Culture on the Couch: Obama and Wright: One’s Own Brother as Destroyer

The story is as old as Cain and Abel.
Jealous that his younger brother’s sacrifice seemed more pleasing, Cain stuck his brother down.

Striking down. Striking against. In any group that has struggled so, this is not as rare an occurrence as one would wish. It’s often ubiquitous.

There’s an old story told amongst Latinos,

An Anglo and a Latino went crab gathering one night.
Down to the shore they trudged, and soon their metal buckets were full of live crabs all waving their claws.
As they walked back up the hill, the Anglo man noticed the Latino had forgotten to put the lid on his can of crabs.

–Hey man, put the lid on the can, otherwise the crabs will crawl out.
–Nah, said the other man, These are Latino crabs, the minute one tries to rise to the top, the others will pull him back down.

I’ve heard the same tale told, only with a Black man and a White man going craw-daddying.

The same joke could be told and understood immediately by any minority group, any group oppressed for generations, also by people from the majority who are highly competitive — against the odds– within their own sport, business niche, any life or death, any group endeavor.

There’s a factor in the psychology of remembered oppression, current oppression or striving together against the odds, ‘the man,’ against the machine… something that requires a mantra that goes something like this: We’re together, together, together, we have to stick together, we have nothing if we don’t stick together. No calling others of one’s group out, no contradicting one another publicly.

And it is true. In travail, in la lucha, struggle, there is more strength together than apart.

But, whether it be the child of non-literate people who wants to go to school; whether it be a woman who leaves the barrio to try to run for legislative office to help others, whether it be a man running for president… high ideals are sometimes overshadowed and attacked by some who assiduously tie weights to the ankles of the one rising… sabotage by members of the very group one came from.

Why? Rising stars are perceived as disloyal abandoners by some.
In group-psychology, the issue of abandonment can be catalyzed by feeling excluded from shine equal to the ‘shiny one”… This reaction can create chaos for the one trying to rise beyond the status quo… no matter how high they’re already risen. As they try to ascend further, some feel provoked… left out… led to unfair exposure… and they jump to provide the drag, the block and tackle.

As some in the northwoods where I grew up used to say of jealous people: ‘Y’ain’t goin nowhere without their face stuck right beside yours. Negatory or pository.’

I’m not going to diagnose Reverend Wright nor Senator Obama, but to observe what goes on in a psychology of groups when one of the group members pulls way out in front. At the end of this article, I have in the Coda, placed a couple observations about the nature of the Obama/Wright relationship. It was more than a friendship; it was a consecrated relationship, and therefore, all anger and counter anger and disappointment aside, has to be all the more devastating for its severing.

In any group, some are more dependent on the group as granter of one’s central sense of selfhood. Others depend more on themselves –and their competition not with others, but with themselves– as the main determinant for sense of selfhood. Some cleave to some of each.

There are many ‘group-personal identity’ patterns, but sooner or later, as one who is ‘more of the world,’ rises, sometimes those who derive their worth from being at the group hub…feel diminished, dethroned, pushed to the outer edge by lack of being applauded or associated in the way they wish… with ‘the rising one.’

They thereby begin to feel deprived of importance not only in relation to that person, but — and this is the central threat or wound– DEPRIVED OF IMPORTANCE to the GROUP.

This fear of being demoted as center of the group, is perceived as not one, but two very serious blows.
–One between person and rising one.
–One with regard to group status.

It doesn’t matter how much honor or wealth or gratitude the wounded person’s been given previously or presently…

As they used to say, again, in the backwoods: ‘He got a hole in the side of his bucket, no matter how much you pour in, it come streaming out the side and he wants ever more.’

Depending on how fragile the ego is, or how wholly built on group granting of selfhood, this feeling of being demoted or made irrelevant can be devastating, angering.

Envy begins to grow atop of abandonment, and in that person’s mind, this untenable position calls for aggressive self-vindication, if not by reasserting themselves with the rising one, then at the least to somehow coalesce the group around themselves again… by sometimes out-of-the-ordinary means…

Downgrading the rising one
There is a scramble then to reassert one’s power and authority over the group… by downgrading the one who is rising, by sequestering the group from them, by saying this group is misunderstood and must soldier on together against the alien forces the rising one has unfaithfully exposed them all to.

In some individuals in closely identified groups, most abandonment fears are unconscious… until or unless they gather enough pressure within a person, and break to the surface, most often in displays of
–whispering about the rising one’s perceived shortcomings behind their back,
–then scornful indifference,
–then aggressive attacks that impugn the ‘abandoner’s’ motives and character…

all these are meant to underline, ‘He or she is NOT like us. They have ‘gone to the other side.’ They have forgotten us. They’re all in it for themselves. They have gotten others to be against us. They’re stupid and dangerous. They are now our common enemy.’

All these are done to coalesce the group around the one who fears demotion. Although the words appear to be for the sake of the protection of the group, they are really to hold the person together who fears no longer showing up on the radar compared to the huge star of the group that is still in rising mode.

If the pressure coming from abandonment and sudden fear of being displaced or seen as inferior or provincial, continues, envy often grows under the guise of cold anger that drives a detractor to attempt to overshadow their envied one.

Who are you to want to learn to read? (you’ll leave us.) Who are you to try for the brass ring? (You’ll forget us). Who are you to try to capture a high office? (You’ll betray us). These are typical unconscious contents.

And so is this one when reaction becomes extreme: ‘Who are you to try for highest anything? (POTUS, for instance?) unless you carry me too, take me with you everywhere, make me recipient of your new privilege, debut me, promote me, help me in every way, give me my due, get me the paybacks I deserve, let me eat off your plate, take shine for your achievements as they are now mine also.’

The psyche of the person feeling abandonment and envy has mistaken that the rising person is being elevated to God status, instead of just a very elaborate form of chief office manager in their calling, whatever that may be.

Thus fears of being left behind, fear of no longer being favored, fear of others’ influences that may demote them in the rising person’s eyes,…fear that the shining boy or girl will now encounter others who are wiser, more impressive… all these add into the fears of being forgotten… erased. Made undead. Falling from the center focus of the group as the group moved to place the rising one at their center.

It’s complicated and can give a headache to parse the machinations of it all.

However, it is a part of personal human behavior that can affect large numbers of people. What was once veneration, turns to vitriol… is not about the person envied; it tells of the extreme axis in the psyche that has no middle ground between deifying and demonizing.

In fairness, the one who envies has often contributed much. But also in fairness, they desire–to their own detriment– to be as important as the one whose fate is different than theirs, whose work has led them to a different outcome than their own.

Thus the subtext of the self-avenging rhetoric is: ‘I told you so, he’s leaving us, has distorted what we’re about, is self-centered, just a hack, is abandoning us for his or her own ambitions, walking on our bones and leaving us, brought brimstone down on our heads, has broken our secrets, talked against us’ …and on.

The rising one may never know exactly what word was said or not said, what exact action was done or not done, to catalyze all this opprobrium from ‘one’s own’. They may not realize that often in minority groups there are those who base their entire sense of self on teasing out the most minute as well as the most enormous offenses against themselves and the group.

Pouncing and condemnation might be their only way of acting heroic. This can be an important maturation phase on the way to a far more balanced way of seeing life from all angles instead of only the deleterious “look at what they’re doing to us now” ones.

It’s useful to consider that unrelenting grandiose accusations are often adrenalin producing and therefore often far more exciting to the person making them, than say the patience it takes to listen, bridge, understand, weave. Thus declaiming the negative can become a most self-invigorating way of perceiving the world.

As a child and woman from a minority immigrant family, I’ve passed through this defensive rendering in some part in my earlier life too. And, it’ one thing to pass through a belligerent and defensive mindset that is, for many, a process of breaking one’s heart over what one finds true evidence of in the world… somehow making the heart larger, far more warrior capable of looking for the way through, for what crosses over, for the good to stand on as fundament.

But, it’s quite another thing to remain addicted to odium and accusation, and to waste away, ironically becoming louder and louder, whilst growing smaller and smaller.

CODA
It may be worth mentioning, that persons who ascend a sudden or very public ‘ladder of success’ are often shocked when they first realize the envy some madly knit up toward them. Envy is often caused by forgetting what we ourselves are called to and instead wanting to jump into what the ‘envied one’ is called to.

Among other things, the envier imagines the envied one has not and does not suffer for all they’ve come to , that all they have accomplished… cost no bloodshed. It did cost however, and plenty. But, enviers imagine that only they themselves suffer greatly. Thereby the envier decides the envied one must be punished.

I don’t think Senator and Mrs. Obama were slow to cut bait with regard to Reverend Wright because they were being political. I think it is because to be betrayed by someone who said they had your every spiritual and psychic welfare in mind to the ends of the earth, and especially who touched the foreheads of your most precious babies to bring them into the Kingdom of God… it’s just hard to register, let alone accept, that a promise so huge could be broken so heedlessly.

When such blatant broken promises occur, the mind initially tries to apply rational measurements to the envier’s irrational behavior… but keeps coming up with 2 plus 2 equal 5. The ‘rising person’ is bewildered and keeps adding the sum and keeps coming to no understanding. They ask, ‘Did I do this, or that wrong? Could I have done differently? How have I offended?’

This agonizing pulls the envied person out of their ‘rising cycle,’ and instead of putting their one precious life at the center of their days, they are dragged into spending inordinate amounts of time worrying about the envier…. who is trying to steal massive amounts of energy from them by making themselves and their complaints the center of everything.

Usually, after a tortured period of time and self-questioning. and after perhaps trying to reach out to find out why this sudden opprobrium has surfaced, but with no result…then it’s properly decided that the envied one does not have to understand the other person’s underlying motives, but rather must move to protect themselves and their family and their own psychic energy… by cutting quick and clean.

Most persons I’ve witnessed who’ve had to sever such an important formerly ‘sealed-promise relationship,’ have done so at last– with exasperation, but also with a sadness that will be remembered lifelong. The entire episode becomes a lesson about a twist of human nature, even consecrated human nature, that no one ever wanted to learn.

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If you would like to read a column I filed at The National Catholic Reporter today, entitled: Abre la puerta, Open the Door, on how we might recover from intrusions by those who say they’re holy but who have acted in unholy ways that injured others badly, it is here for you.