When was the last time you had a calm, reasoned political conversation with someone who holds opposing views? For many Americans, such exchanges have become nearly impossibleas our national discourse fractures into hostile tribes that see the world in stark terms of allies and enemies.
This fragmenting of our American personality isn’t merely political division — it’s a psychological regression. Drawing on psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s groundbreaking work on group behavior, I suggest we’re witnessing a collective retreat into what he called “Basic Assumption Mentality” — a primitive emotional state triggered by societal trauma.
Think of Basic Assumption Mentality as our fight-or-flight response activated at a group level. When overwhelmed by anxiety, groups instinctively search for simple answers and powerful protectors rather than tolerating complexity. We split the world into good and evil, friends and enemies, black and white.
Our digital town squares demonstrate this regression daily. Social media discourse has devolved from thoughtful exchanges to sarcasm and personal attacks. Family gatherings now require careful navigation around “trigger topics” that might expose our collective inability to hold competing ideas in mind simultaneously. Nuance becomes a casualty, complexity an enemy.
Bion observed that groups function like individuals. Under healthy conditions, groups can address problems through cooperation, empathy, and abstract thinking. They maintain intellectual capacity even during stress. But when overtaken by fear and anxiety, groups regress to primitive emotional states-seeking dependent relationships with idealized leaders who promise messianic deliverance from trauma.
My speculation is that a significant number of Americans are reacting to current anxieties through this primitive psychological lens. These anxieties are derived from the widening economic gap, fear about technological disruption of social cohesion and the frightening transition of public discourse from thoughtful communication to the weakest forms of interaction: sarcasm, personal attacks and disparagement.
Rather than tolerating the emotional ambivalence created by these complex challenges, we resort to splitting our world into simplistic categories. When personal and national mindsets employ this psychological defense mechanism, mental disruption follows.
Hate becomes idealized over love, destruction over integration, arrogance over humility.
We had a preview of this psychological phenomenon after 9/11. As a nation we quickly devolved into viewing the world in black and white, embracing an unambiguous moral stance. This emotional splitting gives rise naturally to paranoia, manifesting today at both personal and national levels.
The capacity to integrate complex and ambivalent emotional experiences marks emotional maturity-both for individuals and nations. To the degree we indulge in splitting out emotional responses into artificial categories, we become psychologically ill and developmentally arrested.
Our current dilemma stems from collective psychology, not a single leader. No individual alone creates this crisis, regardless of how well they might embody destructive aspects of Basic Assumption thinking. Even Will and Ariel Durant recognized this pattern in 1968 when they wrote:
“When the itch to rule the world requires a large military establishment and appropriation, the freedoms of democracy may one by one succumb to the discipline of arms and strife. If race or class war divides us into hostile camps, changing political argument into blind hate, one side or the other may overturn the hustings with the rule of the sword. If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all and martial government, under whatever charming phrases, will engulf the democratic world.”
The path forward requires nothing less than collective emotional growth — the willingness to acknowledge ambivalence, mourn the real losses, and resist the comfort of black and white thinking. Democracy itself depends on our capacity to mature beyond our current fragmentation into a society capable of integrating complexity rather than fleeing from it.
