Javier Milei, loneliness, and the bicameral mind

[minnespectrum]

If you’ve been following the news recently, you know that Argentina just elected a president who is quite “out there”, having run on an extreme anarcho-capitalist platform. He won because of widespread popular dissatisfaction with his opponent’s party, which stemmed from the dismal state of the Argentine economy.

What’s slightly less well-known is the reason why Javier Milei ran for president in the first place. Namely, it is because his beloved dog Conan told him to. Moreover, this event happened after Conan’s death from a spinal tumor in 2017!

Milei consulted a medium who promised to help him communicate with his deceased pet, and this is where he said he first got the instruction to run for president. Milei has also said that he and Conan first met each other 2,000 years ago in the Roman Colosseum, where he was a gladiator and Conan was a lion, but they did not fight each other because they knew they would eventually team up to accomplish great things (referring to his presidential bid). Apart from this, Milei also named his sister, a tarot reader, as a campaign advisor.

The phenomenon of politicians looking to psychics for advice is not unique to Javier Milei, of course. Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and Adolf Hitler all consulted mediums or psychics for various reasons. However, Milei’s case seems more extraordinary than any of the above due to how just how central a role the paranormal has played in his political career. Not only that, Javier Milei did not just consult a psychic once, he claims to have had numerous mystical experiences on his own, frequently involving Conan (or his five current dogs, who are Conan’s clones). He even said they give him daily advice on policy and campaign matters. At other times, he has claimed to have personally communicated with God, in encounters he likens to those experienced by Moses.

Religiously, Milei is something of an oddball. Although he is nominally Catholic, he has frequently feuded with Pope Francis (whom he calls a “filthy leftist”) over economic policies; the Pope has referred to Milei’s views as inhumane. Milei has also expressed a strong affinity for Judaism, which has included daily Torah readings and a onetime pilgrimage to the grave of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson. However, he said he chose not to convert because keeping the Sabbath would be inconvenient for him as a politician.

Milei is sometimes compared to Donald Trump due to a similar “right-wing populist” appeal, but psychologically I don’t think the two men have much in common.

Donald Trump, for his part, doesn’t seem to have any bicameral traits at all—he’s way too egocentric, almost solipsistic, for that. He seems to have little use for religion except to exploit it to win support from his evangelical base.

Milei, on the other hand, genuinely seems to believe most of what he is saying about his encounters with God and Conan. It’s harder to believe he could consciously be fabricating all of this, since it’s not likely this would have benefited him politically. His opponent mocked him for talking to his dead dog, and Milei seems to have won in spite of the Conan story, not because of it. Milei is also not an egotist in the same way Trump is; Trump claims to be a “self-made man”, while Milei’s claims to greatness revolve around having been “chosen” by entities outside himself.

So how could Javier Milei have developed so many bicameral traits in the 21st century? One possibility is it could be a cultural phenomenon. It might be that Latin American cultures just tend to have more beliefs in the paranormal, and in the possibility of communicating with dead loved ones. Think of magical realism (the literary genre pioneered by Argentine author, Jorge Luis Borges), or Dia de Los Muertos in Mexico. If so, Milei might not be so unusual within the context of his own society.

But another factor might be his personal life—despite being a self-styled “Tantric - guru”, the man never married and has no children. In other words, for a public figure, he seems unusually lonely; Conan was his primary companion at home. It seems fairly plausible that a person who is starved for authentic human connection might, with time, start to develop more personal connections with non-human entities—even a dead dog. In other words, they might start to have hallucinations, accompanied by some degree of depersonalization (i.e., a weakening of the ego-self). This definitely sounds familiar! I think Julian Jaynes would have had a lot to say about someone like Javier Milei.

In the 21st century, loneliness seems to be increasing, to the point that it is being described as a new epidemic in its own right. Does this mean something of a “bicameral revival” may happen in the near future? If so, it could potentially take society into uncharted territory.

[reflectiondreams]

I think even hitler had the kind of experience where he heard voices during his time in the 1st world war. These I believe are the encounters with the unconscious as Carl Jung calls it and/or the vestiges of the Bicameral Mind as Julian Jaynes calls it. If the experience of Hitler is true then this may be something that repeats itself throughout history.
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/artic ... nd-artist/