Atavism in the American Mass Psyche
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 was a surprise, I conjecture, to Trump himself. I think he was surprised earlier in the Primaries how easy it was to mock and upstage his challengers. He could break all the protocols of proper Primary behavior without check. Perhaps that was the first time he realized there was no one or anything to check him. He was like Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls at play with the pushovers. But he’s a vainglorious sort and he didn’t let a “Damn, I’m the president!” moment stop him from taking command of, well, a whole lot of governmental stuff he didn’t know shite about. Kind of stop me if you can. Like The Gingerbread Man.
His is not an unusual type. We mass produce hucksters swollen on their own hype and con on the assembly line. What’s unusual is that this type has become president and is now in a wire finish race to become president again. I’ve seen photos of his Dad, the slum, racist landlord, and, once again I conjecture, that Trump got twisted in upbringing. Sad, but I don’t care. But the fact that he’s close to twisting the whole country into the same dark, aberrant pit his mind is in needs to be the focus of real concern.
In his debate with Kamala Harris, he exposed a really scary psyche, full tilt delusions and vile fixations bursting through a net of falsehoods. It was like the scene when the curtain drops in The Wizard of Oz and we see the Wizard is just an old guy with a megaphone. Whether Trump’s entrapped himself in his own net, I don’t care. But why and how are others entrapped? What’s going on within the American mass psyche that when the curtain is pulled, they still see a Wizard?
Trump is not a throwback but we are. We are not in the manner of a mass psychosis drawing us to him. I don’t care about that. We’re drawn to Taylor Swift. Is that a mass psychosis? Whatever is going on there far exceeds what is actually there, whether Donald Trump or Taylor Swift. There’s proper weirdness there.
We are atavistic in the ways in which we know the world. Or, more precisely, the ways in which since the end of magic and scholasticism we have adhered to methods of establishing truth and disclosing reality.
What’s going on when Trump denies all fact and evidence, like a Flat Earther or a Holocaust denier, and some 74 million people voted for him in 2020?
Clearly, the Portfolio class will dismiss the soft and fuzzy of the “human factor” and keep their eye on threats to their investments. Democrats will always be a threat to them as long as ”share the wealth” Bernie and Warren are around.
The Pope/Christian Fundamentalists/Evangelicals/Restorationists class will never vote for a party that “kills babies,” or threatens family values with LGBTQ+.
There’s also the “Anything But Liberals, Socialist, and Communist” block who equate diversity with criminal illegals, distrust what lurks behind the call for economic equity, and see Federal intrusion behind inclusion.
The fourth group are bonded to Trump like Jehovah Witnesses are bound to the End Time prophecy of 1870. That may be the Mass Psychosis written about.
Though the fourth group seems more attuned to ignoring rational/empirical cases made based on Enlightenment reasoning, the other three seem to easily handle dumping those “narratives.” They can do what Trump does, which is magisterially dismiss as fake, false and politically weaponized in a heartbeat whatever and whoever tries to put his craziness in check. Maybe the Western Tradition of Rationality and Realism was junked without a thought because it’s always been a peculiarly American style to be free in their thinking, to assert the autonomy of their own thoughts. Within that way of knowing true and false, real and illusion are personal choices. Here, a kind of pathological subjectivism.
Established: Trump’s a psychiatric case study. But what about the 74 million voters who voted for him in 2020 and who may show up again in the coming election?
Clearly, something has happened beyond the ken of political response. Long existing ways of knowing what truth may be and what reality is being confronted have been thrown overboard. I title this piece “Atavism” because it’s clear we’ve reverted to an irrational way of knowing, not confined to religious faith, but across the U.S. landscape. There’s a mass psyche pathology presenting itself here.
The Scientific Method and its practitioners during Covid received little respect and a lot of abuse and personal attacks. Individuals could out do science with a bottle of bleach. No, you didn’t personally believe in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. This dissing of the Method is astounding. Quantum may turn classical physics on its head but what’s going on here is not a rejection of the Law of Non-Contradiction or Causality. This is whacko.
In a short period of time, established print journalism became just “fake news.” If you cite The New York Timesor The Washington Post you’re sneered at. Gratefully, journals of heterodoxy get a pass as to be heterodox suits the belligerent temper of the times. You get the “real truth” from some self-anointed Influencer online.. You didn’t believe a tornado was reported by the weather service because you had never seen one.
Thirty-four felony convictions rendered by due process trial by jury were crooked, weaponized attacks on Trump by Biden operatives. A jury of your peers is now just a big scam. So, the entire judicial system goes out the door. The electoral system is also rigged and needs to go out the door. Or, in Trump’s view, should be done away with. The House’s impeachments had no facts and was also politically conspired against him. He’s the most defamed man since Jesus.
Unless there was already present some aberration in the American mass psyche, the whole Western Tradition of Rationality and Realism would not so easily been vacated. I wrote much at the advent of postmodernity of its critique of that tradition. What I see now is not a deconstruction of that tradition but a reversion to a kind of subjectivism blind and deaf to conditions outside the limitations of our own perceptions. The mad personalize the world within the distorted dimensions of their own consciousness. It can be seen in the man who wants to be president again but it can also be seen so widespread that the common agreement and understanding that any society needs to survive has left us.
It’s the nature of capitalism, especially in its present financialized form to speculate on the movement of prices and gamble on their direction, no value resulting except fabulous riches to the winners, to be unconcerned with our atavism. The uninformed and the delusional are welcome clients of Wealth Management Advisers.
Those who believe that the facts of this world don’t matter and Armageddon is imminent, believe Truth is God’s to know and it’s written that humans are a miserable, hapless lot that can’t be expected to find Truth. It is in fact heretical to presume to know. Galileo was under house arrest and Giordano Bruno burned at the stake. And so, what humans say is always false. Trump points out those occasions.
I suspect that if Trump’s allegation that immigrants are eating dogs and cats in Springfield suits your view of diversity invasion, then he’s Truth telling. A kind of virus in the mind is now preempting any search for what the facts may be. It might be the worm in RFK, Jr’s brain that’s gone pandemic, though it’s clearly not left him. This is bewildering, weird indeed but disastrous also.
Kamala Harris has an inquisitorial and not a deranged mind. How do I know this? If she didn’t respect the facts leading to a case based on evidence, wasn’t able to find the holes in such a case, wasn’t able to mount a countering case, she would not have had the career she has had. She seeks a common understanding of the evidence she presents.
Perhaps a return to such respect might be therapeutic for the country as a whole. Biden’s presidency, waylaid by inflation and immigration as Viet-nam was for LBJ, has deflected that movement of wealth from the bottom to the top launched by Reagan. However, the failure of many to be informed of what he has done on their behalf tells us once again that we do not seek to be informed nor do we know now how to do so. Trump spoke vilely about Biden at the debate but, to those informed as to what Biden has done not for the 1% but for the working and middle classes, Biden exceeded all expectations of what he could do in the presidency. Trump lampooned Biden because he, Trump, is of that wealth class Biden targeted.
This debility of mind that has crept into the American mass psyche will most likely find no cure in Trump’s departure. It was there before he arrived. It enabled his arrival, this loss of knowing above our own nave, this atavism of mind.
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