This ‘motivational technique’ of creating an ‘imaginary enemy’, is, as you may or may not know, old hat. Though it is well known by modern psychiatrists and psychologists, the first detailed mention of it is in Hegel’s Master/Slave dialect (chpt. 7) and its conclusion: where the liberated modern individual introjects the enemy, the Master, as both a moral consciousness and a kind of ‘psychological defense mechanism’. But what you fail to mention in your article is the end game consequences of the imaginary enemy technique. Was this done on purpose? I will include them here for reference.

1. On the creation of the imaginary enemy, the modern person, or the slave to productivity, can become more free as you say, but with a payback: the freedom is always tinged with an irreality: one is free in thought only while in relation to this imaginary enemy. As a consequence, in reality the human becomes stifled for having this imaginary scapegoat on his/her back. This is only the first stage of the imaginary enemy. It was called historically the obsessive/hysterical phase — a phase where someone can neurotically complete all sorts of tasks just in defending against an imaginary enemy countering their desires. Whether these tasks would be viable. ethical, or true, is left out of the question, as their only standard is to be judged in relation to an imaginary enemy. This is why this first stage is still alienated and why, in the end, this type of over-productivity is often lacking, superficial, or, indeed, neurotic.
2. Which leads to the second, depressive phase: once it is discovered that all one’s acts are being tinged with the negativity of scapegoating and an imaginary of enemy, the human begins to fall into an unhappy consciousness. This depression, everyday in occurrence in the world of work, emerges when it is realized one’s work is alienated by the fear of an imaginary enemy and the suspicion not only that the imaginary enemy may be one’s self, but that any productivity may just be all in their head and lead to no real productivity or life worth living.
3. Which leads to a third, paranoiac phase: in order to break out of the first two phases, and introduce some kind of reality into the scene of the enemy, the human begins to hallucinate actual other people are enemies! My boss, my wife, my children, society, etc. any body but myself must all become possible enemies ! This allows the paranoiac to break free from their alienated reality and self, while claiming to be productive in doing so. Indeed, why do you need an imaginary enemy when a real enemy can serve so much better! For it is the destruction of these real enemies that is the heart of any modern racism and has a parallel to modern forms of capitalism (one only need reflect on the arms industry to get a glimpse of where this leads). For Hegel, the French revolution is evidence that modern day democracies devolve into forms of terror in the establishment of their institutions.

Indeed, if such an analysis is relevant today, the enemy does not need to be imagined, not only because most people do it quite automatically, but because the enemy is always on the verge of becoming real. Freud substantiated Hegel’s claim by relabelling it the super-ego and viewing it as a cause of paranoia.

Whatever one thinks about this story, it is told in the tradition over and over by various authors. It should be considered seriously since it adds the conclusion to the old ‘imagine your enemy’ technique.

Historically, at the turn of the century, psychiatrists discovered this etiology of paranoia rather late, a hundred years after Hegel, and hundreds of years after the writers of literature. But what they all have in common is this: to advise anyone to imagine an enemy as a catalyst to productivity is an invitation to madness.

Good luck,

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