An article "Policy of Untruth" published on November 3, 2024 in The New York Times is the topic of today's essay. The writer reviewed a book written by a political reporter from the St.Petersburg Times. That book was published in 2007 and titled " Beyond the Big Lie .” This essay provides a personality, cognitive and moral explanation for lying .
Bill Adair founded PolitiFact. He hoped that public fact checking could serve as a bulwark against widespread deceit. However, not so as the number of fact checkers has ,in fact ,soared in the past decade, According to Bill, “ as the digital age created a wellspring of decreasingly reliable sources while simultaneously eliminating the friction that prevents falsehoods and conspiracy theories from spreading." From 2016 to 2021 , Adairr found that the Republicans lied 55% of the time , while Democrats 31% of the time. Further, the Washington Post counted 30,573 false or misleading claims during Trump's presidency, an average of 21 per day.
Sigmund Freud's theory of personality maintains that there are 2 main categories of instincts or drives .They are the Life instinct of which sex was just one and the Death instinct of which aggression and self-destruction are included. These life-and-death instincts can neutralize or replace one another. For example, love, a derivative of the sex instinct, can neutralize hate,which is a derivative of the death instinct or love can replace hate and / or hate can replace love.
Psychic energy was an energy system concept and a major factor in how personality operates, and involved in resolving conflicts ,frustrations and other issues during personality development . The id, ego, and superego uses psychic energy during functioning. For instance, the id uses energy for a wish fulfillment and this is the pleasure principle which means that the instincts are gratified or tension reduced.
The ego with identification forces the person to differentiate between an instinct in the mind and the reality of the outer world. In other words, with the hunger instinct ,a mental image of a steak does not satisfy that need. Identification is the matching of a mental representation with the physical reality like actually eating the steak; Individuals when able to reduce the tension have succeeded with the pleasure principle. The goal is to seek pleasure and reduce the tension.
The dynamics of identification begins very early in life. It's when that youngster takes over the features of another person, and makes use of their behavioral strategies . The result of identification allows the infant,child to learn how to reduce that tension by modeling that behavior of someone else. The features of the other are incorporated and become part of their personality. Of course the parental models are the first identifications, And with development, the individual then identifies with objects more in line with his wishes which will help him achieve his desired goals The identification models provide the strategies for learning how to reduce tensions from the instincts or drives . Identification models can be animal imagery, fictional, historical or real individuals, institutions, and even abstract ideas.
The Superego is essentially influenced by the internalization of the early identification of parents, especially fathers. The Superego reflects the ethics, morals and values of the culture that’s interpreted by the parents by their use of rewards and punishments. Moreover, In the superego there’s the ego ideal which are simply the values for which rewards are obtained . Individual behaviors when approved and rewarded result in self-respect, and pride. Secondly, the conscience is also formed as it it’s related to unresolved tensions, punishments, and forbidden areas of activity. A severe conscience with its punitive punishments is associated with self-hate.Behaviors that are punished. results in guilt, shame, and the dread of losing a parents' love. In essence, the superego is not only a model of parental behaviors, but also the result of their ethics, family , economic and political traditions, other identifications include teachers, coaches, public officials,and abstract social ideals . The conscience of the Superego becomes the moralistic side of personality and is often in conflict with the id or ego. The parents' ideals of good or bad become the individual's ego ideals and their prohibitions or not become his conscience.
Note, the Superego can be corrupted by the id and if the id retains control over a large share of the psychic energy that behavior of the person tends to be impulsive , primitive and anti-social .
According to Kohlberg, cognition and morality in adolescence are both developmental.as demonstrated experimentally. With age and maturity, adolescents become more aware of the values and beliefs of other opinions , and become more autonomous than from their initial learning of morality based on the authoritarian values of their parents. In other words, adolescents become more aware that there are differences and they no longer have to adopt or obey their parents' beliefs. They become more able to question various social, religious , philosophical and political beliefs and learn to think about moral behavior in terms of rights, standards and wrongs . Some adolescents can go beyond this stage and be guided by more abstract principles that appeal to logic, truth, reality, universality and consistency. In other words, there are levels and differences of cognitive and moralistic thinking based on development. Some are more intelligent and able to grasp the complex issues of morality better than others.
A few examples of higher order thinking and reasoning : 1.Are those lies and are they going to benefit certain individuals or groups ? 2. Are the lies wrong or bad for society at large? 3. To what degree do those lies represent society's and god’s laws, standards, ethics, morality, and outcomes or not ?4. Are those lies associated with freedom , democracy, rule of law, and humanism or with facism ,totalitarianism or authoritarianism? 5. Does authoritarianism benefit capitalism ? 6 .Why is the current law of the overturning of Roe vs. Wade immoral?
Factually, Trump's moral character has been atrocious and toxic as he has committed acts contrary to God's and society's rules ,ethics and laws. Commandments 10 and 7 -he assaulted E. Jean Carol, was found guilty and ordered to pay her monetary damages, he had sex with a porn star Stormy and Playboy model Karen , and parted with Jeffrey Epstein a sex offender. Commandment 9-he lied daily during and after his presidency and he fraudulently claimed, without evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen. Commandment 8-Trump’s University and his foundation was found fraudulent, as were his business schemes in New York as he steals by inflating and deflating the value of his properties to avoid paying taxes. Commandment 6-individuals were killed as a result of his involvement in the January 6 attack on the capital.
In conclusion, 1. Some Individuals are both cognitively and morally inept and limited as they cannot comprehend, synthesize, and evaluate complex moralistic principles and ideas . 2. Some Individuals have the cognitive and moral capacity to know right from wrong, but ignore them because they don't want to lose the love, support of their identified leader. Trump told his congressional followers that if they don't support his policies., he will have Musk economically support and fund their opponents in the primaries 3. Some Individuals have the cognitive and moral capacity to know right from wrong, but ignore or suppress Trump's moral character flaws. 4. Some Individuals may or may not have the cognitive and moral capacity to know right from wrong, but are sociopathic, id dominated with damaged, irrelevant or nonexistent Superego controls. Importantly, the message to our young and to the world, suggests that the United States leader and his many followers are morally damaged . .
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