By Richard John Stapleton, Ph.D, CTA
Unfortunately, I could not watch and hear the debate itself, having no access to TV in our home here in Bulloch County, Georgia, thanks to Hurricane Hellene, but, based on snatches of it I have read and seen, Vance won this battle in the USian Civil War of Ego States.
His victory came about when Walz asked him if he thought the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. His response was a masterful act of lying by omission by not answering the question yes or no, while saying and implying how he did not care about such trivialities, or have time to think about such trivial things, being consumed with thinking about important things to do in the future.
Not only did he lie and get away with it, he psychologically made Walz out to be some sort of nincompoop for even asking about something as irrelevant as what he thought about something Trump said about the 2020 election, such as whether Vance thought the election was stolen from Trump.
How did Vance do it? He did it by controlling his ego states and his transactional vectors with what he did say, mostly irrelevant lies. He cathected a Nurturing Parent ego state by talking to Walz in a condescending polite way as if Walz were a poorly informed child, calling him “Tim” in a friendly-sounding transactional vector directed from his Nurturing Parent ego state to Walz’s Adapted Child ego state, basically psychologically lecturing in a holier-than-thou way about the important things he was supposedly focused on, which was irrelevant bullshit in the context of the debate.
To which Walz then crossed Vance’s Parent—>Child transactional vector with an Adult ego state transactional vector transmitted to Vance’s Adult ego state using the words, “Now that was a damning non-answer.”
Which for sure it was, but it was much more, and Walz, not being a transactional analyst, let Vance get away with his overall con Game. Walz could have said something like, “What the hell are you doing you damn fool, answer the goddamn question. Do you think you can lie like that and get away with that shit in front of millions of people on TV? Not only is it lying by omission, it’s an insult to all of us. You know damn well the election was not stolen from Trump.”
But no, Walz discounted the psychological Game, a variant of NIGYSOB, Now I’ve Got You, You SOB, and MINE’S BETTER, or Walz was oblivious to it. And maybe it was best. He may have made matters worse had he responded using his Adult and Critical Parent ego states to seriously confront Vance’s lie of omission and attack his Nurturing Parent Ego State. It’s as if discounting and lying in USian politics are now not only OK but required if you want to impress supporters. Most political supporters like, even love in Trump’s case, mean-spirited callous liars, who show up wearing Critical Parent Ego States looking as if they’re cocky tough guys who know how to get things done. Many political supporters would agree with Trump that Harris and Walz are too clean-cut, moral, honest, and empathetic to be “smart” USian politicians.
Vance even cast aspersions on the CBS moderators for doing some fact-checking using his Critical Parent ego state, complaining they told him before the debate there would not be any fact-checking, psychologically accusing them of lying. Was this also a lie or was it fact? And does it matter?
Vance, on the other hand, does not always come across in public appearances and utterances like your standard angry rigid Critical Parent ideological patriarchal dictator. Dressed in a suit and tie, sometimes wearing a red MAGA baseball cap, he has a tall bulky frame and body that is characteristic of stereotypical macho male patriarchal dictators, replete with a dark beard and apparently natural dark hair on the top of his head, but close-up pictures do not always reveal this stereotypical macho persona/image. The man in his eyes and voice sometimes comes across as insecure and humble, a bit nervous, but intelligent, and to some extent gentle.
Unfortunately, Vance is also “smart” enough to do what he is told to do by Trump (unlike the reviled and demeaned former Trumpian vice-president, Mike Pence, a FIJI fraternity brother of mine, a true USian hero, who saved our democratic way of life in the Washington Capitol Building January 6, 2021, by refusing to do what Trump told him to do—don’t approve the results of the 2020 presidential election—doing instead his constitutional duty, approving the results, for we the people) and Vance, unlike Trump, can think on his feet while constructing plausible-sounding if irrelevant false utterances in grammatically-correct compound sentences. And he comes across as young, unlike Walz, who comes across as a wise, moral, ethical, genial, empathetic, caring parent. Most alarming, Vance shows up at times wearing a Free Child ego state on his face, appearing to be light-hearted, joyous, maybe a little angelic, free of sin, like any good evangelical TV preacher.
Based on a quick Internet search, it seems to me Vance probably won the vice-president debate in the eyes of Trump’s base by a large margin and Walz might have won in the eyes of the Dem base. And according to one poll I saw it seems voters are still about equally split again, as usual, no doubt polarized along the same USian Red and Blue ideological and demographic ego state civil war battle lines, indicating, alas, that almost all of Trump’s Pied-Piper mesmerized Repug Adapted Child-Critical Parent cult members will vote for him again.
At first I thought Harris could easily defeat Trump this time because enough Trump supporters had had enough of Trump’s lies, crimes, and misogyny to decide not to vote for him again, and it looked at first that Vance might be a weird off-the-wall male version of another Sarah Palin, or Dan Quayle, but he’s not. He’s not a dummy. He has a Yale law degree after all, which might not mean much, considering the inarticulate bumbling Repug USian president Bush II had a Yale degree of some sort, and Dems Bill and Hillary Clinton also had Yale law degrees.
Seems to me the major problem with USian politics, and probably politics everywhere, is that most voters care less about the real truth, what is really going on, than about said truth, what someone with “standing” merely says the truth is. Hell, many USians even believe somehow what the babbling incoherent Trump says. In other words, ego states, the way people say things, are more significant to most people than facts, data, evidence, and reasoning about what is really going on in the case at hand.
Most voters are more concerned about how politicians make them feel when they say things than they are with what they know after politicians say things, which is why Repugs are now attacking Harris and Walz over and over in TV advertising messages, paid for by their greedy rapacious power-mad corporate and elite rich overlords, out to get even more profit and wealth in their pockets with even more federal tax cuts and subsidies, now paying Trump and Vance with dark money in the form of campaign contributions to make it happen—who are now using TV attack ads with no context costing millions of dollars to invade and flood millions of USian homes with pure propaganda and lies, assuming they now have TV service, if they were flooded with water and mud by Hurricane Hellene.
Politicians and preachers have similar scripts. Their job security and pay as leaders of their flocks depend more on their form than their substance.
Unfortunately, Vance and the Repug attack ads might have what it takes with voters to swing the election back to Trump, setting in motion a process that could cause the destruction of our USian democratic way of life in a few years. The first thing they will do if they get elected is start hiring Trump’s obedient loyal Adapted Child family members, cronies, lackeys, and knaves into positions of authority to run the departments of the US government, who will be “smart” enough to do what Trump tells them to do, creating in the process a despotic arbitrary chaotic ideological authoritarian fascist dictatorship, managing the US based on the nefarious personal predatory and exploitative ambitions and impulses of designated street gang leaders, using platitudes, dogmas, irrelevant scripts, and ideologies to justify their behavior and decisions.
They will do this because this is all they can do, since they will not have knowledge and expertise for dealing with the cases that will confront them in all the departments of government. Even if they wanted to, there is no way they could manage the country for the good of everyone, since they will not know how, and, regardless, not to worry, Trump will tell everyone from the top down what to do, using his supposedly-divine natural “stable genius” intellect.
What the US, and all countries around Spaceship Earth, need are decision processes that develop policies and procedures based on consensual answers based on knowing what is really going on around Spaceship Earth after rigorous dialectical group case discussions by democratic Game-free I’m OK—You’re OK Adult-Adult experts with serious training in all relevant fields of all departments of government.
Harris and Walz aren’t perfect, but we don’t have to worry about them enslaving us, and destroying our traditional USian democratic way of life, if they get elected November 5, 2024.
The bottom line is that Repugs use a lot more Critical Parent and Adapted Child ego state energy than Dems fighting in the USian ego state civil war, that has been going on for decades, and Dems use a lot more Nurturing Parent and Free Child energy fighting their battles in the ego state war than Repugs; and both Repugs and Dems need to bring this civil war to an end somehow as soon as possible by both parties using a lot more Adult ego state energy by reducing the energy they cathect and invest in Parent and Child ego state transactions playing their deleterious, sometimes hamartic, psychological Games in senseless wars, both foreign and domestic.
BACKSTORIES
“HOW PLAYING PATHOLOGICAL POLITIAL PSYCHOLOGIAL GAMES CAN DESTROY EARTHIAN HUMAN LIFE,” by Richard John Stapleton, Effective Learning Report, June 27, 2024 https://blog.effectivelearning.net/how-playing-pathological-political-psychological-games-can-destroy-earthian-human-life/?fbclid=IwY2xjawFitCNleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHX3UqystJNI1k3pzOBs6CMEBcUqSn7nD8wjWd5SnbqtJwPBCBKt86atRBQ_aem_zInoelRnTN8JReDMh8sCLQ
IS TRUMP A -3 NOT-OK MONSTER LOSER-SURVIVOR?, by Richard John Stapleton, EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT, September 26, 2024, https://blog.effectivelearning.net/is-trump-a-3-not-ok-monster-loser-survivor/