What Does Trump’s Candidacy Say About Our Capacity for Good and Evil? | Eric Kandel | Big Think

I find the Trump phenomenon so shocking. And if you look at my life, for example, coming here at nine and then here at age 87, I'm four weeks shy of having this interview with you. Having really a privileged life in the United States, I can only say good things about the United States. I think it's – sure, it has weaknesses. You have weaknesses. I have weaknesses. That's intrinsic to life. But if you look at the overall balance of what this country has achieved, it's remarkable.

I was born in Vienna, and Jews were being driven out, and if they stayed, they were killed. So I had to get out in 1939, one year after Hitler came. And I wanted to understand how people could listen to Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven one day and beat up the Jews the next. So I thought I would do this through intellectual history. There was a wonderful major called History and Literature, which was an honors major. Everybody taking that major, a small group of people, had to write a dissertation. I wrote my dissertation on the attitude toward National Socialism of three different writers who were in different positions on their political spectrum.

While I was writing that, I met a psychoanalyst who actually was also an art historian, Ernst Kris, who said, "If you want to understand the human mind, you're not going to do it through intellectual history. You're going to do it through psychoanalysis." And that's what led me to psychoanalysis. But the Harvard experience, nonetheless, when you take these liberal arts courses, you're asked to write dissertations, you're asked to write essays, and I got the experience of being able to write about Dostoyevsky and Freud by working on it for two or three months.

So even though I didn't master the subject, I learned to feel comfortable about extracting key ideas and developing them. You look at the Germans; the Austrians are more complex, but the Germans could not have handled themselves better after the Second World War. It's a transformed society. They're open. They're tolerant. They brought 100,000 Jews into Berlin because they thought the Jewish population had gotten so small they wanted to really reestablish the Jewish community. That's fantastic.

Angela Merkel's response to migrants is so empathic and such a decent humanistic response despite the fact that she's been criticized, and it has caused serious problems. But just to show you how these people have transformed themselves from the horrors of the concentration camp to being an absolutely decent, civilized society in a variety of realms. I think each of us is capable of being brutal; each of us is capable of being perfectly decent. It depends upon the social environment.

A famous American theologian once said, "The capability of people for good makes democracy desirable. The capability for evil makes democracy necessary." And I think this is true. There's the capability for evil in all of us. Who would've thought five years ago that Trump would be a candidate for president for a major political party? Inconceivable that America would do this. It clearly is a mistake. Even Trump, I see this as a mistake.

And yet this wonderful country, to which I'm eternally grateful, almost went off the tracks. The Republican Party, I mean, I'm incompetent in this so this can be nonsense, the Republican Party might have decided earlier, you know, we have a number of very good candidates that would not be dangerous for the country, why don't we unite behind them and see what we can do? But I think they felt that Trump, because he was so outspoken – we never had a candidate like this – was getting attention for being outspoken.

At that time, it was not about ironic matters; it was just about this country is not being run well, we need business talents like my own to run it, and you see his business talents, they're not so great either. So he startled everybody with what appeared to be, honestly, a new bold vision that people found this attractive. There aren't any countries there in the United States; a number of people who are highly dissatisfied. There is a discrepancy in the United States between people who earn an enormous amount of money and many people who just barely eke out a living.

And that's a bothersome issue that upsets many people, and I think Trump seemed, for some incomprehensible reason, to be a solution to that. We have an African American president who I happen to think has done a remarkable job, but that this country would elect him is very much to its credit. And we're now in a position of possibly electing a woman.

So a lot of the built-in prejudices have been worked through in the United States and are being worked through in the United States. I mean, we're not a perfect society. As long as you've got human beings, you're never going to have a perfect society. But when you look around the world, we're doing pretty darn well.