PREFACE
Donald Trump recently noted that each time he has trouble with the law, his popularity goes up.
Why?
I wrote the following article about Rafael Correa, another ex-president and today a wanted man. On revising it, I realized its major points without exception were also applicable to Donald Trump.
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"That is why Robin Hood cannot die and why he is invented even when he does not really exist. Poor men have need of him, for he represents justice, without which, as Saint Augustine observed, kingdoms are nothing but great robbery. That is why they need him most, perhaps, when they cannot hope to overthrow oppression, but merely seek its alleviation, even when they half-accept the law which condemns the brigand who yet represents divine justice and a higher form of society which is powerless to be born."
- Eric Hobsbawn, Bandits -
SYNOPSIS
Hopelessness reigned in Ecuador. Thanks to a boom in oil prices, President Rafael Correa supplied temporary relief. The result was millions of people reinvented him – a common criminal - as something he never was:
A Noble Thief.
Crooked, corrupt, collaborator and facilitator of drug cartels, murderer: all the charges and allegations made against Rafael Correa, President of Ecuador 2007-2017, raise a stupefying question: why do millions of ordinary Ecuadorians still support him?
It is a question nobody is seriously asking. We do so here.
Our one-word reply: exactly!
Obviously, an explanation is called for...
Correa was found guilty on five charges of corruption. His administration was implicated by Attorney General Diana Salazar in the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio. Correa has also been accused of involvement in the murder of corruption-fighter General Jorge Gabela and the kidnapping of political opponent Fernando Balda. Correa flaunts his connections with international drug cartel members and local criminal gangs such as the Choneros. He presently lives in Belgium.
With so much negative baggage, why so much enduring support? Correa´s political party Revolución Ciudadana is the biggest in the national assembly – 51 of 137 members. His unabashed, unabridged protégé, Luisa González, narrowly missed being elected president; she received 4.9 million votes - 48% of the total – in the election of October 15, 2023.
Correa´s supporters are accused of waylaid ignorance at best, barnstorming stupidity at worse. We believe the solution to the mystery of Correa´s lingering appeal lies elsewhere.
It comes in two parts, cultural and psychological.
INTRODUCTION
For this study I am indebted to the ground-breaking work BANDITS by Eric J. Hobsbawn. First published in 1969 (Correa was six years old) the work was updated in 2000. Exhaustively researched, the bibliography alone is worth the price of admission.
Correa was born into a family with criminal connections.
“Rafael Correa Icaza, father of Rafael Correa Delgado, was born in Guayaquil, on March 23, 1934. The one-armed Correa (as he was known), between 1976-78, issued and sold shares for the construction of the El Prado Country Club and when it was built told the shareholder owners that they were only members and had to pay expensive monthly dues. He threatened people who complained with his hook hand and holding a gun in the other. The injured parties filed hundreds of fraud lawsuits against him. He was subsequently arrested at JFK International Airport in New York in 1967 for transporting cocaine as a drug mule." He was released in 1971.
A crucial distinction must be made here at the outset.
We mentioned the Noble Thief, aka Social Bandit. The Noble Thief is not a common criminal. He is a phenomenon sui generis.
The Noble Thief wants the fierce freedom filled with fear which is the only freedom poor people can have. The common criminal wants money; the Noble Thief gives money away. Unlike the common criminal, the Noble Thief has moral, geographical and temporal limits. The Noble Thief also has roots in the local community where he is a hero; the criminal has no roots and is despised.
Robin Hood remains the prototype of the Noble Thief. The fact he is a cross-cultural worldwide phenomenon that has endured for centuries will be explored in Part II. The cause of that reality could not be more profound.
Hobsbawn:
"Yet social and criminal bandits are not comparable, even though in the eyes of the official law they are equally delinquent, because in the eyes of the common people´s morality the ones were criminal and the other were not."
Prevailing ideology, then, is mistaken in that it sees both groups as criminal and goes no further. Crucial insights emerge when a distinction is made. The continuing widespread support for Rafael Correa cannot be understood without it.
The line between Noble Thief and common criminal can be existentially unclear; both can commit the same act. Moreover, the line is becoming less clear than in preindustrial rural times when insiders and outsiders were more clearly distinguished.
In some instances, the definition of “crime” can also be obscure. Banks and trains were so unpopular in the 1800s Wild West that robbing them was not seen as a crime by much of the populace. The bank robber Jesse James (1847-1882) remains a popular figure in folklore, movies, songs, poems, books. All United States citizens have heard of him.
Probably, Correa sincerely does not see robbing $70 billion in public money as a crime. All Ecuadorian presidents steal. Everybody knows it. So what?
I think when Correa began public life he identified with the Noble Thief. However, he never fully understood the role and never could really fill the bill. Today, as would a Noble Thief, he denies he ever was a criminal despite the fact he was found guilty in a court of law. In truth – he will tell you – he robbed from the real criminals, the rich, especially rich foreigners, the Yankee Imperialists.
Noble Thief versus common criminal: the distinction is vital for political purposes because the common criminal is despised by everyone except one group: the permanent underclass – pickpockets, pimps, petty chiselers, drug mules - which Karl Marx disparaged as “lumpen proletariat.” To the contrary, the Noble Thief is heralded, lionized, indeed idolized, by a huge sector of the general populace in all societies. No wonder Correa struggles tooth and nail against the “criminal” jacket hung on him by Diana Salazar.
Is Correa a Noble Thief?
Let´s see.
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The Genesis of the Noble Thief
Ecuador has all three socio-economic conditions required for creating a Noble Thief.
1. The sine qua non of banditry in general, hence of the Noble Thief in particular - its lynchpin - is found in men´s stomachs: hunger. Poverty.
Poverty in Ecuador is 25%. Extreme poverty at 15%.
An inevitable conclusion: the development of modern communication and transportation and of the economy in general undermines the ground under the Noble Thief.
Such socioeconomic progress is not unknown in Ecuador…
Poverty and extreme poverty shrank during the Correa years 2007-2017. That was due not to anything he did but to the spectacular rise in the price of oil, Ecuador´s major export. Oil accounts for about a third of all public revenues and export earnings.
The petroleum bonanza paid for massive public works projects (many of them today white elephants) that employed thousands of people. It also allowed for unbridled corruption on an unprecedented scale - $70 billion was stolen according to official figures.
When the price of oil fell, Correa resorted to colossal international loans that years later still hamstring the nation´s economy.
2. We come to the second sine qua non for creating and maintaining the Noble Thief: the rural world.
Here, too, the Noble Thief’s future is not bright. Rurality in Ecuador has diminished since 1950, from 72% to 39% in 2001
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3. The third condition required for the Noble Thief: the lack of governmental control of frontiers. Weak central governments characterized most young nations into the early 1900s. Bandits flourished in the isolated hinterlands. That lack of control still characterizes Ecuador, particularly in its northern border with Colombia.
Sidebar. Borders need not be defined strictly in traditional terms. Prisons, tough neighborhoods, the Internet and itinerant populations are examples of other frontiers.
In short, given socioeconomic development, we may be looking at the dying embers of millennium-old phenomenon. That said, enough remains of the three conditions to nourish the Noble Thief in Ecuador a while longer.
The political repercussion is obvious. Even if his supporters are correct that Correa is a Noble Thief, a paladin, he hitched his wagon to a fading star. I think he realized that fact and changed horses, resulting in a Correa I and Correa II. More on that subject shortly.
Sidebar. Ecuador´s particular history probably facilitated the myth of the Noble Thief. For centuries Ecuador was a frontier first in the empire of the Incas in what today is Peru and later the empire of Spain. Indigenous people waged guerrilla warfare; the area was never totally dominated by either conqueror. That long history of struggle will not be examined here.
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PART I: CULTURAL
Traits of the Noble Thief
Eric Hobsbawn sums up what is needed to fill the role of a Noble Thief:
"His role is that of the champion, the righter of wrongs, the bringer of justice and social equity. His relation with the peasants is that of total solidarity and identity. The image reflects both. It may be summarized in nine points.
First the noble robber begins his career of outlawry not by crime but by the victim of injustice, or through persecution by the authorities for some act which they, but not the custom of his people, consider as criminal.
Second, he ´rights wrongs.´
Third, he ´takes from the rich to give to the poor.´
Fourth, he ´never kills but in self-defence or just revenge.´
Fifth, if he survives, he returns to his people as an honorable citizen and member of the community. Indeed, he never actually leaves the community.
Sixth, he is admired, helped and supported by his people.
Seventh, he dies invariably and only through treason, since no decent member of the community would help the authorities against him.
Eighth, he is - at least in theory - invisible and invulnerable.
Ninth, he is not the enemy of the king or emperor, who is the fount of justice, but only of the local gentry, clergy or other oppressors."
Rafael Correa scores unequivocally on only one point - #6, admired and supported by ”his” people, roughly 30% of Ecuador´s voting population.
Correa scores partially and intermittently on #8. Contrary to the Noble Thief role, he is highly visible; he tweets regularly and gives interviews to all comers. Invulnerable? Perhaps,…sort of. Recently, he blatantly committed a crime - obstruction of justice - by warning that a nationwide police dragnet was about to fall.
There are of course less conspicuous ways to tip off people they are about to be arrested, which you, I and Correa know about. But unlike us, Correa clearly thinks he cannot be arrested – he has avoided it for years - that he is above the law. Time will tell if he is correct.
Sprinkled throughout his text Hobsbawn identifies other traits of the Noble Thief. Altogether, I identified over 60, but will cite only some major ones here. The reason is not only for brevity´s sake but to avoid making inadvertently a “How To” guide. Correa is only one of countless common criminals – notably drug cartels - who yearn to be seen as a Noble Thief; they adopt the myth, mannerisms and even a few methods. Ditto the “New Left” of the 1960s and other quasi-revolutionaries (Hobsbawn´s term) who dislike the working class and peasantry.
Along the way are more notes distinguishing the Noble Thief from the common criminal:
10. The role of the Noble Thief is highly invariable, fixed. The Ecuadorian version is the Lojano Naún Briones (1902-35). The subject of the novel Polvo y Ceniza (Eliécer Cárdenas), unlike Correa, Naún Briones easily fulfilled all nine points of Eric Hobsbawn.
11. His career is brief – 2-3 years. The prisons are loaded with elderly criminals, not Noble Thieves. Correa has been around publicly for 18+ years.
12. The noble thief is a local figure. He is identified with a confined rural area, e.g., Robin Hood with Sherwood Forest. He is a country boy. Correa is associated with a large city, Guayaquil. That is an identifying trait of gangsters, not Noble Thieves.
13. What the Noble Thief actually does is of little or no importance. We will explain in Part II the source of the enormous myth-making surrounding him. Correa is nowhere near having that stature in the public imagination.
14. Declining prospects force the Noble Thief to form unholy alliances with authorities. Here Correa scores. He has alliances with President Daniel Noboa as well as mayors, governors, prefects, judges. When all is said and done, however, such conspicuous alliances are more a trait of urban gangsters who brandish corrupt ties to City Hall; they are more bosses than rebels. Unlike gangster alliances, those of the Noble Thief are invisible. He is isolated in a rural area and hence is less part of the “system.”
15. The noble thief does not fully commit to any single group, be it left, right or center. He preserves autonomy by negotiating with many groups. Early on, Correa politically overcommitted to leftist governments in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba. He discovered they had little to offer in material support – that “revolution” no matter how defined was not a realistic option for Ecuador. I think that was when he began to discard the Noble Thief image and turned elsewhere. More on that subject below.
16. Local support keeps the Noble Thief from becoming a common criminal. Correa has no rural local community to fall back on.
Those community values are crucial. A man who is a Noble Thief in his land can be considered a common criminal outside it.
17. The noble thief is noble. He has a code of honor. He kills but he doesn´t shoot first and usually only in self-defense. He doesn´t kill defenseless people or engage in “dirty” killing of adversaries. To kill outsiders and police is O.K.
Presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio´s murder in August 2023 was dirty, without honor. Ditto the killing of General Jorge Gabela who denounced corruption in military contracts.
The common criminal has no noble code. He takes the money and runs. Correa is demonstrably weak and is noticeably becoming weaker on this point.
18. The Noble Thief is an activist, not an ideologist or profit-seeker. His role is to clear the road, not to discover or replace it. In ten years in power, Correa performed none of the three functions. Unlike the Noble Thief, he preaches an ideology, “Socialism in The Twenty-First Century.” He is manifestly a profit-seeker.
19. The Noble Thief bases his beliefs in a mythological or lost past. This past can be that of the Noble Church. The common criminal like Correa has no such reference point.
20. The Noble Thief has no social program and does not build a social movement. His group is limited to 20-30 men. Correa headed a national movement, “Revolución Ciudadana.“
21. Peasants are tied to the land and to agricultural rhythms. They don´t have time or the freedom to join revolutionary movements. The Noble Bandit´s recruitment base is therefore limited to overpopulated rural areas; to men between puberty and matrimony; soldiers, deserters; displaced individuals. Correa´s presidential candidate in 2023, a 45-year-old woman lawyer and ex-bureaucrat, was outside that base.
22. On the one hand; on the other. There´s the good side and the bad side. The Noble Thief is, first and foremost, ambiguous. That is the source of his strength because in a situation of ambiguity he who is in the POSITION to know, has the power. When it comes to him and his affairs, the Noble Thief occupies that position.
Two types of ambiguity stand out:
First, the Noble Thief is supremely kind, supremely cruel. He needs that ambiguity to survive. Hobsbawn::
"´Brigands live by love and fear. When they inspire only love, it is a weakness. When they inspire only fear they are hated, and have no supporters´ (Yashar Kemal). In other words, even the best of bandits must demonstrate that he can be ´terrible´. The second is that cruelty is inseparable fron vengence, and vengence is an entirely legitimate activity for the noblest of bandits."
Second, the Noble Thief is simultaneously one of them and one of us.
Hobsbawn:
"For the crucial fact about the bandit´s social situation is its ambiguity. He is an outsider and a rebel, a poor man who refuses to accept the normal roles of poverty, and establishes by means of the only resources within reach of the poor, strength, bravery, cunning and determination. This draws him close to the poor: he is one of them. It sets him in opposition to the hierarchy of power, wealth and influence: he is not one of them. Nothing will make a peasant into a ´gentleman´, for in the societies in which bandits flourish, the nobility and gentry are not recruited from the ranks. At the same time the band is, inevitably, drawn into the web of wealth and power because, unlike other peasants, he acquires wealth and asserts power. He is ´one of us´ who is constantly in the process of being associated with ´them´. The more successful he is as a bandit, the more he is both a representative and champion of the poor and a part of the system of the rich."
The common thief, on the other hand, is cruel, never kind. He is also an outsider, not one of us.
Correa is ambiguous only in the second sense. Rich and powerful but still one of us, he scores well with his supporters.
23. The Noble Thief is an avenger of the poor.
Vengeance explains why violence and cruelty are basic to the Noble Thief´s identification. Hobsbawn:
"Still, though we must mention the pathological aberrations of banditry, the violence and cruelty which is most permanent and characteristic is the one which is inseparable from revenge. Revenge for personal humiliation, but also revenge on those who have oppressed others."
In a decade in power Correa avenged wrongs committed against him but never against the poor.
24. Any order is better than anarchy. Bandits keep order in frontier areas where the government is weak. Hobsbawn:
"For the basic fact of banditry is that, quite apart from the bandit´s need for business contacts, he forms a nucleus of armed strength, and therefore a political force. In the first place, a bandit is something with which the local system has to come to terms.”
I suspect Daniel Noboa listened to his father, a rural banana baron, who gave the traditional advice to make “arrangements” with Correa and other criminals. The fact such pacts may not be necessary is beside the point. Noboa probably thought he could include Correa and other criminals as members of “his” people; such is a common practice among rural oligarchs. Exactly the opposite happened.
25. Hobsbawn:
“At this point the bandit has to chose between becoming a criminal or a revolutionary. What if he chooses revolution? As we have seen, social banditry has an affinity for revolution, being a phenomenon of social protest, if not a precursor or potential incubator of revolt. In this it differs sharply from the ordinary underworld of crime…”
Unlike the Noble Thief, the common criminal only views revolution as an unexpected opportunity to steal.
26. The bandit is not only a man, he is also a symbol.
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The Future of The Noble Thief in Ecuador
The reduction of poverty, of rural life and of uncontrolled frontiers weakens the Noble Thief´s existence. It reduces his options to two options just mentioned: a criminal or a revolutionary.
What usually happens according to Hobsbawn:
“The traditional ´noble robber´ represents an extremely primitive form of social protest, perhaps the most primitive form there is. He is an individual who refuses to bend his back, that is all. Most individual of his kind will, in non-revolutionary conditions, be sooner or later tempted to take the easy road of turning into a simple robber who preys on the poor as well as the rich except perhaps in his native village), a retainer of the lords, a member of some strong-arm squad which comes to terms with the structures of official power. That is why the few who do not, or who are believed to have remained uncontaminated, have so great and passionate a burden of admiration and longing laid upon them. They cannot abolish oppression. But they do prove that justice is possible, that poor men need not be humble, helpless and meek.”
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There was a Correa I and Correa II.
Correa I, who had a few traits of a Noble Thief, died when his ecological Yasuní- ITT project failed. The project called for $3.6 billion to be contributed by foreign nations to keep over a billion barrels of oil in the ground of Ecuador´s Yasuní National Park.
The contributions were meager. Declaring “El mundo nos ha fallado” Correa scrapped the project in 2013; drilling began in 2016. That was when Correa II emerged. Without a revolution as a viable option, with his meager trappings of a Noble Thief stripped away, he became what he always was: a common criminal.
Hobsbawn: Banditry melted “into mafia, social protest disappeared behind criminal enterprise.”
The reduction of the prerequisite socio-economic conditions in Ecuador encumber the Noble Thief, i.e., he is going out the door but has not left yet. Desperation is there, if not mounting in the general Ecuadorian populace; relief will be sought. However, the Noble Thief now has strong competition. Hobsbawn:
“Perhaps, as the state becomes more remote, and such bodies as unions contract into sectional self-defence organizations (as happens in some countries) the appeal of such dreams of private insurgence and private justice will grow. I doubt whether in our societies bandit-figures are the main ways of giving imagined expression to it. Jesse James and even John Wayne can no longer compete with Batman and his like. Survivals of the classical bandit dream in the big cities need not therefore detain us long.”
What is at the bottom of the Noble Thief phenomenon was mentioned in the introductory quote: justice. Hobsbawn cites Ivan Obracht:
“Man has an insatiable longing for justice. In his soul he rebels against a social order which denies it to him, and whatever the world he lives in, he accuses either than social order or the entire material universe of injustice. Man is filled with a strange, stubborn urge to remember, to think things out and to change things; and in addition he carries within himself the wish to have what he cannot have – if only in the form of a fairy tale. That is perhaps the basis for the heroic sagas of all ages, of all religions, all peoples and all classes.
Including ours. That is why Robin Hood is our hero too, and will remain so.”
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As for Rafael Correa, we close Part I where it started. Out of desperation, something that did not exist was invented in the minds of millions of people. Hobsbawn:
“Indeed, given in countries with a deep-rooted tradition of banditry everyone, including the police, the judges and the bandits themselves, hoped to see someone in the role of a noble bandit, a man could become a Robin Hood if he met the minimum requirements.”
Part II will identify those minimal requisites for a Noble Thief which Correa possessed and explain how they created and maintain his popularity with millions of Ecuadorians.
PART II: PSYCHOLOGICAL
“Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes and who is always duped himself.”
- Paul Radin, The Trickster -
Introduction
With so little going for Correa as a Noble Thief, how can millions of people reinvent him as one?
I sent a video of his weekly Saturday TV show to a Jungian psychoanalyst in France. She doesn´t speak Spanish and had no idea who Correa is. I asked her for her impression.
She answered in less than a minute:
“Trickster Figure.”
The Trickster is an archetype (“original pattern” in ancient Greek), a universal archaic pattern and image in the unconscious. Archetypes are inherited potentials - the psychic equivalent of instincts. The wise old man, the hero, the mother, the child and the flood are examples of Jungian archetypes.
Forming the most archaic layer of the psyche, archetypes are not limited in time or place, by cultural or national boundaries. They are the same in India and Indiana, China and Chile, Iran and Ireland, from 20,000 BC to 2024 AD. Although archetypes do not vary, each culture develops them differently.
Psychoanalyst Carl Jung spent a lifetime analyzing archetypes:
(1) “And the essential thing, psychologically, is that in dreams, fantasies, and other exceptional states of mind the most far-fetched mythological motifs and symbols can appear autochthonously at any time, often, apparently, as the result of particular influences, traditions, and excitations working on the individual, but more often without any sign of them. These ´primordial images´ or ´archetypes,´ as I have called them, belong to the basic stock of the unconscious psyche and cannot be explained as personal acquisitions. Together they make up that psychic stratum which has been called the collective unconscious.” C.G. Jung, Collected Works vol. 8 (1960), “The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology” (1929), paragraphs 229-230 (p. 112).
(2) “My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche …, there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.” C.G. Jung, Collected Works vol. 9.I (1959), “The Concept of the Collective Unconscious” (1936), p. 42.
The Trickster is a collective, unconscious archetype which is projected onto Rafael Correa by 30% of the voting population of Ecuador. It is the source of his enduring personal appeal despite his criminal activities and all the legal charges against him. It Is what keeps him in business as a public figure.
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The Traits of the Trickster
“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest -
The Noble Thief is the trickster archetype cum laude. He disobeys rules and defies conventional behavior; has secret knowledge. He plays pranks, makes sly jokes. He is unpredictable; wanton; irresponsible. Witty, cunning, deceitful - he is a mocker with carnival gifts. He can manifest himself in the mischievousness of objects; gaffs; slips; faux pas.
Every person and society has a psychological “shadow” - an unconscious collection of negative traits: we lie, steal, cheat, procrastinate. Because the conscious mind rejects them, those traits are unconsciously projected onto other individuals and groups.
The purpose of projection is relief. It succeeds, but only temporarily. Jung:
“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intention.”
The following quotes are from C.G. Jung, “On The Psychology of The Trickster figure.”
“An earlier, rudimentary stage of consciousness, the trickster represents the shadow in a pristine form.
Only when [man´s] consciousness reached a higher level could he detach the earlier [lower, inferior] state from himself and say anything about it.“
As would be expected, the Trickster is “unconscious of himself…Although he is not really evil he does the most atrocious things from sheer unconsciousness and unrelatedness.”
Overall, the Trickster is forerunner of the savior – god, man and animal rolled into one.
“The trickster is a primitive ´cosmic' being of-divine animal nature, on the one hand superior to man because of his superhuman qualities, and on the other inferior to him because of his unreason and unconsciousness. He is no match for the animals either, because of his extraordinary clumsiness and lack of instinct.” Watching Correa over the years, time and again I found myself wondering how somebody so smart could be so stupid.
The answer in a nutshell: the Trickster is the “reflection of an extremely primitive state of consciousness solidified into a mythological personage…”
The Noble Thief is one such personage – a major one. Since time immemorial he has been a principal protagonist in “collective fantasies, that is myths and fairytales.”
His inner Trickster probably is what propelled Correa into public life:
“The best examples of 'monkey tricks', as popular speech aptly and truthfully sums up this state of affairs in which everything goes wrong and nothing intelligent happens except by mistake at the last moment, are naturally to be found in politics.
The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched.”
The Trickster becomes especially manifest when crowds form. “As soon as people get together in masses and submerge the individual, the shadow is mobilized, and, as history shows, may even be personified and incarnated.”
"Outwardly people are more or less civilized but inwardly they are still primitives. Something in man is profoundly disinclined to give up his beginnings, and something else believes it has long since got beyond all that.”
Jung summed up:
“The trickster is a collective shadow figure, an epitome of all the inferior traits of character in individuals. And since the individual shadow is never absent as a component of personality, the collective figure can construct itself out of it continually. Not always, of course, as a mythological figure, but, in consequence of the increasing repression and neglect of the original mythologems [i.e., basic and recurring themes in myths], as a corresponding projection on other social groups and nations.”
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Which brings us to Ecuador:
Correa´s physical appearance – I have seen him in person - above all his sly smile, unconsciously stirs up the archetype of the Noble Thief, the amusing scoundrel, the clever rogue - the trickster. That is what Correa has going for him. Other than that, as Part I demonstrated, he flunks the Noble Thief exam by a wide margin. That reality, however, does not enter the picture; as Part I pointed out, a characteristic (#13) of the Noble Thief is that what he actually does is of little or no importance. Whether or not Robin Hood, the model Noble Thief, actually existed makes no difference. When despair reigns, it is not what people know; it is what they want which counts.
The importance of facial expressions should not be underestimated. The projection of the Noble Thief – the Trickster – onto Correa requires a trigger; his expression filled the bill. The proof is, take away Correa´s mocking face and the Noble Thief image evaporates. There are ways of hastening and consolidating that process; I will not discuss them here, except to say this: balding, overweight, showing signs of early dementia, as Correa ages, nature is starting the process. It is up to humans to finish it.
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Conclusion
In Correa, the Noble Thief was never more than a stylistic component. As for substance, as Part I overwhelmingly showed, there was precious little. A condiment, then. Something used to enhance the flavor of food, but without the food.
We close with the purpose of this essay. Help the general public become conscious of an unconscious archetype, so that they can begin to control it, instead of it controlling them.
That is the only sure way to prevent common criminals from becoming presidents.