by Dick Minnerly, ©2016
The following article was written in April 2016 and slightly revised in June 2016. In both those months it was offered to several major magazines, all of which rejected it in spite of its timely subject. This didn't surprise me because it requires explanations of my new ideas in psychology and politics, and apparently none of our political magazines will risk publishing new thinking on any subject. In fact, to support academic orthodoxy they avoid discussing any new theories at all, even if these are sound and proven, and instead publish only pragmatic opinions based on our old, provably fallacious traditional conceptions of human nature and politics.
The following article was written in April 2016 and slightly revised in June 2016. In both those months it was offered to several major magazines, all of which rejected it in spite of its timely subject. This didn't surprise me because it requires explanations of my new ideas in psychology and politics, and apparently none of our political magazines will risk publishing new thinking on any subject. In fact, to support academic orthodoxy they avoid discussing any new theories at all, even if these are sound and proven, and instead publish only pragmatic opinions based on our old, provably fallacious traditional conceptions of human nature and politics.
1. The New Psychology
In a world that has never had a valid explanation of human
nature, it is impossible to know anyone’s true character. Nevertheless,
I can show you the basic nature of the major candidates for president in 2016,
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. I will
do this with the new theory of psychology that I created in the late sixties, and
since that theory is not yet widely known, I must begin by explaining it and
some of its terms.
I first saw the need for this theory in writing my political
views, when I realized that no social or political proposal is valid if it is not
based on a sound understanding of human nature, and that in all our history we’ve
never had that understanding. This led me
to review our only two sciences of human nature, psychology and astrology, which
like all of our sciences are flawed because they have no theory, or set of universal principles. What they offer us instead are partialized hypotheses that they call ‘theories’, none
of which explain their subject fully or truly.
As a philosopher, it is my habit to look more deeply into a
problem than scientists do, and what I saw clearly here is that the key to
understanding people was to solve the ancient philosophic dilemma of how all humans reason, which we can’t do
without first solving several dilemmas of classical epistemology and
metaphysics that have blocked our intellectual progress in all areas for
millennia. That done, I was able to deduce
the universal principles, or theories, of both psychology and astrology.
My universal psychologic cycle, which I call the Consideration Cycle, shows how we
humans reason consciously and subconsciously about any event we perceive, real
or imagined. From this it follows that
astrology, which studies the physical cycles in our greater environment, is a basic
and necessary science, especially now that it has a theory that relates its tangible
astronomical cycles to our intangible psychologic cycle.
From that Cycle I developed a new method of character
analysis, which I taught in Manhattan throughout the seventies in classes attended
by psychologists, astrologists, and others who, like Carl Jung, saw the need to
use some astrological methods in psychology.
Since then, this analytic tool, which I call the Minnerly Impulse Pattern (or MIP), has been tested and proven in
thousands of individual cases by myself and my former students, all of whom
still praise its accuracy and value.
I explain all this—the philosophy, the science, and the practice—in
my 2014 book Human Nature: A New Theory
of Psychology, a preview of which is at Amazon.com.
Its Appendix
B shows the MIP of 904 prominent individuals, past and present, classified by
profession in sixteen tables. These
tables are empirical proof of the MIP’s validity, but anyone who has used it to
analyze their own character doesn’t need this further proof.
The MIP is like a psychologic x-ray, for it goes beneath the
surface to show a person’s health or sickness in the five major areas of their
psychologic process. Of course, it
doesn’t tell us all that is revealed about someone’s character by a full study
of their natal chart and, when possible, direct interviews. But it is the overview with which we must begin
any character study, for it shows how a person is naturally impelled to reason in
each of the Consideration Cycle’s
five bipolar systems.
I named those systems, in their logical order, Will, Thought, Feeling, Judgment, and Power, and together they explain all of our conscious reasoning. The MIP itself is just a string of five
symbols in parentheses, like (++R–B), that tell us which of the four possible ways
of reasoning a person always uses in each system (WTFJP). There are four ways because we have only two
basic types of ideas, those that we assimilate (–) from outside ourselves and
those that we project (+) from inside, and two possibilities at each pole gives
a system one of four permutations: (– +), (+ –), (– –), or (+ +).
We are balanced
in a system if we reason logically at both of its poles; that is, objectively
(–) at one and subjectively (+) at the other, as the Cycle prescribes for that system. But we are reversed (R), or totally illogical, there if we reason in the opposite
direction at each pole. If both poles have
the same impulse, then we are assimilative
(–) or projective (+) in that system;
that is, logical at one pole and illogical at the other.
There are 1,024 possible permutations for our MIP, and everyone is one of those types. My own MIP is (++R–B).
This says, by a completely objective method, that I am projective (+) in
Will and in Thought, reversed (R) in Feeling, assimilative (–) in Judgment, and
balanced (B) in Power. From my table of keywords
for each case we can also say that I am a creator,
speaker, spectator, altruist, and progressive, and by extension a humanist, or unselfish leftist, with
empathy and compassion. If a comparison helps, this is almost identical to the MIP of a respected political activist and academic of our time, Noam Chomsky (++– –B), and my keywords for his pattern are creator, speaker, sybarite, altruist, and progressive.
The MIP also helps us to confirm or deny what we hear about people from other sources. For instance, many say that Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt were our three best presidents to date, and indeed their MIPs show that they were all progressives in Power and compassionate humanists. And this, just like its ability to quickly detect psychopaths in our midst, can’t be a coincidence.
The MIP also helps us to confirm or deny what we hear about people from other sources. For instance, many say that Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt were our three best presidents to date, and indeed their MIPs show that they were all progressives in Power and compassionate humanists. And this, just like its ability to quickly detect psychopaths in our midst, can’t be a coincidence.
Shouldn’t we know from the start if our candidates for
office, or for our affections, are psychologically sick or healthy? Not if our psychologists have their way, for
their merely descriptive distinctions of people (such as introvert or extravert,
or alpha, beta, or omega types, etc.) don’t tell us if there is
any illogic or sickness in a psychologic area.
But in the MIP, a reversed impulse (R) in a psychologic system does exactly
that.
I call people with three or more reversals (R) in their five
systems congenitally pathological. We’ve had six such presidents, and since we foolishly
allow psychopaths to hold political office, our governments are often blatantly
evil or nonfunctional (evil by inaction). They are always shaped by rightists, who believe
that their fabricated collectives are more important than the real individuals
who compose them. Both forms of rightism—moderate
liberalism and extremist conservatism—are not ideologies, they
are psychologic disorders. Our current
government was shaped by many people like Bush II, Ted Cruz, Clarence Thomas, Mitch
McConnell, and Rupert Murdoch, all of whom are obviously sick and were born
with three reversed psychologic systems.
The MIP is the best method available for analyzing individuals,
for three reasons. It is totally objective,
so it requires no subjective or speculative input by the subject or the
analyst. It can be used even when the
subject is absent, uncooperative, sick, dead, or newly born. And, most important, it reports on people’s
innate character, while all that modern
psychology can do is to describe some parts of their observed personality.
Psychologists use ‘character’ and ‘personality’
synonymously and interchangeably, but I use those words as opposites, so that character means our essential nature at
the instant of our birth, while personality
means what we are in toto at any later
time in life, which is the sum of all our innate characteristics and postnatally acquired traits up to that time. The dynamic
premise of the MIP is that throughout life our congenital character is the
primary factor that shapes our personality, and ignoring it because it is less apparent
than our environmental, social, and personal experiences is one of the worst
mistakes in our entire traditional system of thought and belief.
So all the methods that psychologists use to describe someone’s
‘personality’ are flawed. But they are widely
used anyway, not always fairly or ethically, by schools, commercial
corporations, medical facilities, think tanks, other institutions, the
military, and our courts and law enforcement agencies. These include the old Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), the NEO Personality Inventory, and many other
similarly fabricated personality tests.
The popular Myers-Briggs method is based on the century-old
typology of Carl Jung (BR–B+), which his astrological writings show was based
on his guesses as to what the four quadrants of an astrological chart mean. He then used those descriptive guesses—intuition, sensation, feeling, and thinking—as key elements of his
psychologic hypothesis, without mentioning that astrology led him to make those
distinctions.
This was his Thought reversal (R) at work. Rather than starting from the causes and objectively
deducing their effects, Jung started from described effects and then tried to
infer their causes subjectively. In
fact, with his ‘synchronicity’ he proposed an additional, mystical way of
reasoning that denies causation, and hence anything that we could even call
‘our psychologic process’. As a result,
the personality indicators that he, then Briggs and Myers, and then many others
built from his weak hypothesis are incomplete and misleading. They don’t even try to explain real and whole
people.
2. Donald Trump
Donald Trump was born on June 14, 1946 in Queens, NY at 9:51 am EDT. His MIP, or Impulse Pattern, is (RRB++). This tells us that he is reversed (R) in his Will and Thought systems, balanced (B) in his Feeling system, and projective (+) in his Judgment and Power systems. My keywords for those impulses are, in that order, that he is a denier, a skeptic, a harmonist, an egoist, a radical, and on the whole a selfist.
His entire MIP shows a split
character, which is when two different impulses occur more than once in the
five psychologic systems. Trump’s MIP
has two reversed (R) and two projective (+) systems. Psychologists refer to sicknesses of this
type as a ‘split personality’, ‘dissociative identity disorder (DID)’, or ‘multiple
personality disorder (MPD)’, but they don’t know what causes these disorders or
if their symptoms are permanent or temporary.
My term, split character, means any type of conflictive disorder, as just defined, that is congenital and has
lifelong symptoms.
To understand Trump, we must first see that he is two
different people in one body, and that at any time different triggering events
will push him into either persona. At
times, his Will and Thought reversals make him a defensive delusionist who denies reality, actual events, and proven facts,
and a skeptic who doubts all thinking
by others. At other times, his
projective systems in Judgment and Power make him an egoist and a radical, and
hence a selfist (selfish leftist)
with no empathy or compassion for others.
This latter conflict is between his extreme rightism (collectivism) and
his extreme leftism (individualism), and it makes him ever unreliable and
untrustworthy.
Will. Trump is reversed (R), or totally illogical,
in his Will system. This initial part of
our reasoning cycle involves our perception of events, internal or external, and our creation or adoption of wishes, motives, and long-range plans
of purpose regarding them. In this he is the opposite of the Clintons, who are
balanced (B) in Will and hence logical in forming long-term goals that determine
how we should deal with any details.
Using my keywords, he is a denier
of reality and they are planners of
it.
This impulse inverts his Will process, so that instead of determining his own life purposes (motives), as we all must, he turns to others for this and then assumes that the world and everyone in it exist only to serve him. Like Don Quixote, he sees events not as they are, but as he wishes them to be. And since he can’t devise realistic plans of purpose for those imaginings, he expects other people or society’s rules to tell him what his plan in each case should be. But in this subjective area others have their own motives and don’t care about his, so, like a petulant child, he is always angry with the world, the existing political system, and anyone who disappoints him.
This impulse inverts his Will process, so that instead of determining his own life purposes (motives), as we all must, he turns to others for this and then assumes that the world and everyone in it exist only to serve him. Like Don Quixote, he sees events not as they are, but as he wishes them to be. And since he can’t devise realistic plans of purpose for those imaginings, he expects other people or society’s rules to tell him what his plan in each case should be. But in this subjective area others have their own motives and don’t care about his, so, like a petulant child, he is always angry with the world, the existing political system, and anyone who disappoints him.
Everyone with a Will reversal suffers this inversion of
reality, and to share their fantasies, they often form or join a cult of
dreamers like themselves and then look for ways to harm anyone with a different
view of reality. This payback may be
just an attempt to prove to others that what they imagined is real, or it can
be some form of terrorism, which dictators and fanatic religionists have
practiced through the ages. Today, ISIS,
the ignorant ‘pro-life’ cults, and even TV’s High Sparrow openly say, “Believe
what we believe, or else we’ll seize your government and punish all you nonbelievers.” That’s the Will reversal talking, and you can
see it in anyone who has this reversal.
Realists face the complexities of life and society, but
Trump creates fantasies to explain them more simply. This and his limited intellect are why he can
pose as a ‘man of the people’, for like about a half of them, he can’t handle
any complicated planning or thinking.
This affects his Judgment later, because a part of any event we perceive
is what we intend to do about it, and from these unrealized intentions he can
claim that he has nothing but the best of intentions and so is more moral than
others. But this isn’t a moral judgment,
it’s a fiction he uses to rationalize acting only in his own interests. He is good and others are bad, he reasons, so
he never gives them a fair hearing and thinks he doesn’t need anyone to help
him judge anything. If as president he
does appoint some wise advisors, they’ll resign before too long because he
won’t follow their advice.
The psychopaths Nixon and Bush II were also born with this
Will impairment, and we all know their fantasies and self-delusions as
president. It’s our primary psychologic
weakness, for it controls our first perception of events and shapes all our
later reasoning about those events. A
serious danger for people who are weak (R or –) in Will is that they are easily
manipulated by people with strong (+ or B) Will systems. The egoist Trump will deny that he is
manipulated by others, but that’s a lie; he is continually manipulated in Will
and Thought. People with a reversal always
need others to help them function there, for while they can deny that system,
they can’t remove it.
Statistically, people with a Will reversal are far more likely
than all others to believe in deities, heavens, or other unprovable mystical
notions, to commit suicide, to have problems in their relationships because of
their unrealistic motives, to live recklessly, or to risk their lives and
health daily with bad habits, diets, and life and partnership choices. And if they, like Trump and all people of every
alternate generation, are also extremists (R or +) in Judgment, they will
be callous and cruel to others. [1]
Thought. Trump is also reversed in Thought, as are
Hillary (BRB+R) and Cruz (RRBR–). This
makes them anti-intellectuals who deny and criticize any new and logical
reasoning. My keyword for them is skeptics, who, since they can’t deduce
valid conclusions from general principles, will project (+) unusual or even
weird subjective opinions that they assume to be objective facts. Skeptics always pretend to know subjects and
facts that they haven’t and won’t study or think deeply about. Still, many of them win honors and boast of
their education, schools, and academic achievements. Trump does this to a fault; Cruz and Hillary
do it too, but not as crudely. [2]
I doubt Trump’s claim that his ‘intelligence’ is
high. I’d put his ‘IQ’ in the 120s,
which is Bush II’s and John Kerry’s level, or less. People in that range can deal well enough
with a life that others laid out for them, but they can’t do any new thinking.
An important aspect of a Thought reversal is that it gives
people an innate lack of dignity, or self-respect. They can’t project (+) their self-concept as
they would if they were logical here; so they must assimilate (–) it from the
opinions of others. All people who are weak (R or –) in Thought, about half of
us, are illogical at this system’s first pole.
Their passivity (–) there both limits their ability in abstract
universal reasoning and constricts their sense of personal dignity. Unlike those who are strong (B or +) in Thought, they are defensive when their opinions
are criticized because they see this as a slur on their essential worth. These naturally undignified people (Trump,
Hillary, and Cruz, for instance) say that they don’t care what others think of
them, but they do, as their often-psychotic responses to others’ criticisms of
them testify.
This lack of dignity in half our population is why so many
people willingly play the role of a buffoon, a nonconformist, or a weird,
unkempt, tattooed, or overly ornamented person, and then criticize those who
are strong in Thought as snobby intellectuals.
This is truer of Trump than Hillary because playing the buffoon is
easier for Power radicals (+) like
him who by nature actually want to be
unpleasant to others, than it is for Power conservatives
(R) like her who by nature try to be beyond reproach in others’ eyes. They both have problems with abstract and
structural reasoning and with forming a true self-concept, but she’s ahead of him there too, for she is strong
in the Will and planning that precedes Thought as he is not, and she is
obviously more intelligent than he is.
Trump is aware of his weakness in Thought, for he
habitually asks us to trust him,
period, even when he has given the issue being discussed no thought at
all. But note what these reversals in
Will and Thought mean for us if he is president. They mean that other people—the appointees-to-be
who, though in the shadows now, are sure to be selected by right-wing
think-tanks, lobbyists, and the Republican establishment—will do all of his
administration’s long-range social and political planning and thinking.
Feeling. Feeling is the middle system of the
Consideration Cycle. It follows our
analytic reasoning about a perceived event and starts our synthetic reasoning
on what to do about it. Will and Thought
are our analytic systems, and since Trump turns them off, the emotions that
normally follow them are undefined and arbitrary. And since they aren’t controlled by any
larger purpose, wholistic reasoning, objective analysis, or plain facts, he
can’t know what his feelings really mean to him. People who have weak impulses (R or –) in
Will and Thought and a strong (B or +) impulse in their Feeling system are
slaves to their emotions and unrealistic in all their synthetic reasoning; that
is, in their hopes, beliefs, social relations, understandings, and decisions to
act.
Simply put, Trump is motivated to action by his Feelings,
not his Will. And since these occur in
him with no conscious analysis of his perceptions, motives, and plans of
purpose, they are detached, happenstance, and unreliable in what they cause him
to do, for himself or to others. Call
this unreliability his ‘impulsiveness’ if you wish, but merely descriptive
terms like that don’t tell us the cause, or sickness, involved.
When our Will and Thought systems are impaired, we reach
our Feeling system with no clear purpose or thought, and then our ‘feelings’
are empty and arbitrary, and so are not what most people mean by that
word. People who aren’t realistically
motivated and don’t form or adopt a true set of universal principles to guide
them in life cannot have sound and
healthy emotions. We may love, admire,
or follow such people anyway, but there’s always a risk and often a steep price
to pay for doing so.
Judgment. Trump’s second persona in Judgment and Power
is all about projecting (+) himself as being unique and special. Because he denies Will and Thought and has no
dignity, this second persona is primarily focused on showing others, as
entertainers do, that he is not as worthless as he appears to be, and that we
should all respect him.
His type of split character makes him alternately like a
rightist conservative and a leftist radical, and those who deal with him
must ask themselves this: At this moment, is he playing the negativist, a
conservative denier of reality, facts, and logical reasoning, or a selfist who
thinks that others’ opinions, judgments, beliefs, and proposals are absurd just
because they aren’t his? Either way, he
sees himself as the sole source of all possible correct opinions, beliefs,
judgments, and plans of action.
Some call him a narcissist,
but I don’t because I’ve defined that disorder as an impairment in one’s Feeling
and Power systems, and this doesn’t apply to him because he is balanced (B) in
feeling and only half-illogical in Power.
Radicals (+), as I define this
Power disposition, are always illogical in their first-pole considerations of
others, but then are logical at the second pole, where as self-reliant
leftists, or individualists, they oppose collectivism and both types of
other-dependent rightists, the moderate liberals
(–) and the extremist conservatives
(R).
Trump’s chief faults in both personae are that he is a
congenital liar who ignores reality
and denies proven facts, an egoist in
judgment, a compassionless selfist,
and an unreliable egomaniac. He is incompetent in forming the broad plans
of purpose (or strategy) needed to serve his country and humanity, and capable
only of devising narrow plans of action (or tactics) that serve him alone.
One might say that he shrewdly shifts between his two
roles to benefit himself, but that’s not quite the case, since he doesn’t
consciously control his role-playing.
Instead, he just responds automatically to whatever situation arises,
and then if he is criticized, he counters with blanket denials, name-calling,
and illiterate attacks on anyone who has said something he doesn’t like.
I have heard nothing meaningful from him about his plans
as president if he wins. Instead, his
talks are 1% vague statements on policy and 99% pure digressions, which are
either irrelevant personal criticisms of others or inane chatter about the
process of the election. I call this old
diversionary tactic ‘talk about the talk’, as distinct from talk about the
subject at issue. And yet our
narrow-purposed corporate media broadcasts every digression he utters. The truth is that he can’t discuss social
issues because he never thinks about
them. But it takes no thought at all to
insult people or to yak meaninglessly about his campaign, or about how he is doing.
Do we really want a president who isn’t able to keep us
informed of what is really happening in our country and the world? If not, then we can’t vote for Trump, who
can’t be truthful because he doesn’t understand the truth of anything. He can’t
because he turns off all deep reasoning and projects his egoistic belief that
he is right to do so. And this is what
he calls ‘negotiating’. He enters the
scene and sees what’s happening, totally unprepared except for the delusion
that he is, as he says, “never wrong,” and that if anyone is hurt or confused
by what he says or does, well, that’s not his
problem.
I define extremism
in a psychologic system as being reversed (R) or projective (+) there, and
since Trump has four such impulses, he is an 80% extremist. The other 20% is his Feeling system, where
his balanced (B) impulse lets him logically handle its two poles; that is, his
objective affections and his
subjective passions. This balance in Feeling is why many people
like him when they meet him. But can we
really like anyone who doesn’t reason fairly or objectively on matters of
importance to us and all others? We can
only reach him by appealing to his emotions, with the hope that this may
flatter him into doing the right thing.
He won’t help anyone otherwise.
He is quick and strong in Judgment because he is
projective (+) there, or subjective at both poles, as are Hillary and Sanders
(R+R+R). At the first pole of our
Judgment system we decide our needs,
which are generalizations of our desires.
For example, you may love a woman and then lose her, and then later you
realize that what you need is not her, but someone like her in some
important respects. That’s how we
transform our passions into the generalized needs that we form at the first
pole of our Judgment system, after which, at the second pole, we try to
anticipate the consequences of various acts we might perform to gratify those
needs.
The positive side of being an egoist, or projective (+) in
Judgment, is that it can make one creative and even generous there. The negative side is that egoists have no
objectivity in reaching judgments or in speculating on the acts they might
perform.
Indeed, an unenlightened egoist believes that we are
always free to gratify our needs, even if this means deceiving, harming,
robbing, killing, or otherwise imposing on others. And all that we can do now with this Hobson’s
choice that our private political parties have once again given us, short of
rejecting the entire baby-boom generation (born from mid-1938 to mid-1957), is to decide which of the three
egoists in this campaign (Trump, Clinton, or Sanders) is an enlightened egoist. It certainly isn’t Trump, but both Democrats
have some grounds for claiming that they’ve matured past their innate
illogic. We’ll see.
Power. Power is the last system in our Consideration
Cycle, which always takes us from wish to fruition. Contrary to the simplistic “political
spectrum” that has misled us in our political thinking for centuries now, there
are four Power types, not two. They are
the progressives (B), or moderate
leftists; the radicals (+), or
extreme leftists; the liberals (–) or
moderate rightists; and the conservatives
(R), or extreme rightists.
However, our overall political perspective is determined by our entire MIP. I give our perspective the same name as the
Power impulse if it is the only duplicated impulse in the MIP; if not, it gets
a compound name that starts with the Power impulse and adds any other impulse
that occurs more than once in the MIP.
For instance, Pat Buchanan (B–R+R) is a conservative in Power and perspective, while Ronald Reagan (– – –
RB) is a progressive in Power and a ProLib,
or progressive-liberal, in perspective.
From his MIP we know that, despite being a progressive (B) in Power, he
was an 80% rightist and a greedy liberal because four of his five systems were
weak (R or –) rather than strong (B or +).
Psychologically, liberals are
rightist collectivists, not leftists or individualists. They often oppose conservatives on first-pole social policies, but not on second-pole
political policies, where they too want to preserve the status quo forever.
Whatever event and wish begins an act of consideration in
us, here in the last system we reach an understanding
of that event, such as it may be, and then a decision on if and how we will act on it. We do this by consciously considering our
Power system’s opposite poles, or cognitions.
The first pole is the objective (–) one, where we consider all the power that we do not have as
individuals, such as that of nature, of other people or creatures, or of
governments. At this pole we learn by
objective assimilation (–) what power is, and then we try to reconcile that
knowledge at the subjective (+) second pole, where we form our sense of all the power that we have or could have
as an individual. In any psychologic
system, our goal is to reconcile its polar-opposite cognitions, the objective
and the subjective ones, perfectly if possible.
That’s how we deal with all realities in a system, if our impulse there
is not illogical.
Trump (RRB++) is a radical
(+), or extreme leftist in his Power system. But his overall perspective is that of a RadCon (radical-conservative) because,
as noted above, his split character makes him at times an extreme
individualist, or radical, and at times an extreme collectivist, or
conservative. And which persona he
displays at any time depends on his current feelings. So Republicans cannot trust that he will
always be an extreme statist, or conservative collectivist. That part of him is real enough, but it’s not
always in control. At any given moment,
he may act like a leftist radical by defending individual rights as against the
rightist’s anti-individualistic statism.
Obviously, he hasn’t given the issue of people’s different political
views any thought at all.
Since Republicans crave that statism so they can control
all the people totally, it is a mistake for them to vote for Trump. The four other candidates who lasted for a
while, unlike Trump, were all rightists in Power. Cruz and Kasich are liberals in Power, and
Clinton and Sanders are conservatives there.
But their overall political perspective,
which is more important, differs in their degree of rightism, or
anti-individualism. Cruz is 80%
rightist, Sanders is 60%, and Trump, Clinton, and Kasich are only 40% rightist.
Since no sane person will vote for Trump because his
psychologic impairments are too great, we can now only hope that the majority
of Americans are not insane. By innate
character, he is too self-concerned, narrow-minded, and lacking in both reason
and compassion to be even a just and sane person, let alone a good
president. Also, my empirical analyses
show that anyone who has one or more reversed (R) systems in their MIP will act
in a self-defeating manner. And the damage that they do to themselves and
to any who join with them is proportional to how many reversed systems they
have.
Much more is said about each of Trump’s five psychologic
impulses in Chapter 6 of my book Human Nature: A New Theory of Psychology.
3. Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton was born on October 26, 1947 in Chicago. Her MIP, or Impulse Pattern, is (BRB+R). This says that she is balanced (B) in her Will system, reversed (R) in Thought, balanced (B) in Feeling, projective (+) in Judgment, and reversed (R) in Power. My keywords for those impulses are, in order, that she is a planner, skeptic, harmonist, egoist, and conservative, and by extension from her Judgment and Power impulses, an elitist, or selfish rightist.
Her whole MIP shows that she too, like Trump and Sanders,
has a split character. This psychologic conflict is between her two
reversed (R) systems, Thought and Power, and her two balanced (B) systems, Will
and Feeling. She too is two different
people in one body, and that makes her unreliable and something of a mystery to
others.
In their political perspective,
which is based on all five systems and not just their Power impulse, Trump is a
RadCon (radical-conservative),
Sanders is a ConRad
(conservative-radical), and Hillary is a ConPro
(conservative-progressive). These are
all leftist-rightist conflicts that reflect a fundamental indecision on the
individualism versus collectivism and
capitalism versus socialism issues.
For some years now, Hillary has claimed to be a
progressive, but I’m sure she knows that she’s more a conservative than a
progressive. Her balanced (B) impulses
in Will and Feeling are called ‘progressive’ because that is the most logical
way to reason in any system. But every
balanced and reversed system has one assimilative pole, and these poles along
with any assimilative (–) systems are points of receptivity that make a person
conventional, especially early in life.
This passive impulse in any psychologic system that is not projective
(+) is why most children adopt the opinions of their elders without analysis,
and then follow the traditional dispositions of that time, including their
parents’ bias for a particular political party. [3]
In Hillary’s case, this traditional indoctrination as a
rightist with respect to her family, her religion, and her politics was
concretized in her by her second persona; that is, by her conservatism
(reversals) in Thought and Power. [4]
But her political disposition as a 60% leftist emerged at
Wellesley in the late sixties, mainly over civil rights and the Vietnam war,
when she started to mature and left the Republican Party. Then at Yale she met her leftist
husband-to-be. She rejected his marriage
proposals for a few years, probably because her two reversed (R) systems in
Thought and Power clashed with his creative, projective (+) impulses in those
systems. This creates difficulty in any
partnership, for the person with the reversed system wants to turn that whole
area of reasoning off, while the other person won’t stop projecting new ideas
there.
Bill’s MIP is (B++++), which is 100% leftist and 80%
selfish, and his single point of openness is at the first pole of his Will
system, where he sees events realistically.
The keywords that apply to him are, in order, planner, speaker, emotionalist, egoist, and radical. His balanced impulse in Will gives him a good
sense of what the public wants at any given time, and Hillary also has this
ability to see political events for what they are. Despite the well-known personal obstacles, their
marriage works in practice because, like Trump, he is a selfist radical who sees other people not personally but only as
tools to use, while she is an elitist
conservative who serves her private power clique first, and that clique
includes Bill and all the ‘tools’ who help him.
Though she started to mature before she met him, he helped
her then because, as she became more progressive and leftist in college, she
needed leftists (individualists) around her to counter her reversals and
indoctrination. Progressivism isn’t
entirely natural for her because it is opposed in her by those conservative
impulses. That’s why leftists worry that
on major issues she will put the needs of her private clique (which is not
properly defined by the term ‘Wall Street’) before those of the people. For instance, Sanders said he wants to expand Social Security and VA benefits
because they are so terribly inadequate now, but until very recently she only
said that she will protect those
benefits. This is a conservative position,
for it means keeping the inadequate benefits as they are. She also says that Obama has done a fine job,
and that she will continue what he started.
But that’s not what any perceptive person wants in this period, when younger
unselfish generations are finally starting to outnumber the selfish 19-year
‘baby-boom’ generation that has controlled our country since Reagan became
president.
Her problems related to the public’s rising disapproval of
her are due mainly to this fact that in her split character, her rightist
persona is still dominant over the leftist one.
In her public addresses, she is still more concerned with disguising her
conservative weaknesses in Thought and Power than she is in communicating her
progressive strengths in Will (long-range planning) and Feeling (friendliness,
sharing). As a result, people sense, as
her MIP shows, that she is indeed an elitist,
or conspiratorial rightist.
We needn’t consider her five systems fully here because
her three middle systems (Thought, Feeling, and Judgment) have the same
impulses Trump has. So you can refer to
what I said above about those impulses in Trump’s case, and of course Chapter 6
of my book discusses each of the twenty impulses more completely. The important thing to note here is that, even
with those identical impulses, she differs much from Trump because her two
other impulses, in Will and Power, are the opposite of his.
Hillary is balanced (B) in Will, and so—unlike Trump, Sanders, and Cruz—she sees events as they really are and will busy herself with long-range plans of purpose that will improve what’s wrong now. In this she is like Bill and Kasich, but unlike Trump, Cruz, and Sanders, all of whom are reversed (R) in Will and not unlike Don Quixote.
In Thought, like Trump and Cruz, she is reversed (R) rather than strong (+ or B), so she too is an anti-intellectual and a natural enemy of all new thinking, no matter how sound it may be. This explains her irrational response to Sanders’ projective, creative approach to new thinking and goals, which she has often dismissed out of hand instead of saying cooperatively, “That way may be better than the conventional way.” So long as she fails to admit this weakness in Thought and her need for people who are strong there—such as Bill, Obama, and Sanders—she will be fighting pathetically from behind against the deep social changes that are in progress already in our new era (2008-2254).
Since, like Trump, Cruz, and Kasich, she is balanced (B) in her Feeling system, she has few difficulties there, except that it’s another reason why she clashes with Sanders. Being reversed (R) in Feeling, Sanders foolishly ignores its great importance in politics and in all social relations, including his exchanges with her. In this system she is more antagonistic to Sanders than to Trump, because the (B) and (R) impulses are direct opposites. That’s why she clashes strongly with both of them in Will—the realm of global wishes, dreams, and plans for the future, which she understands but which Trump and Sanders ignore. She has been missing her biggest advantage over them here, for this system is where we decide on our purposes and goals, and while these issues don’t enter into their thinking, she is strong in dealing with them.
In Judgment she is projective (+), as are Bill, Trump, Sanders, and about half of all the baby-boomers. Though this impulse is extremist, it makes them 50% saner in Judgment than the reversed (R) half of that selfish generation. But unfortunately her natural creativity in her judgments is limited by her Thought reversal, which makes her judge things with little analysis, or almost wholly intuitively. For her, the judgment process is instantaneous and somehow detached from the Thought system that precedes it, which is the only system in which we can do the universal thinking that we must do to establish our general standards and moral and social codes. People with either of these extremist impulses in Judgment (+ or R) have no natural compassion for others. Their entire generation consists entirely of leftist selfists or rightist elitists, and these selfish people are dangerous because it is in our Judgment system that we speculate on our plans of action (tactics), scientific methods, work standards, ways to behave, belief systems, moral values, and our idealistic hopes for the future. [5]
Their Power system is the other major difference between Hillary and Trump. Like Sanders, she is conservative (R) there, while Trump and Bill are radical (+). So all four of them are political extremists, but she and Sanders are extreme rightists (collectivists), while Trump and Bill are extreme leftists (individualists). If you doubt this about Sanders, it’s probably only because you don’t realize that the socialism he embraces is a collectivistic (rightist) view, not an individualistic (leftist) view.
Since both candidates have a split character, the base of their party cannot be entirely satisfied with them. Republicans can see Trump’s conservatism and backward-looking policies, but they sense and rightly fear his radicalism and individualism. Similarly, Democrats can see Hillary’s progressivism and forward-looking policies, but they sense and rightly fear her conservatism and inclination to preserve the status quo. Though a large part of each party’s base doesn’t see this permanent inner conflict of their candidate at all, another large part of that base sees it and is dissatisfied—both with their own party’s choice and with the fact that they can’t switch to the other party’s choice because that candidate is also severely dichotomous.
We wouldn’t be in this situation as often as we are if we
had ever realized that, logically speaking, we must have a sound understanding of
human nature before we say or do anything in politics. ■
ENDNOTES:
[1] Cruz and Sanders also have this irrational, Quixotic impulse in Will that makes them deny reality. But Kasich (BBBR–), like the Clintons, is balanced (B) in Will. His main problems are his Judgment reversal (R), which half of all baby-boomers have, and his rightist liberal (–) impulse in Power. He is balanced (or progressive) in his first three systems, but in practice, meaning in Judgment and in Power, he is just another elitist, or selfish rightist.
[1] Cruz and Sanders also have this irrational, Quixotic impulse in Will that makes them deny reality. But Kasich (BBBR–), like the Clintons, is balanced (B) in Will. His main problems are his Judgment reversal (R), which half of all baby-boomers have, and his rightist liberal (–) impulse in Power. He is balanced (or progressive) in his first three systems, but in practice, meaning in Judgment and in Power, he is just another elitist, or selfish rightist.
The positive side of any reversal is that, in spite
of it, intelligent people who have matured can become perceptive analysts and
critics in that system. For instance,
Cervantes’ (RB–+B) Will reversal and self-criticism led him to imagine Don
Quixote. And Hume’s (–RR+–) Thought and Feeling
reversals made him the definitive skeptic of the entire modern era
(1762-2008). After years of defending
empiricism, his two reversals showed him that empiricism, like rationalism
before it, totally fails to explain how we humans actually reason. Later, Freud (+–RBR), Ellis (+–RB+), and
other psychologists with Feeling reversals overthrew our old ways of seeing our
emotions and our sexual relationships. But
while critics with reversals will try to destroy old views if they can, they are incapable of
replacing them with sound new thinking on the subjects involved.
[2] Generally speaking, weakness (R or –) in Thought is found in all academics and bureaucrats who instantly reject new thinking and new rules. It is also common in many famous academics, scientists, media people, and politicians, and no matter how intelligent they may be, we can’t trust their reasoning (or logic) in anything. They dislike tests and intellectual discourse, for they consider their schooling sufficient, which is true only when their work is to report on what people in the past thought.
[3] This is why I oppose the customs of all our cultures and societies that propose, nay demand, the parental and institutional indoctrination of children. Of course, we couldn’t have done otherwise in the past because we didn’t understand any child’s character then. But now, with the MIP, we can see their innate character and then try not to brainwash them against it.
[4] Another example of this is Chief Justice Roberts (–B++B), who is a ProRad (progressive-radical) and hence an 80% leftist. He too was indoctrinated in his youth as a rightist and a Republican, which wasn’t too difficult because, like every baby-boomer, he has no compassion in Judgment. It’s not impossible for him to mature someday and start using his two creative (+) systems in Feeling and Judgment to overcome the basic illogic of that conservative indoctrination. Dick Cheney (–B–+B), on the other hand, is a ProLib (progressive-liberal) who obviously has never matured. Though he is a 60% leftist with two balanced systems, he too was brainwashed early in life by his elders through his other persona—meaning his two liberal (–) systems, which are a rightist force for greed and acquisition that stopped him from ever opposing the status quo. He and Roberts are both assimilative (–) in Will, and my keyword for that impulse is follower. Though followers see events as they are, they always need advice on their long-range plans from people who are stronger (+ or B) in Will.
[5] If we view the Judgment and Power impulses together, we get four permutations, and my terms for these dispositions let us refer objectively to how people behave in society. Those born in what I call a ‘selfish’ generation are projective (+) at the second pole of Judgment, so they lack compassion and are either selfists (selfish leftists) or elitists (selfish rightists). But those born in the alternate ‘unselfish’ generation are assimilative (–), or logically other-oriented, there, so they do have compassion, and are either otherists (unselfish rightists) or humanists (unselfish leftists). See the section entitled The Generational Clash in Chapter 7 of my book.
