pictureEverything has gone wrong, and everyone is doomed. This is perhaps the greatest and most unrecognized truth of life right now in the United States and much of the rest of the world. The pandemic, eight years of the Trump administration, the distortions, confusion and corruption spread by Silicon Valley, and other looming threats, including climate chaos. We all know this because we are living through it. But our political catastrophe is inseparable from widespread psychological devastation, and maybe we should be saying more about the fact that the public and the private, the political and the personal, are intertwined, or rather that the former are wreaking havoc on the latter.
The wisest people I know recognize that the stresses, cruelty, division, and deviations from the norm of recent years have left them (and everyone else) exhausted and fragile. Less wise, but just as fragile, people either lash out with a sense that it is surely someone else who is in the wrong, or they flee into cults or oversimplified versions where they at least feel in control of what it all means.
Public life affects our private lives. The effects can break our brains and break our hearts. We cannot ignore our conscience. Witnessing so much malice and deliberate destruction, so much injustice, from genocide around the world to terrible injustice at home, affects us. The effects are perhaps best described as moral injury, and veterans groups call it Define “The psychological, social, and spiritual impact of events that occur in significant circumstances and involve a betrayal or violation of one’s deeply held moral beliefs and values.”
Most of us have a sense of what is reasonable and possible, based on what has happened in the past. But we are now lost in a sea of unprecedented events. Never before have we seen such an authoritarian threat in all three branches of the federal government (if you count a former president with dictatorial ambitions, in addition to the Supreme Court and Congress). Never before have we seen such a violent erosion of information and our ability to pay attention to it, thanks to addictive social media and an internet controlled by companies eager to serve up distorted search results and algorithms.
Climate change is a great moral disaster for those who care, a reminder that we are part of a system that is destroying the beautiful tapestry of life on Earth and devastating our beloved species. The new coronavirus has ravaged the world, but it has also affected many more people, about 8 million Many people die each year from breathing air polluted by the burning of fossil fuels, but this is only one aspect of the disaster that is uniquely human.
And yet the pandemic has been devastating. I was surprised that the fourth anniversary of the global coronavirus pandemic was met with almost silence. Apparently, almost no one wants to remember it. Of course, it’s not completely over. People are still getting and dying from this new disease. Trauma, a word used often these days, is an experience that is so devastating that it’s hard to forget and takes over your life. The opposite of trauma is refusing to remember or process the experience, which is just as devastating. In other words, by suppressing the experience, you’re operating with a diminished sense of self and reality.
One of the positive aspects of many kinds of disasters is the sense of shared experience. But with the pandemic, our experiences are vastly different. Some have died, some have lost relatives, some have gone bankrupt, some frontline workers have faced danger or death, some have lost their jobs, and some have suddenly been isolated from the sociality of school or work and from everyday life outside the home. The impacts vary widely depending on a variety of factors, including age, economic status, and family situation. We often hear from teachers and professors that students are having a hard time recovering from two years of isolation and online learning (which often consisted of too little learning and too much time spent online).
It’s hard to imagine how different the COVID-19 pandemic would have been without a man at the helm who has been a major source of divisive misinformation about the virus. In the United States, a major factor in our psyche crisis is four years of the Trump administration, followed by almost four years of Trumpism. When the most powerful people in the country say and do whatever they want with almost no accountability, we descend into incoherence and meaninglessness.
In early 2021, an American flag was flown upside down in front of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s home for several days in an apparent support for the January 6 riots, but Alito refused to back away from issues involving Trump. Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife was an active participant in the riots, also refused to back away or explain the reasons for the riots. no way gift He is embraced by billionaires. The Speaker of the House, an evangelical Christian, came out to support Trump in his criminal trial for hush money to porn stars and election fraud, blasting his conviction and the justice system. The corruption is out in the open, and loyalty to the former president over the rule of law is clear.
In an earlier era, these and dozens of other outrages would have been treated as shocking scandals. But now, each outrage seems to be followed by another, like when Trump had dinner with fossil fuel executives. Asked Trump’s acceptance of $1 billion in campaign contributions in exchange for slashing climate change legislation has been covered with near-complacency, as has the presidential candidate being civilly convicted of rape.
These examples are well known, but perhaps their impact deserves more. Trumpism inspires his supporters with the transgressive boldness that Trump first and best exemplified: that they can say whatever they want, no matter what the truth may be, and can deny or contradict what they say. And if they accumulate enough power, they can break the law with impunity.
Authoritarians want to control not only the economy, the military, the courts, and the media, but also facts, science, history, and meaning itself. To violate the independence of truth and facts and to insist that they are what one wants is to enter the realm of meaninglessness. Authoritarianism is nihilism. As Hannah Arendt put it: Said“Not only is the consistent and total replacement of factual truth with lies so that lies are accepted as truth and truth is denigrated as lies, but our sense of place in the real world is being destroyed, and the category of truth versus falsehood is one of the mental tools used to achieve this end.”
Another danger of our time is that the Internet has isolated us, distracted us, undermined the traditional news media, and created a breeding ground for the spread of hate, misinformation, and propaganda. Loneliness has isolated us from face-to-face contact and placed us in a space where aggressive shouting is normal and emotional honesty is dangerous and rare, where group performance is ubiquitous and dissent is dangerous. Vivek Murthy, the US Surgeon General, said this about the loneliness epidemic: talked It’s all to do with the internet and how it has sucked us in and caused other forms of contact to decline.
That’s my diagnosis. My prescription may be simple: Be kind to one another and remember the suffering we’ve all experienced. Defend the facts with passion. Fight fascism and climate chaos in the way that suits you best (and if you’re lucky, you’ll connect with other good people doing that important work). And know that even if you feel alone, you are not. Millions of people are, and in large part because our world has been reorganized. But diagnosis is only the first step to treatment or healing, and it’s important to just talk about how personal the impact of this chaotic new era is.
