History Lessons?

Why Trump is behaving so self-destructively -- and why it makes sense. My new take on Daily Beast:https://t.co/7dUVggS5Ni

— Tony Schwartz (@tonyschwartz) October 19, 2020

One of the key lessons I learned from watching and working with Trump on The Art of the Deal—and from grappling with the Trump in me—is that we don’t get stronger by disowning the weakest parts of ourselves. Nor do we become more secure by rationalizing, minimizing and denying our shortcomings, or projecting them onto others.

The reality is that all of us struggle at times with fear, insecurity, and a sense that we’re unworthy. These feelings are an ineluctable part of being human. The most profound shift in my own life occurred when I finally recognized that I no longer needed to battle against feelings I had spent so much of my life avoiding—most of all the fear of not being good enough. That is part of who I am, but it’s not all of who I am. Seeing that has allowed me to open my heart in ways I never could before. There is so much less to defend.

We can’t change what we don’t notice. The first challenge of a post-Trumpian, post-paternalistic future is for men to summon the courage and the humility to embrace their humanity, meaning the full range of their emotions, including the most uncomfortable ones. “When we fight against and/or hide from unpleasant or painful sensations and feelings,” the psychologist Peter Levine has written, “we generally make things worse. The more we avoid them, the greater is the power they exert upon our behavior and sense of well-being.”

We can run but we cannot hide, because wherever we go, there we are. Trump will never change or heal, but we men can. The more we accept all of who we are, the less compelled we become to defend our value, and the more energy we free up to care for others and the world we share.

We went through this in the '60's and '70's (late '60's, not the "Mad Men" '60's which were just an extension of the '50's into anachronism).  Alan Alda was our avatar, I remember it well.  By the '80's we had "cowboy" Reagan (who was never any more a cowboy than Marion Robert Morrison was) and every one had to be "manly" again.  And we were soon back to what Tony Schwartz describes here.

Will we learn this lesson again?  Or rather, unlearn the lesson we've been teaching boys for 40 years?  This is a gross generalization, by the way.  Schwartz reaches a bit for for rhetorical effect when he writes:

For Trump, and for so many men desperate to hold onto control they fear is slipping way, the tactics include disparaging rather than encouraging others, reacting harshly rather than reasoning calmly, seeking certainty rather than struggling with complexity, and blaming others in a conflict, instead of first reckoning with their own responsibility. As the psychologist Terry Real puts it, “We raise boys to live in a world in which they are either winners or losers, grandiose or shame-filled, perpetrator or victims.”

The power that most men feel is fleeting and fragile, easily shattered by criticism, and uncushioned by the capacity for intimacy. Without deep relationships, including with themselves, too many men find themselves perpetually looking for ways to fill their inner emptiness and prove their worthiness.

We don't all raise boys to live in a world of winners or losers; but it is too prevalent a model.  And Schwartz' solution is a little too heavy on the Robert Bly for me (again, look it up, punks!  And git offa mah lawn!).  But I do think something's gonna give when Trump is removed from public life (and social life, one rather hopes.  Society should extract its pound of flesh, so to speak.)  We'll just have to see what results; and mostly, what we do with it.