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American
Psychosis
By Chris Hedges
January 30,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Truth
Dig"
- 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 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.” 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.” 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—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 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 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 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 with the press or members of
Congress, along with the attempt to impose
10-year felony convictions 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 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. 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 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 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.
Chris
Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a foreign
correspondent in Central America, the Middle East,
Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than
50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science
Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News
and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign
correspondent for 15 years.
The views
expressed in this article are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of
Information Clearing House. |
