I’m Out with the Id Crowd
I was on an extended solo walk a few days ago when the idea for a blog post hit me: Trump is all id! I got excited about how much those four words explained, from his own behavior to the blind adoration of his base to their joint imperviousness to facts and reason. It also explained why he’s doing so well in polls for the November election. As the recently passed Daniel Kahneman pointed out in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, we are emotional creatures who think, not the other way around. Trump connects with his base at the level of volcanic rage and resentment. Meanwhile Biden, the lifelong Democrat, connects (like most Democrats) on the policy level, which arouses passion only if you’re kinda weird.
Then I looked back through my past posts and discovered I already wrote about Trump being all id after the 2020 election. [Sigh.] But Arthur C. Brooks came to my rescue. He writes about the psychology of happiness, a subject I’ve been interested in since working on business matters with UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, a sort of happiness think tank.
One of the fresh thoughts I had on my walk is that an under-appreciated divide in the American electorate may be between those who give rein to their id (i.e. impulse, what we’d do without restraint) and those who rein in their id by exercising self-control. The id crowd sees itself as authentic, honest, genuine, and the superego crowd as fake, repressed, condescending. The superego crowd sees itself as considerate, cooperative, productive, and the id crowd as vulgar, immature, gullible. The id crowd finds Trump more appealing. The superego crowd leans more toward Biden.
It’s long struck me that supporting Trump fits Carlo Cipolla’s definition of stupid behavior: it’s bad for the person supporting Trump and bad for everyone else (except Putin). Trump supporters would vehemently disagree, believing that whether or not Trump is bad for others (does that even matter?), he’s good for them. But there have been studies about who’s happier, and according to Brooks, the studies find that beyond a bit of immediate gratification, indulging one’s id leads at best to mixed emotions. By contrast, the conclusion of a 2017 study headed by Georgia Institute of Technology scholar Christopher Wiese is that “self-control enhances subjective well-being with little to no apparent downside of too much self-control.”
This isn’t new. Brooks quotes Benjamin Franklin: “Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.” What’s relatively new (I think) is the “if it feels good do it” mentality, which to my knowledge originated with the hippies in the 1960s. They had a point; the conformist culture of the 1950s needed to go. But they succeeded too well. Brooks believes that “By seeking the short-term mood payoff that comes from disinhibition, we have become unapologetic, drunk-dialing, cussing, farting fraudsters who make one another miserable.”
Call me fake, repressed, condescending, whatever, but I’m with Brooks. As we were warned in Forbidden Planet, one of the more forward-looking movies of the 1950s, beware of monsters from the id. A society in which everyone including the president acts on impulse won’t stay functional long.
