Ministers of Defense (Mechanisms)

I invited Dr. Stein to do a deeper dive into the defense mechanisms we discussed in our talk —and more — in the piece below. He will be checking your comments to answer questions so ask away!

On the March 9, 1954 broadcast of his landmark TV show “See It Now,“ Edward R. Murrow told the nation, speaking of Senator Joseph McCarthy, “No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.”^[1]

The ‘we’ Murrow was referring to is everyone – all of us. And the issue he was calling out was why we would let ourselves become complicit in terrorism. Then as now, many decisions are shaped by our psychologies, mixtures of individual and collective motivations, aims, and personal histories. How we perceive and process our experiences of the world. What we’re drawn to or step away from. A reality that’s familiar and we prefer, or can normalize and accept, versus one that we object to and refuse.

Many of us are unaware of those unconscious emotional forces and how they shape decision-making and behavior. There’s usually no pressing need to think about it. Most of the time, we make good enough decisions and generally make our way alright, hopefully keeping own goals and cataclysmic choices to a minimum. But not always. We take risks we shouldn’t and overestimate our abilities. We turn right when we intend to go left, tie our shoelaces together at the worst moment, and serially repeat the same mistakes. People often dismiss these as blunders or a momentary lapse. Sure, sometimes. But considered more deeply, they’re an unintended behavioral communication of something inside us we hadn’t recognized or acknowledged – and sometimes, an indicator or symptom of psychological distress or disorder. They also give rise to any number of unintended consequences.

Some of those consequences may not be immediately obvious but can turn out to be life-changing or world-altering – including turning a blind eye to whom we put or allow into positions of power.

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Institutions and societies are complex. How they function is less the influence of a single individual and more the consequence of multiple intertwining factors, the result of nesting decisions and processes involving many people. But people – citizens of a nation and workers inside organizational ecosystems – naturally adapt to the needs and expectations of the central figure. Culture is not just the tone from the top but how everyone responds to it.

So it’s intuitively sensible that organizations and nation-states alike would be better off with someone psychologically balanced, mature, and emotionally and socially intelligent at the helm. After all, it’s a recipe for disaster when the leader is beset by unresolved conflicts or hobbled by a psychological disorder, whose emotional instabilities drive impulsive, erratic behavior, and behaves like a mad king.

But when that’s who you have, certain things happen. One is that he won’t be the only one you have to deal with. Autocratic capture, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat has explained, is a process in which the ascent of a disturbed and destructive leader forces the state’s administrative and governance ecosystem to undergo a transfusion. Important institutions staffed by competent, experienced, career professionals are replaced by supplicants who know their actual job is to satisfy the whims of the self-serving Poohbah. In addition, as Timothy Snyder makes plain in his 2017 book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, many people will simply obey in advance, becoming volunteer loyalists without a fuss or whimper. Unfortunately, there’s never a shortage of them.

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What’s to be done when we find ourselves stuck in a mess of our own making? One job is to clearly assess what’s happening. No sugar-coating or over-simplifying. Another is to unearth the root causes of how and why it happened. That can be painstaking. As Peter G. Neumann, a computer-science researcher, observed, “complex systems break in complex ways.” Many factors will have contributed; there’s no single failure point and no single solution.

There is, however, a common element: our psychological tendencies, as I’ve already mentioned, to unconsciously accept or move toward emotionally familiar people and situations (often even despite disagreeing with their decisions and behavior). Many elements inside us drive that system. I want to spotlight one: defense mechanisms.

Defense mechanisms are features of our minds that buffer us against anxiety, guilt, or other various painful or disturbing emotions. Freud introduced “defenses” as a term and concept in his 1894 paper, “The Neuro-Psychoses of Defense.” In the decades since, research and clinical data have led to delineating distinct types and categories of defenses. The primary ones are listed and defined here:

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