#argentinitis

(November 6, 2016)

There is a variety of ants that is wreaking havoc around the world. Biologists call them Linepithema humile. But the little insects are better known as “Argentine ants” because they originally came from Argentina. According to some reports, Argentine ants are among the world's 100 worst animal invaders. Once introduced in a new area, as it happened in California, they displace native species and imperil the eco-system. Argentine ants cause serious problems in agricultural areas, as they protect certain weeds that damage crops. Homeowners in North America, Australia and Europe consider them a particularly annoying and vicious pest.

                                              Argentine Ant at Rest

There is another export from Argentina that has the potential of wreaking even more havoc. I am not talking about an insect, microbe or plant. It would be more appropriate to describe it as a cultural disease. I call it argentinitis, because, although it is universal and over the course of history it has affected many nations, in the modern era Argentina is where it developed further and had more devastating effects.

Argentinitis first manifested itself in the 1930s when the promise of endless prosperity started to vanish. It is hard to believe it now but at the turn of the 20th century, thanks to three decades of phenomenal economic growth, Argentines were convinced they were an exceptional and superior nation (at least compared to their Latin American neighbors) and that their country was predestined to greatness. Since then, reality has shown otherwise. But instead of trying to figure out the real reason behind the widening gap between expectations and reality, Argentines blamed others. Peron, the quintessential Latin American populist strongman, offered a particularly compelling and simple explanation: the imperial powers (the UK or the US depending on circumstances) allied with the local landed oligarchy had been exploiting the Argentine people almost since independence.

In 1946, right after the world had ridden itself of nazi-fascism at a great human and material cost, Peron imposed his own version of nazi-fascism in Argentina. At the time, the Argentine economy was the largest in Latin America and the 8th largest in the Western world and measured by GDP per capita it was among the 10th wealthiest nation on earth. In the aftermath of WWII, Europe had no infrastructure and a population that was starving. Argentina, one of the world’s greatest producers and exporters of grains, had a chance to sit at the table where the future of the western world would be defined. 

But Peron would have none of it. In his distorted view of reality, World War III was around the corner and a neutral Argentina would become ever more powerful. Besides, he considered anglo-saxon capitalism as his natural enemy. Seventy years later, Peronism still dominates Argentine politics. And thanks to Peronism, the country’s position in global GDP per capita rankings has fallen to 60 or 70 (unclear because the latest populist government tampered with national statistics). Only Venezuela can match Argentina’s record of self-destructiveness. And this is not due to serendipity. Hugo Chavez was one of Peron’s most diligent disciples.

Argentinitis is a collective cultural disease that clouds rational thought. Societies that have grown accustomed to view themselves as exceptional or superior are particularly vulnerable to suffer from it. Feeling exceptional and unique is one of the distinguishing traits of a personality disorder that psychologists broadly define as narcissism. At a society’s level, narcissism originates in continued political, military and/or economic successes. In modern times, the problem arises when a majority of the electorate forgets what are the fundamental reasons behind a country’s prosperity and greatness. And this is particularly dangerous when a gap opens between the expectations held by that majority and reality. Argentinitis is an obstacle to closing or narrowing this “frustration gap”.

Modern psychology allows us to understand why argentinitis can be so self-destructive. Psychologists define attributional style as the way people try to explain how life events affect them. This explanation identifies three dimensions: the event’s origin, the durability of its effects and their specificity. For example, an optimist would tend to attribute a bad experience to luck (external cause) whereas a pessimist would blame himself (internal cause). A pessimist would also tend to believe that the effect of such experience will last forever and affect his entire life, whereas an optimist would see it as a temporary setback with a limited impact. Narcissists are optimists by nature. In fact, studies show there is a significant association between narcissism and internal, stable attributions for positive outcomes. In the mind of a narcissist, negative outcomes are always somebody else’s fault. This cognitive bias protects his ego but at the same time hampers his learning. Argentinitis is a pathological self-destructive form of collective narcissism,

Psychologist Erich Fromm distinguished between benign and malignant forms of narcissism. In the former, what feeds and supports the narcissist is the result of personal effort. In the latter something intrinsic to the individual, e.g., his looks, ethnic background, nationality or inherited wealth. This form of narcissism is malignant because it doesn’t have the corrective elements found in the benign form. Individuals who suffer from it have a grandiose sense of self-importance, fantasies of unlimited success, power and brilliance, a belief in being exceptional, a strong need for excessive admiration, a sense of entitlement, a lack of empathy and great envy. This inflated sense of greatness leads to an increasing alienation from reality.

Fromm also introduced the idea of collective or group narcissism, in which the object is not the individual but the group to which he or she belongs. And in most cases it comes in the malignant form, which is extremely destructive (chauvinism is the clearest manifestation of malignant group narcissism). According to Fromm, this type of group narcissism was behind the rise of Nazism. 

More generally, when a society cannot fulfill the economic expectations of a majority of its members, group narcissism fills a void. As Fromm pointed out, the degree of group narcissism “is commensurate with the lack of real satisfaction in life. Those social classes which enjoy life more are less fanatical (fanaticism is a characteristic quality of group narcissism) than those which, like the lower middle classes, suffer from scarcity in all material and cultural areas and lead a life of unmitigated boredom.”

In Hitler’s Germany, the sense of racial superiority was more typical (although not exclusive) among people with low income and education with no hope of improving their or their children’s fortunes. For them, the only psychological satisfaction was to feel part of a superior group. Believing that one’s country is the most wonderful, most cultured, most powerful in the world etc. does not sound crazy at all; “on the contrary, it sounds like the expression of patriotism, faith, and loyalty,” explains Fromm. And since it is shared by other members of the group it succeeds in transforming fantasy into reality.

According to Fromm, malignant group narcissism is one of the most important sources of human aggression, and like other forms of defensive aggression, “is a reaction to an attack on vital interests.” I would add, on the vital interests of a majority, or a large portion, of the electorate. In modern democracies the majority of the electorate is made up by the middle class. Obviously, malignant group narcissism can be easily manipulated by populist leaders to attain their own political ambition. Since populist leaders tend to be narcissists themselves they innately understand the dynamics of such manipulation.

In 2016 malignant group narcissism reared its head in two of the world’s most democratic and civilized nations: the UK and the US. In both cases, as a reaction to a perceived attack on vital interests of two groups: the lower income, lesser educated that have been left behind by globalization and members of the elite that are economically well off but feel their political clout is waning. Both suffer from a malignant form of narcissism. In the UK they conformed an unlikely alliance between the readership of The Sun and The Spectator. Both groups view Brexit as the path to England’s greatness (and their own). Clearly neither has understood the reasons behind the UK’s phenomenal prosperity in the last two decades. The British version of argentinitis has already proved self-destructive, as shown by the sharp depreciation of the pound.

Trump is an even more dangerous manifestation of malignant group narcissism for the simple reason that the United States is the world’s most powerful nation. As in the case of Brexit, he leads an unlikely alliance of lower income, uneducated Americans in the Rust Belt for whom the “American Dream” has become no more than a pipe dream, and a narcissistic elite who views Clinton as a crypto-communist who threatens the country’s greatness.

Make no mistake: Trump is the closest thing to Perón that the United States could produce. The obvious differences between both men simply reflect the cultural, social and demographic differences between Argentina in the 1930s and the US today. Perón is incorrectly believed to have been the champion of the lower classes. In reality his political base was much broader. He had support from the middle and the upper classes as well. Not an insignificant part of the latter viewed him as a bulwark against communism, which in the 1930s and 1940s seemed like a dangerous menace.