this comic book movie plot at Wikipedia, however, what I found synchronicitic is that this movie’s character analysis mirrors a Clinton vs Trump comic book movie analysis. Here is the killing joke’s psychoanalysis of its two leading characters.
The book explores Moore’s assertion that, psychologically, “Batman and the Joker are mirror images of each other”[8] by delving into the relationship between the two. The story itself shows how the Joker and Batman came to terms with their respective life-altering tragedies, which both eventually lead to their present lives and confrontation. Critic Geoff Klock further explained that “both Batman and the Joker are creations of a random and tragic ‘one bad day.’ Batman spends his life forging meaning from the random tragedy, whereas the Joker reflects the absurdity of “life, and all its random injustice.”[9]
The torments that the Joker puts Commissioner Gordon through are meant to serve as “proof that there is something buried deep within each lunatic, a nugget of insanity, that is simply waiting for the right moment to spring forth.”[10] Unlike the Joker, however, Gordon emerges from his ordeal with his sanity and moral code intact. The story is also famous for changing how the Modern Age of Comics perceived Batman comics by bringing it back to its darker roots.[11] The comic book, however, delves deeper in order to present Batman’s own psychology – that he is, in his own way, just as insane as the Joker, and that he and the Joker perceive the world according to differing points of view, with the Joker’s interpreted through a joke.[12]
The Joker serves as an unreliable narrator. He admits to his own uncertainty, as he has disparate memories of the single event (“Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another … If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!”), accentuating the comic’s depiction of “a world unraveling toward relentless urban violence and moral nihilism …”[13
So, where does this leave us? We have a title Trump: The Killing Trick, we have a parallel story-line from The Killing Joke, whose characters Donald and Hillary need differing psychoanalytical profiles, then we add a few new characters and begin shooting. We know how Trump Loves A Good Disaster, so can we take some of what he is saying for our script? Probably, but let’s not waste time on this, we need to concentrate on the disaster Jung says comes from “the recognition and unavoidable integration of the shadow that tangles us in a web of our own fate.” Let’s carefully re-read this last sentence…
I think Jung gives us a clue of where to begin “untangling the web of our own fate” in looking “In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness.” So, our focus is to be on the “history of the collective” and here we need to analyze the Shadow Projection of the US and Russia onto each other. Take for example Regan’s projection that “Russia is the evil empire,” or Bush’s that these countries are a “triad of evil.” Understanding that these as US projection onto the other, is the first step in consciousness rising. Russia has a similar task of unpacking its projection onto the US. How well do we think Obama, Putin, and Trump understand this first analytical step to understanding the Other?
So, a new character in Trump’s impending disaster plot, is Russian President Vladimir Putin and the effort to “undermine the faith in the U.S. election” (Time 10.10.2016). The recent Russian hacking efforts are now playing a strategic role at Trump’s impending disaster plot. Here is where we have to focus our camera lens. What is the “whole deal going on” between Trump and Putin. Donald’s killing trick is here.
Seeing into this requires the challenging task of psychoanalyzing the American and the Russian Collective Shadows – then the real challenge, raising their respective levels of consciousness. At the individual level Jung says “the problem constellated by the shadow is answered on the plane of the Anima, that is, through relatedness”. The issue confronting us now is that problems constellated byAmerican and Russian Shadow Projections have no collective Anima to bring a higher level of consciousness. The UN seems not to have been able to assist in the growth of consciousness – I doubt they even understand what this might be. What is left, so it seems, is Trump choreographing his savior roll – a very real disaster in the making as now hear him calling into question the honesty of the US’s election process if he looses. After his defeat, his plan is to lead his 35 million supporters in a up-rising, a violent revolution some are calling for. I think this is an outline of the trick Trump is working on? Need to think more on this – let’s sleep on this and observe for clues in our dreams…
I think Maria Konnikova is giving us an interesting lens to observe and detect Trump’s killing trick.
Sweet Dreams…
Related Posts:
Dark Knight Rising
Trickster Donald Trump
I Ching on Donald Trump
Dark Knight Rising
Air Kiss of Death
The Fool and The Magician
Donald Got His Gun
Bulworth “Lonesome” Trump
Hacking into the Trap
American and Russian Shadow Projections
