An entire generation of Germans, Italians, and Spaniards are aging into their twilight years right now wishing they’d had such imagination in the early 1930s.
So the fascist society — which can’t be a democracy, remember — becomes one giant authoritarian exercise is seeing just who these people that are “born better” really are. Who among them is the most cunning, vicious, and ruthless predators of all, the Nietzschean uberman, who can dominate the weak the most savagely? It usually begins like this: can they exploit the weak, the alien, the immigrant, the foreigner, the disabled? Take their wealth and belongings? Kick and punch them down? But it’s a contest now. Who will go further? Soon enough, there is someone willing to put the weak in ghettoes. Then to split up families. Then to put children in camps. And then the unthinkable happens.
He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. ~Aeschylus~
It’s easy to blame the racist rants of leaders who loudly denigrate the “others, but if leaders weren’t supported by a large number of people, they wouldn’t be able to get away with it. A leader and a large number of people and their shadow/hatred/fear of the “other”- spurred on by the silence of those may not agree but are afraid to speak up – encourage their hatred to feed upon one another.
After the coup, everything seems crazy, the news is overwhelming, and some try to cope by withdrawing or pretending that things are normal. Others are overwhelmed and distraught. I’m afflicted by a kind of hypervigilance of the news, a daily obsession to watch what’s going on that is partly a quest for sense in what seems so senseless. At least I’ve been able to find the patterns and understand who the key players are, but to see the logic behind the chaos brings you face to face with how deep the trouble is.
We still have an enormous capacity to resist the administration, not least by mass civil disobedience and other forms of noncooperation. Sweeping the November elections wouldn’t hurt either, if that results in candidates we hold accountable afterward. Or both. I don’t know if there’s a point at which it will be too late, though every week more regulations, administrators, and norms crash and burn—but we are long past the point at which it is too soon.
Dr. Gabor Maté: Before the election, leading psychiatrists wrote a letter to President Obama advising him that Trump should undergo a psychological evaluation to see if he would be a danger to the country and the world if he were elected. What’s not talked about is what is behind Trump’s obvious pathology. This pathology includes grandiosity, which he’s clearly got; ADHD, which he’s clearly got; and narcissistic personality disorder, which cannot be diagnosed without a first-hand evaluation, but he does seem to have as well. However, what I have not seen discussed publicly is that underlying these categories of psychiatric diagnosis is actually trauma. Trump is an example of a traumatized child who refuses help.
What all of this portends, worldwide, is far from clear. Though there are also significant signs of hope, some commentators have — with good reason — been quoting Gramsci’s observation from his prison cell: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
These are deeply spiritual times. I’ve done everything I can to serve a better world with the desperate hope that I would live to see the “more beautiful world my heart once knew was possible.” It was a lovely dream. There is no new world. It’s over.
He was a public-relations savant, a shameless sycophant who whispered sweet nothings to power in lieu of hard truths. He demonstrated what fortunes could be made, and what human glory could be attained, by transforming evangelical Christianity into a patriotic corporate entity. If that’s not American, by God, what is?