Book Review Preview: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

See also the review.

One thing I've been thinking about recently is how nations are and are not like individuals. We can mentalize nations as individuals, or as horses with riders, or as impersonal phenomena (maybe in other ways?).

When a president acts, does the nation act? Presidents come and go, like different personalities in someone with multiple personalities. An individual president can be evil. Do they make the whole nation -- all of its trends, cultures, emergent phenomena -- evil? We attack a whole nation to deal with an evil president. We might have discipline to not see the nation as being the same as the president. But maybe the president affects how we see the nation. A president (or other elites) can shape the nation they live in.

We are privy to our own conflicting thoughts and feelings. But when we see other people, we are not privy to theirs. All we see is their behavior. We mentalize a person within the behavior -- that is them. But we know from our inside view of ourselves that there is a distinction between the I and the different forces within us. It's like we are presidents of ourselves. We have some control over our body's behavior. But we are not identical with the body that behaves, even though that forms other people's view of us. Functionally, maybe, we are the body that behaves. And maybe if we are good presidents of ourselves, we rule over our conflicting thoughts and feelings better, to form a stronger, more coherent "nation".

That's one dimension of the question of "how do nations resemble individuals?" and I assume that there may be other dimensions. Does it make sense to look at nations using the tools of psychology? Are nations like people with borderline personality disorder, multiple personalities? Are there therapies to use on a nation that might produce more coherent "national psychologies"? Other questions, after those, might be "is it maybe a good thing that nations are incoherent or semicoherent?" or "what are the upsides of national incoherence or semicoherence?"

One story I've written recently (Two Personalities in the Body Politic) talks somewhat about these issues and it is a takeoff on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. I don't remember in any detail what goes on in that book, but I can easily re-read it because it is short.

So, I intend to read it, through the lens of how it might possibly shed light on this question of "national psychology".

I think Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde might give insight on the ways in which temporary leaders of bodies of people might think about how to behave given that they won't always be in power. Also, how to think about nations that have within them radically different factions.