Nietzsche famously said: “he who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself”. Our enemies, our fights, can end up defining ourselves as we are drawn into their abyss.
From a psychoanalytic point of view, we are formed by internal objects, by representations of relations that shape how we understand and engage with the world. Thus, someone whose internal objects are loving and supportive sees the world as if through pink glasses, while someone else with envious and destructive objects finds a world of strife.
These internal objects, as most psychological structures, are formed early in life. Instinctual, biological phenomena can contribute to their shaping, as highlighted by Melanie Klein and other authors. On the other hand, early experiences might have a powerful influence on them and this is the focus of other psychoanalytic orientations, learning theory, Bowlby´s attachment and others. While it might seem clear to some that both inheritance and the environment are important, in practice we often find the polar positions of instinctivism and environmentalism opposing each other with their different views on the shaping of the mind.
The way we see the world conditions (if not determines) how we relate to it and how the world reacts back to us. If we expect a friendly relationship, we might show ourselves open and amicable, eliciting a positive response. On the other hand, if we anticipate dangers and battling, we might throw ourselves into confrontations with the proverbial knife between the teeth, thus causing others to respond in kind. The pattern of interactions we provoke might reinforce our initial expectations, closing a virtuous or vicious circle that is usually difficult to break from. In any case, adult experiences can still have a powerful impact modifying the internal object relations, otherwise the work of psychotherapists would be hopeless.
Our internal object relations can work as a sensor, detecting in the world elements of reality that conform to our expectations. Thus, when someone is expecting a child, she may find many pregnant women around, which would otherwise remain unnoticed. Also, someone whose world is made of aggression and betrayal might be very perceptive to these features in his environment. The expression “it takes one to know one” reflects this receptivity to recognize outside what we carry inside.
We can recognize injustice in the world. We live in hierarchical societies where those on the top have privileges that are denied to those at the base of the pyramid. While some inequalities might be appropriate to reward effort and skill, the social asymmetries we observe are much larger than what can be justified by a socially conscious mind. In the words of the Spanish proverb, “the large fish eats the small one”.
There are those who fight against social injustice. Some people are very conscious of those at the top of the pyramid and of their shortcomings. They are very quick identifying different forms of exploitation or social oppression, hogging of resources, tilting of the playing field and other situations of imbalance that hurt the less favoured. Also, they easily spot in individual people particular traits that are attributed to the powerful, like arrogance, elitism or lack of solidarity, along with other flaws that might not relate with social class but compound the dragon of the oppressor, like greed, cruelty, etc.
As “it takes one to know one”, the revolutionaries or freedom fighters that consecrate their lives to fighting oppression frequently show that their internal world is made of the same flaws they denounced in others. When they are in power, they show the monster they denounced, the dragon, which might actually be a caricature or an exaggeration of traits of the original tyrants they fought against, but which becomes a reality in them. We have seen Robespierre, Stalin and many more recent examples that indicate that this is a pattern, not just a few isolated examples. George Orwell described how the pigs raise on two legs, reproducing the worst features of the dragons (real or imaginary) that they fought.
There is injustice in the world, social and of other kinds. We need things to get better. However, those who are drawn towards the revolution are usually the most likely to become the dragons they fight. This is a conundrum. Perhaps, part of the solution consists in working for positive values, rather than fighting against negative ones.
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