The behaviour of the elected or representative politician betrays many characteristics derived from the family. For example, during the time I filled a political job in Palestine I noticed in myself (and in my colleagues) the satisfaction it gave me to have secret information, knowledge which must on no account be imparted to others. Of course good reasons were always to be found: the people would misuse the information or it would depress them unduly and so on--pretty exactly the parent’s attitude about imparting information, especially of a sexual nature, to the children.... At the back of secret diplomacy, and indeed the whole relationship of the official to the non-official, there rests this father-child affect. This also serves to explain the passion aroused in former days by any proposed extension of the franchise. In the sphere of political dogma, unconscious conflicts play the same rôle which Theodor Reik discussed when he drew a parallel between religious dogma and obsessive ideas.[46] Dogma is a defensive reaction against doubt in the mind of the theorist, but of doubt of which he is unaware. The unconscious hatred of authority discloses itself in the endless capacity of the theorist to imagine new reasons for disbelief, and in his capacity to labor over trivialities, and to reduce his whole intellectual scheme to a logical absurdity. Sometimes this appears in a cryptic formula to which some sort of mysterious potency is ascribed, but which is hopelessly contradictory in so far as it possesses any manifest meaning. The celebrated doctrine of the unity of the trinity is an instance of such culminating nonsense. Words lose their rational reference points and become packed with unconscious symbolism of the ambivalent variety. The description of sovereignty found in Blackstone refers to nothing palpable, and functions principally as an incantation. Much solemn juridical speculation, since so much of it is elaborated by obsessive thinkers, ends thus. Deep doubts about the self are displaced on to doubts about the world outside, and these doubts are sought to be allayed by ostentatious preoccupation with truth.