Barry Spector's Blog

Why Are Americans So Obsessed with Pedophilia?

It is well that war is so terrible. We would grow too fond of it. – Robert E. Lee

You can’t stop me. I spend 30,000 men a month. – Napoleon

I would rather have a dead son than a disobedient one. – Martin Luther

Anybody who tells you that he has some way of leading you to spiritual enlightenment is like somebody who picks your pocket and sells you your own watch. – Alan Watts

We need to address this question from four perspectives:

1 – Psychology

It is certainly possible that some NACs who may be high on empathy and low on boundaries, especially women, are abuse survivors themselves, and that the highly publicized pedophilia within the Catholic Church has triggered old memories of trauma for thousands of people. However, outside the safe, ritual container of therapy, the urge to reveal the truth may be overcome by denial and projection. Psychologist David Bakan writes, “Some things are simply too terrible to think about if one believes them. Thus one does not believe them in order to make it possible to think about them.”

These ego defenses also make it possible to ignore their loyal support of Trumpus, a man who brags about abusing women. Another ego defense – idealization – is the way we keep the secret that our entire culture is built upon the symbolic sacrifice of our children, a theme I’ll return to below.

2 – History and sociology

Conspiracies centering on the vulnerability of children are neither new nor distinctly American. Wild claims of Jews killing Christian children and using their blood in rituals – the “blood libel” – date back to at least the 12th century, and long before that the Roman authorities accused Christians themselves of performing similar rites. So we certainly ought to ask why child-abuse paranoia explodes into public consciousness at certain moments?

In the 1980s the McMartin preschool accusations, with their similarities to last year’s “Pizzagate” narrative, provoked a national spectacle during which scores of people were accused – wrongly, it turned out – of sex crimes against children. The continuities between these two cases suggest a broader explanation for pedophile conspiracies: they’re an outgrowth of reactionary politics.

Richard Beck locates the roots of the McMartin conspiracy theory in the social progress of the previous decade, particularly – and ironically – in the gains won by women. Ali Breland writes that the idea of day care has always held a prominent place in right-wing demonology, that it was a communist plot to destroy the traditional family:

In 1971, President Richard Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would’ve established a national day-care system…By the time Judy Johnson came forward in 1983 with allegations that a teacher at the McMartin preschool had molested her child, the country had been primed to assume the worst by more than a decade of child-care fearmongering.

It wasn’t just the movement of women into the workplace that created the conditions for a reactionary panic. There were other cultural forces at work. The anti-rape campaign of the 1970s, historian Philip Jenkins writes in Moral Panic, had “formulated the concepts and vocabulary that would become integral to child-protection ideology,” in particular a “refusal to disbelieve” victims. The repressed-­memory movement of that era had created a therapeutic consensus surrounding kids’ claims of molestation: “Be willing to believe the unbelievable,” as the self-help book The Courage to Heal put it…And the anti-cult movement of the late 1970s had raised the specter of satanic cabals engaging in human sacrifice and other sinister behavior…

If women’s entry into the workplace in the latter half of the 20th century triggered deep anxieties about the decay of traditional gender roles and the family unit, in the 21st century it was same-sex marriage, growing acceptance of transgender rights, and the seeming cultural hegemony of a social justice agenda.

The new accusations have shifted from individual, male preschool teachers to an entire class of liberals and globalists, many of whom (Epstein, Soros, Dershowitz, Weinstein) are Jews. Chip Berlet writes: “In all Western culture, you can argue that all conspiracy theories, no matter how diverse, come from the idea of the Jews abducting children.” 

But QAnon has added a new and more secular factor, as Amanda Marcotte writes:

Evangelical Christianity played the same role for conservatives in the pre-Trump years, letting them feel holy and moral despite openly backing politicians who promoted immoral policies. But it came with a bunch of downsides, like being made to feel guilty for premarital sex, divorce or even (as Falwell Jr. found out) drinking and partying. With QAnon, you get to sleep in on Sunday and have all the sex you like, without giving up that pious assertion of moral superiority or the presumption of secret knowledge. 

Again, we can’t help but notice the unmistakable smell of money – and the con man, as Eddie Kim writes:

…“Save Our Children Initiative” is fighting to “end sex trafficking” by…asking for sponsorships and selling a $35 T-shirt…revenue from the shirts will go to an unspecified “charitable organization” that is “supporting funding towards increasing the survivors [sic].”…the founders don’t appear to have any experience in child advocacy work; one is a Trump-supporting fitness and lifestyle influencer, while the other runs a custom apparel-printing shop…

My essay “The Con Man” traces the intersections of religion, capitalism, consumerism and the unique confluence of optimism and naivete in the American psyche: “No con man can succeed without a ‘mark,’ however, and this is where American myth re-enters the conversation.” The source of any con man’s power to trick us comes from our own willingness to be tricked. /

3 – Politics and Morality

Many of the Q supporters obsessed with pedophilia have undoubtedly emerged from the same evangelical ranks that have crusaded for decades against abortion rights while simultaneously voting against programs intended to care for poor children (who, in public perception, are often perceived as brown or black). This privileged, even willful ignorance allows them to resolve the cognitive dissonance that arises from the conflict between the legitimate desire to lessen suffering on the one hand, and outright racism on the other.

Beyond their own dissonance, their concerns about child abuse and trafficking are a deep insult to Black people, whose ancestors really were raped and trafficked in the hundreds of thousands; to Native Americans, whose ancestors were stolen in the thousands as children and confined to prisons, otherwise known as “boarding schools;” to contemporary Native American women (at least 5,600 of whom the FBI listed as “disappeared” last year); to Japanese Americans, whose ancestors were sent as children to concentration camps, otherwise known as “relocation camps;” and to the thousands of Latinx children currently held in cages by ICE and the Border Patrol because their parents illegally entered the U.S. looking for work or legally applying for asylum.

Ironically, the Q-inspired paranoia has motivated so many good-hearted people to become active that they actually get in the way of activists who fight the real problem by clogging up phone lines, confusing their fundraising efforts, and interfering with social media campaigns. 

4 – Mythology

History reflects mythology. The misplaced concern about pedophilia rests upon and has re-energized an immensely old story in which boys are groomed by their elders to offer up their bodies in the great ritual sacrifice of war. Here are two essays of mine that refer to it: Redeeming the World and The Hero Must Die.

The myth of the killing of the children is our culture’s most fundamental mythic narrative, as I describe in Chapter Six. We idealize the family as the ultimate “safe container.” Yet we experience the breakdown of myth and the loss of initiation rituals most directly in the crimes and betrayals that adults inflict upon children. Myth suggests that it has always been this way – or at least since the triumph of patriarchy.

Child sacrifice is a common Old Testament theme. Jehovah accused the Israelites: “… you slaughtered my children and presented them as offerings!” Like the pagans, they “shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and daughters, whom they sacrificed unto the altars of Canaan…”

Most significantly, Abraham – father of Judeo-Christian-Moslem monotheism – prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac to prove his loyalty to God. Bruce Chilton writes, “Different versions of Genesis 22 circulated in an immensely varied tradition called the Aqedah or ‘Binding’ of Isaac in Rabbinic sources and – with key changes – in both Christian and Islamic texts.”

From our point of view, it doesn’t matter that Jehovah stopped the sacrifice, only that Abraham was willing. Indeed, in some later versions of the myth, Isaac was indeed killed, and he came to embody the only sacrifice acceptable to God. Generally, however, the patriarchs couldn’t openly admit that they were capable of such barbarism, so they projected child sacrifice onto the gods – such as Moloch – of other people.

In the Christian version, this same God confirmed the centrality of this most fundamental theme of Western culture when he abandoned his only son. When the crucified Jesus asked, “Father, why have you forsaken me?” he was quoting the ancient Psalm 22, which acknowledged centuries of abuse, betrayal and the profound depression – or unquenchable desire for vengeance – that results. Whether Hebrew or Greek, patriarchs feared rivals among their subjects or children, pursued the most terrible of initiations and slaughtered the innocent, while the survivors became killers themselves.

These stories are absolutely central to Western consciousness. They describe basic father-son relationships and indicate how long it has been since initiation rituals broke down. Once, the fathers used to kill the sons symbolically so that they might grow into authentic men. For at least three millennia, however, the patriarchs have conducted pseudo-initiations, feeding their sons into the infinite maw of literalized violence. Indeed, it was their great genius – and primordial crime – to extend child- sacrifice from the family to the state. Boys eventually were forced to participate in the sacrifice. No longer surrendering to symbolic death, they learned to, in a sense, overcome death by inflicting it on others.

Ultimately, sacrifice – dying for the cause – became as important as physical survival. Martyrdom became an ethical virtue that every believer must be prepared to emulate. Chilton writes:

Uniquely among the religions of the world, the three that center on Abraham have made the willingness to offer the lives of children – an action they all symbolize with versions of the Aqedah – a central virtue for the faithful as a whole.

When the state replaces the fathers, boys must become patriots (Latin: pater, father) to become men. Those who most excel in this madness become sociopathic killers and mentors to future generations. Such fathers feel pride, but they also fear the possibility of being overthrown. Thus their initiations always contain both a threat and a deal: You will sacrifice your emotions and relational capacity, submit to our authority in all matters and become our mirror image. In exchange you may physically and sexually dominate your women, your children — and the Earth — as we abuse you.

Yet don’t we idealize our children? Parents commonly deny their own needs so that the children might have a better future, and government demonizes and punishes those suspected of harming them. We go to war so the children may be free. The deeper truth is that we love children because the archetypal child symbolizes rebirth, transformation and innocence. Christ said that to enter the kingdom one must be as innocent as those whose minds and bodies are still undivided by civilization.

The image of the child personifies the lost unity all adults long for. However, to recover that unity requires long and painful work, as D. H. Lawrence knew:

I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self,
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance.

So the image of the child evokes something else: the suffering to be endured on the road back to wholeness, and the grief over what we have lost. Consequently, many adults are compelled to destroy that image, to remove it from consciousness and replace it with idealization. Why else would we emphasize family values and threats to “the children” while destroying social programs that keep families together, or punish children simply because their parents are poor? This can only happen in a society that is deeply ambivalent about its own children.

Lloyd de Mause begins his survey of the vast literature on European child-raising: “The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awake.” Christians long believed that children were inherently perverse: “The new-born babe is full of the stains and pollution of sin, which it inherits from our first parents through our loins.” They required extreme discipline and early baptism, which used to include actual exorcism of the Devil. Initiation rites became literalized in child abuse, with customs ranging from tight swaddling and steel collars to foot binding, genital circumcision and rape.

There is considerable evidence of the literal killing of both illegitimate children (at least as late as the 19th century) and legitimate ones, especially girls, in Europe. As a result, there was a large imbalance of males over females well into the Middle Ages. By the sixteenth century, the new religious dogma of Calvinism flowed seamlessly into the older myth of the killing of the children. Now, the patriarchs had a perfect excuse for their culture-wide abuse of their children: children deserved it, because they were bad by nature.

Physical and sexual abuse was so common that most children born prior to the 18th century were what would today be termed “battered children.” However, the medical syndrome itself didn’t arise among doctors until 1962, when regular use of x-rays revealed widespread multiple fractures in the limbs of small children who were too young to complain verbally.

What kind of men do these patterns traditionally produce? De Mause argues that war and genocide do “…not occur in the absence of widespread early abuse and neglect,” that nations with abusive and punitive childrearing practices emphasize military solutions and state violence in resolving social conflicts. Or they produce other men who, in reaction to this legacy, live lives of quiet, unsatisfied desperation and conformism, disconnected from their natural gifts and callings.

What kind of women do these patterns traditionally produce until very recently? Lives lived in fear of their fathers, husbands and all adult men, repressed ambivalence toward their sons and grief for their daughters; lives of constrained possibilities and impossible dreams of sovereignty.

“Americans,” writes James Hillman, “love the idea of childhood no matter how brutal or vacuous their actual childhoods may have been.” Finally, we idealize childhood because our actual childhood did not serve its purpose, which was to provide a container of welcome into the world that would be the necessary precursor for initiation into mature adulthood. Without such preparation, we assume that alienation is the true nature of maturity.

And if humans have no true animating spark, neither does the natural world. So generation after generation of young men are socialized to project their own need for rebirth onto the world and set out to literally destroy it. This is how Patriarchy perpetuates itself. In each generation, millions of abused children identify with their adult oppressors and become violent perpetrators themselves. In a demythologized world, they have no choice but to act out the myths of the killing of the children on a massive scale, or to glorify those who do.

Can it be any wonder that we are periodically unable to keep ourselves from displacing our rage – and our complicity – of this ancient condition onto some convenient scapegoat, in hopes that he might take our sins way with him into the wilderness?

Save the Children!

I see it (the New Age movement) fundamentally shaped by an impulse to the irrational…it seems to lack any critical evaluation of itself. – Terence McKenna 

The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight. – Joseph Campbell

In March of 2020, a book with no stated author – QAnon: An Invitation to the Great Awakening – entered the list of the top 75 of all books recently sold on Amazon. It alleged that Hollywood celebrities and top Democrats rape, torture and murder large numbers of children, often to drain “adrenochrome,” a substance that allegedly keeps them alive.

In August NBC described a group that had formed in July:

“Freedom for the Children” has organized more than 60 rallies in 26 states and Canada…local media coverage of the events has been widespread and credulous, almost never mentioning the events’ QAnon connections. Indeed, many of the signs seen at rallies ask why the media is reporting on COVID-19 or Black Lives Matter protests instead of “the real pandemic” of missing children.

Most of the organizers and attendees appear to be women. Annie Kelly, who studies digital extremism, notes:

…there’s something about QAnon that makes it stand out in the world of Trump-adjacent online groups: Its ranks are populated by a noticeably high percentage of women. Many of the congressional candidates who have voiced their support for QAnon are women…Even more alarming are the believers who have demonstrated their willingness to hurt people…Plenty of far-right conspiracy theorists, such as the neo-Nazi believers in “white genocide,” make similar claims about defending children but cannot point to such gender diversity across their ranks. So what is going on?

…At the heart of QAnon lies an undeniably frightening ethos that demands harsh punishment, even execution, for its ever-growing list of political enemies. History teaches us that sex panics do not end well for society’s most vulnerable minorities…(Rejecting QAnon) becomes more personally and politically difficult if the theory’s adherents look less like our traditional conception of fascists and more like ordinary concerned mothers taking a stand for child sex abuse victims.

Kaitlyn Tiffany (“The Women Making Conspiracy Theories Beautiful”) claims that Instagram is a major site of misinformation:

Instagram—more than any other major social platform—shows each of its users exactly what they want to see. It’s a habitual, ritualistic space where people (like me) go for examples of how to be happy and well liked…Time spent there is reciprocal, a never-ending exchange of sweet words and the heart icons that are the only possible way to instantly respond to a piece of content on the platform. Instagram is women’s work, as it demands skills they’ve historically been compelled to excel at: presenting as lovely, presenting as desirable, presenting as good, safe, nonthreatening. All of which, of course, are valuable appearances for a dangerous conspiracy theory to have.

She quotes Becca Lewis, who studies online political subcultures,

It’s a huge misconception that disinformation and conspiracy theorizing happens only in fringe spaces, or dark corners of the internet…much of this content is being disseminated by super popular accounts with absolutely mainstream aesthetics.

White-supremacist internet personalities use similar tactics. Their Instagram accounts may be completely free of extremist rhetoric and dedicated instead to dreamy engagement photos and romantic vacations. Then they draw followers to YouTube, where they tell how they’d come to believe in various white-nationalist, far-right causes, and conspiracy theories.

If you’re able to make this covetable, beautiful aesthetic and then attach these conspiracy theories to it, that normalizes the conspiracy theories in a very specific way that Instagram is particularly good for…Of course, it’s hard to say what’s orchestrated and what’s genuine on Instagram. But the effect is the same…

With the election approaching, this business is happening in real time, and much may already be outdated by the time I post it.

By August 2020, the major social media platforms realized the nature of this particular con and limited the reach of most Q-derived sites (along, we note, with many legitimate progressive sites). Quickly, Q leaders urged their followers to drop the “QAnon” label and instead publicize their crusade against the secret cabal of baby-eating politicians.

The anonymous Q account…wrote an uncharacteristically unambiguous message to adherents last week: “Deploy camouflage. Drop all references re: ‘Q’ ‘Qanon’ etc. to avoid ban/termination…_censorship install. Algos [sniffers] bypass.”

Some high-profile QAnon influencers with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers took down their accounts and scrubbed any mentions of QAnon to avoid the ban. Other accounts were able to amplify and co-opt #SaveOurChildren and its related language by creating a large and unprecedented flurry of posts and activity. “This is not about pedophilia,” said Whitney Phillips, co-author of the book, You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories and Our Polluted Media Landscape. “This is not about child protection. This is about a conspiracy theory that’s trying to couch itself in other terms to get more people involved and sympathetic…”

By September, because it takes a con-man to know a con, Trumpus’ own people quickly got into the act, announcing that the federal government would award over $100 million in grants to target human trafficking. The problem is real, of course, but the announcement was clearly pure politics. However, in an ironic twist on the concern for the children, some Q followers are endangering actual children. Will Sommer writes:

Police and court records have lately revealed a…clandestine network comprising QAnon conspiracy theorists, fringe legal figures…and even Republican politicians…This network has allegedly encouraged and inspired other QAnon believers, especially parents, to commit crimes, including kidnapping…often by targeting parents who have lost custody of their children or fear they will.

Timothy Holmseth’s profile grew this spring, when he became the leading “source” for viral claims that tens of thousands of abused “mole children” had been rescued from underground prisons underneath New York City…While on the run, Holmseth recorded a video urging his fans to shoot child protective services staffers who come to their homes…postulating that Child Protective Services are abducting children for sex-crime networks raises the risks for agency workers, the families, and the children involved in the cases.

Q-sponsored pedophilia obsession is a massive con, fabricated by right-wingers to manipulate large numbers of people, a majority of them female followers of New Age wellness influencers. On the other hand, the Jeffrey Epstein story reminds us that child sexual abuse certainly does occur among the powerful.

But the deeply emotional obsession with it reveals projection and or displacement on many levels. So we can’t stop here. We need to look into the historical/sociological, psychological, political and ultimately the mythological factors that make so many Americans uniquely susceptible to these machinations.

Conspirituality

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. – Carl Jung

Most conspiratorial thinking deliberately serves the interests of the rich and powerful. But, as I wrote above, we are now confronting something entirely new. Extreme right wingers are presenting aesthetic web presences with superficially progressive themes, but which, upon closer inspection, reveal pro-capitalist, reactionary and/or racist agendas. This phenomenon relies on two factors. The first is the major social media platforms and their algorithms that encourage rapid dissemination of unreliable information and the confirmation bias that results from seeing only what the viewer already believes in. Now, Q-followers rarely see what you see, and if they do, it is presented in a format that minimizes the moral consequences.

The second is that these platforms are deliberately designed to take advantage of millions of good-hearted, “spiritual but not religious” people who have – quite rightly, in my opinion – lost all trust in the mainstream media, but who seem to have also lost the ability to discriminate between progressive ideas and the language of hate. One writer refers to these folks as “DRH” for “Down the Rabbit Hole.” I prefer “New Age Conspiracists,” or NACs, and I’ll bet you know a few of them.

Such people often share certain personality traits such as distrust of authority and institutions, particularly in the fields of health and education; openness to unusual experiences; willingness to detect hidden patterns; deep longing for authentic community; and an attraction to alternative paradigms.

Many of these folks have long existed outside of conventional career paths, resonate with a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist entrepreneurial tone, are open to information that some psychics claim to have “channeled” from other, non-physical dimensions, and believe in the ability to manifest financial and romantic success and vibrant health through positive thinking, as taught by Rhonda Byrne’s best-selling book and film The Secret. In the film version, a series of self-help teachers promote positive thinking, primarily toward the goal of acquiring consumer goods and a great love life. This tradition extends back to the New Thought teachers of early 19^th-century America. And let’s be really clear about this: the film ignores the values of community almost totally.

Mainstream media writers, who are primarily from the middle class, have never understood people who reject their values, demeaning the post-hippie culture as “bliss ninnies” of the “the love-and-light crowd.” Nor has the mainstream acknowledged how the counterculture actually birthed the high-tech world we all take for granted, as John Markoff relates in What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.

Among my 60s generation the characteristics that encourage artistic, religious and even scientific exploration, as well as a disdain for convention, usually produced liberal, anti-authoritarian attitudes on social issues and optimism about the future. But those same characteristics, encouraged by a lack of deep introspection, have a dark shadow. The term “conspirituality” was coined in 2011 – long before either Trumpus or QAnon. Charlotte Ward and David Voas write that

It offers a broad politico-spiritual philosophy based on two core convictions, the first traditional to conspiracy theory, the second rooted in the New Age: 1) a secret group covertly controls, or is trying to control, the political and social order, and 2) humanity is undergoing a ‘paradigm shift’ in consciousness. Proponents believe that the best strategy for dealing with the threat of a totalitarian ‘new world order’ is to act in accordance with an awakened ‘new paradigm’ worldview.

Jules Evans suggests how these two forms of experience can flow into one stream:

…. The first is a sort of extroverted euphoric mystical experience: “Everything is connected. I am synchronistically drawn to helpers and allies, the universe is carrying us forward to a wonderful climactic transformation (the Rapture, the Omega Point, the Paradigm Shift), and we are the divine warriors of light appointed by God / the Universe to manifest this glorious new phase shift in human history.” The second: “…Everything is connected, there is a secret order being revealed to me, but I am not part of it. It is an evil demonic order…perhaps I, and one or two others, can wake up to this Grand Plan, and expose it”…The first trip is a euphoric ego-expansion (I am God! I am the Cosmic Universe evolving!) and the second is paranoid ego-persecution (The Universe is controlled by Evil Demons…) In both, the individual awakens to this hidden reality. But in the first, they are a superpowered initiate in the hidden order and a catalyst for a Millenarian transformation, in the second they are a vulnerable and disempowered exposer of the powerful hidden order.

Both forms exemplify mystical or even schizoid thinking. In both, the ego is part of a grand cosmic drama. In one, it is the divine appointed catalyst for humanity’s rebirth. In the other, one is the heroic exposer of the Hidden Order. And it appears to be possible that one can switch between ecstatic, optimistic Millenarianism and paranoid persecutory conspiracy thinking, from “everything is connected and I’m a central part of this wonderful cosmic transformation!’’ to “everything is connected and I’m at risk from this global plot!”

It’s always been about waking up – being “woke.” For my children’s generation, the “red pill” moment of the 1999 film The Matrix became the central metaphor that connected these two forms of mystical thinking. On the left, being red-pilled implies awareness of social justice issues.

Rightists, however, have adopted the metaphor to represent an awakening from their perceived conditioned trance of soft, inappropriately liberal concern for the poor – those whom our American mythologies have labelled as unworthy. And any institutions that interfere with this libertarian focus on the individual are simply impediments to a narcissistic preoccupation with self-fulfillment. Then we enter the slippery slope in which the ability to discriminate diminishes in favor of an intuitive knowing and an essentially religious disdain for science and conventional sources of authority.

As I’ve said, much of that disdain is regularly justified by revelations of massive corporate corruption, especially in the fields of nutrition and wellness so treasured by NACs. The danger, however, is that they can become vulnerable to fake news that encourages that magical thinking. (Before we slide into simplistic demonization of “anti-vaxxers,” however, let’s remember that many others on the progressive Left who have retained that precious ability to discriminate are vaccine skeptics not because they disregard science, but because they reject the capitalist corruption of science.)

American history, especially the history of health care, is replete with good-hearted, naïve “holy fools” – and the con-men, from P.T. Barnum to the grifters already lining up to replace Trumpus – who have always been willing to steal our watches and sell them back to us. For more, read my series “The Con Man: An American Archetype.”

The devaluing of intellectual checks and balances combined with exclusive emphasis on positivity and the inability to grieve (another American religious characteristic) can result in “spiritual bypass” – the use of metaphysical beliefs to deny, distort, or reframe legitimate human suffering, both personal and social, and it can attract really decent and idealistic people toward cults and ideologies, whether spiritual, political or consumeristic. 

After the Dionysian explosion of the sixties, the meeting with Eastern religion, psychedelics and indigenous spirituality introduced healthier lifestyles that have benefited millions. But the phrase “human potential movement” entered the lexicon carrying the seeds of its own destruction wherever its proponents refused to address the fullness of the psyche. In late capitalist America, a society lead by uninitiated men and sociopathic narcissists long before Trumpus, they encountered institutions – work, church, media, politics, education, the police and the military, and perhaps most of all, the family – designed expressly to elicit their darkest potentials, much of which were channeled into fundamentalism, toxic masculinity, addictions and the vicarious fascination with brutal militarism.

Chapter Five of my book describes James Hillman’s Depth Psychological insight into the excessive identification with the dry values of “spirit” as opposed to the wet values we associate with “soul.” In mythological terms, this is the opposition between Apollo and Dionysus taken to its extreme. Julian Walker writes that for spiritual people,

…we end up engaging in a practice that, rather than shaping outside reality, as is often claimed in media like The Secret, instead burns a distorted operating system and perceptual lens into our neuroplastic brains…It’s the practice of thinking facts and evidence are relative, mutable, and can be made to mean whatever we want via the narcissism-enabling belief in absolute subjectivity — the divine “I” that alone creates reality and stands all-powerful within it…For spiritual folks the threshold into the overlap is crossed…into just the exact shadow reflection of the light-and-love delusion. It is the positive, synchronistic all-is-perfect obsessive pattern-seeking confirmation bias turned on its head and set on fire — and that fire fantastically fueled by the explosive emotional gasoline kept buried until now by spiritual bypass.

Walker is one of many voices writing from within the Human Potential Movement.  He describes several “worldview weaknesses” held by many NACs:

1 – Over-privileging of the individual over the collective.

2 – Denying the validity of other points of view, over-equalizing opinion and undermining of respect for expertise, all of which can lead to bigger sales and more followers. “Real scientists are always open to being wrong. Real scientists know the current hypothesis is only as good as the next batch of data. Real scientists are careful.” I would add: real scientists refuse to allow corporate toadies to corrupt their data to show quarterly profits.

3 – “Esoteric knowledge ego inflation:” rejecting virtually anything that can be called mainstream as a means of subtly bolstering one’s sense of having esoteric insights into reality.

4 – A sanitized, overly rosy spirituality that ignores the shadow “creates a bubble of positivity” that, when faced with actual suffering, can twist into its opposite and perceive its polarized antithesis in the form of evil elites. This can fuel messianic zealots who “can become compelling and charismatic leaders because they are rock solid in their convictions.”

5 – Belief in the “Law of Attraction,” which teaches that people create their own realities. This idea does have a core of truth. But it reinforces detachment from collective political action, radical individualism – that most fundamental American myth – and New Age promises of “instant gratification mental changes.” And, I would add, by ignoring its own deeply Calvinist roots, it leads to moral condemnation of those who don’t think positive thoughts. This is another specifically American story, as I describe in “Blaming the victim.”

Another person writing from within this community is Martin Winiecki, who offers “Six Reasons so Many Spiritual People Have Been Fooled by QAnon”, and I extrapolate:

1 – Lack of Structural Analysis:The culture of radical individualism sees both heroes and villains in particular individuals or small, hidden groups. But when we don’t address the systemic nature of our condition (whether spiritual or material), this kind of thinking merely reinforces the system itself.

2 – Overly simplistic, binary thinking: Suppressing “negativity” encourages the shadow to take on a life of its own, “which will terrorize and subconsciously dominate them…” Jung concluded from his study of world mythology that when suppressed aspects of the psyche finally emerge – as they always do – they tend to be angry.

3 – Implicit Racial Bias: Stories about Soros’ control of social movements clearly reflect old-school, anti-Semitic prejudice about all-powerful Jews, while New Age fear of introspection leads to the unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of white privilege. Repetition of claims that Black Lives Matter is “a tool of the liberal elites” reveals the belief that black people aren’t able to speak for themselves. “Not seeing color” insults actual people of color who live their entire lives identifying exactly as they are.

4 – To denounce conventional reality as illusion can lead to the inability to realize that one’s own political views reflect ideology and thus believe everything and nothing at once. “According to the great political philosopher Hannah Arendt, this is precisely the psychological state of people who follow totalitarian ideologies.”

5 – The post-modern experience that the left has lost its appeal due to intellectual elitism, moral and ideological rigidity and rejection of non-material realities leads to the unconscious search for another ideology as a replacement.

6 – The natural desire for community is corrupted by its shadow of radical individualism and the profit motive. This results in people with no previous connection to each other fusing together in an illusionary sense of shared identity. Why are so many wellness practitioners in particular falling for the onslaught of QAnon claims? Although the global wellness industry is reportedly worth $4.5 trillion, its more controversial elements continue to suffer disparagement not only from Big Pharma but from countless self-appointed, individual gatekeepers of the status quo (do you, reader, giggle when a friend offers a treatment with healing crystals?) Now in this current state of emergency – where defeating the pandemic requires universal social acquiescence – many purveyors of these views see their paranoia being confirmed. In a form of what Brigid Delaney calls “trauma bonding,” this strengthens their connections with figures such as Alex Jones who appear to favor individual rights, and like that broken clock, may well be right twice a day.

I would add a seventh factor:

7 – The natural desire to attain self-awareness and mystical realization is corrupted by those same factors. People often realize the deeper unity of beings and the need for a truly planetary frame of reference, at least briefly, through the experience of psychedelic plant medicines. However, as Daniel Pinchbeck writes,

The problem is that they need a cultural / initiatory context or container which supports them in fully integrating the influx of new knowledge and wisdom. Otherwise, the ego structure finds ways to distort these revelations for its own purposes, in a variety of subtle ways. This is how the Neo-spiritual and psychedelic movement have gone off track…Fascism is a kind of low-grade occultism: It satisfies the ego mind’s desire for a simplistic unity and gets rid of all the nagging paradoxes and contradictions of reality.

For more insight into conspirituality, there’s an entire website, www.Conspirituality.net, which describes itself as “a weekly study of converging right-wing conspiracy theories and faux-progressive wellness utopianism.” One of its pages lists over thirty wellness “influencers” that have posted, shared, or explicitly created QAnon-related content, even though many have recently scrubbed direct reference to Q itself.

Let’s be clear about this: we need to integrate the mystical and self-realization visions with indigenous initiation wisdom and roll it all into a perspective that reveals the systemic sources of racism, misogyny and political alienation that impact us all. Indeed, the idea of “spiritually awakening” to our true nature long ago predated the current idea of “woke.” But without the ability to discriminate, to understand the mythic narratives that drive our willingness to innocently embody and enact them, we remain “bliss ninnies” at best and crusaders for fascism at worst.

History and Myth

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. – Andre Gide

As both American history and American mythology have shown us, it is always easier to blame others – dark-skinned people or dark-web conspiracies – for our troubles than it is to admit our own complicity. Chapters seven and ten of my book discuss what I call the Paranoid Imagination, tracing it backwards to the roots of Christianity and forward to the very beginning of the American Republic and its original fascination with the Illuminati:

The paranoid imagination seeks itself: it constantly projects its fantasies outward onto the Other and then proceeds to demonize it. Therefore, it finds conspiracies everywhere. In 1798, ministers whipped up hysteria about a tiny Masonic group. Anticipating McCarthyism by 150 years, one minister ranted: “I have now in my possession…authenticated list of names.” In 1835, future President John Tyler blamed abolitionism on “a reptile who had crawled from some of the sinks of Europe…to sow the seeds of discord among us.”

The classic text on our unique willingness to search for that “reptile” is Richard Hofstadter’sThe Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964), and most of our gatekeepers still quote it when pontificating about conspiracy theories. But Hofstadter has his own critics, who have pointed out his tendency to conflate left-wing and right-wing populism and ignore significant differences between them. In other words, Hofstadter himself was a gatekeeper who encouraged the same kind of false equivalencies that I’ve been talking about.

We don’t need another study of conspiracy theories. What we do need is a deeper understanding of why and how we decide to be part of the gatekeeping process, how we reflexively reject what doesn’t appear to be “common sense” and marginalize progressive thought. We also need to learn to discriminate. Indeed, we can learn much from some of the gatekeepers, some of whom offer brilliant analyses of right-wing conspiracism. (Since they invariably express the anxiety of the Center, however, they cannot resist the temptation to falsely equate right and left.) Steve Clarke and Brian Keeley offer a useful definition:

A theory that traces important events to a secret, nefarious cabal, and whose proponents consistently respond to contrary facts not by modifying their theory, but instead by insisting on the existence of ever-wider circles of high-level conspirators controlling most or all parts of society.

There is often a strong similarity to religious cults, as we’ll see below. Rachel Bernstein, a writer who specializes in recovery therapy, argues that there is no self-correction process within cults, since the self-reinforcing true believers are immune to fact-checking or conflicting opinions. This makes them feel special, part of something important:

When people get involved in a movement, collectively, what they’re saying is they want to be connected to each other. They want to have exclusive access to secret information other people don’t have, information they believe the powers that be are keeping from the masses, because it makes them feel protected and empowered. They’re a step ahead of those in society who remain willfully blind. This creates a feeling similar to a drug – it’s its own high.

Jonathan Kay (Among the Truthers) writes:

In America…life’s losers have no one to blame but themselves. And so the conceit that they are up against some all-powerful corporate or governmental conspiracy comes as a relief: It removes the stigma of failure, and replaces it with the more psychologically manageable feeling of anger.

Note Kay’s apparent acceptance of American mythology: “…losers have no one to blame but themselves.” But his observations do make sense to me, even if they are patronizing (using pop psychology to label and dismiss people is one of the most common gatekeeping tools. In mythological terms, this is Apollo the lone archer killing from afar, as opposed to the drunken Dionysus who lives among the common people). To patronize is to label oneself as an expert – smarter, better, more advanced than the other, and Kay excels in this tactic, peppering phrases such as “quackery,” “satisfy his hunger for public attention,” “typing out manifestoes on basement card tables,” “something they fit in between video gaming and Facebook,” “college-educated Internet addicts,” “faculty-lounge guerillas,” and the almost comic false equivalency of “Glenn Beck and Michael Moore.” Can we take this guy seriously? Can we identify his agenda?

Ultimately, this kind of analysis tells us more about the psychology of the “experts” than about their subjects. And it is precisely his style of east-coast, liberal, quasi-academic pontification and devaluing of flyover state values that drives millions of white working-class people either into reactionary politics or out of political engagement entirely.  

So we find ourselves divided into perhaps five groups. First, there is a progressive, activist, young, mostly non-white, often non-binary community who question the fundamental aspects of the myth of American innocence. Second, we have a tiny but vastly influential class of media and academic gatekeepers (divided into true believers and others who are clearly in it only for the money) whose professional mandate is to maintain the illusion of innocence and rationality for (three) the great majority in the center, innocently consuming all the American myths.

Fourth, the true believers on the right who, despite their white privilege and evangelical fervor, consider themselves victims of the Center, which they equate with the Left. Very many of them take a very selective “libertarian” stance, as the book Uncivil Liberties: Deconstructing Libertarianism explains. You can read the introductory essay (which I wrote), The Mythic Foundations of Libertarianism here. At the far end of this continuum we find the Q followers, many of whom apparently see no contradiction in, for example, their support of both Trumpus and the Black Lives Matter movement, or of both personal choice on vaccines and their hatred of abortion. Self-described “libertarians” who would ban abortion? Rand Paul is only one example.

And finally, we have some, children perhaps of the 1960s self-reliant, back-to-the-land movement, who dream of an Aquarian Age heaven on Earth if only everyone would think positive thoughts, but, because they cannot seem to perceive how they are manipulated, inhabit every zone of the margins without discriminating right from left, not to mention right from wrong. They are, truly, all over the map – like my Facebook friend who re-posts constantly, alternatingly from progressive and from ultra-right sources, denouncing racism on the one hand and praising those who enforce it on the other.

Psychology gets us only so far. I prefer mythological and religious-historical perspectives. In Chapter Seven I identify a trend that developed early on in American Protestantism in which

Cooperation between northerners and southerners birthed a paradoxical mix of extreme religious and modern Enlightenment values. Man was fallen and sinful, yet he could become whatever he wanted. Indeed, in 1776 – for the first time in history – a nation proclaimed the pursuit of happiness as its prime value. Soon, Tocqueville observed of American preachers, “…it is often difficult to be sure when listening to them whether the main object of religion is to procure eternal felicity in the next world or prosperity in this.”

Where else but in America would there exist a doctrine known as the “Prosperity Gospel”? QAnon may be propelled by paranoia and populism, but it is also propelled by religious faith, and it utilizes the language of evangelical, apocalyptic Christianity. Adrienne LaFrance writes:

In his classic 1957 book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, the historian Norman Cohn examined the emergence of apocalyptic thinking over many centuries. He found one common condition: This way of thinking consistently emerged in regions where rapid social and economic change was taking place – and at periods of time when displays of spectacular wealth were highly visible but unavailable to most people. This was true in Europe during the Crusades in the 11th century, and during the Black Death in the 14th century, and in the Rhine Valley in the 16th century…

Here are two essays on apocalyptic thinking, one by Michael Meade and one that I wrote, in which I argue that millenarians always mistaken the need for internal, symbolic change for literal end-of-days.  

…we must step away from literalist thinking (whether New Age or fundamentalist) and accept that in biological, ecological, mythological or indigenous initiatory terms, to end is nothing other than to die. Only when death and decay are complete can they be understood as the necessary precursors to fermentation and potential new growth…

“End times” is also a metaphor for the archetypal cry for initiation. It is our own transformation – the death of who we have been – that we both fear and long for. The soul understands that there is no initiation into a new state of being unless we fully accept the necessary death of what came before…(but) when we can no longer imagine inner renewal, we see literal images elsewhere. We project our internal state onto the world and look for the signs of world changes “out there.”

The literalization of mythic images occurs everywhere that mythic thinking has broken down. But we know that a social or even political movement has elements of specifically American religiosity by the unmistakable smell of money. LaFrance continues:

The most prominent QAnon figures have a presence beyond the biggest social-media platforms and image boards. The Q universe encompasses numerous blogs, proprietary websites, and types of chat software, as well as alternative social-media platforms such as Gab, the site known for anti-Semitism and white nationalism, where many people banned from Twitter have congregated. Vloggers and bloggers promote their Patreon accounts, where people can pay them in monthly sums. There’s also money to be made from ads on YouTube. That seems to be the primary focus for (David) Hayes, whose videos have been viewed more than 33 million times altogether. His “Q for Beginners” video includes ads from companies such as the vacation-rental site Vrbo and from The Epoch Times, an international pro-Trump newspaper.

This notion of overwhelming influence, control and victimhood that is so characteristic of conspiracism is a form of literalistic thinking, an aspect of our de-mythologized world, in which the true believers have essentially eliminated both the Old Testament Jehovah and his demonic adversary and substituted the Illuminati, Bill Gates, the Clintons or George Soros. But it is still monotheistic thinking, and it expresses the Paranoid Imagination.

The mythic figure who embodies this thinking is transcendent, distant, all-knowing, all-powerful and exclusively masculine. This thinking objectifies Nature and Woman. It invites misogyny, hierarchy and dogma. It rejects cyclical time for linear time, allowing for only a single creation myth and a single ending. It reduces mystery to simplistic dualisms such as ultimate good and ultimate evil or innocence and original sin. However, since it cannot include its opposite, it requires another mythic figure to carry that role, and therefore it is obsessed with both evil and temptation, and it almost always leads to puritanism. Since it rejects paradox, diversity and ambiguity, it demands belief, which implies not merely a single set of truths but also the obligation to convert – or eliminate – those who question it.

This heritage is perhaps three thousand years old. Or, if we were to take a feminist perspective, we could say that its antecedents extend two thousand years further back, to the origins of patriarchy itself. But by the beginning of the Christian era, it had solidified into the thinking that ultimately led to the mentality of the crusader. Here is more insight from Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium: 

The elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted and yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary…ruthlessness directed towards…a total and final solution…The world is dominated by an evil, tyrannous power of boundless destructiveness. The tyranny of that power will become more and more outrageous, the sufferings of its victims more and more intolerable until suddenly the hour will strike when the Saints of God are able to rise up and overthrow it. Then the saints themselves, the chosen, holy people who hitherto have groaned under the oppressor’s heel, shall in their turn inherit the earth. This will be the culmination of history; the kingdom of the saints will not only surpass in glory all previous kingdoms, it will have no successors.

Cohn also repeatedly points out another characteristic of those times when the oppressed saints “rise up and overthrow.” In his examples from Northern Europe, they begin by attacking their rich overlords, but they quickly move on to massacring more traditional scapegoats, the Jews (if you haven’t noticed that much Q-related ranting is merely a recycling in 21^st-century terms of Medieval anti-Semitism, you haven’t been paying attention).

But what happens when, after a thousand years, a grand narrative, that sense of meaning, begins to break down? Or, as I’ve argued in my book, when an entire mythology – such as the myth of American innocence – collapses? Religion as a system holding the mass of society together has been essentially dead since the mid-19^th century, when a new way of knowing, the scientific method, replaced it and modernity was born. Very quickly, a new meta-narrative, nationalism arose. Germany, Italy and Japan, for example, did not constitute themselves as nation-states until the 1860s. And one could certainly argue that this was also true for the United States, in terms of the North-South reunification that occurred after the end of Reconstruction.

This new thinking was ideological, and in the sense that people were willing to die (and kill) for an idea, it had clear religious undertones. It gave people meaning in a world in which science had taken that meaning away from religion.

All nations certainly continued to give lip service to religion, but in reality, they utilized religion to justify the new national orders. Fundamentalism continues to motivate millions, but primarily as an adjunct to the state (as the consistently pro-war positions of nearly all televangelists show) or as its mirror-opposite (as in every socialist country).

The new literary and cultural movement of Modernism followed the universal disillusionment after World War One and attempted to make sense of what to do when we lose the certainties by which we define ourselves. But it offered only two alternatives for the non-artistic: the scientific method that had helped de-throne religion, and the political ideologies that led quickly to the second World War, the Holocaust and the Cold War. And, since neither of these belief systems addressed the soul’s longing for deeper meaning, faith in both began to collapse.

In the 1960s, Post-modernism identified this dislocation, celebrated the breakdown of structure and threw off the constraints of grand narratives. Individual identity, especially gender, was no longer fixed, but fluid and socially constructed. Postmodern individuals have no essential selfhood; they are constructed by webs of language and power relations. But very few of us can thrive in such a world, as Huston Smith wrote:

I am thinking of frontier thinkers who chart the course that others follow. These thinkers have ceased to be modern because they have seen through the so-called scientific worldview, recognizing it to be not scientific but scientistic. They continue to honor science for what it tells us about nature, but as that is not all that exists, science cannot provide us with a worldview ― not a valid one. The most it can show us is half of the world, the half where normative and intrinsic values, existential and ultimate meanings, teleologies, qualities, immaterial realities, and beings that are superior to us do not appear…Where, then, do we now turn for an inclusive worldview? Postmodernism hasn’t a clue. And this is its deepest definition… “incredulity toward metanarratives”. Having deserted revelation for science, the West has now abandoned the scientif­ic worldview as well, leaving it without replacement.

All this would be hugely magnified by technology, writes Alexander Beiner:

This is what identity is online. Fragmented, fluid, partial. Online, you can be anyone you want to be, and simultaneously, you are nobody. If this is where we gain our sense of self, we find ourselves adrift in a sea of language and relativistic narratives over which we have no control.

By the 1980s dissatisfaction with the trappings of post-modern culture – consumerism, the nuclear family, conventional religion, anti-communism and vicarious intensity (see Chapter 10 of my book) – was leading many Americans in one (or both) of two directions: the substance abuse that would eventually explode into mass death-by-opiates in the 2010s, and the retreat into fundamentalist religion.

When myths that bind us together in worlds of meaning die, the soul – and the soul of the culture – search for substitutes. All political ideologies, like the religions they emerged from, are monotheistic, since they allow no alternative viewpoints. Whereas myth once invited us to have our own ideas about the same thing, as Meade has said, ideologies force us to think the same idea.

From what I can see, many New Age Conspiracists cling neither to conventional religion nor to any nationalist ideology, but only to a simplistic and optimistic faith in “freedom.” They do seem to value the pseudo-community that characterizes the Internet, where they can freely share meta-narratives and experience neither the risks nor the support of authentic community, especially during the enforced isolation of the pandemic. And they do have one thing – the opportunity to connect the dots and explain everything, and in so doing, reduce their levels of anxiety.

Connecting the dots – finding some degree of correlation and attributing direct causality – may well be a new way of countering the terror of finding oneself in an economy, a pandemic and a political system that is broken and a climate that is out of control, in which a god of evil seems to have replaced a god of good. It’s difficult to confront the possibility that this good god may not really be concerned with our welfare (that would be a truly pagan perspective), or that he may never have existed at all. Americans still believe in that good god at much higher rates than Europeans – but 57% of American adults also believe in the existence of Satan, or in the hazy figure of the Antichrist.

Although he can’t resist throwing in false equivalencies, Kay accurately observes:

Conspiracism is attractive to the Doomsayer because it organizes all of the world’s menacing threats into one monolithic force – allowing him to reconcile the bewildering complexities of our secular world with the good-versus-evil narrative contained in the Book of Revelation and other religious texts…(he) vigilantly scans the news for signs that the world is moving toward some final apocalyptic confrontation between good and evil…so saturated is American culture with the imagery of Christian eschatology that it has been widely co-opted…Once you strip away their jargon, radicalized Marxists also can be classified as Evangelical Doomsayers… unfailingly compressing many random evils into a single, identifiable point-source of malign power…This psychic need to impute all evil to a lone, omnipotent source inevitably requires the conspiracist to create larger and larger meta-conspiracies that sweep together seemingly unconnected power centers.

…Both of them (conspiracism and millenarianism) go together: Both of them put the fact of human suffering at the center of the human condition. Conspiracism is a strategy for explaining the origin of that suffering. Millenarianism is a strategy for forging meaning from it…(in) a generalized nostalgia for America’s past.

Let’s be clear about this: No one in our culture fully escapes this legacy, since, as James Hillman said, “We are each children of the Biblical God…(it is) the essential American fact.” Deep in the unconscious psyche of every American Yogi, Buddhist or New Age influencer is a three-thousand-year-old monotheist, and it has its own agenda to convert or eliminate its competition.

Here is a clue: if your people consider their story to be literally true and other people’s stories are “myths,” then you and your people are thinking mythically or literally. Other mono-words share the brittleness of one correct way: monopoly, monogamy, monolithic, monarchy, monotonous. If solutions to our great social and environmental crises emerge, they will originate outside of the monoculture, from people on the edges – or at least those who have learned to discriminate.

Once we become comfortable thinking in terms of myth – as stories we tell ourselves about ourselves – we can step out of own monocular thinking. We can acknowledge, as Charles Eisenstein writes, that a conspiracy narrative is “…after all, neither provable nor falsifiable,” and then take a clearer look at what it can illuminate.

Underneath its literalism, it conveys important information…First, it demonstrates the shocking extent of public alienation from institutions of authority…Second, (It) gives narrative form to an authentic intuition that an inhuman power governs the world…(it) locates that power in a group of malevolent human beings…Therein lies a certain psychological comfort, because now there is someone to blame…

Alternatively, we could locate the “inhuman power” in systems or ideologies, not a group of conspirators. That is less psychologically rewarding, because we can no longer easily identify as good fighting evil; after all, we ourselves participate in these systems, which pervade our entire society…Stamped from the same template, conspiracy theories tap into an unconscious orthodoxy. They emanate from the same mythic pantheon as the social ills they protest. We might call it…the mythology of Separation…matter separate from spirit, human separate from nature…Because we are (in this myth) separate from other people and from nature, we must dominate our competitors and master nature. Progress, therefore, consists in increasing our capacity to control the Other…

…Events are indeed orchestrated in the direction of more and more control, only the orchestrating power is itself a zeitgeist, an ideology…a myth. This deep ideology…is beyond anyone’s power to invent. The Illuminati, if they exist, are not its authors; it is more true to say that the mythology is their author. We do not create our myths; they create us.

Now I think we have enough background to try and understand what makes NACs tick.

Part Four will post shortly.

The essence of American politics is the manipulation of populism by elitism. – Christopher Hitchens

The QAnon narrative, as most of us know by now, explains how we are in a sinister and dimly visible global power struggle. On one side of the fight is a depraved group of pedophiles, secretly sowing chaos and strife to create a pretext for their rule. On the other side is the public, decent people who have been deceived by the power brokers and their collaborators in the press. But patriotic elements within the military recruited Trumpus, and he’s been working hard behind the scenes to defeat the evil ones.

Whoever Q is (or are), its millions of followers receive and re-post thousands of hints about its agenda, and Trumpus himself (who many believe to actually be Q) has taken full advantage of it, especially in terms of coronavirus skepticism. Q followers agree that a great awakening is approaching to bring salvation. A promise of foreknowledge seems to be part of Q’s appeal, as is the feeling of being part of a secret community, which is reinforced through the use of acronyms and ritual phrases such as “Nothing can stop what is coming” and “Trust the plan.”

The year 2020 has added another dimension to the conspiracy mongering. Many people on both the right and the left who have legitimate concerns about corporate corruption of federal regulatory agencies, specifically on the question of vaccines, are finding it easier to question some aspects of the consensus on the Covid pandemic. And the Q people have skillfully taken advantage of this skepticism to convince them that the evil cabal of insiders deliberately created the pandemic or is at least ruthlessly exploiting it to frighten the public into accepting a totalitarian world government under permanent medical martial law. William Stranger writes:

The QAnon conspiracy represents nothing less than the chickens coming home to roost for the massive loss of public trust created by the plethora of outlandishly uninvestigated, under-investigated, and even fraudulently investigated marquee crimes in American history…

But we need to realize that QAnon is well-situated in a long and racialized American tradition in which people who feel threatened by evil cabals are in fact relatively well-off. It’s a story about victimhood (as I write in Chapters Seven and Eight of my book) and an excuse for violence, real or vicarious, that we’ve been telling ourselves ever since the first massacre of Indians in the early seventeenth century. But in this new version, the savior is the President himself, who is arguably the most powerful person in the world already, and his people are already in charge. It’s a story that seems to have been designed to cope with the cognitive dissonance caused by the gap between Trumpus as his fans imagine him and Trumpus as he is. Here are some articles I’ve found useful:

The Wizard of Q 

Decoding QAnon: How the delusional theory beloved by far-right loons began 

QAnon spreads across globe, shadowing COVID-19

The Prophecies of Q: American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase

The deep, twisted roots of QAnon: Delusions of demon-cannibal conspiracies aren’t even original 

Majority of Republicans believe the QAnon conspiracy theory is partly or mostly true

A list of key words and phrases used by QAnon followers

How to know what’s true? Or, as Caitlin Johnstone asks,How You Can Be 100% Certain That QAnon Is Bullshit:

1. It always excuses Trump’s facilitation of corporate agendas.

2. It always refuses to prove the validity of its position.

3. It’s made countless bogus claims and inaccurate predictions.

I would add a fourth point, as a question: How many people who claim to be victims of the deep state are people of color? Or are they in fact people who are generally quite privileged and almost universally white?

But we mythologists cannot afford to wallow in our own form of patronizing self-deception. This is a mass phenomenon, and besides, plenty of its adherents are armed to the teeth. More critically, we have to acknowledge that at its core, it represents a legitimate, if misdirected anger at a secular state (and its media) that in their (and my) mind is no longer legitimate. Johnstone continues:

…it’s an obvious propaganda construct designed to manufacture support for the status quo among people who otherwise would not support it. It presents itself as an exciting movement where the little guy is finally rising up and throwing off the chains of the tyrannical forces which have been exploiting and oppressing us, yet in reality all it’s doing is telling a discontented sector of the population to relax and “trust the plan” and put all their faith in the leader of the US government.

And that’s exactly what makes QAnon so uniquely toxic. It’s not just that it gets people believing false things which confuse and alienate them, it’s that it’s a fake, decoy imitation of what a healthy revolutionary impulse would look like. It sells people on important truths that they already intuitively know on some level…It takes those vital, truthful, healthy revolutionary impulses, then twists them around into support for the…president and the agendas of the Republican Party.

The Anti-Fascist Network places Q and its strategies squarely within an old tradition:

Part of the fascist strategy is to misguide people into thinking the centrist neoliberal policies that trouble them are leftist policies. The far-right then pretend to be rebels against capitalism, whilst in fact standing for an even more extreme and brutal form of capitalism.

To simply dismiss these people, however, is to ignore the implications of two of the basic ideas I’ll be speaking about further on. The first is that even a broken clock is right twice a day.Q followers and progressives agree that the mainstream media and mainstream political parties can’t be trusted, and some of the things that Q people say may well sound superficially attractive. But – and here is the second – we all need to learn how to discriminate, to notice when the clock really is broken, why it’s been broken and who broke it.

The issue is immensely complicated by technology – despite those few points of agreement, Q followers no longer share a common language with progressives. Indeed, the documentary The Social Dilemma reveals that the major social media sites have deliberately ensured that these people don’t ever read or hear the same news that we do.

Still, we must acknowledge that the worst lies can effective if they contain a core of truth. The great majority of Americans are suffering from a brutally unequal economic system and behind that, a soul-killing mythology, and the one thing all but the happy ten percent agree on is the need for change. Again: Q is “a fake, decoy imitation of what a healthy revolutionary impulse would look like.” That said, I’m interested not so much in its Tea-Party, libertarian or evangelical followers, most of whom identified with racist, misogynist, Republican politics long before Q arose, and will return to their roots when it disappears.

I’m more interested in figuring out what makes the NACs tick, and why so many of them have fallen for this con. It has been suggested that such people are particularly susceptible to being manipulated because they are perceived as high on empathy and low on boundaries. Also, it appears that one of the far right’s current strategies is to actively rebrand themselves as spiritual teachers or “new paradigm influencers.”

But we first we have to detour through American history and myth.

Read Part Three here.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. – W.B. Yeats

All that is solid melts into air. – Karl Marx

In a previous blog series I discussed how the gatekeepers of our culture exclude and demonize much progressive thought by associating it in the reader’s mind with bizarre right-wing claims, thereby delegitimizing both:

…countless websites and books devoted to narratives that marginalize anyone who questions the dominant paradigms of the culture. They typically do this by identifying “loony” theories from the perspective of the “rational center.” Such gatekeepers almost always lump all of the questioners together. Then with patronizing, pseudo-psychology they explore the unconscious motivations of conspiracy theorists, be they fascists or anarchists, Christians or Pagans, oligarchs or street people.

I’m talking about people who want us to forget about radical change because – they tell us – some of its adherents and some of their proposals are as laughably, preposterously unacceptable as are those on the other extreme.

The use of the term “conspiracy theory” is one of the main ways in which they banish any legitimate criticism of those in power to the realm of the truly illegitimate. The intent is insidious, even if often sincere. The only position that reasonable people could hold is the only one that remains, C – the consensual center that ranges between “not as crazy as A” to “not as crazy as B.” When they hear it often enough, people hold to that center so as to reaffirm their sense of American Innocence, and their identities.

I’ve read much by those who claim to objectively analyze conspiracy theories, and they all, left or right, serve that gatekeeping function. Even though most of what they say applies primarily to the right-wing loonies, they consistently associate the same faulty thinking with people further to the left.

But here is something new. In this age of fake news, “alternative facts”, high-resolution film and internet, when any image can be manipulated, some right wingers have become very skilled at offering theories with superficially progressive themes, but which, upon closer inspection, reveal reactionary agendas. They rely on the inability or unwillingness of countless good-hearted people who consume their well-funded rants and web posts to actually discriminate the former from the latter. One writer refers to these folks as “DRH” for “Down the Rabbit Hole.” I suggest another term: “New Age Conspiracists,” or NACs.

The wild popularity (seen by over 84 million people and translated into 27 languages) of the 2011 film Thrive is an example. Its creator Foster Gamble interviewed many progressive thinkers but hid his own libertarian views. Once they learned about those views, ten of the participants publicly denounced the film, claiming that Gamble had misrepresented himself. For more on that, see my blog, “The Mythic Foundations of Libertarianism” or Ben Boyce’s essay, in which he acknowledges “…how a skillfully edited documentary, backed with a big budget, can draw new adherents to a long-discredited political doctrine.” Later in this essay, I’ll describe how other “influencers” are manipulating thousands of people.

The pandemic year 2020 has seen massive resistance to social distancing and masking guidelines that have overlapped with vaccine skepticism. The great majority of it has emanated from right-wing and libertarian sources. But for now, I offer some confusing truths: quite a few left-wingers also favor personal choice on these matters – and the right is well aware of this. So we’re seeing slick, well-designed, “free-speech” websites such as Londonreal that, like Thrive, include articles by Noam Chomsky. But the further down one reads in their links, the more explicitly right-wing writings appear. This appears to be a deliberate strategy to influence young, anti-establishment, New Age readers.  

Let’s get a few things straight. Of course, there are conspiracies in which powerful people or classes discuss their shared goals and strategies away from the public eye. After all, to con-spire is merely to “breathe together.” Call it the Committee of 300, the Illuminati, the British Royal Family, the Rothschilds or the Khazarian Mafia – or just call it late capitalism and neo-colonialism rationally pursuing its short-term goals. Such people would be crazy not to get together periodically to shape national policies and international trends in their interests. And for my money, in this kind of a world, Trumpus is a minor mob thug and a useful idiot, while George H.W. Bush was Capo di Tutti I Capi of the Deep State.

“Deep State” is a phrase that can mean anything to anyone, and it seems that NACs especially use it too loosely. So I’ll try to define it from three perspectives:

1 – From the Center: The Deep State is the entrenched status quo that (in public perception) gets nothing done, whose members, lazy career bureaucrats and unmotivated administrators, care only to protect their own positions and retirement benefits. From a slightly more charitable perspective, it is composed of areas of government, including regulatory agencies such as the (pre-Trumpus) EPA that exist permanently, keeping the whole thing going, regardless of periodic changes in the White House. For more, read here.

2 – From the Right: The Deep State is “Big Government,” ideologically devoted to piling up infinite numbers of regulations intended to crush personal initiative and redistribute the national wealth to the undeserving poor. As Ronald Reagan said, “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Note the mythological assumptions: only in America, with its aggrandizement of radical individualism, is poverty considered the fault of the individual. Similarly, we celebrate people who claim to have accumulated vast wealth without the benefits of inheritance or the assistance of that same State. For more on this topic, see my essay, “Blaming the Victim,” and take note of how deeply this cruel belief system has penetrated the American religious psyche, especially in New Age thinking.

This is the libertarian perspective of many NACs, who perceive federal regulatory agencies as instruments of a massive conspiracy to deprive them of the right to choose for themselves, especially in matters of health. To be clear, I agree with them to an extent, but it is very much a matter of discrimination, as we will see below. This thinking can slide down a long continuum that posits secret groups that control even the Deep State itself. In the most extreme scenarios, they are composed of alien (or Jewish) pedophiles determined to impose and dominate a New World Order; there is little practical difference between Big Government and the shadowy figures who conspire to control everything and everyone.

Note the mythological assumption: It’s a dualistic world of extreme good vs. extreme evil. This thinking has its roots in ancient Zoroastrianism, became solidified in Medieval Catholicism and justified centuries of European barbarism that led directly to the Holocaust.  

3 – From the Left: The Deep State is what we used to call the Military-Industrial Complex. Now we could describe it as the Military / National Security / Intelligence / Corporate / Petrochemical / Big Pharma / Big Banking / Big Agriculture Complex. From this perspective, government is not inherently bad, but it has been so utterly corrupted by capitalism that the State itself creates and maintains a culture of fear to generate a perpetual state of war. It crushes the imagination and redistributes the national wealth to the undeserving rich. Note another mythological assumption: nothing in our 400-year history has so deeply held our attention and limited our natural kindness as fear of the Other (the internal Other of race and the external Others of immigration, communism and terrorism). In this model, there is hardly any practical difference between Big Business and Big Government. When Defense Secretary Charles Wilson said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America” in 1953, he was speaking quite literally.

Of course, more than one person conspired to kill John F. Kennedy. Even the U.S. Senate found this to be likely. Of course, elements within the government conspired to assassinate Martin Luther King, Jr. Indeed, a court determined that this is a legal fact. Obviously, elements of the Bush administration had some foreknowledge of the 9-11 attacks and did nothing to prevent them. And there are plenty of broader conspiracies to worry about.

But many people who have rejected the official narratives, who clearly understand that the mainstream media have shaped a false picture of the world (and possibly of American innocence) for decades, also seem to be getting caught up in some really wacky, paranoid, misogynistic and certainly racist claims. It appears that once you reject the center as illegitimate and the media as mendacious and locate yourself as a maverick out on the margins, you naturally become open to other marginalized opinions. From this perspective, when you entertain the possibility that everything we’ve been taught is wrong, then any alternatives may well be right.

Not long ago, most so-called conspiracy theories were clearly divided between right (Obama “Truthers”) and left (assassinations, CIA drug dealing). Gradually, many people have come to muddy the distinctions (if with very different conclusions), beginning with health issues such as fluoridation and the vaccine controversy, with the right mistrusting the government for intruding on their liberties and the left rightly criticizing Big Pharma’s perversion of the FDA. Meanwhile, the liberal, rational center – the abode of the gatekeepers – desperately holds to a naïve trust in objective and uncorruptible science, a working democracy, mainstream media who inform us (rather than selling us to their sponsors) and a foreign policy that protects freedom.

But then something new happened. The palpably obvious lie of the official 9-11 narrative brought individuals on both right and left together, if again with wildly different conclusions. Meanwhile, the mainstream media circled the wagons to marginalize all dissent in favor of unified military belligerence, just as they had done 84 years before to drag the nation into World War One, 60 years before to drag the nation into World War Two, 37 years before to drag the nation into Viet Nam, and only nine years before to drag the nation into Iraq.

People such as David Icke (one of the few people interviewed in Thrive who has not repudiated the film) have taken advantage of this really large segment of the public – remember, 100 million potential voters have opted out of the system – to posit a world in which powerful yet secret groups are striving to control the destiny of the entire world. This leads us to the QAnon phenomenon.

Read Part Two here.

I have never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure. – Mark Twain.

The period from mid-September through the first week of October were bookended by Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death and Trumpus’ illness.

Republican Corruption: The release of Trumpus’ taxes revealed years of no payments at all, income from undeclared foreign sources, massive debts to unknown creditors, gargantuan conflict-of-interest problems when they come due soon, and the likelihood of outright fraud. It was revealed that he had described war veterans as “suckers and losers” and that his 2016 campaign had identified 3.5 million Black Americans as voters they wanted to suppress through Facebook logarithms.

Republican plans to wreck the election continued quite openly. Trumpus hinted at his plans to use phony claims about “fraud” as cover to keep election officials from counting all the ballots after Election Day and repeatedly refused to promise that he’d step down peacefully if he lost. Right wing operatives were everywhere in the swing states, openly attempting to restrict the vote. A judge struck down their plan to allow only 1 ballot box in each Ohio county. But Governor Greg Abbot simply avoided the courts entirely and effectively handed Texas over to Trumpus by ordering all Texas counties to do exactly that. Harris County (population: 4 million, including Houston) will have exactly one drop-off box.

A pro-Trumpus militant Group has allegedly recruited thousands of police, soldiers and assorted thugs to monitor and harass voters in Black and Latinx neighborhoods. Even the FBI – certainly no friend to people of color – is now preparing for a “violent extremist threat” posed by anti-government militia whose members have advocated for a “race war.”

But why are Trumpus and Barr being so open – almost bragging – about their plans to steal the election? The answer, like their plans, is right in front of us. Polls indicate that Democrats are less likely to vote if they believe Trump will steal the election, something Republicans are banking on. Those voters are most assuredly people of color, who understand the long tradition of American white mob violence quite well, writes John Feffer:

Whether it was the displacement and massacre of Native Americans, the horrors that slaveowners inflicted on African Americans, the wave of lynching that followed Reconstruction, the bloodletting of Red Summer around World War I, the murders conducted by the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist organizations, or even everyday resistance to federal policies like school desegregation, gangs of Americans have repeatedly taken the law into their own hands on behalf of white supremacy.

This puts the Dems in a tight spot. While it is absolutely vital to raise the alarm, amplifying Trumpus’ promise to sow chaos serves his goal of suppressing Democratic turnout. So, as these bastards learned over many generations in the South (although they were Democrats then), the threat of voter suppression is itself a form of voter suppression.

Liberals were shocked. His base, if they noticed at all, approved.

Ginsburg’s body was hardly cold before Trumpus named her replacement. As I mentioned above, they had already used strong-arm tactics (under Roger Stone) to steal the 2000 election, and Amy Coney Barrett had been a member of his team, providing some of the wacky legal arguments that helped sway the Supreme Court. For twenty years, she has quietly epitomized the bizarre confluence of Christian zealotry and mob tactics that characterizes these people. Aside from the certainty that her presence on the court will destroy Obamacare, abortion rights and same-sex marriage, Trumpus will expect her support if the election is disputed.

Democratic Corruption: Analysts have posed this question about Trumpus for four years: can his corruption be distinguished from his incompetence? Is he an idiot, or does he simply play one on TV? It’s time to ask the same question of the Democrats. On September 22nd, Biden made his loyalties crystal clear, telling interviewers that no one earning up to $400,000 would see their taxes raised by “one cent” and following that with “I beat the socialist!…Do I look like a socialist?”

By the way, we are not talking about a 6-3 split on the court if she joins it; we’re really talking about 7-2 (unless the Dems win the Senate and expand the size of the court), since the liberal Stephen Breyer turned 82 in August.

But, again, if we simply blame Republicans for this state of affairs, we miss the real story. The federal courts would not play such a large political role if the Democrats had been serious about winning at the local level. Their nearly exclusive focus on winning the Presidency had resulted in the loss (under Obama alone) of over 900 seats in state legislatures and the Congress. “The fact that the Democrats mishandled this situation so badly”, writes Margaret Kimberley of the Black Agenda Report, “is one of the reasons they have deified the late justice Ginsburg. They have to divert attention from the mess they created.”

… the Democrats are now…behaving with the same lackadaisical attitude that cost them the 2016 election. In the must-win  state of Michigan, the Biden campaign has no in-person voter outreach, and no one that people who want to help can talk to…an on the ground campaign doesn’t really exist…Of course, Hillary Clinton raised more money than Donald Trump, but four years of propaganda have rendered most Democrats incapable of critical thought. They believe that repeating a losing strategy will somehow work this time around.

The First Debate: I see three critical points. The first is that the mainstream media framed the debate itself, not Trumpus, as deplorable. The next day, my local paper, the liberal San Francisco Chronicle proclaimed: “First Debate devolves into debacle,” rather than “Trump wrecks debate.” For contrast with normal years, you may want to read my earlier essay, The Ritual of the Presidential Debate.

The second is that relative to almost any election in memory, most people have already decided whom they prefer, or hate less. This year, the “undecided moderates” who are the traditional targets of most rhetoric and advertising are an endangered species. The largest bloc of undecided voters are the one hundred million people who haven’t decided if it is worth voting at all. The Republicans are doing everything possible to keep them from deciding to vote, while the Democrats want them to vote but not become active in the future or put any pressure for real reforms on a Democratic Congress.

This leads to my third point. Trumpus knows he’s losing in the polls (for what they’re worth), and he knows what he needs to do to win, including having a Fox News “journalist” as moderator who consistently framed his questions from a right-wing perspective. His intention, well-rehearsed and certainly gleaned from the study of focus groups (see below), was quite clear: to provoke such a hot mess that large numbers of people would not only quickly change the channel but give up in disgust on the whole process.

His intention, precisely as with his studied refusal to condemn white supremacy, was literally to suppress the vote. Well, that’s my opinion, but I found it confirmed across the spectrum. On the left, Caitlin Johnstone wrote:

You seriously could not have designed a more perfect display to do everything we’ve been told for years that Russian propagandists are trying to do: depress the vote, encourage support for third parties, weaken public trust in America’s institutions…

On the right, Frank Luntz (who certainly knows more than he let on) claimed to have found a dozen undecideds for a focus group – and to have been as shocked as anyone else: “This debate has actually convinced some undecided voters not to vote at all.”

Part of that strategy was to provoke Biden into a no-win situation – continue to act the spineless wimp, always willing to come more than halfway, or take the bait and add to the chaos. Still, who can deny that it felt good to see the old geezer show some cojones?

Then Trumpus got Covid (and knowingly exposed large numbers of people).The news immediately set loose an astonishing range of speculation, fear, chaos, rejoicing, incrimination, flip-flop announcements from his own doctors, and full-on looniness from the QAnon crowd. Was this the long-awaited October Surprise or merely a very convenient distraction? Or both? Michael Moore wrote, “Trump being diagnosed with COVID is about the best thing that could have happened to him right now. So much so, in fact, that I pretty sincerely doubt that it’s true.” Some of his speculations:

— He can control the news cycle and get lots of free publicity.

— He can opt out of the next debate without repercussions.

— He’s going to be cured by a new drug that will make him and his cronies billions.

— He doesn’t have it but will “recover” very quickly to show how Covid is overblown.

— He’s planning to drop out of the race and be replaced by Pence, who will then pardon him.

“Don’t even pretend you can’t believe he’d lie about it,” wrote Moore.” Indeed, many people had predicted weeks before that Trumpus would claim to get – and be quickly cured – from Covid.

But his doctors claimed to be using a treatment plan normally used only for the severely ill, leading many to suggest that he was sicker than they were letting on. Meanwhile, at least two Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee contracted Covid, raising questions about the timing of the Barrett hearings. The Republicans vowed to continue, even if they have to change the rules.

Biden hung up his cojones. Predictably, the Democratic leadership and the usual media pundits took the high road with faux-Christian charity, praying for Trumpus’ recovery and even removing their negative advertising (even as the Republicans specifically refused to do so). Johnstone would have none of this:

Do these seem like the sentiments of a media class who believes Donald Trump poses an urgent existential threat and must be defeated at all cost?…Would you stop fighting someone who was trying to kill you with every weapon at your disposal just because they got sick?… It turns out all that unprecedented hysterical shrieking about a Russian Nazi in the White House was just political hyperbole…They’ve never seen Trump as a uniquely menacing threat, they see him as what he is: a garden variety corrupt American president who is evil in more or less the same ways the other corrupt American presidents are evil. They see him as a part of the establishment they serve, advancing more or less the same agendas…

All kinds of broad, quotable philosophy went around the web. Here’s my favorite: The country is being asked to pray for their abuser and being shamed for not feeling sorry for him.

After just a few days Trumpus, having “controlled the news cycle and got lots of free publicity,” left the hospital, claiming to have been miraculously cured, removing his mask and telling the public not to fear the virus. He received no charity bump, though, as Biden’s poll lead increased. Perhaps there really still were/are lots of undecided voters. Or perhaps some committed Trumpus voters changed their minds.

The only thing that is sure is that the nation is in utter chaos – a deeply archetypal, ritual image. The King suffers from a wound in his groin (symbolic of the capacity to generate new life), and our Parsifal is a holy fool. We know from world mythology that chaos is the necessary precursor to the re-stabilizing of cosmos, the ordering of culture. But chaos can just as easily lead to even deeper chaos. It does not by any means predict a straight line toward a happy ending. Its primary characteristic is a most profound not-knowing.

Republican corruption: The ACLU of Georgia revealed that as recently as 2019 the state had purged nearly 200,000 citizens for moving from the addresses on their voter registration applications – none of whom had actually moved. Mitch McConnell quietly rammed through several more extreme right-wingers to lifetime federal judgeships — people who will oversee future elections. And in the topsy-turvy drama of Florida ex-felons, A federal appeals court ruled that they must pay all fines and legal fees before they can regain their right to vote. The fix – in the form of a revived poll tax – was back in.

But despite the massive evidence of GOP plans to steal the election, wrote Fairness and Accuracy in Media, the usual mainstream giants (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, etc)  were still very reluctant “to straightforwardly report the fact that Trump is trying to do so.” A rare exception is Greg Sargent, who writes, “Trump isn’t trying to win…He’s trying to get within cheating distance.”

The corruption of the Democrats (and a liberal writer): Bob Woodward is a very rich and influential man. He doesn’t need either the income or the fame that another book may bring him. His new one revealed that Trumpus knew about the consequences of the coronavirus in February and deliberately chose not to speak publicly about it. Liberals, of course, were shocked, but few seemed concerned that Woodward waited six months “…to be sure that Trump’s private comments…were accurate.” That decision most certainly contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands. We expect nothing less from Trumpus. But, wrote William Pitt:

By trading people’s lives for a larger payday, by waiting months to divulge vital information that could have forced a COVID course correction out of this administration, the man who helped take down Richard Nixon a half-century ago chose in this instance to afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable.

Well over a week after the news broke that Woodward had waited so long to release the audio, everyone’s favorite liberal, Stephen Colbert, had him on his show for a very lengthy interview. At that point, the only newsworthy question was “Why did you wait?” But Colbert, who works for CBS, never asked it. Instead, they wallowed in the usual stuff: Trumpus is bad. Shocking.

Yes, we hope for a Biden victory. But in terms of on-going narratives, the career bureaucrats, lobbyists, superdelegates and officials in safe districts who make up the inner circles of the DNC have created a win-win dynamic in their ongoing attempt to marginalize progressives, including significant efforts to keep Green Party candidates off the ballot in several states. (Nothing illegal here, just hardball politics – outside of the Democratic insistence on the evils of voter suppression).

Sanders supporters will receive no credit for helping a Biden victory and all the blame if he loses, writes Keaton Weiss:

If they win in November, they’ll be sure to cite their appeals to senior citizens and college-educated whites, two traditionally conservative constituencies, as their reason for victory. In this version of events, they will tout their strategy of reaching out to the “Biden Republicans,” as Rahm Emanuel gleefully termed them, and shunning the left flank of their party…

But here’s the true evil genius of their plan: if they lose, they’ll pretend that they couldn’t successfully distance themselves from Leftists in all of the ways they actually did…they’ll no doubt blame Black Lives Matter for scaring away the affluent suburbanites…They’ll say that progressives were too loudmouthed in their advocacy for Medicare for All and the Green New Deal…They’ll say that calls to defund the police alienated center-left city dwellers…They’ll say that Bernie Sanders’ and AOC’s rise to prominence made it impossible for Democrats to shake the socialist label…they will surely be able to scapegoat progressives and push them out of their coalition; and that’s their paramount goal. So even in this version of events, they still get the sundae (crushing the Left), just without the cherry on top (defeating Trump).

Liberal innocence: This is no reason to remain disengaged. Of course, Trumpus must be removed. But Liberals must also remove something – their innocence about the American empire and America’s good intentions in the world, and their colossal ignorance about how the military budget is the unspoken basis of all discussions about government funding priorities. Whenever you hear Biden ask, Yes, but how are we going to pay for it?, know that both he and his media questioner are colluding in a very deadly game, one that will likely destroy his chances for election.

The Military-Industrial Complex appears to be enjoying this food fight between two gangs within the ruling class. Caitlin Johnstone writes:

In a recent interview…Biden said that it’s likely that America’s bloated military budget will not only remain at its current size but may actually increase under his presidency… (He) has been consistently out-hawking Trump on foreign policy by attacking him for insufficient aggression toward Venezuela, China, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, and of course Russia…The Wall Street Journal’s Walter Russell Mead writes, “Democrats haven’t been this hawkish on Russia since the Kennedy administration.”

Indeed if wars are planned it seems entirely likely that they will happen regardless of what oligarchic puppet happens to be sitting in the Oval Office after January 20th, just like the escalations that were scheduled to begin against Russia under Hillary Clinton ended up getting rolled out anyway under Trump despite his vocal opposition to them…US presidents reliably campaign as doves and govern as hawks; Trump did it, Obama did it, even Bush did it…Still it’s hard to look at all the sabre rattling Biden and his team of ventriloquists have been doing on the campaign trail without getting the distinct impression that some major international escalations are being planned.

The stunningly incomprehensible decision to ignore Latinx Democrats: The headline “Donald Trump says Ted Cruz is on his list of potential second-term Supreme Court picks” (yes, that “Lyin’ Ted”) provoked guffaws among liberals, but they should have seen it as a warning.

In a related development, it was reported that the Democrats have been missing yet another big chance to increase turnout. Eleanor Eagan writes:

At U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a complete failure, or perhaps unwillingness, to adapt to changing conditions during the pandemic slowed new naturalizations such that hundreds of thousands who may have otherwise been able to vote this year will not be able to…For more than 70 days, it did not offer naturalization ceremonies or visa and asylum interviews…each day without naturalization ceremonies translated into “2,100 potential new voters” being disenfranchised…House Democrats’ response can only be described as muted…at no point was it clear that this was a top priority around which they were organizing a serious opposition effort.

And there have been plenty of other warnings:

Biden’s Latino outreach is under fire: ‘I can’t tell what their strategy is’

Democrats Worry Joe Biden Is Taking Latino Voters for Granted

Biden’s Lethal Latino Problem

“The Latino vote is not being taken seriously”

Biden is Losing Latino Support in South Florida, Which Could Sway Election

Joe Biden struggling with Latino voters in key state Florida, polls show

Polls show Biden lagging among Latinos in close Florida race

By the way, I must continually remind you that when we factor in voter suppression and computer fraud (which, as usual, none of these writers are doing), if the polls say a race is “close,” it really won’t be. “Close” means Trumpus wins easily. There is no universe in which Biden can afford “close.”

This issue is such an absolute scandal of completely avoidable and apparently deliberate stupidity that in political terms, we can only make sense of it by reference to the win-win dynamic I just mentioned. In psychological terms, it slides right into “Boy psychology.”

Boy psychology: do either of these candidates really want to be President? Why, at age 79, does Biden still work his ass off to become President but not take his foot off the emergency brake? And was Trumpus just flat out daring Bob Woodward way back in February to out him as an unrepentant, serial liar with no vestige of human empathy and not even any concern for the implications of the pandemic and the economic depression on his own chances for re-election?

How do we resolve the obvious contradiction between the obvious Republican plans to steal the election and my speculations about Trumpus’ equally obvious desire to be caught and punished? In practical terms it hardly matters, but I insist that what may be true on one level of consciousness is often balanced by its opposite on a more unconscious level.

But also again, I have to say that in terms of practical results, there is no equivalence here. Regardless of his unconscious preferences, Trumpus doesn’t have to do anything to win. Biden must act. He must wholeheartedly embrace the Green New deal, the Latino voting block, and most especially, Medicare For All, or he – and we – will lose.

Read Part Eleven here.

Let’s look at developments in a half dozen themes that I’ve been emphasizing.

The corruption of the Republicans continues unabated. Each day brings new revelations. Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe announced that he would be scaling back election security briefings. Trumpus encouraged North Carolina residents to vote twice. He doubled down on his praise of white supremacist violence while repeating the old fascist strategy of claiming that his opponents will do (cheat in the election) exactly what he will certainly do.

Liberals were shocked. Shocked!

There was some good news. The ACLU, citing investigations by Greg Palast, blocked the wildly inaccurate and deeply racist “Crosscheck” voter purge program in at least one state, Indiana. And Markey defeated Kennedy in Massachusetts, proving that Nancy Pelosi’s endorsement is the kiss of death among young progressives.

But Palast offered some terrifying speculations, which I summarize:

Unless Biden wins in a clear and early landslide, the election may not be determined on November 3^rd but during the following week, when far-right gangs disrupt vote count centers. If they are successful in enough places, they will prevent several states from certifying the count, and neither candidate will receive the necessary electoral college votes. Then, according to Amendment 12 of the Constitution, the election will be decided in the House, with each state getting one vote. Since Republicans have majority delegations in 26 states, Trumpus wins. Is this scenario too far-fetched? It can’t happen here? Well it already has, in Florida in 2000, under the direction of Roger Stone.

The corruption of the Democrats: Unfortunately, another progressive, Alex Morse, lost, due in large part to an anti-gay backlash set in motion by the College Democrats of the University of Massachusetts. Yes, you read that correctly. University. Democrats. Massachusetts. Meanwhile, Biden touted Rick Snyder’s endorsement, which one writer called his “most toxic endorsement yet”.

Liberal innocence: More polls and graphs such as these regularly show that Biden’s lead among likely voters remains strong. May it be so. But as usual, they never mention anything about Republican dirty tricks, in other words, whether those votes will actually be counted. Yet another memoir by a former Trumpus insider appeared, from Michael Cohen. And yet again, liberals – and liberal journalists – were shocked. Literally: Alternet’s headline was Shocking details from Michael Cohen tell-all book revealed after Washington Post obtained a copy!(my exclamation point).

We have been here before. Just as we’d like to think that Biden’s earnest call to our better natures would be enough to motivate most people, so we’d like to think that in some mythic America, the prospect of being shamed by the god-fearing citizenry would be enough to restrain the behavior of all but the most sociopathic of criminals. We would really like to think that sociopaths, assassins, fear mongers and organized crime bosses don’t run our government. Cohen’s book will have no effect on Trumpus’ base, since only liberals are likely to read it.  

The continuing revelations (and, sure as the sun rises, they will continue to continue) of Republican corruption are not impacting the election itself because shaming no longer works. Corruption has been normalized. After five years it’s quite clear Trumpus supporters don’t care. Some so desperately believe in him that they accept his regular denials and accusations at face value; others actually seem to boast of his crimes, interpreting them (Q-style) as proof of his actions against the Deep State.

There was a brief time when convincing citizens to act – to do the right thing – by appealing to their sense of shame actually worked. Shaming the public into supporting the civil rights movement was a successful political strategy from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, when the economy was growing, White people still had positive if patronizing attitudes toward Black people and post-assassination cynicism had not yet alienated millions from civic engagement. For more on this issue, read my essays The Civil Rights Movement in American Myth and John F. Kennedy and America’s Obsession With Innocence.

As recently as the last years of the Obama administration, the phrase “Don’t shoot! Hands up!” – a clear acknowledgement of the legal, non-violent, non-threatening nature of anti-racist activism – had no effect on either police behavior or right-wing attitudes toward people of color. Police murders of unarmed POC continued at the same rates, not only because murderous cops were rarely held accountable, but also because they had grown up in a shame-less culture, in which conservative politicians and preachers had laid the groundwork for pride in hatred. When Trumpus arrived to give haters permission he was merely stating directly what his predecessors had been hinting at since the days of Barry Goldwater.

Here is the mythological truth: Every year, America proudly rewards its security forces for sacrificing thousands of scapegoats, as I write here: now, the only people who react negatively to new proof that American democracy no longer works (if it ever did) are the same innocent liberals who have been continually shocked by Trumpus for five years.

In lectures or radio interviews, I often ask a trick question: When did you lose your innocence? After the usual replies (JFK, 9/11, etc), I ask, When did you lose it again? In this context, to be shocked is the painful experience of having one’s cherished beliefs demolished. But when innocence is the foundation of a belief system, when a culture no longer offers its young people the initiatory rituals that affirm their unique gifts and permanently erase their childhood innocence, people live lives of denial and perpetual childishness. When a tear in the fabric of the myth of innocence appears, it quickly closes back up, and each loss of innocence, no matter how old we are or how often it happens, feels like the first time.

The Military-Industrial Complex reaffirmed, even after the news of Trumpus’ insults about American war dead (“losers and suckers”), that the generals and the arms merchants would thrive under either party.

Over 100 former staff members for Senator John McCain endorsed Biden, writes Scott Horton, “Explicitly Because He’s Worse on War”. Venezuela’s opposition leader Juan Guaido (who had received a bipartisan standing ovation at the last State of the Union address) said he is counting on U.S. plans to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro no matter who wins the election. Thirty-four Democrats with military-intelligence backgrounds won their primaries for the House, as well as three Senate candidates.

The stunningly incomprehensible decision to ignore Latinx Democrats: No news is bad news. The DNC lurched on after the convention with no apologies or explanations. This is political suicide, plain and simple. In February a poll indicated that 73% of Latinxs said they were “certain” to vote in November. However, after Biden secured the nomination, that number dropped to 60%. It has rebounded somewhat since then, but not up to the earlier figure. Two-thirds of them will support Biden – if they can find places to vote.

Boy psychology: do either of these candidates really want to be President? Political scientists accurately describeTrumpus’s fear mongering as an ugly but rational strategy going back to the Jim Crow years. But his hate mongering and worse, his violence mongering are unique in presidential politics, representing a wild gamble that they will garner him enough support. In conjunction with voter suppression, computer fraud and Biden’s mistakes it could work. But this is no monolithic universe; what may appear to be appropriate (if evil) realpolitik at one level of motivation may at another level be deliberate, adolescent provocation, upping of the ante, and ultimately a cry for help. Stop me!

Meanwhile, a pre-convention poll claimed that 56% of likely Biden supporters are voting for him because “He Is Not Trump,” proof that he still hasn’t offered anything positive, let alone progressive, to the 100 million other people who, once again, probably won’t vote. I doubt if, during the convention, appeals to our better nature – and moderate Republicans – changed much of that reality.

Once again, we have to wonder not simply whether the Democrats are repeating the failed strategy of appealing to suburbanites while shunning progressives, but whether this guy really wants to get elected. If we can agree that four more years of Trumpus would certainly destroy our last chance to prevent global environmental collapse, not to mention a 7-2 Republican majority on the Supreme Court, then we can at least wonder whether the future of humanity depends on Joe Biden’s unconscious desire for failure. Ralph Nader writes:

Biden should be thirty points ahead in the polls against the delusional, falsifying, lawless, selected occupant of the White House…Instead, Biden’s lead is in single digits and he is having a hard time getting the offensive Trump on the defense.

Trumpus goes low, doing everything possible to provoke violence and arouse his base (the predatory imagination manipulating the paranoid imagination), praising the Kenosha killer, while Biden’s strategy of going high would be a fine strategy in a normal world. But idealistic language without actual progressive policies sounds insincere, because it is. People are not stupid if they are apathetic about voting, and treating them as if they are only makes things worse.

Let’s face it: Biden is uninspiring in both style and substance, while Trumpus makes crazy people crazier and more likely to act. Michael Moore, who was so enthusiastic about Kamala Harris only a month ago, is now saying that that “enthusiasm for Trump is off the charts” in the swing states and he’s mentioning polls indicating that the race is tightening. Whom to believe?

I hope he’s wrong, but he was right four years ago.

Do polls (other than exit polls) tell us anything at all? Why haven’t we heard of polls that ask, If you are not planning to vote, would you change your mind and vote Democratic if Biden announced that he is supporting Medicare For All? One reason we haven’t is that polls question likely voters, but this begs the question. To me, it’s the elephant in the national living room, and it’s growing larger by the day.

One hundred million non-voters, the majority of whom are young, have no health insurance and are one paycheck away from being evicted (if they have jobs at all). If one tenth of them voted, the result would be a Democratic landslide. WTF?

Biden’s one chance, and one only, to win: Trumpus’ incendiary language is effective, and Biden’s isn’t. Still, I predict that Biden would succeed – again, if this were a normal election without the certainty of massive fraud. For what it’s worth, here are two predictions:

To win, Biden will need a solid ten-point lead in most of the battleground states on election day. And even if he does, voter fraud will make it quite close, the Dems won’t flip the Senate, and Trumpus, at the very least, will contest the results.

OR: Biden announces his support of MFA, makes it the core of his campaign and enters election day with a lead so huge that no Republican dirty tricks can change it.

One hundred million non-voters. Biden still has time to motivate them. If he doesn’t, well, I guess he’ll get what he really wants, and deserves.

In September of 2020, with the pandemic, the economy, the racial violence, the election (see my essay, “A Mythologist Looks at the 2020 Election”)  and (for Californians) the forest fires on our minds, it’s easy for us to shunt thoughts of America’s post-World War Two foreign policy to the back of our minds. But when we bring them to the forefront, we remember some of the statistics that remind us of the astonishing and heartbreaking seventy-five years of waste and cruelty, including the bombing of some forty countries. 

Now, and for several decades, the U.S. military budget has amounted to two-thirds of the nation’s discretionary budget.  It is half the world’s budget, greater than the next ten countries combined. 

Such estimates, by the way, are very conservative. When all aspects of military spending are added in, including the Department of Energy’s nuclear-weapons programs, the Departments of State, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security, various anti-terrorism programs, foreign military assistance (most of which goes to Israel and Egypt) and interest paid on the national debt (much of which pays for past wars), the true cost of the American empire, supported equally by Democrats  and republicans, is well over a trillion dollars per year.

And we may well be forced to conclude that much of our domestic political drama is really a distraction from this much larger moral tragedy.

And when either presidential candidate dismisses Medicare For All, even during this pandemic, with “Nice idea, but how are you going to pay for it?” he is quite deliberately avoiding this elephant in the living room, and assuming that the mainstream media will as well.

Our beliefs about wealth and poverty are the absolute foundations of our domestic issues. But the same thinking has undergirded our foreign policies – and the public’s acquiescence to them – since the very beginning. This is how white Americans have always resolved the contradiction of living in a society that raises freedom and equality to the highest values while simultaneously enslaving millions, murdering other millions and consuming vast areas of the Earth and its resources. From the Indian wars and the Mexican War to Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, to whatever “October surprise” madness Trumpus may be planning before the election, it has always been composed of a series of seven basic principles:

1 – We are good, pure and innocent, and we always come to help those in need.

2 – We become violent only when we are provoked, or to defend freedom.

3 – We hurt / kill / enslave / take the resources of other people or nations.

4 – We can only do this if they were evil. They, the victims, are to blame.

5 – Therefore, they must have acted or planned to attack us. We are the actual victims.

6 – Therefore, we are justified in having attacked them, and we are not accountable.

7 – Ultimately, we do it for their own good.

Chapters Seven and Eight of my book explain how the mythic narratives grew about a people without land who settled a “land without people” in the name of freedom, and how a nation of radical individualists became a nation with a unified, divine mandate. Since those times, Americans have been “coming to help” in countless places – whether asked or not. And always, as the missionaries to Hawaii were described, many of those who came to do good ended up doing quite well for themselves. This is the particularly American genesis of empire.

Skeptics will argue that in this regard America empire is not exceptional. Indeed, apologists for other empires such as the British have often strayed into this territory. The Nazis claimed that Poland had provoked them into defending themselves (by invading Poland). Chroniclers of the medieval Crusades justified their pillaging of Muslim lands (and raping of Jewish communities on the way) with talk of divine motivation. But such language fell most easily upon white, Anglo-Saxon American ears because by the second half of the 19th century, we already had a 200-year legacy of believing in our good intentions.

At that time, American intellectuals (and only in America) twisted the idea of natural selection into “Social Darwinism” by falling back upon Puritan justifications for wealth and poverty and asserting that America’s wealth, just like the wealth of its ruling classes, proved its virtue.

Exploitation and elimination of the weak, they claimed, were natural processes; and competition produced the survival of the fittest. The next step was to infer that only the affluent were worthy of survival. These gatekeepers were, of course, merely restating the Calvinist view of poverty as a condition of the spirit. Life was a harsh, unsatisfying prelude to the afterlife, redeemable only through discipline. Deeply religious and idealistic people passionately argued that the suffering of the poor was a good thing because it provoked remorse and repentance, and that political movements to relieve their condition were unnatural. Secular apologists, meanwhile, simply substituted the word “nature” for “God.”

Social Darwinism was one of the primary justifications for colonialism, at least among Americans. The intense and unrelenting competition for survival had produced a new human type, the Anglo-Saxon, who alone had the moral sense to accept the White Man’s burden. Such men were uniquely qualified to help civilize those who couldn’t improve themselves without the prolonged tutelage of enlightened colonial rule. For a detailed description of how generations of white American intellectuals have justified this nonsense, see The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter. These notions, tempered with superficially idealistic verbiage, have remained at the core of America’s foreign policy right up to the present, because they express the essence of our mythic narratives.

When some future American President decides that it will be in his political interests to invade Venezuela, he will justify his criminal actions by resorting to this essentially mythological language. As Noam Chomsky has said, “If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”

But Social Darwinism evokes a profound anxiety that mirrors the anxiety at the very core of Puritanism: how can I really know if I am among the elect? If the Other actually has the same rights, skills and privileges that I have and the Other is evil, what does that make me? It should be no surprise that the issues of gay marriage and immigration, not to mention equal rights for Black people, have provoked such vicious reactions in our time.

When social change periodically creates threats to our sense of identity, as it did after the Civil War and during each of our regular economic crises, white Americans typically coalesce around our most core principles and attitudes. We fall back upon the tried-and-true notions of knowing who we, as we would like to think of ourselves, but negatively: in terms of the Other. We are not the Other.

But the unapologetic rants about entitlement and poverty of charlatans such as Jerry Falwell and clowns like Herman Cain (both quoted in Part One of this essay) seem somewhat new, or at least since the political backlash that brought Ronald Reagan to power 35 years ago. Why does the media now give them such attention? Perhaps only because the public’s disgust with Trumpus is forcing them to do so.

Demonization of the poor continued unabated in the 2016 election and beyond. Alice Miranda Ollstein writes of Paul Ryan’s rhetoric:

For several years — as he has pushed policies to slash Medicaid funding, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and other social programs — Ryan has repeatedly referred to poverty as a “culture problem” among people in “inner cities,” where “generations of men [are] not even thinking about working.”…His most recent poverty plan takes a punitive stance, punishing people who can’t find a job by a certain mandated deadline by reducing their benefits.

When old myths break down, writes historian Richard Slotkin, ideology generates “a new narrative or myth…to create the basis for a new cultural consensus.” Or we could say that (with the help of the corporate media) older, previously de-legitimated narratives resurface into the public discourse because they still retain their emotional attraction, and because white men need, with increasing desperation, something to confirm their sense of identity.

We have been seeing a resurgence of this “blame the victims” rhetoric because the shared consensus that upheld our social fabric of optimism, perpetual growth, technology, white privilege and imperial influence began to collapse during the 1960s. Or, as I have written, cracks have appeared and continued to widen in the great edifice of the myth of American innocence. These cracks have brought into question most of the assumptions that Americans – certainly most white male Americans – have lived by and continue to identify themselves by. And at some deep level, we all know that if any one of those assumptions is called into question, then the whole house of cards may collapse. If it does, we know that it will reveal the vast pit of self-hatred, anxiety and grief that lies just below consciousness, that we normally avoid thinking about with our optimism, our consumerism, our addictions, our fundamentalism – and our race hatred.

It’s very difficult to determine how many people of color we kill, writes Michael Harriot:

The reason the number remains a mystery is that law enforcement agencies, politicians, lobbyists and the…NRA have gone to extraordinary measures to prevent government agencies from counting how many people die at the hands of law enforcement agencies. Even when organizations attempt to count the number of people who die in police encounters, the data is sometimes flawed and often incomplete…In 2014, for the first time in history, the Obama administration tasked the FBI with counting how many arrest-related deaths happened that year. When the Bureau of Justice Statistics issued its report, it found that the FBI had been under-reporting the number by an average of 545 deaths per year.

The estimates range from the Washington Post’s preposterous and insulting statement that “police fatally shot 13 unarmed Black men in 2019”  to multiple sources which agree that cops, jailers and vigilantes kill well over a thousand people per year (or three per day), over half of whom are POCs and about 20% of whom are unarmed.

And this creates a profound anxiety, an anxiety that mirrors that at the very core of Puritanism: how can I really know if I am among the elect? If the Other actually has the same rights, skills and privileges that I have and the Other is evil, what does that make me? It should be no surprise that the issues of gay marriage and immigration have provoked such vicious reactions in our time.

America is really good at this, because our mythic narratives, our electronic entertainment, our politicians and our preachers have consistently told us not only that bad guys get what they deserve, but also that if people – at least POC – get the punishment that they deserve, then they must be bad.

Even through the Reagan years and beyond, white rage had been restrained, at least in political rhetoric, if not in policy and police behavior, despite the constant fear-mongering. For Terrorist Fearmongers, It’s Always the Scariest Time Ever

But Trumpus gauged the new rise of white victimhood and rode it to power not only by evoking fear of POCs and Muslims, but also by using previously unacceptable language to even blame victims of mass shootings  and rape survivors for their own misery.

…if the attack on Dr. (Christine Blasey) Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement… – Trumpus

The President’s words have enabled white supremacists across the country – especially among the police and right-wing vigilantes – to justify their undiluted violence, where the vilest of the victim-blaming is reserved for POCs, most especially those whom they have murdered. From well before Trayvon Martin to beyond Jacob Blake (there have already been others), prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges and right-wing media habitually justify the fate of a police shooting by dredging up negative details about his or her life prior to the incident.

“You are using his past to determine whether the officers were right?” Quinyetta McMillon, the mother of Alton Sterling…said in a recent interview. “This has nothing to do with why he was gunned down.”

But in the minds of mythologcally-instructed, 21st century Calvinists, such material, real or not, has everything to do with why cops pull triggers. And as this president’s popularity continues to drop in the polls, we really shouldn’t be surprised even this week to read sickening headlines such as Kenosha Police Chief Blames Protesters for Their Own Deaths, Defends Vigilante Groups or First Man Shot By Kyle Rittenhouse In Kenosha Riot Was A Convicted Pedophile (to be clear, I’ve only seen this accusation in far-right websites, and to be even more clear, it doesn’t freaking matter if it is true).

Expect more of this as November approaches. The myth – and Trumpus’ re-election hopes depend on it. This is the American story and the American psyche. But not every American, not those whose mythologies come from this North American earth.

Representatives of indigenous cultures do not need courses in Depth Psychology to know how fragile such a personality is. If we regard ourselves from their perspective, we may well realize that America is a society primarily composed of – and led by – uninitiated men. At the root of our national identity is the grief and rage of young men who have never been seen and blessed by their elders, who cover up their depression with masks of grandiosity, racial entitlement and easy violence.

We white people insist that we are not the Other, and that we are good, pure and innocent. So whatever happens to the Other, whatever we inflict upon her, must be her own fault. But in our souls, we know very well that this is a 400-year-old projection, and that it really speaks of our own self-image.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the whole American project is that, well below the surface of our egalitarian ideals, our optimism, our heroic and macho posturing and our good intentions, most of us still believe this about ourselves.