The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists

Humanism
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If only we had enough interested people around here to have an actual discuss about some of these matters.
Such as this horror happening to America these days.

How can trump’s sociopathic movement be confronted if no one want’s to explore what’s going on inside those heads and how to constructively confront that sort of delusional and basically very unAmerican and self destructive information processing.

Mega Corporate Dark Money, is the megaphone that’s leading this very successful brainwashing effort.

But after that, if we aren’t changing minds we are losing!

The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists

Forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee explains the outgoing president’s pathological appeal and how to wean people from it

The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building last week, incited by President Donald Trump, serves as the grimmest moment in one of the darkest chapters in the nation’s history. Yet the rioters’ actions—and Trump’s own role in, and response to, them—come as little surprise to many, particularly those who have been studying the president’s mental fitness and the psychology of his most ardent followers since he took office.

One such person is Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist and president of the World Mental Health Coalition.* Lee led a group of psychiatrists, psychologists and other specialists who questioned Trump’s mental fitness for office in a book that she edited called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President . In doing so, Lee and her colleagues strongly rejected the American Psychiatric Association’s modification of a 1970s-era guideline,known as the Goldwater rule, that discouraged psychiatrists from giving a professional opinion about public figures who they have not examined in person. “Whenever the Goldwater rule is mentioned, we should refer back to the Declaration of Geneva, which mandates that physicians speak up against destructive governments,” Lee says. “This declaration was created in response to the experience of Nazism.”

Lee recently wrote Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul , a psychological assessment of the president against the backdrop of his supporters and the country as a whole. …

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Actually there’s quite a bit on that topic, check it out

Of course, there’s By Andy Borowitz December 12, 2019, to the rescue.

Although, on the serious compassionate side there’s stuff like this:

The Case for Feeling Compassion Toward Trump Supporters

BY ARIEL DORFMAN - Times Mag.

{Although it’s rather dated, April 19, 2016, and it’s a bit rambling, but he makes an interesting analogy between Shelley’s famous monster novel and trumpism}

… Whether Trump is ultimately defeated or not, those masses of our misguided fellow citizens will remain vastly among us. They pose the real challenge. It was the darker side of America that spawned them, that facilitated their need of a Superman savior like Trump, so it must be the other, more luminous America, that should, after looking deep into the mirror, contest and defuse the wrath of so many frustrated millions, convince them to stop conjuring up false demons from the abyss and start confronting the all too tangible demons of war, poverty, racism, inequality of gender and ecological catastrophe that threaten us all, the true terrors and monsters we must vanquish side by side.

Only if we find a way of stripping the backers of Trump of their delusions and dread, find a way to include them in the solutions to the shared dilemmas of our time, will the last words of Mary Shelley’s novel, as she bids farewell to the Monster and what is monstrous in us, deserve the slim chance of coming true, turn into a wondrous prophecy: “He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.”

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I post about this quite a bit and don’t get much response. I try to get friends to think about the language they are using, and don’t get much support there either. I don’t see much difference between what people who consider themselves enlightened liberals are saying today, like, “He’s conservative, but he’s nice, not one of the bad ones” and what older people, the ones I used to be forced to sit with because they were my parent’s friends, the ones who considered themselves the strength of the fabric of America, would say, like “I know this black guy, he’s nice, not those others.”

While we were saving the whales and listening to Vandava Shiva, people in West Virginia were having their mountaintops blown off and getting addicted to opioids. I just watched a Frontline, tracing from 9/11 to Jan 6. We sent kids to die in Afghanistan and neither party would admit it was pointless, and just kept on killing. We cut education, then wonder why the family of those kids is looking for a conspiracy to try to understand this mess.

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Yup, don’t I hear you. Our mistakes were so obvious and self evidence, some well before making them, even in the planning it was impossible not to expect nightmare upon nightmare to come from our flippant recourse to mass murder destruction, and try to convince others that our mass murder is somehow forgiven, but there’ mass murder we will retaliated a thousand fold, no matter what the long lasting damage.

Like you say here we are, the entire system is one the verge of breaking.

As our infrastructure is under the relentless assault of increasingly destructive extreme AGW triggered extreme climate events.

There will be a breaking point. But then, there will also be a morning after. With way less people, less resources and in a limited world we never want to see, but those survivors will have a very different attitudes, so all bets will be off, for them.

Increasingly, it seems like we’re just free falling wise ones, rich ones, workers, beggars, and everyone in-between.

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Here’s another history I just stumbled on yesterday.

The guy being interviewed is a Conservative. I envy him because he started forming organizations on his own at age 15 and has never had a regular job. His long story is the first in the interview, maybe 20 minutes long. In brief:

In 1995 he wrote Fatherless in America, then gay marriage ramped up and he was in the middle of it. But, he became good friends with John Rausch, who was debating him from the pro-gay side.

Because of that, David published that he had altered his perspective on gay marriage, not completely changed, but saw it differently. By then, the polarization of America was ramped up, and David found himself hated by both sides now. The organization he led fell apart.

His experience with Rausch led him to creating Braver Angels. What he saw was a country where the basic civility had eroded, so people didn’t look at each other as people anymore, but as means to an end, or as the enemy. He talks about other “restraints” on hate and anger and exploitation that are eroding, that’s around 40 minutes and on a little more.