Illusion, Religion, and Authoritarian Politics
Insights from the work of Sigmund Freud
Have you ever seen the moon hanging low on the horizon, and thought that it looks enormous? Then, as it rises in the sky, it seems to gradually shrink? Psychologists call this the “moon illusion,” and regard it as just one of many optical illusions explained by the emotion-free, cognitive machinery of perception. Illusions, in this sense, occur when circumstances cause this machinery to malfunction. But there’s more to the meaning of “illusion” than that. In ordinary speech, we describe false beliefs as illusions (for example, “His belief that his lover is faithful turned out to be an illusion.”). In both cases, the scientific and the vernacular, illusions are seen as distortions. They describe something that’s gone wrong: misrepresentations of reality. Illusions, it seems, must be false.
Freud had a completely different take on illusions. Illusions are beliefs that we hold because we want them to be true. It isn’t a belief’s falsity that makes it an illusion. The determining factor is how the belief comes about. That means that illusions don’t have to be false, although they’re overwhelmingly likely to be so. For example, you might need money and form the belief that you will win the lottery. Suppose that coincidentally you do win the lottery. Your belief wasn’t false: it was a veridical illusion.
Freudian illusions happen when pressing desires hijack the thinking process. They can do this by biasing how we weigh evidence, distorting memories, or causing us not to notice readily observable facts.
One of Freud’s most significant contributions is his emphasis on the pervasiveness of illusion in human life on account of how the human mind is configured. An illusion-free life is a pipe-dream, and even if such a life were possible, it wouldn’t be desirable. Life is tough, and all of us need something to get us through the night. We require some illusions to keep us sane. “The life imposed on us is too hard to bear,” Freud wrote, “it brings too much pain, too many disappointments, to many insoluble problems. If we are to endure it, we cannot do without palliative measures.” The reasonable epistemic goal, then, is to dissipate the surplus illusions—the illusions that harm us more than help us manage the harshness of human existence.
Freud’s main discussion of illusion is in his short book The Future of an Illusion. It’s a book about religious belief—more precisely, monotheism. Although Freud was a committed, and even a militant, atheist, The Future of an Illusion is not in any direct sense an argument against the existence of God. As is hinted in the title, Freud makes the case that religious beliefs are illusions. Those who believe in God do so because they badly want God to exist.
The Future of an Illusion addresses psychological question rather than a theological one. It is concerned with the question why people believe in God rather than the question of whether God exists. Given the paucity of evidence, why do so many people passionately believe in God—so passionately, in fact, that they are willing to die or kill in His name? Freud followed a line of thinkers who argued that religious beliefs arise from human needs. The best known of these was Karl Marx, who saw religion as a pain-killer (“the opium of the people”)—a means whereby the oppressed and exploited poor could gain relief, albeit only temporary relief, from their suffering.
Freud’s analysis follows a similar path, but deepens it by emphasizing not only the suffering of the proletariat, but the suffering inherent in the human condition itself. Human beings are, to use Freud’s word, helpless. The powerful forces that threaten us—all of us—are arrayed on several fronts. We are helpless in the face of the forces of nature. And we are helpless in the face of “fate”—our inevitable mortality. And we are also vulnerable to human injustice: the harms that people perpetrate against their fellow human beings—the oppression, wars, cruelty, and genocides that have littered human history with corpses.
Religious illusions are measures to soothe the pain of human life. They promise salvation from the existential terrors suffusing the human condition. They do this by pretending to fulfill what Freud memorably described as “the deepest, most powerful, and most urgent wishes of mankind.” Religion addresses our existential vulnerability through the idea of an afterlife. We don’t really die, and evildoers will be punished for their crimes, while their victims will be rewarded with eternal bliss.
The distinctively Freudian twist, though, is the claim that our awareness of our helplessness awakens memories of childhood, when we depended on our parents’ protection for our very survival. The experience of vulnerability throws us back on our experience as children, impelling us to look for protection from an all-powerful parent. That parent is God.
Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion against an ominous political background, which clearly preoccupied him. He told an interviewer in 1926:
My language is German. My culture, my attainments are German. I considered myself German intellectually, until I noticed the growth of anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany and German Austria. Since that time, I prefer to call myself a Jew.
Freud only rarely discussed politics in his published work. However, in his discussion of illusion, he gave as an example the belief that “the Germanic race is the only one capable of civilization.” It’s hard to escape the impression that political tumult contributed to his reflections on illusion the religious impulse.
Freud was all too aware of the fragility of Jewish life in Europe. In 1873, just four days after his 17th birthday, the Vienna stock exchange crashed. The ensuing economic crisis was blamed on Jewish economic influence, resulting in a rising tide of right-wing antisemitism and political instability.
Freud’s career aspirations were stymied by the rising tide of antisemitism that restricted employment prospects for Jews, no matter how determined or talented. Political volatility did not fade away with economic recovery. It was fed by the trauma of the First World War, and the economic devastation that followed. Austria and Germany became hotbeds of political extremism during the 1920s, including a fringe group that called themselves National Socialists.
No Austrian Jew could fail to be concerned by the rise of political anti-Semitism, both in Austria and in Germany. In 1927—the same year Freud wrote The Future of An Illusion (and the year of Hitler’s first Nuremburg rally)—leftists staged a demonstration at the University of Vienna, which was only a few minutes’ walk from Freud’s apartment. The crowd then stormed and set fire to the Palace of Justice. Police opened fire, and 89 people lay dead in the street. These days became known as the Schreckentage – the ‘days of horror’. The great depression of 1929 added fuel to the fire, boosting the popularity of the Nazi party, both in Germany and in Austria.
The gathering storm of fascism and political antisemitism was plain for all to see, as well as their strongly religious overtones.
Freud was persuaded to flee Austria only after his youngest daughter Anna was taken by the Gestapo for interrogation. He spent the final year of his life in London, as a refugee from Nazi terror. Four of his five sisters never made it. One died of starvation in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and the others perished in the gas chambers of Treblinka.
Freud didn’t write a lot about politics, at least explicitly, but given the time and place that he lived, politics was a constant background to his psychological work, and cast a shadow over it. His main contribution was the short book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, which focused on the psychological dynamics of the relationship between authoritarian leaders and their devoted followers. There are two main themes that stand out. Freud argued that those who are attracted to authoritarian leaders idealize them. They are literally in love with the leader, who is seen as an exemplary human being. This happens because followers abandon their moral compass (in the Freudian jargon of the period, their “ego ideal”), and replace it with the will of the leader.
The fact that the community of followers has a common identification with the leader has another important consequence. The followers identify with one another as parts of a “movement”, and they experience themselves as merging into something greater than themselves. Part of the appeal of Nazi propaganda, as well as other dangerous political movements, was the message that individual human beings matter only as vehicles for something greater: the race or nation, and that one’s duty to this numinous reality trumps narrow self-interest. For instance, German children were instructed to keep their blood ‘pure.’ Their blood did not belong to them, they were told, but to the German race – past, present, and future – and through it they would have eternal life.
All of this has unmistakably religious overtones. It involves surrendering oneself to a higher power and relinquishing individual ego boundaries for the sake of spiritual purity. It evokes eternal life, rebirth and redemption. With this in mind, we can return to Freud’s theory of illusion.
There are clear links between Freud’s analysis of the religious impulse, and psychological forces at play in the political sphere. Politics is, explicitly, a response to human vulnerability. Our deepest hopes and fears permeate the political arena, and this makes us susceptible to political illusions. From this perspective, authoritarian political systems echo monotheistic religions. Like God himself, the leader is regarded as all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-benevolent. His words define the horizons of reality. He must be praised and appeased, but never challenged. His enemies are, by definition, in league with the forces of evil.
The blatantly religious, messianic character of the National Socialist movement is underscored by Laurence Rees, as well as other historians:
The hordes of Germans who travelled – almost as pilgrims – to pay homage to Hitler at his home in Berchtesgaden; the thousands of personal petitions sent to Hitler at the Reich Chancellery; the pseudo-religious iconography of the Nuremberg rallies; the fact that German children were taught that Hitler was ‘sent from God’ and was their ‘faith’ and ‘light’; all this spoke to the fact that Hitler was seen less as a normal politician and more as a prophet touched by the divine.
Whether or not Freud’s take on the psychology of religion as applied to authoritarian politics is correct, some such analysis of the psychological wellsprings of the craving for authoritarian leaders is needed. Understanding the attraction of authoritarian illusions might help to inoculate us against it, and so avoid being led once again into the abyss.