Truthdig
American Psychosis
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/american_psychosis_20170129/
AddThis Sharing Buttons
Share to FacebookShare to TwitterShare to More15
Posted on Jan 29, 2017
By Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Reality is under assault. Verbal confusion reigns. Truth and illusion have
merged. Mental chaos makes it hard to fathom what is happening. We feel
trapped in a hall of mirrors. Exposed lies are answered with other lies. The
rational is countered with the irrational. Cognitive dissonance prevails. We
endure a disquieting shame and even guilt. Tens of millions of Americans,
especially women, undocumented workers, Muslims and African-Americans,
suffer the acute anxiety of being pursued by a predator. All this is by
design. Demagogues always infect the governed with their own psychosis.
"The comparison between totalitarianism and psychosis is not incidental,"
the psychiatrist Joost A.M. Meerloo
(http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5609700.Joost_A_M_Meerloo ;) wrote in
his book "The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control,
Menticide, and Brainwashing." "Delusional thinking inevitably creeps into
every form of tyranny and despotism. Unconscious backward forces come into
action. Evil powers from the archaic past return. An automatic compulsion to
go on to self-destruction develops, to justify one mistake with a new one;
to enlarge and expand the vicious pathological circle becomes the dominating
end of life. The frightened man, burdened by a culture he does not
understand, retreats into the brute's fantasy of limitless power in order to
cover up the vacuum inside himself. This fantasy starts with the leaders and
is later taken over by the masses they oppress."
The lies fly out of the White House like flocks of pigeons: Donald Trump's
election victory was a landslide. He had the largest inauguration crowds in
American history. Three million to 5 million undocumented immigrants voted
illegally. Climate change is a hoax. Vaccines cause autism. Immigrants are
carriers of "[t]remendous infectious disease
(http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/jul/23/are-illegal-imm
igrants-bringing-tremendous-diseas/ ) ." The election was rigged-until it
wasn't. We don't know "who really knocked down" the World Trade Center.
Torture works. Mexico will pay for the wall. Conspiracy theories are fact.
Scientific facts are conspiracies. America will be great again.
Our new president, a 70-year-old with orange-tinted skin and hair that Penn
Jillette has likened to "cotton candy made of piss," is, as Trump often
reminds us, "very good looking
(https://newrepublic.com/article/122651/trumps-face ;) ." He has almost no
intellectual accomplishments-he knows little of history, politics, law,
philosophy, art or governance-but insists "[m]y IQ is one of the highest
(https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/332308211321425920?lang=en ;)
-and you all know it! Please don't feel so stupid or insecure, it's not your
fault." And the mediocrities and half-wits he has installed in his Cabinet
have "by far the highest IQ of any Cabinet
(http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-cabinet-highest-iq-233853 ;)
ever assembled."
It is an avalanche of absurdities.
This mendacity would be easier to repulse if the problem was solely embodied
in Trump. But even in the face of a rising despotism, the Democratic Party
refuses to denounce the corporate forces that eviscerated our democracy and
impoverished the country. The neoliberal Trump demonizes Muslims,
undocumented workers and the media. The neoliberal
(https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-proble
m-george-monbiot ) Democratic Party demonizes Vladimir Putin and FBI
Director James Comey. No one speaks about the destructive force of corporate
power. The warring elites pit alternative facts
(http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/22/politics/kellyanne-conway-alternative-facts/
) against alternative facts. All engage in demagoguery. We will, I expect,
be condemned to despotism by the venality of Trump and the cowardice and
dishonesty of the liberal class.
Trump and those around him have a deep hatred for what they cannot
understand. They silence anyone who thinks independently. They elevate
pseudo-intellectuals who adhere to their bizarre script. They cannot cope
with complexity, nuance or the unpredictable. Individual initiative is a
mortal threat. The order for some employees of several federal agencies,
including the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of
Agriculture's research service, the National Park Service and the Department
of Health and Human Services, to restrict or cease communication
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-communication-freeze_us_58878b3ae
4b0441a8f7114e2) with the press or members of Congress, along with the
attempt to impose 10-year felony convictions
(http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/24/these-reporters-were-jaile
d-after-covering-a-trump-related-riot.html ) on six reporters who covered
the inauguration protests, signals the beginning of a campaign to
marginalize reality and promote fantasy. Facts depend solely on those who
have the power to create them. The goal of the Trump administration is to
create an artificial consistency that conforms to its warped perception of
the world.
"Before they seize power and establish a world according to their doctrines,
totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more
adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which,
through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared
the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human
beings and their expectations," Hannah Arendt
(http://www.iep.utm.edu/arendt/ ;) wrote in "The Origins of
Totalitarianism." "The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda-before the
movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone's
disturbing, by the slightest reality, the gruesome quiet of an entirely
imaginary world-lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real
world."
Trump's blinding narcissism was captured in his bizarre talk to the CIA on
Jan. 21. "[T]hey say, is Donald Trump an intellectual?" he said. "Trust me,
I'm, like, a smart persona."
"I have a running war with the media," he added. "They are among the most
dishonest human beings on earth. And they sort of made it sound like I had a
feud with the intelligence community
(http://www.factcheck.org/2017/01/trump-and-intelligence-community/) . And I
just want to let you know, the reason you're the number one stop [in the new
presidency] is exactly the opposite-exactly. And they understand that, too."
He launched into an attack on the media for not reporting that "a million,
million and a half people" showed up for his inauguration. "They showed a
field where there was practically nobody standing there," he said about the
media's depiction of the inauguration crowd. "And they said, Donald Trump
did not draw well. I said, it was almost raining, the rain should have
scared them away, but God looked down and he said, we're not going to let it
rain on your speech."
He has been on the cover of Time "like, 14 or 15 times," Trump said in
speaking of his criticism of the magazine because one of its reporters
incorrectly wrote that the president had removed a bust of Martin Luther
King Jr. from the Oval Office. "I think we have the all-time record in the
history of Time magazine. Like, if Tom Brady is on the cover, it's one time,
because he won the Super Bowl or something, right? I've been on it for 15
times this year. I don't think that's a record, Mike, that can ever be
broken. Do you agree with that? What do you think?" [Editor's note:
Photographs or drawings of Trump were on the cover of Time 10 times
(http://time.com/4528468/donald-trump-time-cover-2/ ;) in the last year and
a half and once in 1989.]
Trump's theatricality works. He forces the press and the public to repeat
his lies, inadvertently giving them credibility. He is always moving. He is
always on display. He has no fixed belief system. Trump, as he consolidates
power, will adopt the ideology of the Christian right to fill his own
ideological vacuum. The Christian right's magical thinking will merge
seamlessly with Trump's magical thinking. Idiocy, self-delusion,
megalomania, fantasy and government repression will come wrapped in images
of the Christian cross and the American flag.
The corporate state, hostile or indifferent to the plight of the citizens,
has no emotional pull among the public. It is often hated. Political
candidates run not as politicians but as celebrities. Campaigns eschew
issues to make people feel good about candidates and themselves. Ideas are
irrelevant. Emotional euphoria is paramount. The voter is only a prop in the
political theater. Politics is anti-politics. It is reality television.
Trump proved better at this game than his opponents. It is a game in which
fact and knowledge do not matter. Reality is what you create. We were
conditioned for a Trump.
Meerloo wrote, "The demagogue relies for his effectiveness on the fact that
people will take seriously the fantastic accusations he makes, will discuss
the phony issues he raises as if they had reality, or will be thrown into
such a state of panic by his accusations and charges that they will simply
abdicate their right to think and verify for themselves."
The lies create a climate in which everyone is assumed to be lying. The
truth becomes suspect and obscured. Narratives begin to be believed not
because they are true, or even sound true, but because they are emotionally
appealing. The aim of systematic lying, as Arendt wrote, is the
"transformation of human nature itself." The lies eventually foster
somnambulism among a population that surrenders to the magical thinking and
ceases to care. It checks out. It becomes cynical. It only asks to be
entertained and given a vent for its frustration and rage. Demagogues
produce enemies the way a magician pulls rabbits out of a hat. They wage
constant battles against nonexistent dangers, rapidly replacing one after
the other to keep the rhetoric at a fever pitch.
"Practically speaking, the totalitarian ruler proceeds like a man who
persistently insults another man until everybody knows that the latter is
his enemy, so that he can, with some plausibility, go out and kill him in
self-defense," Arendt wrote. "This certainly is a little crude, but it
works-as everybody will know who has ever watched how certain successful
careerists eliminate competitors."
We are entering a period of national psychological trauma. We are stalked by
lunatics. We are, as Judith Herman
(http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/44171.Judith_Lewis_Herman ;) writes
about trauma victims in her book "Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of
Violence-From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror," being "rendered helpless
by overwhelming force." This trauma, like all traumas, overwhelms "the
ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection,
and meaning."
To recover our mental balance we must respond to Trump the way victims of
trauma respond to abuse. We must build communities where we can find
understanding and solidarity. We must allow ourselves to mourn. We must name
the psychosis that afflicts us. We must carry out acts of civil disobedience
and steadfast defiance to re-empower others and ourselves. We must fend off
the madness and engage in dialogues based on truth, literacy, empathy and
reality. We must invest more time in activities such as finding solace in
nature, or focusing on music, theater, literature, art and even
worship-activities that hold the capacity for renewal and transcendence.
This is the only way we will remain psychologically whole. Building an outer
shell or attempting to hide will exacerbate our psychological distress and
depression. We may not win, but we will have, if we create small,
like-minded cells of defiance, the capacity not to go insane.
There Will Be Less Mild Weather As the World Warms
Remembering People's Lawyer Len Weinglass
American Psychosis
How the Hyde Amendment and HR 7 Punish America's Poor Women (Video)
Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
C 2017 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.
Signup for Truthdig's newsletter
