Over the past four years I have continually asked myself why 63 million people voted for this highly disturbed individual. Were they gaslighted into a narcissistic personality cult?
I know narcissists can be powerful and convincing. Ask any spouse of such an individual. Emotional abuse, gaslighting, manipulation - all the strategic tricks in the book are employed to control the echo chamber. It requires enormous effort to escape. It requires a strong sense of self to withstand the strategic manipulation and escape from the hell they can lock a spouse into.
It seems the whole country, with the enthusiastic help of the mass media, has been dominated by this outrageous narcissism. I have been unable to look away. Every day there is a new outrage. As Dana Milbank said, he finally figured out when the Trump administration hit bottom: “Tomorrow.” It is exhausting and demoralizing, and the media cannot seem to help themselves; like they insisted upon showing the towers collapsing, over and over again. People, including me, were traumatized by the media reporting as much as the actual event.
So, as maybe a therapeutic exercise in writing words on the Internet, I can find a little bit of relief by recording my thinking about this - and without using the extreme graphic language of my first draft.
Narcissism is about selling an image in order to distract from a withered reality. Massive psychic energy is devoted to maintaining an image; a performing self. In some charismatic individuals this “performing self” is very powerful and can advance them to highly successful positions. When they become leaders they enter a kind of echo chamber where everyone around them applauds and gives lip service to their performing self; while, within themselves they know it’s all bullshit. They’re performing too. It becomes a black hole of inauthentic performance.
Narcissists are notoriously impervious to therapy. Getting beneath the performing self to that shrunken, withered real-self they are desperately concealing is nearly impossible - unless they suffer some cataclysmic, near fatal collision with Reality. The Emperor, surrounded by obsequious sycophants, is supported in his belief that his raiment is, indeed, of the finest cloth imaginable.
Extreme malevolent narcissism is within the bounds of possible human behaviors. It is an extreme on a continuum. Evolution in tribal survival units has created brains which are exquisitely adapted to survive and turn resources into offspring within that tribal milieu. Among those hard-wired traits is a highly skilled ability at deception. A show of force takes much less precious energy than an actual fight; a good chest-thumping display covering over abject fear has distinct survival advantages.Those who observe chimpanzee behavior are often disturbed at how similar it is to the deceptive alliances and power hierarchies in any Fortune 500 company or political party.
So, there is a capacity within all of us to develop a Trumpish performing self. Warren Susman gives an insight into the way this hard-wiring has developed in modern consumer capitalism. When the transition from traditional village life to modern industrialized cities occurred there was also a transition in social relations; he called it a change from a “Culture of Character” - the culture of the village where one became known by how they lived their life - to a “Culture of Personality:”
The social role demanded of all in the Culture of Personality was that of a performer… Every American was to become a performing self
That “Culture of Personality” has led to an onslaught of “brand” promotion and social media hyper-narcissism. In this new cultural wasteland, we are urged to not only be “performing selves” but to actively compete in a marketplace to sell ourselves as brands. Even before Trump, politics had become more and more reduced to something along the lines of Vince Lombardy’s “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” And the process of winning elections had become more and more reduced to a very expensive kind of brand promotion.
Consumerism has attached itself to a novel identity politics in which business itself plays a role in forging identities conducive to buying and selling. Identity here becomes a reflection of “lifestyles” that are closely associated with commercial brands and the products they label, as well as with attitudes and behaviors linked to where we shop, how we buy, and what we eat, wear, and consume.
The identity politics of the 21st century is then part and parcel of the infantilist ethos. It mistakes brand for identity and consumption for character while treating Americans as consumers of Brand USA rather than as the free citizens of a democratic republic.
– Benjamin Barber Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole
It is buying and selling that matters. Everything has a price and everything is for sale. Even our own personalities. But, it is like the alcoholic who spins beautiful delusions about how their drinking is “responsible,” while the biological reality of what is happening in their liver continues to move towards disaster. And, in similar fashion, this brand promotion has evolved into an empty industrial proliferation of lies and propaganda covering over a disastrous full speed race off a cliff.
Many people are sick and tired of living in such an empty world; watching empty marketing propaganda directed at their performing selves - which they are told are completely inadequate without the latest consumer product to enhance their image. It is exhausting maintaining these performances. So, people were craving someone who would “tell it like it is” on the national stage. And the media ate up his outrageous performances. The falsest of false selves, a reality show con artist, was able to portray himself as a no nonsense patriot. And the 63 million marks believed him. He would blow up the tired swamp of lies and propaganda and “Make America Great Again.”
Critical, objective thinking occurs in a gelatinous mass of neurons bathed in hormones that arise from primitive hard-wired evolutionary adaptations that promoted survival, not philosophic detachment. An animal that stopped and thought about an environmental danger signal would have ended up dead, even if that signal were incorrectly interpreted - the rustling in the bush was only the wind, not a tiger. Fearful flight may not have been “rational” but it enable survival during those rare times when it really was necessary.
Authoritarians know how easy it is to stimulate these primitive survival mechanisms. They do so by submerging the fragile processes of critical thinking, of reason and logic, in a sea of lies. Lying powerfully, often angrily, and repeatedly confuses the minds of followers and distorts their sense of reality. As Hanna Arendt says, they “conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself.” Authoritarians first attack is always upon the Truth. “Don’t believe your own eyes and ears, believe what we tell you!”
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’. - Ron Suskind (2004)
The problem with all this is sustainability. Flowery denial of the truth and the facts only serves to postpone an inevitable collision with reality.
The relationship between truth and power has always been complex. Authoritarians rely upon this dynamic. If the Emperor has enough authority to silence the boy and put him and those who agree with him in prison, then the reality of his nakedness can be suppressed. Truth no longer matters in the face of this authoritarian power. Truth seeks to convince by the democratic process of rational and logical argument. Power proclaims, “It is so, because I say so! Disagreement will be severely punished!”
Truth is democratic and promotes radical equality. Authority has no arbitrary rule over the “tests of deep science” as Ken Wilbur puts it; the King can be overruled by the meekest peasant by an appeal to logic and reason. Those who affirm the Emperor’s nakedness can only do so temporarily before someone, even a child, forces them to come to terms with Truth. This may make many of them very angry; especially if they have invested much of their energy and effort into maintaining their false position. The Truth then makes fools of them. Angry fools.
And along comes the coronavirus and a dose of Reality.
We're just at the beginning phase of this crisis. Epidemiologists generally agree that there will be at least another wave, more severe, just around the corner. In spite of the bravado of the malevolent narcissist in the White House and the lies he is trying to sell, this reality will not be able to be buried under Republican bullshit talking points.
Of all the tools required for an effective U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic, one that is sorely missing is the truth. — Rick Bright
Unfortunately, in spite of the hope of many, a return to "normal" is not going to happen. Nature is flashing a bright yellow light at this intersection. The coronavirus has wreaked destruction upon many systems that won't ever return to “normal.” There are more viruses waiting as humans expand unsustainably into previously undisturbed ecosystems, bats are just one member of an army of vectors. Time is not on our side.
And then there is the reality of the climate crisis ready to topple our fragile global food supply chains - among many other dire consequences. There are many other fragile choke points to the systems we have designed for our convenience. I think the next decades will be characterized by a series of crises in many different areas of our unsustainable fossil-fuel based civilization. Civilizations have collapsed before (Jared Diamond’s "Collapse" is one perspective on this) and ours is beginning such a process now.
Facing these Realities will require a “We the People” who can think for themselves and make decisions based upon their logical analysis of evidence. This requirement can be challenging and difficult. It is much easier to simply say, “It is so because the Bible says so.” Or, “It is so because Dear Leader says so.” Truth requires time and effort and the ability to think logically and rationally. Unfortunately many people prefer doing otherwise.
It certainly looks like the Trump brand is crashing into the reality of Nature’s harsh, but effective, ways of dealing with out of control populations. And Nature always bats last.
But this is only the first inning.