Toward a Psychoanalytic Explanation of Social Events

This subject is difficult to put in a convincing way without referring to actual events from historical living happenings that could be noticed directly. Therefore, taking an ongoing social event as a point of refence is advantageous because we could avoid using the conclusions of previously happened events to support the ongoing argument at hand. Hopefully it will reveal the logic of the explanations that I will offer.

1.   The Kavanaugh Affair: Social Change.

In the last few days the USA chamber of the senators (upper chamber of the legislative institution) approved the election of a justice to the supreme court. The process was mired in clear and arguable legal, procedural, and ethical transgressions. The justice name is B. Kavanaugh. I am using this very recent case to discuss three issue: How certain social events embody (unconsciously contain) the aspired and needed changes in a society. The second is the psychological underpinnings of the manifestations of the changing taking shape, The third the mutual and corresponding changes in the society and the members of the society.

Confirming Kavanaugh’s membership to the Supreme Court of the USA is not a simple, purely, American matter that should not be of concern to none Americans. As we will see a little later, the way the selection and confirmation of that man portended some major social and political changes in the US that will have international echoes. The reason for stating this idea is the obvious way the republicans (a legislative power) managed to obstruct the democrats’ efforts to block the justice’s selection. They used their majority to break several rules in sharing the authority of the legislative by manipulating the voting process, and not refraining publicly from politicizing an act that belongs to the supposedly important pillar of democracy: the independence and separation of the three powers in a nation. This was not done subtly but openly by stating that their choice of that judiciary is based on his political leanings that are supportive of the declared political stand of the political party in power. The political branch of power in the USA confessed openly its interference in the judiciary power, not only by influencing the process of voting but also by the choice of a judge who supports some of the most partisan moral and political views.  

The Kavanaugh Affair, shows in an unmitigated way that the judges of the supreme court in the USA, which is the final protector of the constitution, are chosen and will be chosen in the future based on their political leanings. Nowhere in the world (even in the lingering dictatorships) does a dictator or a revolutionary leader justifies or legitimizes his or her dictatorship through the judiciary’s source of power (the third power). They openly use the administrative powers (army or Police) or the legislative power (false and fraudulent elections) to claim legitimacy. The reason is that even dictators would like to keep the judiciary power free of blemishes for future use (suspend the constitution but not tarnish it).  The Kavanaugh Affair is the only and the most audacious disregard of conventionalities in the USA, in the last fifty years (or in modern history to my knowledge). Because there are no mistakes in history there must have been precursors to that affair, and it should be looked for and pinpointed. The importance of that is in the absence of concern among American citizens about the inappetence of their claim to pride. The long-lasting claim of the USA of being a nation of the rule of law, and the nation most concern about that internationally is clearly discarded in Kavanaugh Affair.

I would like to make two stipulations for the next idea in this posting.

The Kavanaugh affaire is basically a matter of the principle of separation of powers and the relationship between the judiciary and the legislative powers, and also the place of the executive power in that relationship. It is an affair that relates to the principle of separation of powers and nothing else. The separation of power is the essence and the core of the RULE Of LAW.

The second stipulation is that moral issues are the apex of the social structure of a society. Morality is not absolute or relative to anything outside the social structure of the society. They merely reflect the state of the social structure in some societies, at certain times and change accordingly. Sexual morality varies from society to another, and changes with time in the same society. Therefore, morality is not the main or the only mover of social change.

However, within HOURS of selecting Kavanaugh to the supreme court the issue changed from a serious legal and political matter to become a moral issue. Young females went out demonstrating and objecting, based on a bad individual moral act committed by judge Kavanaugh when he was 18. They forgot the serious and blatantly dangerous precedence of the legislative majority biasing and blemishing the neutrality of the supreme court. The opposition to that dangerous precedence of overpassing the separation of powers was degraded to a moral one. GOD, and what a trivial one. An 18 years old male adolescent (Kavanaugh) tried to violate the privacy and moral standards of a 15 years old adolescent girl and failed. This happening happens tens of million times every day, everywhere in the world, as part of the initiation rituals of boys and girls to social maturity. It is an ugly face of immaturity but from it the good relationship between men and women comes out. However, Kavanaugh’s behaviour then- as it is now- is something ugly but is not indicative of an unusually deviant personality. His views on the powers of the president, the rights allowed to the office of the administrative branch to obstruct justice, the extent of the president’s authority to forgive himself, and the right to act as an absolute king (ordained by the senates) are the dangers that young girls should have joined young men and marched against. Mature men and women should have also joined to object to Cavanaugh’s judicial mentality not his sexual views.

The precedence of this Historical flop:

If political issues in the USA are degraded, replaced, and lose their importance to moral issues, then the society is unconsciously declaring its political system dysfunctional in two meanings of the word. The first is that the political system is not independent of the social eventualities; it is not a system for ruling the country but it is ruled by whatever social values predominate at the time. This fact is clear in the response to the Kavanaugh case. The insistence, and the objection to his selection were dictated by none judiciary principles. The second meaning is even more alarming. The issue of human rights is the USA is shockingly naïve. In the last two decades the country has been in perpetual street uprising (some violent) for various demands for human rights: women rights, children right (schools shooting), Gay rights, ‘Me too’ rights of women against harassment, even a tennis player claiming the right to break her racket in court like men do, etc. One would consider movements like that in Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia as sign of progress, but in the USA, they mean something else. They mean that the society is waking up from a deep self deception wave to some facts that need to be faced.

How could that happen in the USA. It is a country that has half of the best 100 universities in the world, garnered and still reaping half the Nobel prizes in sciences, gave the world some of the most beneficial inventions we are enjoying, and is the young country that dispelled the fable of Roya Rule and introduced the republican system of government. The USA, was for two centuries a great contributor to the progressive social ideologies and some moral issues too. 

What could have happened lately for the USA to degrade its political problems to some moral issues.