Illusions in Ulysses

What if your leaders are nuts? Your heroes delusional? Your rulers warped? Everything goes wrong. I don't want Odysseus running my country. But better that than Ajax. Better Apollo than Zeus. And better either than Ares. In other words, you don't want Douglas MacArthur or Curtis LeMay or George Patton in positions requiring tact, diplomacy, deliberation etc.

You see what I'm saying. Look to your archetypes. Archetypes are normally more unidimensional than what you want in a leader. That's the point. Someone with healthy personality development can draw widely on aspects of themselves to fit the circumstances. An arrested or emotionally sick person wants to force circumstances into their drama. 

Their story, with its compensatory twists. As a means to an end.

Therapy exists for that. Not electoral politics. But this means, under them, a bad ruler, you play a role. You are a means to an end. I've experienced this in interpersonal relationships. I'm sure I've done it. It's both pathological and normal, depending on the degree. In a good relationship you're more yourself in spite of all the inevitable compromises. Which is cool.

And that might be a paradox or bullshit. I don't know. But, we're at the other end of the thing. Such monstrous pathology that the unrealizable self-actualization of a tiny group of horribly sick people is controlling us. People with -- guess? -- an authoritarian bent. I hate to bring him up but Trump is incredibly sick. He's probably unfixable. A lost soul. 

He makes Curtis LeMay look like St. Francis. The guy is so sick it works for him because too many people can't imagine he's as sick as he is. He's an archetype. Or maybe a number of them, sequentially, as he struggles along, lashing out all over the place. To everyone's detriment including his own. A seething mass of pathology. He's arrested at multiple levels, never rising above the sickness. 

He never cycles out of it. And he's running for president again.

The air-raid sirens should be on. All day. This is an emergency. And there's the entire bureaucracy of pathology that enabled him. That made him possible. The assorted cults. View these with archetypes in mind. Because they've thrust us into that primal world again, which the lovers of civilization and decency thought we might have finally escaped.