The Karma of America

Epigenetics, Ancestral Guilt, the Madness of Crowds

I am in the Bay Area, staying in Berkeley, for the first time since the pandemic, enjoying the shimmering, soft beauty of Northern California’s nature, which I have always preferred to that of New York. The local neighborhood is a refuge for deer, rabbits, raccoons, even coyote. I will focus on our recent seminar, The Future of Consciousness, and reflect on our evolutionary potential as a species, even in this very dangerous threshold.

In the last few days I have been taking long walks with old friends. Inevitably the subject turns to the existential risks of Artificial Intelligence, the possibility that this synthetic mind humans are choosing to build so quickly, with so little forethought or oversight, will lead to our extinction in a short time. Beyond that, we speak about the upcoming election, the sense of dread we feel around it.

I sometimes suspect we made a terrible mistake in the last ten or twenty years: We took the wrong turn onto an alternative timeline, entering a weirder, more turbulent dimension of reality. Yet, at the same time, I find a certain inevitability to everything happening, and even a perfection to it. It feels as if the karma of America is reaching some new level of expression or crystallization. Perhaps we are reaching the end of the United States as a project.

Increasingly, I feel there is both a genetic and epigenetic component as well as a spiritual / karmic component to Trump-ism. I want to try to explore all of that honestly here, today, even though the flow of my thoughts may anger some people. I am not saying for sure I am right about any of this. It involves a level of intuition, a sensing / feeling into the situation. I could be wrong.

I often sense, when I try to communicate with people who have turned toward Trump, that something has contracted, closed off, in their psyches. They no longer want to deal with the ambiguity, anguish, complexity of the world as it is. They stridently reject any guilt, any responsibility for what their ancestors or their culture might have done in the past, perhaps mass murdering other people or stealing their lands.

There is a sense of surrender — giving in to the mass, the crowd, as Elias Canetti wrote in Crowds and Power:

The crowd is the same everywhere, in all periods and cultures; it remains essentially the same among men of the most diverse origin, education and language. Once in being, it spreads with the utmost violence. Few can resist its contagion; it always wants to go on growing and there are no inherent limits to its growth. It can arise wherever people are together, and its spontaneity and suddenness are uncanny.

To embrace Trump-ism, one must relinquish any need to think or reflect originally. All future responses conform to preset patterns, shaped by the continuous social and mass media barrage, the memetic onslaught, which employs all the psychological techniques I described in a previous essay. These patterns become worn like grooves in an old record that the mind relaxes into. Standardized or stereotyped refrains replay over and over, without the presence of an authentic conscience or curiosity to interrupt the hypnosis.

This is why the “Big Lie” technique is powerful, as we see with JD Vance and Trump still refusing to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election. This denial of reality is like a repetitive psychic flaying that dulls the individual’s capacity to make meaningful distinctions. As the Big Lie is accepted or integrated, this act of cognitive dissonance breaks the defenses of the Psyche. The individual them becomes a passive receptacle, ready to accept an alternative reality and meld with the mass-mind. This article in Mother Jones, “Trump Is Running a Disinformation Campaign, Not a Political Campaign”, explores Trump’s technique well:

Trump’s dishonesty goes further than the usual campaign lying. He concocts and promotes utterly false narratives to shape voters’ perceptions of fundamental realities. His campaign is a full-fledged project to pervert how Americans view the nation and the world, an extensive propaganda campaign designed to fire up fears and intensify anxieties that Trump can then exploit to collect votes. And the political media world has yet to come to terms with the fact that Trump is heading a disinformation crusade more likely to be found in an authoritarian state than a vibrant democracy. This is unlike other presidential campaigns in modern American history—other than his own previous efforts.

…Not merely peddling a series of lies, Trump is knitting together a full story that is bogus, trying to convince tens of millions of a reality that does not exist: They’re living in a dangerous hellhole in which they’re imperiled by barbarians, who happen to be people of color. And Trump then accuses Harris and President Joe Biden of purposefully orchestrating this purportedly deadly situation and the collapse of America. At a recent campaign stop, Trump presented a nutty conspiracy theory: “I will shut down all entries through Kamala’s migrant phone app. She’s got a phone app. It’s meant for the cartel heads. The cartel heads call the app, and they tell them where to drop the illegal migrants…It’s not even believable.” It’s not true.

The overarching goal of Trump’s disinformation efforts is to persuade voters that they should live in fear—and that only he can save them. At a campaign event in Wisconsin, Trump said of migrants, “They will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.” And elsewhere he brayed, “They’re conquering your communities.” He pointed to Aurora, Colorado, “where they’re taking over with AK-47s.” In another campaign speech, he warned it will get worse: “They’re going to take over a lot more than Aurora. They’re going to go through Colorado. They’re going to take over the whole damn state by the time they finish. Unless I become president.” This was another phony story. Crime in Aurora is not driven by migrant gangs. On a different occasion, Trump maintained these beasts were on the rampage across Middle America: “You see how bad it’s getting when you look at what’s going on with migrants attacking villages and cities throughout the Midwest.”

Trump has been depicting all of America as a place of tremendous peril: “You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get whatever it may be and you’ve seen it and I’ve seen it.”

In fact, murder rates are down in the US. Recent immigrants and minorities do not engage in violent crime sprees — certainly not in any coordinated or large-scale fashion. This is all a complete fraud.

One finds very similar undercurrents in 1930s Germany, culminating in Naziism, as we find, today, in contemporary America, supporting Trump. One Nazi rallying cry was the demand for “Lebensraum” or “living room.” Dealing with high inflation and economic collapse after World War One, Germans believed they needed to expand territorially. They needed space and resources for the growth of the Aryan population, the genetically superior master race. The concept of Lebensraum was rooted in ideas of racial superiority.

There is nothing exactly like Lebensraum in Trump/Vance's slogans, although the Great Replacement theory hits similar notes. The goal is to get rid of unwanted “others” so white Christian Americans will have more space for themselves, gaining more political and economic power as they “take back” the country.

As Russell Vought, one of the authors of Project 2025 says in this must-watch hidden camera interview, one of the initiatives for a second Trump term will be the mass deportation of both illegal and legal immigrants. While this will have terrible economic consequences, it will help the Republicans create the White Christian ethno-state they want to see America become, modeling themselves on Israel in some ways. Vought also makes it clear that Trump backs the Christian extremist plan to make all abortion illegal nationwide, even in the case of rape or in medical emergencies.