Month: January 2021

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the election by a healthy seven million votes, but the 74 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump are not going away, nor do some of them want to be a part of our civil society.

Some portion of those 74 million people carried such an irrational identification with their Dear Leader and his words that they believed the 30,000 lies he told over his tenure. They genuinely believed in the fraud that he won the election, that the election was “stolen,” that their vote was denied. They were whole-heartedly invested in a savior complex that Donald Trump could not be wrong, that he would prevail against all enemies and pull off a second term of office. Believing their false prophets, they believed their Dear Leader when he said to “Come to Washington” and stop the certification of his election loss – an overtly illegal act.

A portion of those people obeyed his command to go with him to the Capital building to try to stop our constitutionally mandated election process. Some had weapons, body armor, zip ties, and they erected a gallows. Hundreds of them engaged in varying degrees of violent actions against boundaries, property, and police – killing one. They trespassed, destroyed, and stole government property, hunted after legislators, chanting murderous chants – and their Dear Leader said he loved them and then told them to go home – after having incited his failed coup/insurrection/sedition. Some of these criminals believed in their hearts they were following their leader’s legitimate commands and felt betrayed when they did not receive pardons. Their hope was broken after having been fed the lies of their leader, various senators, legislators, and propaganda machines. This, combined with the tacit complicity of nearly all republicans and their baseless legal challenges (supported by our own Tom Emmer), their anger and manufactured victimization had nowhere else to go but, for the moment, to turn on one another.

But the cabal of pseudo-conservatives that have no respect for the Constitution are regrouping out of their devotion to a delusional leader, to unhinged conspiracy fantasies, and with the hope of regaining power at any cost.

As I noted in previous Cult 45 posts, they have been groomed for this, and a large part of that grooming has been a real or imagined victimization that they now use to justify their violation of laws, along with social and democratic norms in their efforts to extract “justice,” if not revenge. Thus, they have been twice victims – first the victim of their Dear Leader’s grooming, and now the victim of their political loss and illegal actions. What’s more, some felt like victims prior to all this, feeling their country was being invaded by foreign, non-white, non-Christian aliens. Some were victims of economic forces that were the direct result of their representatives’ policies. Most of them have been victims of an inadequate education in civil constitutional government, and a lack of critical thinking. Many have been victims of religious institutions that taught them hatred, judgmentalism, an imagined right of dominion, and a fantasied conceit of superiority.

Under the grandeur, inspiration, normality of patriotic displays, and the civil ritual of the inauguration hides pockets of fear, hatred, self-justification, false religiosity, propaganda mills, and a corrupt lobbying system that brought us to this place of violent division. These malcontents have not gone away, nor has their most visible leader.

Some portion of those 74 million Americans do not want anything to do with a civil transfer of power. They want justification, victory, and domination. The cult remains. It may appear to be headless at the moment, but this gives other demagogic wannabe leaders the opportunity to have their day in the sun and to continue serving the swamp they claim to oppose. It also allows Donald Trump to manipulate from the sidelines those who believe they can share in his power and influence. They will become another class of victims.

The danger we face is not just from the violent rabble seeking civil war or trying to overthrow an elected government, but in the legislators who fed the propaganda and lie machines, who are willing to continue doing so, and who want to exonerate their Dear Leader of his crimes and insurrection. The American people have expressed their disapproval of Trump’s regime, but we now need to expose the propaganda machines and financial backers that these anti-constitutional power-greedy civilians and legislators depend on.

There has been big money behind this insurrection. Some of the seditious rioters had the means to travel long distances – even on private planes – to be a part of their Dear Leader’s call to action. Many large businesses have been major contributors to those legislators who spread the lies and fomented doubt in the election process. To their credit, some of these usually amoral corporations are reconsidering their support for seditious lawmakers.

This new administration has but two years to show good faith and improve the lives of everyone – not just the majority who voted for them. Perhaps most important of all, we have no time to lose in attempting to restore the norms of a civil society: respect for one another, a devotion to truth, a relentless investment in reality, and bold action to address the profoundly serious climatic, economic, and social problems facing us. Meanwhile, those who lost must be heard and engaged with, even while their criminal behaviors are contained and prosecuted. All legitimate grievances should be addressed, and false ones exposed for what they are lest we all become victims of delusional chaos.

We can live lives of reaction and impulse, compulsion and complex, or we can live thoughtfully, purposefully. We all try to survive, and most of us try to find meaning and pleasure in that survival. However we live, we are faced with three fundamental questions – whether we address them or not. They are:

Who are we?
What is the nature of the world in which we live?
What is our relationship with that world?

Who we are is not defined by social, occupational, gender, familial, or similar titles. It’s the set of core values that motivate us and the deep yearning of the heart that tell us who we are. As depth psychology has shown us, who we are runs from our limited ego consciousness, through our personal unconscious, into a collective consciousness from which we are never separated, always a recipient of its movement, and always contributing to it.

To look seriously at the nature of the world, we easily see its sensory, material aspects, and we are told of energetic and vibrational dimensions explored by physicists and philosophers. The nature of our personal world is also reflected in the nature of the people with which we surround ourselves, for they are part of our environment, part of nature, part of the world in which we live. Is everything alive and conscious as shamanists (and maybe some physicists) tell us? Is it the dream of a god? Is it a mindless mechanism running according to accidental “laws?” What we truly believe about the nature of the world shapes our relationship with it – consciously or unconsciously.

The question about our relationship with the world has most often been a domain claimed by theology, philosophy, morality, law, and spirituality. With an increasing awareness of ecological threats, scientists have become a part of this discussion about our collective and individual relationship with the world.

Eventually, we all decide for ourselves what our relationship is with the world. Those decisions tell us a lot about who we are or who we’ve been shaped to be by outside forces. So, we might do well to ask the questions:

What is my relationship with the world?
What do I really believe about the world? Is it hostile and threatening, supportive and kind, or neutral, or something else?
What is my responsibility as a citizen of the world, as a creature of the earth, as an element of collective humanity, as defined by my spiritual experiences and beliefs?
How much of packaged theological, political, familial, or social ideologies have I taken in without due examination?
Where is my heart in all this?

And this takes us back to the first question: who am I?

In these times of social and political upheaval, I think it behooves us all to carefully contemplate who we are, what we believe, and what we most deeply desire for this world and for those that come after us. Our children will live in our collective and individual answers to these questions.

Reality testing is an element often used when a psychologist evaluates the mental status of an individual. A person in a psychotic state is often unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy, mistaking things happening within the mind for external events. And so we see everything from hallucinations to delusions and paranoid ideation. Most of us have a touch of this at times but it doesn’t interfere with our ability to navigate the world or our relationships. They are simply an element of our character. Few of us may know someone who sees and hears things no one else does (psychics notwithstanding), but most of us know people with a fixed set of questionable beliefs they hold onto as though they were realities – paranoia and beliefs in conspiracies being the most debilitating.

For ordinary people, wishful thinking can be creative and motivating. It is not a problem unless it overtakes the rest of the personality – or the person is in a position of power over those who have a better orientation toward reality. Unfortunately, over the last four years, wishful thinking has been made the measure of “reality.” This is a sign of mental instability. We all have our fantasies, of course, along with those blurred areas where we distort our perception of things out of some emotional charge, but most of us can adequately discern the difference. We can avoid most of life’s hazards, maintain some degree of stability and healthy relationships, and work constructively toward our goals.

This president and his propagandists have been successful in uprooting their minions from any grounding in reality, leaving them prey to rumor, innuendo, and a persistent stream of lies and disinformation fed to them by opportunists. They have been reduced to copies of their leader’s whims.

If a reality violated the president’s fantasy, it was ignored, dismissed, minimized, or decried as fake news. People who attempted to assert reality were criticized, exiled, or fired. People of his party stood by silently, taking advantage of the far-right mind control.

His followers largely adopted the same defenses: if it did not match their wishful fantasy, they dismissed it as fake. Because he said he would win and because he said he did win, his followers have fallen in line, sharing the same fantasy. And now we see armed groups, screaming women and men, and mindless talking heads repeating the party-line propaganda that the election was stolen. And we saw the consequences as armed, violent groups stormed the U.S. Capitol like some invading army.

This is essentially a social psychosis that threatens not only the mental health of those under its thrall but anyone who might be in their way. They suffer sufficiently from manufactured but very real feelings of anger, betrayal, and persecution that they can justify their violations of legal and social norms. They are sincere and cannot see outside the bubble created for them by propagandists. They fear invasions of all kinds, and that fear has been used as a motivator by unscrupulous manipulators. Prosecution of their crimes will be framed as persecution because persecution is their method of control. This fantasy condition with its fixed delusions is not very responsive to reasoning.

It’s clear that the educational and mental health needs of a large part of our population has gone unmet for decades. White supremacy, misogyny, theocracy, predatory economics, and social oppression have been unleashed upon us all, partly because we – the majority – have been in denial of these festering forces operating in plain sight in everyday life. We may have thought (fantasized) that we were safely beyond such things, but we’ve had a rude awakening over the last few years and, especially, the events in D.C.

Although we can look forward to changes with the inauguration of a new administration, and the potential cleansing of a corrupt self-serving regime, we must be aware of two things. First, corruption comes with power and is not limited to any party. Second, our own fantasy that would imagine that new leaders will make these changes for us is only a partial reality. In reality, it is up to all of us to maintain the vision of what we are for (not just against). The social ills, from which these cult members’ insidious fantasies come, must be addressed, and the walls held fast by bigotry broken down not only through law, but by education and understanding. Our own hearts must also be cleansed of the rancor of these years, and a better fantasy created that helps us be of genuine service to one another in the context of the social and scientific realities of our world. This is just the beginning of the work.