There have been various attempts to explain Donald Trump's strange appeal. I think any adequate explanation needs to recognize how he summons within us a set of instincts which, if we are not careful, can override our more advanced processes of thinking and judgment. In Western society, inspired by the Enlightenment and organized into nation states, we have long since moved beyond the idea that society is guarded by divinely appointed kings. The idea remains compelling to us on a level deeper than intellect, though, and it retains its power to woo us when we feel our best ideas and rational solutions have failed us.

More than we realize, we depend on sets of instincts and patterns for behavior to tell us what to do next. These patterns come to us, in ways we only partly understand, through our genetic endowment, our cultural, religious and family heritage, and our individual experiences. In the language of Jungian psychology, we live in a world of archetypes--basic forms that seem to underlie our experience of reality. We do almost nothing from scratch, but instead call up from these available templates and turn control over to one of them or another. It is like choosing from preprogrammed scripts on a computer or (in the near future) a self-driving car.

Extreme anxiety can cause us to grab for scripts that may not be the most helpful ones, but we are frightened at what might happen if we don’t come up with something quickly. In periods of stress and emergency, templates that tell us how to survive at any cost can clog the flow of other templates which might actually be more useful. Until the alarm bells of emergency can be turned down, we may not be able to access these more helpful scripts.

The experience of not being able to access a useful set of instincts can be terrifying. When this happens, we are especially vulnerable to people who offer to fill the gap for us, to give us a game plan—their own set of instincts and templates for behavior—so that we can be saved from the discomfort of not knowing. Such people can also be masters at activating and turning up the volume of our alarm for emergency. This gives them power to persuade us that we are in desperate need of what they offer.

So, what exactly does Trump offer us? He seems to constellate (another Jungian term) within us archetypes related to the "great man." Trump has been compared to Hitler. I think it may be more accurate, though, to recognize that Trump and Hitler share certain archetypal characteristics, which hearken back to examples much earlier in history, such as Napoleon and--even earlier--Julius Caesar. The idea of the great man is that of someone who brings a new direction to the world, not through ideas, words, and persuasion, but through the sheer force of their personality and action. They are not bound by normal rules or morality, because they are seen as possessing something in their essence that is more important than what these rules are designed to protect. They come into the world like a force of nature, and they move history with the gust of their presence. In this way they are bigger than nations and governments, which are merely the result of ideas and plans.

There is much evidence that we, in our culture, are at a moment of great anxiety concerning what script we should entrust ourselves to now. This puts us at risk. Whatever templates we eventually entrust ourselves to, we may be compelled to live with their consequences for a very long time. Trump offers the possibility of settling into a set of instincts that seem to absolve us of profound anxiety: the anxiety of having to clean up the mess we have made of our civil society. It feels good to believe our current challenges can be swept away by someone who is not bound by society's rules. The cost of giving ourselves over to these relieving instincts, though, is that society will break in the process. At the end of our expensive vacation in fantasy, we will have plenty of work to make up. There is no guarantee that what is reassembled after such a break will be better than what we have right now. The reconstructed world can only be as good as the people involved in making it, and we are those people.