“When we so fear the dark that we demand light around the clock, there can be only one result: artificial light that is glaring and graceless and, beyond its borders, a darkness that grows ever more terrifying as we try to hold it off.” - Parker Palmer
I’ve read literally five hundred think pieces about why people vote for Trump over the last five years, and I don’t think any of them really get to the core of the issue.
I mean, yeah, we can talk about the decline of rural societies, and economies of scale, and automation, and opioid use, and racism and white supremacy, and the evils of capitalism, and xenophobia, and Republicans.
And like, yes. All of these things are problems.
I remember the early days of the Trump presidency where I pingponged between these articles and my own observations, trying to understand, feeling simultaneously:
shocked (so. many. other white women voted for Trump)
and shameful (no, I hadn’t thought about how hard it must be to live in West Virginia and see literally every economic opportunity evaporate over the span of two generations)
and complicit (there are only so many conversations you can overhear in the bars of Lansing, MI without feeling you’ve personally contributed to the closure of the Ford factory with the purchase of your very green, very foreign 2010 Kia Soul).
But ultimately, these truths don’t actually really explain why people voted for Trump, especially when many of his policies actually compound these issues, and when most direct solutions are stopgap measures, if anything.
So, then, why? Why do people who have nothing to gain from his presidency support Trump with a feral desperation? Even after everything? Even now?
I’m not going to pretend I have the single answer, but I have an angle: while Trump is president, the modern pattern of ignoring our own deep work is validated.
When Trump is president, there is not a single one of us who is less thoughtful, less introspective, less willing to grapple with the discomfort of being corporeal and mortal and vulnerable.
In the president, there is leadership for a certain kind of American tradition: never ever, not even once, giving a single second’s thought to living our own best life, following our own heart, and living soulfully, in alignment with ourselves and our own morals, and doing the hard work of enforcing our truth through lived experience and finding our own way through the weeds.
It’s an invulnerability borne from intentional self-ignorance.
And while Trump is president, no one who supports him has to answer that clarion call of the quiet voice of the soul that is easy to ignore but impossible to silence, the one that beats inside of your chest, saying, over and over: No. This is not right.
There is power in that, and at the prospect of losing it, a blinding desperation.
And why wouldn’t there be? The shared human experience of facing down the darkness of our own souls is literally akin to self-annihilation.
But where ancient societies scaffolded the acute difficulty of this experience through stories and ritual coming-of-age ceremonies and symbols, like the ouroboros, we have nothing.
We don’t collectively remember the rebirth. So the prospect of death is all that remains.
The archetypical underworld narrative has three parts: the descent, the trial to be overcome, and the return.
Last week, I wrote about the archetypical journey of the Lightbringer, about how her descent into darkness was modeled by the movements of the planet Venus in the night sky.
The story matches the way the planet appears in the heavens, explaining the natural phenomenon in much the same way as we might tell children that “god is bowling” to explain away the thunder.
And this pattern is not unique to Inanna and the Mesopotamians; you see similar patterns in stories throughout time and culture:
Persephone and Hades, where Demeter’s daughter Persephone is attached (married? abducted? beholden?) to Hades for several months of each year after consuming seeds from a pomegranate, a symbol of life, regeneration, and marriage.
Orpheus and Eurydice, where Orpheus attempts to regain his wife after her untimely death, successfully convinces Hades to allow her to return, and then fails to follow the conditions for her release, losing her forever.
Boromir and Frodo (at least in the motion picture), where Boromir journeys briefly into the underworld of his own greed and desire for power, and having failed, dies in a brilliant sacrifice to ensure the success of Frodo’s mission. (If you want to get super AP English about this, you can use Galadriel’s similar trial as a foil for Boromir’s.)
Natasha and Hawkeye fighting over who gets to sacrifice themselves to gain the soul stone in Avengers: Endgame; this is obviously a very recent retelling, and an underworld journey from which there’s no return (although Natasha’s sacrifice does save the world, so…)
As you might notice, the gender of the involved parties, the relationships between the key characters, and ability to return to the overworld in whole or in part shifts from story to story and over time, and I could probably write an entire dissertation teasing out the differences and connecting them to social patterns over the ages. (But like only seven people would read it, and that would be much less fun than sending emails out into the internet.)
And, true, not all of these stories match exactly the Venusian pattern of waning evening visibility (descent), darkness (trial), and then morning return.
But there is a thread of similarity between them.
And the reason this all matters: I believe this narrative pattern is more fundamental than a bedtime story that was created to explain why there was a glowy bit in the sky some nights and not others.
Instead, these kind of archetypes are timeless stories borne out of patterns of lived human experience. People noticed their similar experiences over time, and before we could write things down, we mapped them to patterns we witnessed in the natural world around us.
By doing this, we were continually reminded of the sacred truth of these archetypical patterns; in this case, that the descent and the trial was followed by a triumphant return.
These stories taught us what we don’t know collectively today: that we can face down the darkness, endure the pain of the descent, grow wise from our experiences, and live again tomorrow.
When you think about the fabric of myth and archetype as a kind of narrative training for the discomfort of living (and a service to society to help ensure tolerance for self-reflection, personal growth, and individual sacrifice for the collective good), it makes a lot more sense why so much of our early resources were dedicated to codifying and sharing these stories.
From the very beginning of recorded history, we have been able to salvage enough material to see these narratives shift and travel and morph and grow. With so much of that “paper” trail lost to time, there’s no question that storytelling of this sort was fundamental to society.
And in cultures where the written word was less important, less available, or fundamentally denied, those stories and that shared sense of narrative understanding still exist. (Let’s be clear here: writing these stories down does not make them better, just more fungible.)
Especially when you consider the fact that life 4000 (or 2000 or 1000 or 500) years ago was a lot less full of creature comforts and resources and stability, it becomes peculiar to consider the amount of human energy and time that was dedicated to these efforts.
But in modern America, where we have endless resources for entertainment and streaming Disney, but no shared cultural myths, where we often base the soundness of story almost exclusively on the personal politics of the author, where we drown out societal storytelling with television and look down on the stories of old as primitive and small-minded, and dismiss the mystery and magic of human life in favor of quarterly earnings, we see what happens when we can’t explain the patterns of human development to ourselves or normalize the discomfort (or benefit) of looking within on a societal level.
Without understanding that these underworld journeys are a part of life, it is literally more appealing to burn down the motherfucking planet than to walk into the depth (and discomfort) of our own human experience.
And it is not just the alt-right who grapples with this dynamic. The left’s insistence on performative “goodness” is itself an abdication of individual truth.
When we allow ourselves to be patternized and policed and silenced, when we insist that everyone who is our ally must look and think and speak like us, when we mob up to enforce behavior or particular channels of expression, when we try to align ourselves to the standard bearers of far-left discourse to avoid criticism…there is harm there too.
Neither side of the political spectrum grants qualified immunity or confers absolute moral vindication (and if you think it does, remember that people on the opposite side of the political spectrum feel exactly the same).
Ultimately, this behavior too dulls nuance and pulls us away from our own inner compass.
This is why we used to tell each other stories about surviving the transit through the underworld. This is where we see the power of myth.
This is why these questions are bigger than modern politics. It’s unprecedented enough to have a country without a shared ethnic background or a shared experience.
How do we live without story? I would say we don’t. We die. Or at least we believe we will. And when you don’t know you have the tenacity to survive that journey, you fight like hell to avoid it.
But even if just a few of us remember that there’s something for us on the other side of that discomfort, the pattern can live on even if the story we used to tell doesn’t.
And the more of us who are willing to walk bravely into the dark to fight our own demons, the better the world will be for all of us.