We held a community call last Friday for paid subscribers. I intend to start holding these every two weeks, with the next one on Friday, November 22. I will let you know the exact time and date in a few days. I really hope you will join us. I find this community a remarkable braintrust of intelligent, kind, and open-minded people who have the rare ability to balance social/political and esoteric/mystical modes of thought. This level of engagement gives us something to build on for the future.
To summarize what was moving for us in a positive sense: As a response to Trumpism, we discussed the possibility of building a new movement of local and bioregional communities networked with each other, creating a mycelial mesh. What some of us would like to see, or help create, is a communications initiative for local in-person meetings in cities and towns across the US. These projects can happen outside of the political system. They can operate in parallel with it rather than seeking to oppose or fight against it.
Now I want to dive back into my developing thoughts on this extraordinary moment in world history. I want to explore some of the perspectives I am finding useful right now to enhance my understanding. Please leave yours in the comments.
What’s fascinating and scary at this moment is the uncertainty. Many people have mentioned the adage: History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes. We have to admit that our immediate situation rhymes with early 1930s Germany. We know that Trump has expressed admiration for Hitler, and has used many of Hitler’s rhetorical devices and propaganda strategies. Like Hitler, Trump seems to be an extraordinary apotheosis of the American character at this point in time, summoning up all of the suppressed demons and shadows of our past. As with Hitler in Germany, he is America’s collective shadow projection; our reckoning.
I once described him, riffing off Douglas Rushkoff’s concept of a media virus, as a media fungus: Trump reveals the rot and corruption that has already eaten through our failing institutions as he accelerates the process of dissolution. Of course, the potential upside of this is that, perhaps, the collapse of the old will lead to the birth of the new. But as we know, birthing processes can be violent.
Until a few months ago, when I sought to engage that fragment of the public mind I could access directly through my Facebook and other social media accounts, I did not realize how much more deeply Trumpism had penetrated into the collective Psyche over the last four years. I discovered that many friends I know and love had suddenly, it seemed, been converted to the cult. There was no talking them out of it. The fact that Trump’s entire career has been one criminal grift after another didn’t even register.
Trump’s victory (although I still have some questions about this, discussed previously) reveals the secret that every con man knows: People actually want to be conned. They yearn to surrender control, to see what happens to them if they just give into the game and let them get taken. And of course, the flip side of Trump’s victory is the pathetic case made by the Democrats, who sold out their working class base decades ago. Bernie Sanders and David Sirota have expressed this passionately and well. I also appreciate this TikTok tirade on the last fifty years of America’s political life, which seems fully accurate to me:
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Like almost everyone, after Biden won, I relaxed that spidery sense of danger one felt every day during Trump’s time in office. One major problem in American life, I find, is the lack of any social connective tissue. There is me, in my little world, seemingly connected to everyone all of the time via the Internet, yet lacking political capacity or real power to change anything. The gap between our hyper-individuated, infinitesimal, solipsistic realms and the “big Other” of society seems a very huge one. This weird circumstance contributes to the deepening collective sense of frustration, outrage, and resentment that generated Trumpism.
Something about this still relatively new territory of social media, particularly as it functions under the dictates and economic logic of Capitalism, seems to have led us, almost like a mathematical progression, backward, to despotic, centralized control. Something has happened to the inward domains of consciousness and self-reflective awareness in this Internet information culture of “everything everywhere all at once” that we can’t fully, as of yet, understand or process. We are gaining new capabilities, yes, but we are rapidly shedding old ones — and it may be that those older cognitive abilities are actually quite crucial for our long-term health, happiness, and even survival.
Trump’s instantaneous, impulsive reactivity fits the tenor of the times. Unlike Kamala Harris and many of the established Democrats who seem painfully scripted and laborious as they seek to avoid offending any of their long list of constituents or financial backers, Trump is untethered, authentic, cunning, vicious, unpredictable. He is closer to unleashed Id than contained Superego. I find it interesting to watch, and feel into, the evolution of Elon Musk into Trump’s new best buddy and sidekick. Musk’s fealty to Trumpism began with his mimickry of Trump’s untethered, expressive style, which clearly felt good for him. He now utilizes it continuously on Twitter, the platform he bought for $44 billion with money from Saudi Arabian princes and Russian oligarchs. Taking the company private to dispense with any oversight, Musk converted it into a Right Wing propaganda machine. Musk’s late-inning entry into Trumplandia helped seal the deal (or perhaps the steal) of this election.
I have a pop psychological perspective on both of them, which perhaps isn’t worth much, but I will share it anyway. Not only are they narcissists, they are both narcissistic extensions of cruel, capricious, narcissist fathers. They didn’t receive the love and care they needed as children (Musk’s mother recently surfaced in many news interviews, giving off very unsettling vibes), and learned to reject feelings of empathy and compassion for themselves, first of all, as well as anyone else. Their massively inflated sense of self-importance compensates for the insecurity and worthlessness lying at the bottom of the well: A pool of murk and misery that can never be churned upward, as it would endanger their identity, the entire self-construction. In some way, their unaddressed anguish is what makes them so relatable.
One commentator I am now thoroughly enjoying is Anthony Scaramucci, who worked with Trump and has become one of his most insightful public critics.
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