HA Journal text pages 12-10_Layout 1 12/11/12 1:44 PM Page 44
members of the elite to recognize, formulate, and confess this passion (but it wasn’t for Alcibiades). The force of the passion exceeds criminality, overpowers responsibility, and deepens unreality by investing it with magic. The passion is an effort to break out of standard motivation and into what is unprecedented (the spirit of Dante’s Ulysses, in Canto 26 of the Inferno, urging his men to transgress limits, to sail through the forbidding landmarks of Hercules [what we call the straits of Gibraltar]). Adventurism is a flight from unreality to a greater unreality, from the self-imposed yoke of ordinary determinism, though not to freedom, but rather to the embrace of chance and fate. Explaining this mutation of political psychology is not easy and leaves political action, especially in the foreign policy of a great and imperialist power, largely untransparent and hence unaccountable. It goes on over our heads and behind our backs, and then when it hits home, it leaves us stunned or wondering. Of course, everyday life can show personal equivalents to the political sublime— another term for adventurism—but the political sublime affects us all. Citizens dreamily partake of it and endure its frequently terrible consequences, with either enthusiasm or resignation. We observers must make the effort to penetrate it, even though nothing we do as citizens could ever promise to tame it. Yes, the elite’s sense of possibility is a permanent obstacle to our clear understanding of their actions, most acutely in the field of foreign policy. I would mention one more obstacle, one that is shown in the numerous times when personal psychology inserts itself into the motivation of political leaders, whether the leader merges his or her psyche with that of the personified state or remains aware of the distance and difference between them. I have already referred to the anxieties of U.S. presidents who cannot tolerate the thought of the damage that losing a war either to the enemy or to the domestic opposition would do to their personal interests or self-image. This motive is made difficult to take in just because it is either so ill defined or meanly sordid. But suppose the use of power is driven in part by more obscure motives, not quite shabby, but immensely selfcentered or vainglorious, and some of them subconscious or unconscious? As examples we can mention the wish to compensate for personal weakness or avenge personal humiliation, or being moved by Oedipal reasons or sibling competitiveness. How can the analyst estimate definitively the importance of such elements of personal psychology and thus dispel political untruth? Or suppose that leaders are functionally pathological: obsessive, avaricious, personally sadistic, paranoid, infinitely vengeful, or ideologically crazy, and from one or more of these traits, they manage to get their following, who are more or less sane, to enact the leaders’ personal pathology? Do we know
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