Last Friday, Gabor Maté, a renowned Canadian physician and expert on the impact of trauma on health, published a fascinating open letter in The Guardian : “We all have a Nazi in us. We need to understand the psychological roots of authoritarianism.” The author of several international bestsellers is also a Holocaust survivor: his title attracts attention.
The text is a summary of one of the chapters of his most recent essay, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Both the open letter and the chapter offer us a comparison of the psychological traits of Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. Maté tells us about their propensity to lie, their suspicion bordering on paranoia, their crass opportunism, their penchant for cruelty, their megalomania, their boundless impulsiveness and their contempt for weakness.
What is interesting is that beyond opinion, we rely on the latest studies in mental health to see in these traits the characteristic signs of a childhood marked by trauma.
Drawing on the expertise of several colleagues, Gabor Maté teaches us in particular that the more a child has been exposed to an authoritarian and punitive parental style, the more likely he will be to support authoritarian and violent political options once he is an adult. Particularly if he has never undergone psychotherapy — and if he is a man.
The author also tells us that the amygdala, the region of the brain responsible for fear, tends to be larger and more active in people who are more right-wing, who are attracted to “strong” authoritarian figures, and who display a marked distrust of strangers and difference. And, of course, brain development is influenced by the context in which a child grows up.
If I may sum it up in my own words: a child who has been scorned and ridiculed, even abused for his “weakness” and need for protection, will tend, unless healed, to turn into an adult who despises vulnerability—his own and that of others—and to protect himself from any form of future humiliation by becoming the chief bully himself, or by gravitating towards leaders who operate with a similar worldview.
Diving into Gabor Maté’s writings helped me listen to Tuesday’s U.S. presidential debate with a particularly… “clinical” attention. Because neuroscience ideas can certainly help us understand Donald Trump, his admiration for authoritarian figures like Viktor Orbán or Vladimir Putin, and his appeal to his base. They can also give us clues to better understand what’s happening inside ourselves when we listen to him. The key word here is a feeling of exhaustion.
Many of us these days are talking about “Brandolini’s Law,” the idea that it’s much more energy-consuming to refute nonsense than to tell it. Trump lies almost automatically: he invents a reality of which he is the hero, as he goes along, to avoid facing reality. Responding to his lies provokes exhaustion, disgust, but also fascination — a mixture of emotions that could be read on Kamala Harris’s face on Tuesday. Saying that immigrants are eating Americans’ pets, for example: really, it has to be done. Any sane person will take a moment to ask themselves how this is possible. This amazement will drain us of energy.
The universe of paranoia into which Trumpism, as well as authoritarian right-wing movements more generally, plunges us, is just as energy-consuming. If we fundamentally believe that all “weakness” is to be repressed, despised, crushed and eliminated, we will never overcome the enemy, since the world will never stop producing vulnerability and difference.
It is a vision of the world that explains the contempt for women — associated in the imagination with sensitivity — and for their fundamental rights. And we know that white supremacy has also deeply marked America: if we insist on imagining the majority of humanity as barbaric, “savage,” we necessarily feel constantly in danger, besieged by the figure of the foreigner, the immigrant, the racialized person.
In the authoritarian way of thinking, we sincerely believe that a “strong” leader, that is to say violent towards an Other whom we imagine capable of understanding only punitive violence, is our only bulwark against chaos and insecurity. We are dealing here with a distant descendant of the political thought of the influential philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who imagined like others before him that “man is a wolf to man” in the “state of nature”. It is a psychological universe that is deeply dangerous for those who pay the price, but also distressing for those who adhere to it.
So much has been said about Donald Trump since 2016. But I think we still underestimate how his public existence acts as a world-class energy-consuming vortex. Many of us have encountered wounded people in our personal lives who have remained emotionally immature and who do not heal. In extreme cases, they become black holes of attention that absorb the vital forces of their environment and lock us into managing their volatility. But when this type of profile is that of one of the most powerful men in the world, it is the planet that risks seeing its level of exchanges lowered to that of this tyrant and his mood swings.
On Tuesday night, 90 minutes of television re-exposed us to a man who displays a morbid fear of large parts of reality, and who defends himself by denying reality through lies or by promising to crush reality through political violence. If 90 minutes is enough to generate a profound feeling of exhaustion, I dare not imagine four more years.