Perhaps the most remarkable (and, for many, alarming) political event in 2015 has been the rise of Donald Trump. At first, many people thought of Trump as an amusing sideshow. Over the months, mass-media talking heads (and also lots of my philosopher friends) kept repeating that there’s “no chance” of Trump getting the republican nomination, and therefore that there’s “no chance” of his becoming president of the United States. After each of his inflammatory statements, they declared thatthis timeTrump has “gone too far” and predicted his downfall. But instead of fading away, he’s now more prominent than ever, and is doing better than all of his rivals.

If you can’t understand how someone like Trump can garner so much support, you probably have some misconceptions about how political salesmanship works. In what follows, I’m going to take a look at political rhetoric from the perspectives of two giants of the Western intellectual tradition, Socrates and Sigmund Freud, and then from the perspective of the psychoanalyst-philosopher Roger Money-Kyrle, a thinker who is not as well known, but whose take on propagandistic political speech is stunningly useful.

Let’s kick off with Socrates. In theGorgias, a dialogue written down by Plato around 380 BC, Socrates likens political rhetoric to junk food. Politicians, he claims, are more like pastry chefs than they are like physicians. They cook up sweet illusions rather than serving the public good. “Pastry baking has put on the mask of medicine,” he remarks, “and pretends to know the foods that are best for the body, so that if a pastry baker and a doctor had to compete in front of children, or in front of men just as foolish as children, to determine which of the two, the doctor or the pastry baker, had expert knowledge of good food and bad, the doctor would die of starvation.”[1]

苏格拉底的诊断肯定是有道理的。毫无疑问，政客们经常迎合我们的虚荣心和私利。但它也有一些错误——至少在应用于现代政治时是这样。只有“愚蠢”的人才会接受政治宣传，这根本不是事实。举个例子:马丁·海德格尔和戈特洛布·弗雷格，二十世纪最具影响力的两位哲学家，是当时最聪明、受过高等教育、最善于思考的人。他们也是阿道夫·希特勒的狂热粉丝——就像许多其他欧洲知识分子一样。此外，许多著名的纳粹分子都受过高等教育。希特勒的宣传部长约瑟夫·戈培尔(Josef Goebbels)拥有海德堡大学(University of Heidelberg)的文学博士学位，在1942年的万湖会议(万湖会议决定了欧洲犹太人的可怕命运)上，坐在桌旁的16人中有8人拥有博士学位。

正如这些例子所表明的那样，教育和智力都不能保护一个人免受政治幻想的腐蚀作用。In this connection, it’s helpful to turn to the work of Sigmund Freud—in particular, his 1927 bookThe Future of an Illusion. Although it’s mainly about the psychology of religion, Freud’s book also sets out a general account of illusion that’s useful for making sense of the power of political rhetoric.

Freud defines illusions as我们接受这些信念是因为我们希望它们是真实的。我们通常认为错觉是错误的信念，但弗洛伊德反对这种观点，他认为错觉可以是真的，也可以是假的。他认为，使一种信念成为一种幻觉的原因与它与现实相符的程度无关，而与它的心理原因有关。这是一个微妙的想法，也许一个例子会让它更清楚。假设(1)乔想成为房间里最好看的人，(2)所有的证据都表明乔是房间里最好看的人，(3)乔相信他是房间里最好看的人。如果(3)是真的，并且是由(1)引起的，那么根据弗洛伊德的说法，(3)是一种幻觉，尽管(2)是真的。当然，如果(2)是假的，这也是一种错觉。

弗洛伊德认为，宗教信仰是幻觉，因为它们是“人类最古老、最强烈和最迫切的愿望的实现”。他的观点是，我们的生命是脆弱的，受到死亡的限制，易受疾病和不幸事件的影响，并受制于我们对彼此施加的痛苦、不公和残忍。他认为，面对这些残酷的现实，我们被宗教信仰所吸引，作为一种解药，来缓解我们最终的无助。

弗洛伊德接着说，我们在世界上的地位，以及对它的宗教反应，就像一个寻求强大父母保护的小孩子。“我们已经知道，”他写道，“童年无助的可怕印象唤起了对保护的需要——通过爱来保护——这种保护是由父亲提供的，而意识到无助会贯穿一生，因此有必要依附于父亲的存在，但这次是一个更强大的父亲。”[2]

弗洛伊德对宗教的看法和在政治领域中发挥作用的心理力量之间有明显的联系。政治是对人类弱点的一种回应——尤其是由于我们对他人的依赖而产生的弱点。我们最深切的希望和恐惧弥漫在政治舞台上——包括那些支撑着对更高权力的渴望的——这使我们容易受到政治幻想的影响。

用弗洛伊德的理论来思考政治演讲比苏格拉底留给我们的理论要深刻得多。苏格拉底对像孩子一样愚蠢的人发表了贬损的评论，而弗洛伊德对无助的恐惧和对全能父母的渴望提供了富有同情心的见解。苏格拉底将政治家描述为善于奉承，而弗洛伊德则解释了那些承诺将我们从自己最糟糕的噩梦中解救出来的人的强大吸引力。

As compelling as it may seem, the Freudian story is incomplete, for two main reasons. First, it doesn’t say anything about the rhetorical means that politicians use to achieve their ends. Second, it doesn’t give us a handle on why political rhetoric emphasizes insecurity and failure at least as much as security and success. These two gaps are easy to fill. Politicians manipulate our attitudes by arousing our anxieties and then offering us illusions as a way of escaping from them.

This is all very general. To get down to the nitty-gritty, it’s helpful to draw on the insights of the British psychoanalyst Roger Money-Kyrle. During the 1920s Money-Kyrle left England, where he was working on his Ph.D. in philosophy at Cambridge University, to spend four years in Vienna undergoing psychoanalysis with Freud pursuing his philosophical research under the guidance of Moritz Schlick, the leader of the Vienna Circle. During this period, he visited Germany and went to a rally where Hitler and Goebbels spoke. It left a deep impression on him.

Money-Kyrle gives a vivid description of the rally in his 1941 paper “The Psychology of Propaganda.”

“The speeches,” he wrote, “were not particularly impressive. But the crowd was unforgettable. The people seemed gradually to lose their individuality and to become fused into a not very intelligent but immensely powerful monster” that was “under the complete control of the figure on the rostrum” who “evoked or changed its passions as easily as if they had been notes of some gigantic organ.”[3]

有十分钟的时间，我们听到了德国自战争以来的苦难。这个怪物似乎沉溺于自怜的狂欢。接着，在接下来的十分钟里，出现了对犹太人和社会民主党人的最可怕的谴责，他们认为这是造成这些苦难的唯一原因。恨取代了自怜;这个怪物似乎快要杀人了。但是这张钞票又变了。这一次，我们用了十分钟的时间听人讲纳粹党是如何发展壮大的，以及它是如何从小到大变成一股势不可当的力量的。怪物开始意识到自己的大小，并陶醉在对自己无所不能的信念中....希特勒最后激昂地呼吁所有德国人团结起来。[4]

Observing Hitler and Goebbels in action led Money-Kyrle to the idea that for political propaganda to work, propagandists have got to convince their audience that they need to be saved from a terrible fate. The first step is to elicit a profound sense of depression—the feeling that the future is bleak, and that this situation is their fault. The next step is to drum up a paranoid sense of fear and hate in the audience by convincing them that they are under threat from powerful external enemies and insidious internal ones. Once they’re thoroughly marinated in feelings of helplessness, and reduced to a position of infantile dependence, the skillful propagandist offers himself or his cause as the straight and narrow path to salvation: “He is all-powerful and must protect them. He is their conscience; and what he says is inevitably right.”[5]

Now, consider Donald Trump’s speech of June 16, 2015—the speech in which he announced his bid for the Republican nomination—in light of Money-Kyrle’s analysis. He begins by eliciting feelings of depression and loss. “Our country is in serious trouble,” he intones, “We don’t have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don’t have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let’s say, China in a trade deal? They kill us…. They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically.”

Having created a gloomy atmosphere, he transitions to the paranoid mode, representing good Americans as innocent victims of predatory outsiders.

当墨西哥派人来的时候，他们并没有派出最好的....他们派出的人有很多问题，他们把这些问题带来给我们。他们把毒品。他们把犯罪。他们是强奸犯……它不仅仅来自墨西哥。它来自整个南美和拉丁美洲，而且它可能——很可能——来自中东。但我们不知道。因为我们没有保护，我们没有能力，我们不知道发生了什么。

接下来，带来坏消息的人会拿出他的灵丹妙药。拯救就在眼前。危险将被消除。问题将会得到解决。

Now, our country needs…a truly great leader, and we need a truly great leader now. We need a leader that wrote “The Art of the Deal.” We need a leader that can bring back our jobs, can bring back our manufacturing, can bring back our military, can take care of our vets. Our vets have been abandoned…. We need somebody that can take the brand of the United States and make it great again.[6]

After repeating the first two movements a couple of times, driving his audience to a crescendo of enthusiasm (chants of “We want Trump” and “Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump”), he concludes, “Sadly, the American dream is dead. But if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before, and we will make America great again.”

在接下来的一年里，我们美国人将被淹没在政治言论中。我希望苏格拉底、弗洛伊德和莫尼-基尔提供的见解将帮助你抵制政治幻想，质疑你自己的偏好，并成为更有眼光的政治言论消费者;不仅仅是那些你反对的政客的言论，也许最重要的是，那些政治言论能抓住你同情的人的言论。