MOSF 19.18: Trump v. Harris: Catastrophizing the Electorate v. Reason, Growth, and Change (closing argument of a psychiatrist for Kamala Harris and the American People)
Memoirs of a Superfan, Vol. 19.18: Trump v. Harris: Catastrophizing the Electorate v. Reason, Growth, and Change (closing argument of a psychiatrist for Kamala Harris and the American People)
by Ravi Chandra
October 17, 2024
The main portion of this essay is available as a talk on YouTube. I didn’t have time for all the angles, of course – we’ll be talking about this for a loooong time. Some other angles which I’ve touched on in prior essays include the conflict between vertical (social dominance orientation) and horizontal (egalitarian) ways of organizing society and psyche, and the strongman appeal to authoritarian voters.
My purpose in this talk is to give my interpretation of mass psychology for this moment, to both support the project of analysis but also question it, and question organized psychiatry. The critiques I have of both are around silence and silencing, avoidance, abstinence, and supposed “neutrality” which hides bias. After thoughtful consideration, I consider the Goldwater guideline to be pure bunk, and a source of more trouble than good. (My essay on the Goldwater “Rule” is in Dr. Bandy Lee’s new book.) I think we should affirm free speech, free assembly, and thoughtful consideration of issues being presented to the American psyche. If we can’t speak freely, we can’t think freely. The Goldwater Rule has become a technique of mind and social control, pressuring us towards enactment over insight, learning, and growth. It has rippled through the system and influenced the ways the whole society can think about these topics. It is part and parcel of the attempted silencing and suppression of psychological struggle through complicity and obedience to the dominant culture.
This talk is actually not so much about Donald Trump but about what this all says about us. Today, I’m sure that our concrete fundamentals are secure, but the intrapsychic and interpersonal fundamentals are a mixed bag. A subtitle might be “dirty rotten schemas – if you know, you know.”
It would be a great day when people like Donald Trump would be unelectable – when people like him could not advance in society – but that has proven to not be the case, and it is alarming that the race appears so close as of today, October 16, 2024. Comedian Desi Lydic said “I love how he’s acknowledging that we’re stressed out, as though he’s not the one stressing us out.” It’s as if the culture is testing the limits of free, even derogatory speech and identity – as if the historical trial hasn’t already been run, in 1930s Germany or 1990s Rwanda. We are in great jeopardy, and this jeopardy will not easily pass even if Trump loses to Kamala Harris. We have opened the can of mental health and societal nightmares, and we are not prepared. I’m hopeful that our activity at this time can be a catalyst for change, growth and greater belonging. But the Tarot card of death signals transformation, and we are facing both.
Trump is a uniquely disruptive figure, and we need the tools of historical, psychological, and social analysis to understand and push back against the ways he has been allowed to make himself significant. He’s an outgrowth of America’s historical roots of racism, and that aspect has resisted analysis in many ways. Reportedly, a prominent, late African American psychiatrist shocked other members of the Black Psychiatrists of America in 2016 by saying he had voted for Trump in order to “tear the scab off the wound of racism.” A white man told me prior to that election that he was voting for Trump to “see how strong things were.” In other words, we have definitely taken the red pill, and we are in surreal, derealized, dissociated times.
We stand amidst revelations, and I hope we can survive the forces unleashed, and use them to generate a better, stronger society. Love and compassion are long games, as we all know, and we are at a point of crisis and emergence, and of deepening our commitments to truth and one another. As I wrote in my essay about the lies of Trump and Vance – “the worm turns before it becomes the word.” Both worm and word derive from Sanskrit vartate, as do converge and avert. I hope we can avert disaster and converge, towards a more perfect union of hearts, minds, and purposes.
There is a political divide which is functionally a psychological split, quite clearly an attempt to divide and conquer minds by creating a false equivalency between nonsense and sense, between hate and our best attempts at love. There have been failures of journalism, mental health, polling, religious and democratic institutions to perpetrate this false equivalency.
You could see the country as a blown-out macrocosm of a very distressed family system, with an abusive, powerful would-be patriarch in Trump sucking up all the oxygen, and other members of the family in strident opposition. Still other members of the family are complicit with his abuse or are his outright cheerleaders. The children, the dependents, are forced into a new level of engagement with the family system in an environment that does not fully support the well-being of their hearts and minds. But you can’t have society without service. Many of us have not had enough society, but we have always gotten by by giving more than we have received. Society keeps the score of what we put in, and what is allowed to take root.
This insight is not unfamiliar to the most vulnerable members of the family, who have always known the cycle of abuse that runs in our American family. Trump is the most prominent transmission of our abusive history. White supremacy does not go gentle into that good night. It will go kicking and screaming, and possibly violently when it realizes it cannot have its way with the rest of us. I am a deeply spiritual, non-violent man. I favor non-violent responses to even the most difficult situations, but many, including me, have been worried about the unleashing of political violence for some time. The psychic tension caused by the split is severe, and not all will be able to restrain themselves. The mental health fallout from the election will be severe, no matter who wins. I’m not aware of any plan to cope with the fallout – and organized psychiatry along with many of our institutions have a lot of work ahead. But better mental health fallout than nuclear, which is what I’m most worried about from a Trump win. As Dr. Bandy Lee and her colleagues at the World Mental Health Coalition have comprehensively documented, Donald John Trump is a dangerous and incompetent person, and should not be allowed anywhere near the corridors of power. Humanity’s survival is at stake. Our family drama has spilled beyond the continent to threaten a world and even life on Earth.
We find ourselves in hostile territory. As Judith Herman points out in Trauma and Recovery, the traumatized see others as either allies, perpetrators, or betrayers. Which one will we be to our vulnerable community members and parts of ourselves? I’m doing all I can to be a compassionate ally, and I am not alone. We are strong. But we have to face uncertainty made more uncertain by the thinking apparatus of the nation, including biased, weaponized polling, journalism, and organized psychiatry. Journalism and psychiatry are significantly weighted towards standing on their protocols, wealth, and wish to either curry favor with the abuser or avoid his wrath, instead of nimbly and courageously facing the day. I’m sure many of us have had the wish that powerful people would stand up taller in our favor.
The resentment, disappointment, and frustration coming from that unfulfilled wish for protection is shared across the board despite party affiliation. The whole family has been affected by abuse. Only compassion and shared humanity can unite us, and they have been subordinated by the abuser and the system that supports abuse. We have to amplify compassion, reason, and shared humanity, and we are being misled into thinking there are other issues more pressing. The culture has gone full bore into the fight-flight-freeze-fawn of catastrophic anxiety, minimizing the soothing that comes from flocking together. Fear-based survival responses are a great challenge to our collective cortex. Only love will keep us together, and we are creating it anew in our enactment.
Keeping a nation together is not about the economy – it’s about trust and social norms, and we are shredding these in favor of the ego of the abuser, who makes it all about himself, and loyalty to his lies, including the Big Lie of election denial and the Great, Wicked Lie of White Supremacy.
Mr. Trump doesn’t know the first thing about people other than the fact that they can be exploited. He cares not a whit for any of us other than being means to his ends. He is a child who has been taught he must possess others, rather than relate to them. He is dangerously unfit to lead, and yet journalism continues to rant that Harris is somehow unknown. They ranted for interviews, and when she did lots of them, they garner meager media coverage, passed over in favor of the unmanaged fears of journalists.
Why does he have support?
Let’s break it down.
He has a privileged position, he has used that to deceive, and he is a destructive charismatic, inflaming his followers base passions to take on his cause as opposed to the cause of the nation or the cause of suffering. He has totally misled people into thinking enemies are the source of their suffering. Specifically his enemies.
First, his privilege:
He is a White Man who has skillfully gamed the system to market an image of himself as a strong, successful businessman. He knows how to get attention and even entertain some, and in America, perceptions and entertainment have become everything. He is thus able to create a delusional alt-reality where he is competent by force of insistent lies. This alt-reality is seized upon by the religious delusions of the culture for White Nationalist purposes. The family system has lionized an exploitative, abusive man and effectively called exploitation and abuse “strong.”
Second, his deceptions:
Dr. Don Grubin writes in 2005’s Getting at the Truth about Pathological Lying:
“[A] number of studies have demonstrated that people are poor lie detectors, being able to identify lies in experimental studies at about chance rates, and sometimes below chance. Experienced detectives, Secret Service personnel, and CIA agents are better than average at detecting lies, but they still achieve accuracy rates of only about 70 percent.”
When the lies come from the most powerful voices in the country – the average person does not do well. Once a lie infests the system, it’s hard to root out. We have been hacked. We need help, and by and large we have not gotten it. Instead, the pathway to popularity and power has been greased for this man.
Finally, his charisma and its misuse:
The late psychiatrist and CIA analyst Jerrold Post described Trump as a destructive charismatic who attempts to become whole by binding his followers to him and demanding total fealty, to become extensions and amplifiers of his wounded self. He weaponizes his wounds and vulnerabilities. His most ardent followers become his psychic clones in a personality cult, brainwashed to take up his cause rather than the cause of the nation. Reparative charismatics, like Gandhi and King, recognize their wounds in a wounded society, and inspire others to work at healing the wounds of the world.
I would say destructive charismatics are on a flight from vulnerability through abusive power, and reparative charismatics and their followers remain in proximity to suffering with compassion. The Equal Justice Initiative’s Bryan Stevenson has said that we find our embodiment as humans in our proximity to suffering. So the destructive charismatic, in attempted flight from vulnerability and suffering, embarks on an inherently dehumanizing journey, and dehumanizes others in the process.
Trump has confused himself for reality, and that, according to the Gnostics and every principle of mental health I know, is sin and illness. The only cure includes keeping him away from power and the executive function of the country.
One of the hardest tasks of consciousness is to embody self-reflection, accountability, apology, and repair – and this is exponentially harder for big and powerful people, and harder still for a collective motivated by bigness and power. I’ve written that the greatest single point failure of leadership is a failure to listen, and Trump has that in spades. If he wins, we will all fully have the experience of dealing with an authority that refuses to listen to the needs of the nation, and instead will try to pool us with the close-minded kleptocracy of Putin and strongmen around the world. History has not favored societies led by strongmen, and America will be no different if Trump prevails in November. He will rip us apart from our allies and friends, and finish the job begun by all our enemies, both domestic terrorists and the axis of global autocrats.
Thank you for your time. Remember the fundamentals – and love will keep us together!
***
Addendum
It is also true that no one figures out everything in their own heads. What we see right now is an entire culture of people trying to figure out what is going on – with our neighbors, fellow citizens, and the world at large. What we see also is that the thinking apparatus of the culture, as embodied by journalists, government, and social media – and organized mental health – also does not know how to cope with the emotions and cognitions of the masses. Perhaps they all hope they can just deal with leaders who will then deal with the masses. How would those proposed leaders deal with the anxieties of the nation?
As we all know, we have survival-based responses to threat.
Trump manufactures threats in order to push the collective into fear. He’s made people afraid of crime, even though crime, particularly violent crime, is at a record low. He’s made people afraid of economic collapse, though the economy, as lopsided as it is towards the superrich, has been chugging along in recovery from the pandemic which he worsened. Many people feel overwhelmed by the world, and his disinformation provides a simplistic cartoon. “Me great – them horrible.” Self-amplification and rapid devaluation of opponents are cardinal features of covert narcissism, but it is also mudslinging that can depress voter turnout. Both campaigns are competing with the couch at this point.
What are the fear responses he amplifies? We can see fight – xenophobic and racist antagonism. Flight and freeze – in psychologically suppressing some through cynicism of the political process, saying “both sides are corrupt.” And we clearly see fawning as well, in which people need to fawn over and cling to an abuser, who then promises safety to loyalists while he abuses “other” people. Some of these fawning, even idolatrous people STILL SAY his words are just “play-acting,” that he doesn’t really mean them, and he needs to talk tough in order to deliver. Talk about worshipping the golden calf! Talk about a tacit acknowledgment that he is unbelievable and deceptive!
Never before in our history has a man of such unbelievable lack of accomplishment been able to assert superiority. He is the biggest whopper America has ever told.
What are better responses to fear?
Well, let’s start with not catastrophizing. From there we proceed to reason, compassion, and relatedness – the building blocks of mental health and social well-being. Instead of fawning, we flock together and tend to each other’s needs. We see this happening in every disaster.
Americans, and global citizens writ large, are basically good, kind, and helpful to people in need – but we do get overwhelmed and need organized support for our needs. Trump is not helping our reasoning capacity, our compassion, or our relatedness. He is a wrecking ball.
As psychiatrists and citizens, we have to create a transitional space for the transmission of great trauma, anxiety, and distress we are receiving, and we can’t do that with a hooligan, a convicted felon, sexual predator, and psychic berserker at the helm.
Donald John Trump poses an incalculable threat to reason, compassion, and relatedness. He is poised to destroy individual mental health and social well-being. As I’ve said, the mental health fallout facing us is incalculable if he wins. All because he is a starkly unwell man – and we as psychiatrists are supposedly unable to offer our professional opinions because he hasn’t given consent and we haven’t individually evaluated him.
Well, we haven’t given consent for him to intrude upon our lives and synapses either. The APA is supposedly concerned about us insulting people with mental health conditions – they continue to trumpet privacy and consent through the Goldwater guideline which has become a “rule.” That wish of the vulnerable child to be protected from abuse – has gone unfulfilled by everyone from the GOP to the APA, and that, too is a crying shame.
But they continue to insult our intelligence by saying we should be cautious or avoidant around leadership qualities that deface our union as citizens. I can’t reject his influence without trying to inoculate myself and society from the poison he, Vance, and the GOP spew every time they have opened their mouths in the last 9 years. It is my personal and professional opinion that these people need to not just be defeated in elections, but charged with conspiracies to incite crimes against humanity.
Indeed, leaders of the American nonprofit Haitian Bridge Alliance have filed charges against them for their horrendous, unfounded and hateful narrative about Haitians stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio – all seemingly a cynical ploy to get racists and those fearful of immigrants off their couches to vote for them in November.
We are fundamentally insecure as human beings. We have not been fully competent. There are those who flee from insecurity through entitlement, abusive power, and aggressive, egotistical individualism. These strain and dissociate the collective, and create great suffering, because suffering is a crisis in connection. Belonging is the opposite of suffering. So the question becomes – why do these people fear belonging? Why do they fear and devalue service to society?
Partly because they can, and partly because our incentives are highly misplaced. The definition of emotional exhaustion is to be constantly faced with a lack of empathy. President Biden was right to underscore empathy in our American Psyche. We have an empathy gap and compassion chasm, because our society has been built for the accumulation of wealth instead of wisdom and belonging.
I recently wrote this to friends in an email:
“It occurs to me that it all boils down to the tensions of relationship. Not a groundbreaking idea – we talk about it all the time – from relational cultural theory to analysis.
I think democracy is the best hope for egalitarian relatedness, but so clearly deficient. Betrayed by all the isms and schisms, and people just going on migrating to their self-satisfaction without concern for the people they’ve left behind or disappointed. So the status quo is an embodiment of dissatisfactions and accomplishments, and frayed or lost connections. I can relate that to most communities I’m a part of, maybe all. How collegial are our colleagues? How willing are we to participate in each others’ growth, or collaborate to the success of our mutual aims?
This is a haunting question, and as I’ve written this summer, “society keeps the score.” The mass of the disappointed collective looms above our heads, asking perhaps not for solutions, but for presence. Friendship.”
Be well! Fingers crossed, postcards sent, phone banking and canvassing in progress!
Psychiatry and mental health are desperately needed. Reason, compassion and relatedness are in dire demand.
We must love like no one has loved before.
Adobe stock image by K_kyoto, licensed by Ravi Chandra
For further reading:
Chandra R. MOSF 19.15: TrumpVance and their Proposed Advance of the Plantation of Lies and Weirdness. October 2, 2024
Photo by Bob Hsiang, 2022