Regardless of the monstrous evils he’s inflicted upon the world, I feel for George W Bush. I recently read Justin Frank’s book, Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President (Regan Books, 2004), as well as an essay by John Briggs and his son, John Briggs II, entitled “A Terrible Secret: The Psychology Behind George W Bush’s Decision Making” (Scoop Independent News, April 12 2007). Frank and Briggs Senior are distinguished psychiatrists, and Briggs Junior is a respected psychologist. Based on the extensive biographical information they’ve collected, they believe that Bush is suffering from serious emotional problems.

George W’s emotionally frigid parents have always demanded excellence from their children. Unfortunately, the President could never live up to their standards. Unlike his more accomplished brother Jeb, George W has bungled every major project he’s attempted. His personal life has been fouled by alcohol, and his academic, business, military, and political careers have all been pitiful imitations of his father’s. George W isn’t terribly bright, he may suffer from dyslexia, and his years of heavy drinking may have subtly damaged his brain. On some level, the President must understand the significance of his many failures, but to consciously admit to them would be psychologically devastating. He therefore strives to suppress this awareness, which only compounds the problem.

It’s an ambivalent world

To be effective problem-solvers and decision-makers, we need to be able to ask questions and to see things from multiple points of view, and to do this we have to tolerate feelings of ambivalence and uncertainty. For George W, these feelings are reminders of his profound limitations and must be avoided at all costs. Thus, as the Briggs write, “instead of focusing on the process one needs to arrive at a decision, he focuses on the defences he needs in order not to feel incompetent.”

The sympathy I feel for the man stems from my own glaring incompetence. Thanks partially to a non-verbal learning disorder, I’m a consummate bungler, though unlike George W, I haven’t had the poisonous luxury of a wealthy and well-connected family to protect me from the consequences of my mistakes, and while my ineptitude has often wounded people, it’s never had the opportunity to create the kind of havoc that the President’s has. We’re similar in this, however: neither one of us has very many memories of success.

The regime of self-esteem

This creates a dilemma in a culture that’s so obsessed with self-esteem. Self-esteem is essentially a celebration of the will-to-power. Our culture grounds self-esteem in the notion that if we have the right attitude and try hard enough, we can do anything. This belief is supposed to give us a feeling of mastery and to encourage us to turn our dreams into reality. It also creates a sense of entitlement. We value the pursuit of our dreams so highly that it often overrides our concern for how it may affect other people. Even though this encourages universal self-absorption at the expense of community, we still feel insulted when others don’t acknowledge how “special” we are.

When circumstances or personal failings prevent us from fulfilling our dreams, our self-esteem threatens to turn into self-loathing. To protect ourselves, we employ a myriad of psychological defences that buy a little bit of peace at what is often a very high price to ourselves and to those we have power over. In George W’s case, the price is catastrophically high.

We need an alternative to self-esteem. Fortunately, the theoretical foundations for such an alternative were laid long ago by the 18th-century philosopher, Immanuel Kant.

In his metaphysics, Kant made a distinction between two types of reality that he referred to as “phenomena” and “noumena” in the plural, and “phenomenon” and “noumenon” in the singular. A “phenomenon” is an object as it’s perceived by our senses and our thoughts, but our senses and thoughts are very limited. For example, unlike bats, humans don’t navigate with sonar, and unlike sharks we can’t perceive electrical fields. Similarly, people with average intellects are often blind to things that are obvious to the intellectually gifted. We can use education and technology to overcome some of our perceptual limitations, but even the greatest minds using the finest technology can only perceive the tiniest fraction of the world’s unfathomable complexity. Kant used the term “noumena” to refer to the realm beyond the reach of perception and cognition. If the word “phenomena” refers to things as they appear, then “noumena” refers to things as they are.

We don’t know much

Because noumena are beyond our perceptual and intellectual grasp, whatever value judgements we make about things are necessarily judgements about phenomena. Since phenomena convey only the most simplified, superficial, and often contradictory information about reality, our judgements are always lacking: it’s impossible to understand the ocean by tasting a teaspoon of seawater. The rational response to this predicament is to withhold value judgements whenever possible, and when judgements have to be made, to recognize that they’re provisional, partial, and very possibly wrong. The realization that phenomena are only the shadows of noumena, that whatever we perceive is only a mask concealing an endless mystery, nurtures the development of an attitude of intellectual humility and reverence.

The distinction between phenomena and noumena holds true for human beings as much as anything else. Although we appear to ourselves and to one another as phenomena, in reality we are noumena: each of us is a metaphysical mystery.

And here we discover a fundamental philosophical problem with self-esteem. If we are noumena, then value judgements simply don’t apply to us, and if value judgements don’t apply to us, then what is this self we’re esteeming? The selves we perceive are shadows and masks. Our successes and our blunders, the things we create and the things we ruin, the accolades we receive and the humiliations we suffer, these are all phenomena: they indicate nothing, good or bad, about what we really are.

Failures as threats

George W’s self-loathing stems from his failure to distinguish between noumena and phenomena. Because of his confusion, he interprets his failures as a threat to his noumenal self, and so he frantically tries to reconstruct his phenomenal self in such a way as to seem strong and successful, decisive and righteous. Like all of us, he knows intuitively that he is more than what he seems, and he wants other people to see this. The paradoxical truth is that he is infinitely more than what he seems, but what he is simply can’t be seen by anyone, including himself. More than that, what he is utterly transcends anything he’s ever done or failed to do.

Like all parents, George Bush Senior and Barbara Bush had a responsibility to convey this basic truth to their son, as did the community he grew up in. They failed to do this, and the whole world is now living with the consequences. Despite all of the economic, political, and cultural factors surrounding the Bush presidency, and despite the influence of puppet-masters like Cheney, the fact remains that as long as George W is president, his self-loathing will endanger the entire planet. Besides impeachment there’s little anyone can do about this, but his example is illuminating.

Embrace the darkness, George

As a society, we need to recognize that beyond the phenomenon of the self there is a transcendent noumenon, and that this noumenon deserves our reverence. To be liberated from self-loathing and its conjoined twin, self-esteem, we need to direct our attention past these phenomenal shores into the resplendent darkness within which the noumenal crown of being lies forever hidden. It’s in the realization of our perceptual limitations that we achieve an intuition of the realm beyond all such limitations, and this intuition can free us from our fascination with the failures and victories of the phenomenal self. If there is such a thing as salvation, then this is it, and though I doubt it will ever happen, I hope George W finds it. I hope we all do.