Psychology: the Fetish of Western Democracy

Trump and Transformers as Critics of Capitalism

The irony of the postmodern age, for Baudrillard, is its obsession with cultural heritage at the same time as it invents increasingly advanced ways of destroying any remnants of culture. An obsession with archaeology and an industry-level excavation of fossils and relics operates in tandem with a decentralised techno-capitalism driven by endless reproduction and the commodification of the virtual sphere, in so doing eradicating the very idea of an ‘origin’. Cultural heritage or the linear genealogy of civilisation is a contemporary invention which retroactively frames any origin according to malleable, economically contingent necessities.

Today, we are obsessed with history just as much as we are eradicating the stability of the past itself. This is to some extent what can be called the ‘fetish for fossils’ that Baudrillard diagnoses: we fixate on fossils as a method of disavowing the temporal destructiveness of modern industry. The rise in popularity of new accounts of the history of mankind, such as those of Graham Hancock, of perplexing original events that triggered the agricultural revolution - including lost cities, tectonic plate shifts, or even alien visitors - are testaments to the indifference with which capitalism infiltrates not only political structures, but temporal categories, reworking what came before whilst propelling us towards an unimaginable future. Behind the fossil we find not only the cancellation of the future, but the destruction of the past.

The underlying implication of our fetish for fossils, of our reconstruction of the past and the future, is that when we are confronted with something terrible, with the possibility of an end, of a limit, or of a catastrophe, we inevitably displace this recognition. Every confrontation with the end is in its very conception re-formatted, rendered digestible and without any serious threat. There is in this perhaps a justification for reviving the Deleuzean category of territorialisation. Every movement away from the confines of a system, towards its limit point, inevitably comes to be registered as an internal movement, as something preconfigured by the system itself. The absolute, external limit to the system of global capitalism is a spectral limit, internally reproduced and relativised as a point of production.

Even the so-called ‘end of globalisation’ with Trump’s tariff frenzy, which could not help but shake the global stock market, will only lead to a period of recalibration rather than capitulation. Trump does not denounce global capitalism, he simply wants it to work more in his favour. Whilst some long-standing industries may suffer, what we are most likely to see towards the end of Trump’s second term is a new advancement in even more aggressively exploitative international organisations. The right likes to point out an apparent irony: the left vehemently disavows global capitalism, and yet they hate the very man whose tariff policy is bringing this same global economic interdependence to an end. There is of course a certain level of truth in this, but the right also misses an important point. Trump is not an anti-capitalist. He is the highest culmination of the Jameson-model of postmodern capitalism, where capitalism will even reject itself as a temporary sacrifice in order to be reconstructed in increasingly powerful and disorienting ways. Globalisation, just like anti-globalisation, are both convenient tools - to be used or discarded whenever necessary - of the same late capitalist form of circulation.

Whatever we mean by the end, then, it is figured only whilst being simultaneously mis-figured. We recognise the possibility of something terrible over the horizon by blindly turning our attention elsewhere, by distorting this terrible limit-point. In this sense, one of the best postmodern treatises of the last few decades is Michael Bay’s Transformers film franchise (more precisely, the first two instalments, after which the crucial component of imagination that attracts both children and adults to sci-fi was lost).

The general brilliance of the idea of Transformers is the way that the cultural distinction between human and non-human is ultimately distorted. Both Autobots and Decepticons are presented as distant aliens of a futuristic civilisation, so advanced yet so different that humanity would be unable to comprehend it. Transformers are conceived as the highest embodiment of alienness, infinitely beyond and constitutively irreducible to anything we might consider human. Yet at the same time, the Transformers are rendered digestible and negotiable by the fact that, from the moment they appear on earth, they take on the most familiar forms of human industry (as cars, helicopters, planes, and even as humans themselves). In other words, the limit of humanity can only be framed as a mode or expression of humanity itself.

In Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, a similar sleight of hand occurs. The Transformers had set the foundation of human civilisation long before the humans themselves appeared to do so: they provided extraterrestrial technology and built the pyramids that humanity protected for millennia. The ‘completion’ of this human civilisation is, in the plot of the film, to then eradicate humanity, to use the pyramids as a harvesting machine for the energy of the sun, in order to advance the real civilisation, the only civilisation that truly exists, that of the Decepticons. Human civilisation, in other words, was installed as a temporary discrepancy in civilisation as a whole, a side-effect that was to be eradicated in order for civilisation as such to continue.

In a Medieval metaphysical fashion, then, the Transformers films frame the same truth as the New Testament doctrine or as Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica: the end of civilisation is only the prelude to civilisation proper. Here, however, we recognise the inherent logic of fetishism. In the very moment that a limit is recognised, we displace it and fixate on something adjacent to this limit, something that conceals this limit.

I would argue that we can see this problem most clearly in our modern obsession with psychology. Psychology does not simply investigate individual human behaviour within a greater social setting. It fixates on the individual so that it doesn’t have to confront the social. The ‘psychologising’ and pathologising of individuality conceals, or inhibits, the more serious question of the total system in which any individual psychology is expressed. Trump is perhaps the most current example of this. Rather than admitting that Trump is the symptom of a more objective systematic discrepancy in the liberal democratic order, the liberal media fixates on the psychological profile that accompanies his policies: whether he has some narcissistic disorder, or if his shifting geopolitical stances reveal nothing more than a bipolar personality tendency.

There is a popular trend of contrasting Trump’s tariff reforms with the 2008 financial crash. 2008, it is claimed, was on the whole more ‘impersonal’. It was not the action of one man, but the product of precarious financial speculation, exploitative lending practices including credit default swaps, and an intentional lack of market transparency. The forced mass bailouts by governments and banks, such as the Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank, and the collapse of the booming housing market were all representative of a crisis without a figurehead. The irresponsible Wall Street risk management strategies and the betting of banks against their own clients do of course suggest that the 2008 crisis was not everybody’s responsibility, but also that it was just as little the responsibility of a single man. Trump, it is instead claimed, has sparked an economic crisis through his personal derangements and unstable personality.

But this is an entirely false opposition. Trump’s psychology is as much a factor of a generalised financial system as the 2008 crash. The fact that a single man can cause so much economic instability speaks less about the man himself, than the fact that the system as a whole was not stable in the first place. Yet instead of recognising this, the liberal tactic is to pathologise Trump as a villain in an otherwise effective system, to view him as an isolated agent, and in so doing to conceal a broader, problematic economic structure which allows for figures like Trump to profit from whatever personal narcissistic traits he might have.

We cling to psychology as the scapegoat which allows us to avoid a real confrontation with the antagonisms of the modern capitalist market, as if everything would be fine if only Trump had not been born. This fixation on psychology deploys the exact same logic as the orthodox, Freudian mechanism of fetishism. The fetish-object, such as a foot or a shoe, acts as a disavowal of the reality of castration. It allows us to acknowledge a state of things and in so doing act as if this weren’t really the case. The fetish is a stagnation, the last thing seen before the real situation is violently exposed. Today, psychology acts as the economic translation of this fetish. It is the last thing we see, the final bulwark, before a more traumatic realisation of the fact that something in the system as a whole is wrong. Psychology maintains the belief that the problem really is people, rather than the collective economic or ideological structures in which people operate.

The Netflix and YouTube obsession with serial killers and criminals is an extension of this same fetish. A false opposition is staged in documentaries and TV shows exploring the inner workings of conveniently termed ‘deranged’ minds: between a homogenous, problem free population and its abnormal exception. But the fiction of this consistent body politic is itself the product of necessary exceptions: the serial killer is required as the ‘internal outsider’ producing the illusion of an otherwise functional population. In order to continue operating through all of its contradictions, the social furnishes its own undigestible remainder, it produces the violent anomaly which allows us the think that the social is otherwise functioning well.

Like the shoe-fetish, the psychology-fetish is a subjective fixation that acts as the last, desperate disavowal of an objective, systematic antagonism that psychology conceals. When confronted with the fact that something on the global economic scale is wrong, the easy solution is to blame certain unstable or exploitative individuals.

When Trump narrowly missed being assassinated in the summer of 2024, this same false binary emerged. The most pressing media question was whether the shooter was politically motivated, or nothing more than a madman. It seems, in other words, that we’ve missed the crucial Deleuzean insight: madness is itself a political category. Whilst Deleuze and Guattari recognise schizophrenia as the obverse of capitalism, as the intensity that is both prefigured by capitalism and yet irreducible to its internal logic, Mark Fisher extends this ideological dimension of mental illness to include the proliferation of ADHD, depression, and anxiety. The diagnostic and psychiatric insistence on personality disorders and a plethora of psychological disturbances produced by faulty cognitive feedback systems or biochemical imbalances, obscures the social and economic antagonisms that produce psychological discrepancies as an inevitable after effect.

We would prefer to think mankind as flawed rather than think the system in which he operates as flawed. Psychology is the ultimate tool for rampant capitalism: people are framed as faulty objects of scientific study, and the problem of people is people themselves. At the same time, unstable economic processes are left alone. Psychology, it is claimed, explains human behaviour, and since psychology does not ask any economic questions, we conclude that economics can be disregarded. Nothing is more convenient than this for aggressive economic practices! In order to really make sense of people in the 21st century, psychology should be dethroned, and exposed for the ideological function that it really provides for the status quo.

---