Blurts & Spasms

My original title for this post was "Why is Steve Bannon Such a Dick?" But that seemed a level of provocation and insensitivity that, frankly, verged on irony. However, it does remain a central question being answered here.

I'll dive right in with my primary thesis: Steve Bannon lacks something important in his psychological makeup. Important how? Important in being able to formulate wise and discerning choices, for one. Important in navigating the perspectives of others. Important in even understanding the world around him, and why things are the way they are. Important in appreciating how he himself has accomplished the things he has done, and why he feels so disappointed and frustrated - both with other people, and with the institutions of modern society. Important in being able to manage a position of power, and use that power effectively for his desired aims.

So what is lacking, then?

I don't know Steve Bannon personally, but I have been immersing myself in his language, sifting through his life experiences, and watching him closely from afar. This means I could be mistaken in some of my judgments about him, but I suspect I likely have cobbled together a fairly accurate picture. And what seems glaring is the same insight I've had about nearly all of my acquaintances and friends who lean towards Bannon's slice of the sociopolitical spectrum: a pronounced lack of emotional-perceptual intelligence. And just so we have that slice nailed down, I would call it "the tribe of self-righteous privilege." However, lest I seem to be projecting some preexisting bias about this particular tribe onto Mr. Bannon, I will walk you through my thinking as carefully as possible.

First it should be said that those who don't possess this particular kind of intelligence tend to react to descriptions of it in predictable ways. They will say it's "touchy-feely bullshit," "irrational," "girly talk," or even "gay." It is interesting how quickly they will associate strong, masculine, dominant characteristics with their own mode of being, while distancing themselves from emotional-perceptual intelligence as something feminine, weak, inferior or other. This is telling in itself, and perhaps touches on tendencies I observed in a previous blog post about the tensions between testosterone and feminine power, but the important observation right now is that this deficit produces an almost universally hostile discomfort with - and dismissal of - the very qualities that are lacking.

But let's look at some illustrations. Here's one of Steve Bannon's quotes from a Mother Jones interview:

"I don't think it's a systemic race problem in this country. My own life experience. I've just seen in communities like Richmond, Virginia and the United States military when I was a naval officer. I don't see systemic racism in the military. I don't see systemic racism in these communities."

There are actually two errors being made here - one perceptual, and one cognitive. The perceptual error is "not seeing" systemic racism. I worked for the military as a civilian during some of the same years Bannon was an officer there, and I can tell you racism was not only systemic and pervasive, it was well-known - a raw and chaffing wound barely concealed beneath the veneer of military discipline and bureaucracy. Bannon's subsequent cognitive error is concluding that, because he doesn't see systemic racism, it doesn't exist. And we see him repeating these two errors over and over again in his writing and interviews - essentially locking down on a set of conclusions without perceiving the reality that contradicts them. For example, from the August, 2016 Atlantic article:

“After making the Occupy movie, when you finish watching the film, you want to take a hot shower... because you’ve just spent an hour and fifteen minutes with the greasiest, dirtiest people you will ever see.”

And from a 2011 Political Vindication Radio segment:

“That’s why there are some unintended consequences of the women’s liberation movement. That, in fact, the women that would lead this country would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love their children. They wouldn’t be a bunch of dykes that came from the Seven Sisters schools up in New England. That drives the left insane and that’s why they hate these women.”

These need not be, as many in mainstream media have opined, evidence of a deep-seated racism, sexism or anti-liberal rage. There is a much simpler explanation: Steve Bannon is just clueless. He does not have the innate capacity to accurately perceive what is really going on in the world around him, or how other people experience reality, or why certain sentiments he can't comprehend even exist. Like so many of his brothers and sisters in the tribe of self-righteous privilege, Bannon's empathic antenna is broken; he is constitutionally incapable of fully appreciating any experience - and particularly felt experience - outside of his own. On a cognitive level, Bannon has demonstrated an equal incapacity to appreciate or understand the building blocks of alternative worldviews, which again leads to more cognitive errors. I suspect that even his own felt experience and interior emotional landscape are also a mystery to him, as the organs of perception involved in empathy or a nuanced understanding of complex social issues are the same ones that provide accurate and multidimensional self-awareness. But of course, as I said, I don't know him personally.

At this point I think it is important to underscore how a person can journey through life - and even succeed in fairly prestigious areas - while exhibiting what is essentially a profound form of emotional-perceptual retardation. Bannon himself seems to have demonstrated a high level of success and adaptability in the military, in business school, in the investment banking industry, in journalism and mass media, and now in the political arena. He has made millions of dollars as proof of his own abilities, and has risen to a tremendous position of influence. And of course such successes seem to countervail any necessity for cultivating emotional-perceptual intelligence or relying upon it - and certainly bring its utility into question. In fact, this is what all-too-frequently leads to the condition of self-righteous privilege, where the experience of ongoing success amplifies the artificial "rightness" of ones own worldview in a self-congratulatory way, while justifying a reflexive rejection of all other perspectives...since they can't be understood anyway.

But here's the rub: If you are white and male, and fairly bright in an analytical or systematizing way, who has benefitted from all the perks of a civil society established long before your birth, and are able to navigate environments and relationships that are orderly and structured to an almost mathematical degree, and then you have a bit of additional luck or find yourself in the right places at the right times...well, you do often get to be a winner, especially in the material sense, in modern American culture. But it would be a mistake to believe that this winning is purely a result of your own choices and efforts, or that anyone else could achieve similar results if they just worked hard, played it smart and "pulled themselves up by their bootstraps." It is like a rat who believes they own the maze within which they scurry, and have control and responsibility over the button that provides them cheese. Because, in fact, there is a magnificent mass of cultural momentum at work here - an enormous wave of preexisting conditions spanning countless generations that lifts any individual to the apex of their own accomplishments. In Bannon's case, it is easy to trace the convergence of these factors to his obtaining royalties from Seinfeld, a TV show he himself did not create and had no idea would be so successful, but which played a large part in making him independently wealthy. Right place, right time, and a ripe opportunity to cash in on his multigenerational cultural capital. But self-sufficiency? Superiority? Righteousness? Hardly.

A humble person - a person who recognizes that a lot of variables beyond their control have been involved - might respond to this progression by saying "I've really been blessed," or "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I'm standing on the shoulders of giants." But a member of the self-righteous privilege tribe is by definition much more arrogant. They cannot penetrate or appreciate the expanding cascade of cause-and-effect in play regarding their own abilities, opportunities and successes. They cannot see how their white skin helped them, or how their maleness gave them a leg up, or how a tradition of education in their family - or some trade skill, or entrepreneurial spirit, or wealth, or critical thinking, or emotional and physical safety, or availability of capital, or any other inherited, temporal or geographic advantage - provided them a deep well of resources that other people simply do not have. They do not recognize how centuries of hard-won civil society enabled and supported their cavalier capitalist adventures, and protected them from harm. And because they cannot perceive these things, they mistakenly assume they can take credit for their own achievements, and further that anyone who doesn't succeed within the same culturally shaped opportunities and systems - ones that clearly favor white, American-born men who possess a narrow spectrum of intelligence - is simply not trying hard enough, or not thinking smart enough. The self-righteous privileged often assert that everyone else is acting like a rat in a maze, expecting to be guided and fed. Everyone else is whiny and entitled. But not them, no.

In this context, it really makes predictable sense for Steve Bannon to act and speak the way he does. Why he feels he can ignore the opinions and input of others. Why he has sought so much power, so quickly, and championed his goals and worldview so aggressively. Why he has become so enamored of a Reagonesque, highly romantic but fictional ideal of the American past. Why he lashes out at anyone who disagrees with him, telling them to "Keep their mouth shut." Why he took advantage of non-profit tax shelters (GAI) to pay himself and employees of a for-profit business (Breitbart), even as he rabidly criticized the crony-capitalism of government at that time. Why he can rage against the press now after having acted for years in precisely the same capacity. Why he can sneer with disdain at recent Goldman Sachs "gambling" habits, after building and selling his own rent-seeking investment firm for a handsome profit. Why it shouldn't surprise us when he declared via The Daily Beast: "I'm a Leninist...Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today's establishment." And it is certainly a good explanation for why he gets along so well with people like Donald Trump and Sarah Palin. In Bannon's mind, these often contradictory and hypocritical sentiments, behaviors and relationships are grounded on a wholesale misperception of reality, and a consequent projection of uninformed, unconstrained and immature ego onto everyone and everything around him. Steve Bannon is an incomplete man, but part of that incompleteness is that he has no idea what he is missing, and automatically devalues and dismisses the qualities he lacks when encountering them in others. He does not know what he does not know, even as he rails against the ignorance outside himself.

All of this understandably leads to immense frustration and resentment, because members of the self-righteous privilege tribe inevitably ask: "Why doesn't the world operate according to my values and priorities? Why aren't more people like me? Why do they believe such bizarre things that contradict my worldview? Why should I ever have to compromise? What will it take to make them see they are wrong? How can I get control of this situation?" To paraphrase how Steve Bannon frequently framed this on Breitbart: "We can't let the crazies win." So now we get to witness what brilliant but broken, capable but incomplete human beings can do from the highest positions of power. Bannon and Trump are quite the team in this regard. Hopefully I have offered some helpful insight as to what governs our new leaders - and, indeed, why Steve Bannon is such a dick. Let's just hope that Mr. Bannon doesn't share Lenin's tolerance of violent, dictatorial revolution to advance his ideals, and that he doesn't encourage his angry and vocal tribe to elevate a second Joseph Stalin into power.

Or has that already happened...?


For more:

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2015-steve-bannon/

https://www.romper.com/p/7-steve-bannon-quotes-on-race-that-are-seriously-concerning-22875

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/07/10/sympathy-devils-plot-roger-ailes-america/

http://www.thewrap.com/steve-bannon-seinfeld/