A Wrinkle in Projection

And T.S. Eliot

[Trivia: what dramatization of a real-life story began as an 1830 Alexander Pushkin verse drama, then became an 1897 Rimsky-Korsakov opera, and then a 1979 Peter Shaffer play, before becoming a 1984 Milos Forman-directed film?]

I’ve written a couple times about “projection”—a term that I’m still using even though I think it’s horribly unhelpful—the phenomenon where people implicitly assume that even their worst enemies operate the same exact way that they themselves do just because they don’t realize that there is another way to function, because they think that any other way would be unrealistic, or because it’s just a tacit assumption, they never even think to explore per se.

My favorite real-life example of this is President Putin accusing then-President George W. Bush of having a journalist (Dan Rather) fired. Dan Rather was fired by his network for being a bad journalist—although I’m sure that in Russia it actually is the President’s call. I say that’s my favorite real-life example since a lot of the other great ones I’ve come across are fictitious—there’s a good if dramatically complex one in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, there’s are great ones in episode 3 of Psych and in Spaceballs, etc.

And sometimes I think that I see this everywhere in the public discourse. Last spring, for instance, when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a Parents Rights bill into law that forbade teachers of kindergarteners-through-third-graders from talking about sexual orientation or gender identity. Great policy, by the way—anyone who thinks that those things are vital subject matters for that age bracket is a pervert.

Opponents called this the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, derisively making it out to be a fearful and fascistic attempt to clamp down on free speech via blackballing individual words. And that seemed to be yet another instance of projection. People on the Left seem characteristically unhappy with the use of certain individual words and of policing language at that level. Heck, I imagine that “Don’t Say ‘God’” is the genuine, literal norm that a lot of these same people would enforce for public schools if possible. (That’s not literally already the case—the federal Department of Education has extensive guidelines relating to prayer and religious expression in public schools, most of which amount to administrative stuff about funding, affirming that students aren’t muzzled from praying, and saying that teachers more or less have the same ability to pray that they have to take personal phone calls.)

This felt like an instance of projection: the Left’s aspirations for public school control look like dictating the individual words that people are or aren’t allowed to use. (This is relevant with God in public schools, although it is paramount when picking the language to be used is the complete substitute for argument—see, e.g., the way that journalists scrupulous use the language of “gender-affirming care” to refer to sex-change surgeries.) They advance their cause by mandating or blacklisting individual words, and so they did it here too, just (for once) drawing attention to the mechanism and how neurotic-yet-fascistic it looks when you spell it out.

But was it projection? Or was it just a slogan that got the point across in as few words as possible and made their adversaries sound like repressed, Footloose-type control freaks? Did people on the Left understand that it was a pretty terrible way of describing the bill’s actual policy, and just run with it because it was effective branding? (I mean, I know I’m calling it effective branding even though the bill got signed into law and DeSantis won re-election by 20 points. But I don’t know how they could have done it better.) Maybe there was a sincere intellectual slip in their way of thinking about it—projection—or maybe it was just a cynical PR play from beginning to end.

Generally, I identify projection when I see one party A accusing another party B of something X that does not fit party B’s track record at all—but could apply to party A. The problem I’ve been realizing is that, especially in an accusatory context, the mismatch might not be the result of genuine projection. The mismatch might simply be a bad-faith, hostile attempt to tar an adversary with the most lurid interpretation or accusation that you think you can get away with.

This doesn’t always apply. There’s an (apocryphal, alas) example of Soviet leader Gorbachev flying over London asking PM Margaret Thatcher how she could manage to feed all those people. She didn’t—free people in a market capitalist system did that on their own. But this story, whether it happened or not, seems like a definite case of projection because there’s no accusatory context. There’s no reason for Gorbachev to invent the question disingenuously.

At any rate, it feels like an important consideration to check before categorizing something, especially something hostile and in front of a big audience, as sincere projection. Maybe they know exactly what they’re doing.

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One of the fun parts of the advent of multimedia is the number of poems that we now have recordings of as read by their author. We have audio, e.g., of e.e. cummings reading anyone lived in a pretty how town, Dylan Thomas reading Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, and the Robert Frost reading Birches. We have audio of T.S. Eliot reading most of his major works: Ash Wednesday, The Wasteland, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the Four Quartets, the Hollow Men, and I’d guess more.

On the other hand, if you’re ever in the mood for Scar from The Lion King to recite T.S. Eliot, I found a collection of recordings that Jeremy Irons did for the BBC of basically all those same major poems. Although note that the audio files for parts 3 and 4 are switched. So if you’d want to listen to Ash Wednesday, e.g., that would be at the 9:42 timestamp of the episode that the website labels “Part Three – The Waste Land.”

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Answer: the drama and opera were entitled Mozart and Salieri, while the play and film were entitled Amadeus.