Donald Trump recently posted a series of tweets slamming Jill Stein’s call for a recount. The contradictory nature of those tweets was a perfect example of “kettle logic.”

In “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Sigmund Freud used the term “kettle logic” to describe the series of mutually exclusive defenses put forth by a man who returns a kettle to his neighbor in a damaged condition:

“In the first place, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second place it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and in the third place, he had never borrowed it at all.”

According to Freud, “A complicated defense, but so much the better; if only one of these three lines of defense is recognized as valid, the man must be acquitted.”

In a recent posting in The New Republic, Jeet Heer likens Donald Trump’s tweets about Stein’s recount effort to this very kind of “kettle logic.”

Donald’s tweets:

• So much time and money will be spent [on the recount]—same result! Sad.
• In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.
• It would have been much easier for me to win the so-called popular vote than the Electoral College in that I would only campaign in 3 or 4-states instead of the 15 states that I visited. I would have won even more easily and convincingly (but smaller states are forgotten)!

What’s going on here? Trump frequently plays the larger game by throwing out lots of contradictory smaller untruths. Candy to distract a multitude of audiences. And, according to Heer, therein lies the real danger.

Fact-checkers typically look at individual comments a politician makes and judge them against known evidence. That’s fine so far as it goes, but it simply establishes the accuracy or inaccuracy of that one statement, rather than the pattern of deception or even irrationality at work….

To be able to constantly lie and get people to accept contrary statements is, after all, an assertion of power. And it’s a type of power Trump understands all too well.

What’s really wrong with Trump’s claim of widespread illegal voting fraud isn’t just that it is untrue but also that, when combined with his other comments, it shows Trump doesn’t care about rational logic at all.

As Heer points out, “Unless we analyze how he’s attacking not just facts but also logic, we can’t measure the full damage he’s doing and respond accordingly.”

Faulty logic can be much more dangerous than mere untruths. Sometimes we focus too much on the trees and miss the fact that the forest is on fire.

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Spending a few minutes on Facebook, or the internet in general, puts one squarely in the crosshairs of three camps: those who think Donald Trump is the greatest thing to happen to politics since Sarah Palin, those who think he is the second coming of Hitler, and the media, who are snacking on popcorn while watching the clicks roll in. Although “the Donald Trump Controversy” is only a few months old, its origins are nothing new. We are witnessing the latest incarnation of the age-old battle between the Id and the Superego.

According to Sigmund Freud, the Id represents the life stage of the infant: singularly oriented toward avoiding pain and gratifying any impulse immediately, by any means necessary. Whether or not you agree with Sigmund Freud’s theory of the Id, it’s not hard to see the resemblance between the description and the “policies” espoused with vigor by Donald Trump. What is harder to understand is the number of people who appear to support these statements. Where is this coming from? Has society gone crazy, or is there a method to the madness?

When it comes to questions of humanity, I’m hard pressed to disagree with Kurt Vonnegut’s assessment that perhaps our brains are too large for our own good. More often than not, the products of our society – technologies, trends, and the like – amount to little more than window dressing on a series of base desires that can either be in balance with, or in opposition to each other. Perhaps we are not so much further along from apes as we’d like to believe. I’m not sure whether that idea is frightening or comforting – perhaps it’s both.

Looking at Donald Trump and his supporters as the Id requires us to look at the Id’s natural opponent, the Superego. If Freud’s Id is the infant, his Superego is the parent: singularly oriented toward social appropriateness and control of base instincts, primarily through regulation and guilt. Today, the Superego is perhaps best exemplified by the trend of “trigger warnings.” Once designed to prepare (not excuse) readers who may be suffering from PTSD, it has morphed into an attempt to eradicate anything that could potentially cause distress or discomfort in any form. To quote a recent article in the Atlantic criticizing the misuse of trigger warnings, words have become “forms of violence that require strict control” (Lukianoff & Haidt).

It’s important to note that although the Id and Superego are naturally in opposition to each other, the one thing they share is that they are both largely unconscious. Lack of reason is a hallmark of unconsciousness; the ideas above are governed by impulse much more than anything that could be described as “thought.” Historically, this type of situation does not usually end well, to put it mildly. Historically, we also know that without dialogue, unconscious processes have no hope of seeing the light of day. Achieving dialogue is like making a meringue – it requires the right ingredients (facts), adjusted to the environment in which the dish is being made (awareness of self and other). Failure to consider either component yields failure.

It appears that two important structures in our society – our political system and our institutions of higher learning – are caught in the grip of unconscious processes. They are getting at least one, and in many cases, both, of the components wrong. To me, this suggests that it is important to take actions that, above all, succeed in the task of achieving dialogue.

Humanity is messy, but predictably so. If advertisers can come to understand the predictability of human desires, and use this knowledge against us, surely those of us who remain dedicated to reason can learn the same, and use it for good? Instead of doubling down on one component of dialogue at the expense of the other, which is what my instinct wants me to do, I am taking “the Donald Trump Controversy” as a personal challenge to overcome barriers to dialogue one person at a time. I encourage you to do the same. The stakes are too high to do otherwise.

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