Editor’s note: Donald Trump’s presidency shows how individual psychopathology and a politics of fear are deeply intertwined. Ian Hughes was one of the first writers to explore this relationship in a series of articles published on Transformation between 2017 and 2020. In the week of the US Presidential election, I asked him to revisit these pieces and provide a commentary.
Politicians who live in an angry narcissistic fog pose a clear threat to democracy and peace, and Donald Trump is a classic illustration of what this means in practice. But it isn’t a simple issue of psychology. As I argued in 2017 in Demons and angels: strongman leaders and social violence, changing circumstances, rather than changes in human nature, are responsible for the varying levels of violence in human societies that can be observed across history - an insight that echoes the writings of Steven Pinker.
For most of us, ‘inner demons’ such as our impulses towards predation, dominance and vengeance coexist with ‘better angels’ like compassion, fairness, self-control and reason. When social, material and cultural conditions favour our better qualities, violence remains low, but if conditions reward our inner demons, violence increases. In 2017 I warned that the election of Trump and the rise of other strongman leaders around the world was an indication that the conditions favouring those inner demons - like economic inequality, political polarization, and rapid technological and demographic change - were once again becoming dominant.
