For the last decade or more, I’ve had a sense that Americans have been losing their grip on reality. We’ve had a number of times in the past hundred years that have resulted in naturalised and natural-born American citizens being interned without having committed any crimes, the blacklisting of Americans causing them to lose their ability to work, and so on. Maybe it comes in cycles. Not having lived during such episodes, the current Zeitgeist may be equivalent to other ‘scares’. Living through this one, it seems more severe.
Psychosis is defined as ‘a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality.’ The Mayo Clinic’s page on Mental illness does not use the word ‘psychosis’. They list conditions such as depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, PTSD, and so on.
I said that Americans seem to have been losing their grip on reality for at least a decade. It seems that there has been an acceleration in the last two years, and things have really gone askew since the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. a bit over one year ago. Mass shootings have happened more times than they happened previously. Almost daily we hear of someone being disruptive on a commercial aircraft or business. Mythical conspiracies are being accepted as fact. Have we gone mad?
I think we all know, or think we know, the causes of this abnormal behaviour. The question is, given that the people who are acting out believe they are the sane ones, how to we return to a more rational, more reality-based citizenry?
Or am I completely off-base? Maybe I’m the mad one?
Well my feeling is that all stems from distrust of the government. Most of our differences are based upon politics on both sides and not trusting what politicians say and what they do. Scandals every couple of weeks, corruption constantly going on and people who say things they don’t even believe just to get a reaction out of people and fire up their side no matter the side affects.
One example, how to get sensible gun control without any new laws being abused by the police and prosecutors? Nope can’t trust them to do so. Same with every other main stream issue, the fear is that laws will just be twisted to benifit one side or the other. And historically this is a justified fear.
Government has brought this on themselves by politicians more concerned maintaining power at all cost. Is it any wonder that the people are exhibiting signs if psychosis, paranoia and disgust?
What is one if the main reasons for people not getting vaccinated, distrust of the government. Not just Joe Biden, but leadership over the past several decades.
We are in a major crisis of faith in our nation, no matter how patriotic people claim to be. The extreme patriotism is a sign of the psychosis.
And remember, our government has been openingly waging a war against there own population since the seventies with the drug war. People, many minorities have been victims of the government due to the drug war and has created division and criminaliztion over a what is mental health crisis. The government has shown to many people that it doesn’t care about them and their lives. Its a totally fucked up situation.
This might be the crux of the problem. I think that until the Watergate scandal, more people trusted the government than didn’t. Those who didn’t believed government could be changed. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington came out in 1939, so political corruption as a mainstream issue had been known for more than 30 years before Watergate; but I think people still remembered how Mr. Smith fought against it and won.
How can We The People find candidates that will put the country before their party? There will always be corruption; but how do we make the benefits to the country outweigh the benefits to politicians?
I guess you could make a case for psychosis. However, I think you can make a better case for cult mind control. Steve Hassan wrote about it in his book The Cult Of Trump and makes a very compelling case. Given he’s a cult expert I’m inclined to go with his theory. But we (my fellow psychiatrists and I) have had discussions about similarly led-astray individuals when it came to radicalized Muslims /ISIS supporters, so your idea isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem.
I think social media has made things a lot worse. Maybe it’s hypocritical of me to say this because I do use it too, but at least as far as the people who already had misanthropic or paranoid tendencies, it has exacerbated them to a great degree, in my opinion. People are flooded with a constant stream of misinformation and negativity, and in many cases they deliberately curate their own social media to exclusively feature those who they agree with on their political and social views, creating a very bad feedback loop. This HAS to play a part in what the OP is talking about.
In particular, the Internet has dramatically lowered the cost of spewing b******t with no consequences. Today you almost never get sued for libel, you don’t get fired from your coveted job at a respected news outlet, and someone on the other end of the continent isn’t going to come over and punch you in the nose. (Everyone hailed Buzz Aldrin as a hero for punching a crank who called him “a coward and a liar and a thief,” to his face).
You’re certainly not alone in your feelings regarding the collective mental health in the US these days–the article I’m linking is an uncomfortable read but makes some pretty valid points about how we look to those outside our collective reality.
I used ‘psychosis’ advisedly, as I am a layman. I think it goes beyond cult mind control because while many of the people who act out on aircraft have a certain political bent, I think a large percentage of mass shooters (including spree shooters) lean the opposite direction or do not have strong political leanings.
Yes, this has been my hypothesis for a dozen years or so.
It seems to me that the pandemic has led to America collectively forgetting how to act right. There were all of those fistfights (and even murders) over masks, and I’m sure you’re more than aware of how dangerous it is to fly thanks to jackasses who don’t know how to be polite in an airplane. And I read recently that, now that restaurants and such are opening up, customers are being straight assholes to the employees at a level not seen since before the pandemic.
I keep watching these foreign YouTubers talking about how friendly Americans are. Not any more.
It goes back much farther than that. Look at some real quotes by Mark Twain.
“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
“Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can.”
“There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
The Internet changed everything, I agree. Although partisan media has existed since the 18th century, the Internet made it possible to live entirely inside a bubble of alternate reality. Most news media in the past, even while slanting news, needed to stay within the ideals of “objectivity” and “neutrality” to be taken seriously. Those ideals are actively rejected by 40% of the population, who equate objective reality with liberal propaganda.
We have had periods in which lies and propaganda were triumphant - the South until the Civil War made a religion out of them and just adapted them to their loss. But I can’t think of a time when such a high percentage of reality was denied by such a high percentage of people across so many classes and locations.
The only hope for the future is that we appear to have hit a plateau. The percentage of the reality-denying population is not growing and seems to be getting nibbled at around the edges. The flip side of that is the need to go crazier and crazier to make the would-be movement leaders stand out from the crowd. We’ll have to wait and see which trend dominates.
Great piece; thanks for linking it. Always gratifying when someone else, unbidden, puts your thoughts into words, not least because it assures that you are not alone.
I think Pete Buttigieg summed almost all of it up in his book Trust. Americans simply don’t trust each other anymore. And not only that, but to a certain extent, they have good reason not to - it would be suicidal to put your trust in someone who intends you harm.
Imagine if Democrats, for instance, trusted Republicans and handed over all the reins of power to them. The result would be an end of democracy as we know it.
Unfortunately, my expectation is that we won’t change until we go through a horrific experience that forces all of us to agree on the same reality. There’s not necessarily a guarantee that cataclysmic forces necessarily lead to a consensus, either. As we’ve seen with the pandemic, emergencies can either lead to a collective realization that we’re all facing the same challenges and must work together (as we did during the FDR era), but such circumstances can easily lead to the amplification of fear and irrational thought, and a desire to completely combat and even annihilate ‘others’. What I’ve seen in America’s decline isn’t simply a failure of education but also a failure of values, and that really concerns me going forward.
I’ve said it before but I don’t think the pandemic is even remotely as bad as what lies ahead with climate change. It’s going to be terrifying to live through, and it will test all of humanity’s cooperative instincts.
I absolutely agree with you that social media is a huge factor. The ability of a relatively small number of people to build a kind of toxic insularity and cohesion and to disrupt comity throughout society as a whole is definitely having a tremendous impact on our trust in institutions and even each other.
Wasn’t too impressed by it, I’ve read better. The author’s broad brush bothsides-ism does him no credit, for starters, as the very first [“most relevant”] comment there calls him out for. [It also isn’t apparently from Medium-the url says “eand.co”]
Right? As I said, a very disquieting read but if there’s anything I’ve learned from being in therapy and having a therapist BFF it’s that as soon as something makes me squirm and kneejerk and “but I’M not like that!” it’s a real good time to sit with it and analyze WHY it makes me feel so uncomfortable because if I don’t I’ll never learn any better. There’s something profoundly wrong in American culture–we can point fingers and assign blame all day long but the fact is that we’re all infected with a dreadful malaise that needs to be dragged out into the light and acknowledged fully or we’ll never pull out of this death spiral we’re in. A big dose of universal empathy would probably be a good start.
One of my Anthropology profs claimed WWII was the watershed. He told us that before the war you could believe pretty much anything the government told you. But with the advent of intelligence and counterintelligence ops etc that started during the war and snowballed afterward, you could no longer believe the government. He was an interesting man – a Marine who stormed Iwo Jima during the war, then an honest-to-god 1960s hippie – and you may or may night subscribe to his view, but I remember him making a persuasive case.
You may not have lived through previous episodes, but you most assuredly have the ability to learn history, if you choose to do so.
Speaking of history, how would you characterize a person who deliberately blew up a school full of children, apparently because of tax increases and personal setbacks? Let’s make a quick visit to 1927. . . .
And then there’s 1920. . . .
Or if it’s the political climate you’re worried about, try this on for size–