James Hillman on Show Business Ethics

James Hillman

 In “On Show-Business Ethics” (Philosophical Intimations, Uniform Edition), archetypal psychologist James Hillman offers a prophetic understanding of what drives Trump’s power with this base. Writing in 1988, the Reagan era, Hillman points out that, replacing morality as we know it—you know, right and wrong—show biz ethics has instead taken over the agora and the forum, the marketplace and the body politic. In show biz ethics, it is not the rightness or wrongness of action but strictly the question, does it work?

Trump’s reign is a perfect example of show biz ethics. “For show-business ethics,” Hillman writes, “there is no good in itself.” The new categorical imperative—with apologies to Herr Professor Kant—is, does it work? And know your goal. Don’t ask whether the Mexican Wall works, can it be built, nor whether we can get the Mexicans to pay for it. No, the goal it seeks is not infrastructure. It’s what works to motivate and control his base. It did and it still does. Even though little of it was built.

Trump’s goal is never policy, what might better the lot of American voters. The goal is always transactional, feeding his narcissistic ego and wealth, and staying in power.

Hillman writes: “Isn’t there in us each a desire for living theater, to see myth enacted, to enter the illusions and delusions of suspension of disbelief? We want to be taken in just as we want the delusions and illusions of falling in love. We are suckers for the power of the mask.”

James is right, but I add, watch what you wish for.

Hillman’s Cassandra-like treatment of show biz ethics was written before reality TV took hold and a reality show host became president. Amazing. How we miss James’s commentary today. He died in 2011.

Donnynisus, Hermes’ Dark Trickster Cousin

© Matt Wuerker

The mask Trump wears is not that of the friendliest god, Hermes, but his dark cousin Dionysus. We are familiar with the god of wine, a god who brings sweetness and light. But Dionysus is also the raging chaos-driven god of Euripides’s The Bacchae, a darker Trickster.

Euripides’s Dionysus cares not for what’s right, but only that his godhead be acknowledged. His followers, the maenads, drunk on his wine, leave their looms and hearth and take to the woods. Such labor was a woman’s civic duty in Greek culture, what’s right, which the Greeks called themis, named for Zeus’s second wife, the blindfolded Titan who still carries the scales outside courts of law.

Outside the city of Thebes Dionysus’s followers discover King Pentheus, the embodiment of hyperrationality, who seeks to spy on them. Agavê, Pentheus’s daughter, leader of the drunken maenads, mistakes her father for a lion cub. Hunting him down, she tears him limb from limb. She eats his flesh.

There go a few norms, namely, parricide, regicide, and cannibalism. The trifecta of taboos. All in all, Agavê has put in a good day’s dark work inspired by her cousin Dionysus.

In the play’s final moments, aged Cadmus talks granddaughter Agavê down from her Bacchic intoxication: “When you know what you’ve done, you’ll feel the most terrible agony of pain. But if you stay in the state you’re in forever, you’ll be unlucky to the end.”

Slowly the hallucination lifts. A kind of redemption comes with their awakening. “Tell me, now,” Cadmus asks, “Whose face do you have in your arms?”:

Agavê: A lion’s. At least that’s what they said, the hunters.

Cadmus: Look straight this time. It won’t take long to see it. 

Agavê: Oh! What am I looking at? What am I carrying in my arms?

…

I see horrible pain. I am so miserable.

Cadmus: You don’t think it looks like a lion anymore?

Agavê: No. It’s Pentheus. I have his head.

Come to her senses, Agavê tries to put her father’s torn body back together, a kind of re-membering but hardly a rebirth. It seems pointedly not a rebirth. Along with her father, founder of Thebes, Agavê is banished by Dionysus from the city, the ultimate penalty. The Bacchae ends, as surely Trump’s second term will end, in pure chaos.

Many of the Jan 6 insurrectionists express the same dazed, dawning awareness that they had been duped. The lawyer for Riley June Williams, the woman convicted of stealing Speaker Pelosi’s laptop, said in an interview that her client had taken Trump’s “bait.” Jacob Chansley, the QAnon shaman with the funny headdress—among the most disruptive insurrectionists and certainly the most colorful—claimed through his lawyer that “He heard the words of the president. He believed them. He genuinely believed him … He thought the president was walking with him.”

As with Agavê, the mist disperses …

Trickster has been all too much with us in our everyday lives. He is the archetypal embodiment of our hungers, our stomach and our genitals. Trump is clearly a man of appetites, the best chocolate cake from Mar a Lago, and Big Macs till the cows come home—or don’t come home. His genitals, well judges and juries weighed in on those matters. 

If Donnynius seems bent only on sowing chaos, he follows in a long tradition. That’s what we are dealing with. Dark, instinctual energies that date to antiquity. That’s what his base is responding to. How do you reach people who have thrown their rationality into a ditch, as Dionysus’s maenads did in ancient Thebes?

A show biz trickster made his way into the White House in 2015 by displaying his spontaneity which lent him authority, authenticity, and power.

He may do so again.

How can we, like Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, help Trump’s followers recover from their intoxication? That is the challenge before us.  

© Matt Wuerker