This is the fourth in a series of essays1 addressing the current rise of populist movements in USAmerica, identifying them as expressions of messianism2 (with emphasis on the dynamics and core processes of messianism rather than on the interchangeable core contents or ideologies). The tendency toward messianism is not only a product of two early developmental stages (egocentric/magic and ethnocentric/mythic), but also a predisposition that has been encoded into the national and cultural “DNA” of USAmerica as one result of its particular history.
The problems we face will not be solved by the next election, as crucially important as it is. If significant numbers of USAmericans remain stuck in egocentric/magic or ethnocentric/mythic stages of development, they will continue to operate out of a pre-rational worldview shot through with messianism. If the Church of MAGA dropped off the face of the earth, as long as the social, political, and economic conditions that produced the Church of MAGA remain, the messianism-prone system called USAmerica will simply produce more messianic movements to take its place-—theistic, nontheistic, or a blend of both-—in ever-escalating vicious cycles.
Populist messianism sacrifices personal and collective responsibility to destiny, to deity, to sacred texts, and to a messiah/savior with god-powers. Responsible action is replaced with obedience. Being a critical thinker is replaced with being a true believer. Personal and community agency are replaced with destiny. Choice is replaced with determinism. Reason is replaced with blind faith. Facts are replaced with “alternative facts,” conspiracy theories, and ideological dogmas. Empirical testing of ideas by a “community of the adequate” is replaced with revelation of The Truth for All Time transmitted to one chosen prophet or messiah. Community is replaced with cult. Cooperation and collaboration are replaced with division into the children of light and the children of darkness. Education is replaced with indoctrination. Messianism should have a sign above its door like the one over the door to hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” and right under it, “Abandon all responsibility, ye who enter here.”
The payoff is an absolute certainty (though counterfeit), born of an awful, gnawing, need for order and stability in an increasingly troubled and uncertain world. Ironically, that need for absolute order, certainty, and the messianism it fosters, only make everything worse. Messianism absolves its followers of all personal and collective responsibility but gives the illusion of “doing something.” Messianism has never made anything better but has instead resulted in holy wars of one kind or another. One ideology gets replaced with a another ideology, the true believers remain, the saviors get crucified, the emperors have no clothes, and the One Way always ends up being a highway to hell.
Responsibility, both individual and collective, is one of the most effective preventatives and antidotes for messianism.
What exactly does it mean to be responsible for something? The online etymology dictionary (etymonline.com) says this about the adjective responsible:
"accountable for one's actions, answerable" to another, for an act performed or its consequences... from Latin responsabilis, from Latin respons-, past-participle stem of respondere "respond, answer to, promise in return,"
It’s not about blame. It’s not about taking on the sins of the world. It’s not about guilt, retribution, or martyrdom. It’s about being accountable for consequences, being responsive, answering to one another, owning our decisions and actions, and working to correct errors and do better when we have fallen short. It’s not fate, destiny. divine favor, correct belief, or luck.
Taking responsibility necessarily includes growing up, cleaning up, waking up, and showing up (terms from Ken Wilber’s The Religion for Tomorrow). Taking responsibility necessarily includes effective and moral action, critical thinking skills, personal agency, ethical choice, reason, verifiable facts, empirical testing of ideas by a community of the adequate, cooperation, collaboration, and education for freedom. These are minimum standards.
Responsibility is both individual and collective. Many persons who are quite willing to accept personal responsibility for their own beliefs and behaviors bristle at the thought of also being responsible for the collective cultural and systemic aspects. For example, a white male might honestly be able to claim “I am not racist” or “I am not sexist” (it does happen!). Such a person will have examined their own attitudes and behaviors, identified their own disowned shadows and worked to integrate them, and made their outer behaviors congruent with their inner values and beliefs. This is difficult and necessary work, and not to be discounted. The problem comes with the next step: “Because I am a white male, I have benefitted from my position in a racist and sexist culture, and I have benefitted from racist and sexist systems and structures, and those collective aspects of racism and sexism are my responsibility as well. I need to own them just as I have owned my personal racism and sexism.”
It is an indispensable next step, and one that does not in any way diminish any of the personal growth and change. It’s also a step that encounters a surprising amount of resistance from sincere, fair-minded persons, probably because responsibility has been incorrectly understood as blame and guilt.
In the above discussion, I have not only set out my intentions for this essay, I have also introduced the four critical aspects of our experience where work is required: individual-interior, individual-exterior, collective-interior, and collective-exterior. None of these four areas are optional. Working in one or two or three will not be adequate for effective, positive, and durable change. This meta-map of the four aspects of experience is the work of Ken Wilber3 and is known as “the quadrants.” Those four integrated aspects of experience—the interiors and exteriors of the individual and the collective—are Wilber’s model, not mine. I find his map useful and practical: Here is my representation of Wilber’s quadrants:
Upper left: the “I” quadrant
This is the “identity” quadrant: who I am, who I am not, what I’m thinking, what I believe, what I intend, what matters most to me, what my values are, what I believe, what I accept as my “gender.” My current stage of development “center of gravity” lives in this quadrant. No one else knows what is in this quadrant unless I tell them, and even then I can be more or less honest, more or less trustworthy, more or less transparent. Education, psychotherapy, counseling, spirituality, consciousness-raising, self-awareness, mindfulness, emotions, sensations, perceptions, mind and consciousness—all these are aspects of the upper-left, individual-interior, “I” quadrant. This is the domain of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jane Loevinger and Ira Progoff, among others.
This quadrant is all about me and my interior reality.
Upper right: the “IT” quadrant
This is the “behaviors and appearances” quadrant. It includes everything that can be observed and measured about an individual—body and brain, appearance, physical attributes, height, weight, biological sex, presentation to the world (persona). Values live in the “I” quadrant but “value indicators” live in the “IT” quadrant. We might infer a person’s values from their behavior/value indicators, but inference is all we get from here. We can infer or assess a person’s current stage of development based on what they are showing us—their behaviors, statements, choices. A person may tell us who they are—for example, that they value honesty (upper left)—but their behavior (upper-right) may or may not be congruent with what they profess to believe (upper-left). This quadrant is the domain of medical lab tests, ECG machines, polygraphs, personality inventories, operant conditioning, Snygg and Combs phenomenal field theory, and B.F. Skinner behaviorism.
When a person’s behavior and choices do not match what they profess to value and believe, we tend to call them hypocrites. When a persons beliefs and values are congruent with their behavior, when the “outer” matches the “inner,” we tend to say they are persons of integrity.
This quadrant is all about me, but it is what everyone can see about me.
Lower left: the “WE” quadrant
This is the “culture” quadrant: who we are collectively, who we are not, what we believe, how we see the world, what matters most to our family and our tribe, our nation, the norms and mores that we live by, our shared values, our ethnic/cultural/social identity. Just as in the individual-interior quadrant, what is in the “WE” quadrant cannot be directly observed. Shared values such as “liberty and justice for all” as well as “greatest profit to the shareholders” live here. Culture is expressed through art, music, dance, rituals and customs, religions, writings, ethnic heritage, and family traditions but those outer expressions live in the collective-exterior “ITS” quadrant. What is being expressed through those various forms is what lives in the collective-interior “WE” quadrant. The “WE” is the domain of cultural anthropologists, of Jean Gebser, of Jurgen Habermas, of Margaret Mead.
This quadrant is all about us and our interior reality, both in the narrow sense of “my family, my tribe, my clan” and in the wider sense of all of us and eventually all living things.
Lower right, the “ITS” quadrant
This is the quadrant of systems, structures, and all of the tangible “stuff” out there—all of it. This quadrant includes political systems, economic systems, social systems, transportation systems, cars, trucks, busses, trains, communication systems, monetary systems, technology, the natural environment, in short, everything that can be observed and measured. In this quadrant are found languages, legal system of laws and procedures, law enforcement, and courts, government structures, and corporation structures (all the little connected hierarchical boxes.) Our system of government lives here, our system of elections, the polling places themselves, the voting machines and paper ballots, all live here. This is the realm of scientific materialism, Marvin Harris’s cultural materialism/environmental determinism, and Peter Senge’s work on in The Fifth Discipline.
It is one thing to look at the organization charts of the community in which a person may live: this is lower-right “ITS” quadrant stuff. Found here are plat maps, names, departments, documents, offices, addresses and phone numbers, the hierarchical structure of village and township government, mission statements, and street maps. To really know the place, however, that person has to live in that community for awhile to get a sense of the culture of the place. That “getting to know” is lower-left “WE” quadrant stuff. It will eventually become clear if the community actually lives up to its mission statements.
Why the quadrants are important
Taking responsibility for mending a broken and hurting world, and the messianism that arises as a result of that brokenness, necessarily includes all four quadrants. It is not enough to work in only one, or two, or even three because the brokenness, along with the consequent populist messianism, shows up in all four quadrants. If messianism is found in one, it has “leaked” into the others. As individuals, we each can wake up to our own racist and sexist attitudes (upper-left), for example, but if we do not change our behavior (upper-right), and if we do not change the cultural beliefs, values, and attitudes (lower-left), and if we do not change the systemic structures of racism and sexism (lower right), racism and sexism will stubbornly persist. Theorists who have collapsed the four into one or two have ended up with flatland: an extremely distorted, one-dimensional, and incomplete view of persons, of communities, and of reality itself.
Steps toward an ecology of responsibility
Individual-interior quadrant “I” responsibility
thoughts, feelings, intentions, values, beliefs, personal identity: everything about me that cannot be directly observed
Individual-interior messianism takes the forms of my motivations, my intentions, my feelings, my deeply-held beliefs. Much has been written about “true believers” and their role as foot soldiers in messianic mass movements. Eric Hoffer (in The True Believer) describes true believers as “the inordinately selfish, the free poor, the ambitions, the bored, the sinners.” Hannah Arendt (in The Origins of Totalitarianism) lists loneliness as one of the root drivers of totalist movements. Sociologists describe the social disorganization and individual anomie that accompanies rapid social change. To those I would add “the entitled and privileged who fear loss of entitlement and privilege.” What Hoffer describes as “the inordinately selfish” I would describe as persons still in the egocentric/magic stage of development, or even as persons with narcissistic or borderline personality disorders. Persons whose center of gravity hovers around ethnocentric-mythic have a predisposition to find their identity primarily as part of the “tribe.”
Hoffer differentiates free poor from enslaved or destitute poor who do not have the freedom to join mass movements. The sinners Hoffer describes find their home in contemporary sin-redemption christianist churches: “Amazing grace! How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me” says a well-known hymn. It could as easily read “Amazing MAGA! How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.” Persons with characteristics like the ones described by Hoffer, Arndt and others tend to gravitate to messianic movements in order to gain a sense of identity, meaning, and purpose. These characteristics are individual-interior aspects, but the descriptors are an outside perspective looking at the individual-interior.
Bottom line: messianism erases personal responsibility. Each one of us who are working for liberty and justice for all, for democratic processes, for democratic systems and structures, and against the forces of messianic authoritarianism and totalitarianism, must do what the 12-step programs call “a searching and fearless inventory,” and be crystal clear “who I am, who I am not, and what I stand for, where I need to grow and change.”
I am 100% responsible for my own cleaning up and growing up, for bending over backwards to make sure I am not buying any of my own bullshit propaganda. How do I know what I think I know? What are my biases? My prejudices? My blind spots? I am 100% responsible for my values, perspectives, and attitudes, and for making sure they are any good. I am 100% responsible for my continuing development cognitively, emotionally, moral/ethically, relationally, and spiritually.
individual-exterior quadrant “IT” responsibility
behaviors, appearance, physical attributes, persona: everything about me that can be observed and measured by others
This quadrant is also all about me, but the outside aspects: everything that shows, everything that others can plainly see. Individual-external messianism takes expression as outer actions, behaviors, and value indicators. Individuals drawn into messianic movements tend to behave, by definition, in observably dogmatic, exclusivist, intolerant, blaming, scapegoating, disrespectful, threatening, abusive, reckless, and violent ways.
Messianism in this quadrant sacrifices personal agency and choice on the altar of conformity and obedience. Responsibility in this quadrant takes the forms of owning what I say, what I do, and, just as importantly, what I don’t or won’t say, what I don’t or won’t do. Where do I put my time, energy, and money? Where do I withhold those resources? Responsibility in this quadrant reclaims personal agency, choice, and personal accountability.
Are my actions and behaviors congruent with my values, perspectives, and attitudes? Am I a person of integrity or a sanctimonious hypocrite? How do I behave when no one is looking? Congruity is no guarantee of anything good. I might truly believe that USAmerica is a cesspool of corruption and fraud, and I might also put my time, energy, and money into supporting the Church of MAGA, and that is perfectly congruent.
Bottom line: I am 100% responsible for my choices and my actions. That means no denials when I do well, and no excuses when I do not. In this quadrant, what I think about myself is not as important as what others see about me.
collective-interior quadrant “WE” responsibility
culture, norms and mores, shared values, ethnic/cultural identity: everything about “us” that cannot be directly observed
This quadrant is all about my family, my tribe, my clan, my social group, my nation, but from the inside. Collective-interior messianism in this quadrant provides a strong group identity and sense of being part of a “chosen people”whose destiny is pre-ordained. Hoffer includes the free poor (but now as a group), the sinners (but now as a group), misfits, outcasts, and minorities who have been disenfranchised and disadvantaged by unjust systems and structures. The particular history of USAmerica (especially the messianism of the Pilgrims, Protestants, and early Unitarians and Quakers) is encoded into USAmerica’s collective national identity.
I was born into my family, my tribe, my clan, my social group, my nation. The way I perceive and understand others “like me,” others not like me, and the rest of the world, was absorbed from and shaped by the “WE” into which I was born. Almost all of what I absorbed and what shaped me was tacit.
Taking responsibility in this quadrant means examining everything that is in that tacit dimension (following Michael Polanyi) and making it explicit, dragging the cultural assumptions I have taken for granted into the light. “Examine everything you have been told,” wrote Walt Whitman, “and discard everything that insults your soul.” I’d expand that to read “Examine everything you have inadvertently learned as well, and discard everything that insults your soul, the souls of other persons, and the soul of reality itself.” A major question for this quadrant is: “Are our collective, shared values any good?” And if they are not good, do I continue to benefit from membership in this collective with its not-good values? I have 100% responsibility for being a active/responsive (not passive/obedient) participant in the family, the tribe, the clan, the social group, the nation inside which I was born.
collective-exterior quadrant “ITS” responsibility
systems & structures (political, economic, social, transportation, communication)
This quadrant is all about the outer expressions of collective cultural values, norms, mores, and tacit assumptions. Messianism here takes the tangible forms of, for example, late-stage capitalist systems and structures (especially disaster capitalism, following Naomi Klein), sin-redemption christianist churches and denominations, white supremacist organizations, Church of MAGA rallies, all the written texts, literature, advertising, slogans, propaganda, misinformation/disinformation, demonstrations and marches, think-tanks and structured groups like the “freedom caucus” and “Proud Boys,” and the infrastructure and organizational structures of ideological broadcasting networks. In this quadrant are found websites, communication networks, infrastructures, weapons procurement chains, and command structures. Systems and structures on the causation side of USAmerican messianism are those that have created injustice, disenfranchisement, poverty, castes, and extreme income inequality.
Similar to the upper two quadrants, the dynamic here is one of congruity: do the “outer” systems and structures reflect the “inner” cultural values we profess? To what degree? Collectively, do we profess “liberty and justice for all” but then build systems, or perpetuate systems, that restrict that liberty and justice to only some? We have a national hymn that celebrates these heartfelt, lower-left collective-interior cultural ideals:
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears.
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.
(from America, by Katharine Lee Bates)
The proof, however is in the collective-exterior quadrant, in the outer expression of these professed values and intentions. Are our cities really gleaming alabaster? Are the years really undimmed by human tears? It’s one thing to petition a deity to “shed grace” on us and “crown our good with brotherhood,” but it is rather sanctimoniously hypocritical if we create, or perpetuate, systems and structures that leave all the sisters out of the “brotherhood.” Do I continue to benefit from these male-privileged systems and structures because I am a “brother” or do I refuse to participate, relinquish my lopsided privileges, and, even better, use them up to challenge the inequities built into the systems and structures?
I have 100% responsibility for the degree to which I continue to accept or reject the undeserved benefits and privileges of systems and structures that disadvantage, disenfranchise, or otherwise cause harm to others. I have 100% responsibility for supporting the systems and structures that express our highest ideals. As in the upper-right individual-exterior quadrant, congruity is no guarantee of anything good: a group with a core belief in white supremacy with collective systems and structures in place to deport all non-white persons is perfectly congruent even if it isn’t good.
Here’s the thing: the four quadrants all work together, they are not four separate things. They are four correlated aspects of a whole, they grow or devolve together. Good (or bad) internal personal values and experiences can result in good (or bad) behavior, but good (or bad) behavior can also result in good (or bad) personal values and interior experience. Good (or bad) individual values and behaviors can result in good (or bad) collective norms and values as well as good (or bad) systems and structures (especially in these days of “social media influencers”). Systems and structures may be the outer expression of cultural shared values, but they also shape what those shared values are. And, as every student of family systems therapy knows, good (or bad) collective-interior environments and systems/structures (like healthy or dysfunctional extended families) exert huge formative influences on individuals immersed in those cultures, and constrained by those systems and structures, for better and for worse.
“The quadrants all work together” means we are responsible for individual personal development, and personal behavior change, and counter-cultural change and development of shared values and ideals, and improving existing systems and structures to function better, and then designing even better ones.
“The quadrants all work together” means we are responsible for the growing up, cleaning up, waking up, and showing up that occurs in the individual-interior, the individual-exterior, the collective-interior, and the collective-exterior aspects of our experience.
“The quadrants all work together” means we are responsible-—accountable and answerable-—each to our own selves as well as to each other as we work to create a better world.
endnotes
1.
The first essay in the series is what I am/what I am not: the religious politics of self-deception
The second essay is the Church of MAGA: messianism and its cure
The third essay is messianism in USAmerica: a case study
2.
For convenience, Vatro Murvar’s list of characteristics of messianism is listed here:
1. They claim to have the total truth, the one true faith, to answer all questions of meaning, purpose, and destiny of life. The one true faith “is binding on all human beings everywhere.”
2. They are dogmatic, exclusivist, and intolerant, resulting in demands for doctrinal purity and consequent purges of the unorthodox and the dissenters.
3. They are elitist, resulting in a ruling elite as well as a cult of leadership.
4. They are totalistic-—it’s all or nothing, the one true faith with its sacred body of beliefs must be accepted in its entirety, and all at once. Extreme means are justified.
5. They demand an ascetic and absolute obedience to authority. Suffering is a sign of commitment, and martyrdom-—sacrificing one’s own life in the holy war-— is the highest form of loyalty.
6. There is guilt and expiation, guilt and retribution, for the collective sins of those who came before. The evil is pervasive, and those responsible will be held accountable. Only extreme sacrifice will put things right again (or, make America great again).
7. They have an apocalyptic vision. These are the end times, it’s now or never.
3.
See Ken Wilber’s books, especially, Sex Ecology, Spirituality: the spirit of evolution. A reasonable overview can be found here on Wikipedia