So what do we do as a society when confronted with a psychotic former leader who’s continuing to spread contagious forms of mental illness among our nation? How do we repair the damage?
So, unfortunately, what I knew in the run up to the 2016 election, that we would be in deep doo doo if we elected a malignant narcissist proved even more true than I knew then. He was much sicker than I knew and our modern political climate was equally sick. So this shared psychosis is the result. "Dr. Bandy X. Lee says, “The treatment is removal of exposure.” So. We need to limit media coverage of their dangerous rhetoric and we need charge the former guy and all of his toadies. Or we are lost. And as we go so will go the world and eventually the human race. We tried moving on over and over again since Nixon. That led us to 1/6. It's now or never, people. QAnon and Trumpism represent not just a local terrorist threat, but an existential threat to the human race.
I think Spencer Ackerman hit it on the nose when he said on this show this week that Bush's choice to respond to 9/11 by attacking Muslims established the path for Trump...
I have believed for years that the future of democracy in the world (not just here in the burning city on a landfill) largely hinges upon a single prospect: The prosecution and imprisonment of Donald J Trump.
Will there be a Vincent Bugliosi of this moment? Justice cannot be a slogan - it is an imperative.
As for mass psychosis, I'll never forget Dr Justin Frank stating that we all have a seed of psychopathy/ sociopathy within us.
It's well understood, given optimal conditions, that any seed will eventually take root in the physical world. I believe the same holds true for our minds. Our current societal conditions appear to be an optimal ecosystem for the shattering of a shared reality.
How’s this for an idea: Calling all aspiring comedians: Come up with a creative, crazy right-wing conspiracy theory. Post it on Facebook. Make it look legit like other conspiracy theory posts. After Facebook is flooded with these, wait for one to go viral and picked up by right wing media. When it does, reveal the hoax and get some publicity. Repeat. Plus: Any of the other conspiracy theories getting toxic can be falsely claimed by a comedian to be their own hoax. The true originator wouldn’t dare out themselves and it’s good enough to scare people away from believing it. Even if this doesn’t work, as long as Facebook is flooded with conspiracy theories self-revealed as a hoax, people think twice about believing everything they read.
This Hartmann Report begs the question of why some are drawn to madness. Hopefully, once we figure out the physiology and neurology of that 3 pounds of mostly fat in our heads we will have answers.
Last century we mapped the human genome---this century it's going to be the human brain. President Obama began the research and development in 2013; it's called the "BRAIN Initiative". With 86 billion neurons to map, computer storage was a problem in the past, but brilliant humans solved that issue. They did it layer by layer, further developing the previous person's work.
Conspiracies are built layer by layer, but so are solutions. The repairs will take time, and we must have reasonable expectations of the outcome. More exposure and accountability please and thank you.
How do we repair the damage? Basically impossible while we have the media such as Fox News etc. I live in a Republican neighborhood. These people are not dumb. They consider themselves to be law and order conservatives. All that they watch is Fox News or similar. They do not see any reporting on bad things that Trump and the Republicans do. They do see Democratic Reps saying to defund the police. Then It is repeated and Fox opinion is drilled into their heads. Fox News gives slanted news, the opinion it wants you to have and then repeats it. On voting rights they are told that millions of illegals are registered to vote. And that you do not have to show ID to register. They believe it because Fox says it. Also repeats it until it is believed. Thus the majority of Republicans believe the Big Lie.
This reminds me of Professor Phillip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect - Understanding How Good People Turn Evil: https://www.lucifereffect.com
"Rather than providing a religious analysis, however, I offer a psychological account of how ordinary people sometimes turn evil and commit unspeakable acts. As part of this account, The Lucifer Effect tells, for the first time, the full story behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, a now-classic study I conducted in 1971. In that study, normal college students were randomly assigned to play the role of guard or inmate for two weeks in a simulated prison, yet the guards quickly became so brutal that the experiment had to be shut down after only six days."
Yep. It's pretty surprising, really, how vulnerable we all are to this. I suspect it goes back to survival strategies involving "notice danger" and "protect the group/tribe" that go back in our DNA to millions of years before we became modern humans. And then every generation some hustler/demagogue comes along to exploit it...
Thom, you are also part of the problem. You fall in line with the Stoic Philosophers (as portrayed in "Star Trek" by the Vulcans and Spock) and with modern psychological beliefs (not science) that emotions must be managed, controlled, and regulated because they drive behavior.
I would like to bring to your attention the disempowering design of you and your viewers' linguistics of emotions. The Republican Propaganda Machine utilizes this linguistics of emotions to “brainwash” their viewers. Unfortunately, this same emotional linguistics is also used to justify current disempowering psychological and pharmaceutical therapies and severely limit their efficacy.
To understand my thesis, you must first understand control theory from an engineering perspective. “Open-loop” control is like the burner on your stovetop. The flame on a gas stove is set at a certain size and left there. “Closed-loop” control is like the oven. The temperature within the oven is used as feedback in a closed-loop process to maintain the desired temperature.
(Note: I have had over 20,000 hits on my websites from researchers from over 70 nations around the world exploring my work. Most notably is China (where I taught industrial management in the 1990's). They have no issues with appropriating ideas that are beneficial to their livelihood.)
The current psychology of emotions uses an open-loop emotional linguistics. This is the same linguistics of emotions first inscribed by Homer in the Iliad nearly 3000 years-ago and which has been used in religious and secular literature ever since and has been uncritically adopted by psychology as science. That is, destructive behavior is believed to be driven by aberrant and dangerous emotions and therefore these emotions must be controlled, even with the use of pharmaceuticals if deemed necessary. Similarly, rhetoric uses emotional fear to control, direct and drive the external behavior of their subjects. This is an open-loop emotional control system.
Whereas in a closed-loop theory of emotional control, emotions are used as feedback to control, direct, and drive an individual’s cognitive behavior which is precipitating the states and changes in the biochemical physiology of their brain and body and drives behavior. Fear, instead of driving an individual’s behavior is used by the individual to re-process their cognitive activities towards those which feel good. An empowered individual, instead of being driven by fearful emotions in an animalistic behavior as desired by our Fascists brethren, uses emotions as an evolved human to re-process, re-frame, and restructure fearful cognitive activities into those that feel better and may, eventually, actually feel good.
This is an introductory comment to bring to your awareness your disempowering emotional linguistics. My full argument can be found in my self-published text, "Emotions-as-Effect and Emotional Control Theory: The Linguistic Semantics of Emotional vs. Cognitive Dysregulation". Symbiotic Psychology Press (17,700 words). This and its application text, Cognitive-Emotional Wisdom, Education, and Training: A Primary and Secondary School Overview. Symbiotic Psychology Press (50,300 words) can be freely downloaded as a PDF at, emotional-evolution.com.
Passionately,
Andrew O. Jackson
If philosophy, religion, and law are ignorant of what drives human behavior and decision-making, how can there be but laws of ignorance and injustice (and disorder, conflict, and crisis)? Justice founded upon falsehood is itself false and unjust.
You also asked today, “When will The Public good become more important than profits?” This psychosis promotes profit-over-people.
Priority of The Public Good will happen only after the oligarch, psychotic, employers are replaced by democratic groups of employees who will ensure a more democratic distribution of profits. This will happen only after The Public of our democratic political system elects politicians who represent The Public and not the oligarchs. Then a People’s Congress can pass laws that enable employees to take control of and democratize our authoritarian economic system. These new laws will promote economic democracy by taxing excessive wealth out of existence and enabling worker unionization that gives unions, and their members/workers, a controlling interest on boards of directors and by enabling the massive creation of employee owned coops where employees decide how profit is democratically distributed.
The People’s government could buy a controlling interest of stocks in Big Oil and Big Pharma, change corporate policy to support the common good by converting to Green energy and negotiating drug prices for The People, and then turn over their controlling shares to the employees to continue the new mission. The People’s government could also encourage the unemployed to create a local coops with other unemployed workers. These former employees would get their entire unemployment compensation as a lump sum to fund the startup costs of the new coop.
We need to democratize our authoritarian economic system so that it protects and empowers our democratic political system and removes psychotic oligarchs from power. Our current profit-over-people, psychotic-oligarch-run, economic system is again trying to remake our democratic political system in their own authoritarian image.
The impact of the psychotic oligarchs like DJT is powered by our profits-over-people economic system. They are using the wealth stolen via our authoritarian economic system to spread their psychosis. Their media helps spread the psychosis because it is good for their bottom line. Disempower the oligarchs by democratizing our economic system with employee-driven unions and coops.
The mass psychosis that most of the world is suffering from is an unquestioning belief in authoritarian capitalism and its imaginary, exaggerated, invisible hand.
Note: These suggestions are mostly my restatement of suggestions provided by Professor Richard Wolff who promotes Democracy at Work, https://www.democracyatwork.info
Blaming others for their own messes, created by selfish schemes lacking self-awareness, is the first knee-jerk reaction of a narcissist. They don't assume personal responsibility for failure because they can't. In their egotistical minds, they can do no wrong because they are better and smarter than everyone else. They have to be. Admitting any perceived weakness no matter how big or small is just not in their psychological makeup unless, of course, it's an insincere ploy (an inside joke) to gain some transactional advantage by merely appearing humble.
Because it's all about appearances. To gain and maintain power, a larger-than-life facade that followers can adulate and swear loyalty to becomes all-important. And like a huge black hole, a malignant narcissist like Trump sucks in the surrounding debris of like-minded haters.
To counteract the dark gravity of Trump, the laws of political and legal physics demand a force greater than Trumpism to break up the momentum that attracts so many other anti-democratic forces, which are growing ever more effective and menacing. The U.S. Congress must step in and require the states to protect the vote and who counts the votes. The leader of the failed coup must face the consequences of his actions and must be held accountable with the heavy hand of justice that reflects the gravity of the crimes, as must all his followers and fellow scoundrels. Otherwise, Jefferson's experiment in democracy is a spectacular fail.
Peter Dinklage produced and narrates a timely docuseries on Netflix called, "How to Become a Tyrant."
So, unfortunately, what I knew in the run up to the 2016 election, that we would be in deep doo doo if we elected a malignant narcissist proved even more true than I knew then. He was much sicker than I knew and our modern political climate was equally sick. So this shared psychosis is the result. "Dr. Bandy X. Lee says, “The treatment is removal of exposure.” So. We need to limit media coverage of their dangerous rhetoric and we need charge the former guy and all of his toadies. Or we are lost. And as we go so will go the world and eventually the human race. We tried moving on over and over again since Nixon. That led us to 1/6. It's now or never, people. QAnon and Trumpism represent not just a local terrorist threat, but an existential threat to the human race.
I think Spencer Ackerman hit it on the nose when he said on this show this week that Bush's choice to respond to 9/11 by attacking Muslims established the path for Trump...
I have believed for years that the future of democracy in the world (not just here in the burning city on a landfill) largely hinges upon a single prospect: The prosecution and imprisonment of Donald J Trump.
Will there be a Vincent Bugliosi of this moment? Justice cannot be a slogan - it is an imperative.
As for mass psychosis, I'll never forget Dr Justin Frank stating that we all have a seed of psychopathy/ sociopathy within us.
It's well understood, given optimal conditions, that any seed will eventually take root in the physical world. I believe the same holds true for our minds. Our current societal conditions appear to be an optimal ecosystem for the shattering of a shared reality.
Good question, now that Bugliosi is passed away. And I love your metaphor of "the burning city on a landfill"! Sadly, it's so true...
How’s this for an idea: Calling all aspiring comedians: Come up with a creative, crazy right-wing conspiracy theory. Post it on Facebook. Make it look legit like other conspiracy theory posts. After Facebook is flooded with these, wait for one to go viral and picked up by right wing media. When it does, reveal the hoax and get some publicity. Repeat. Plus: Any of the other conspiracy theories getting toxic can be falsely claimed by a comedian to be their own hoax. The true originator wouldn’t dare out themselves and it’s good enough to scare people away from believing it. Even if this doesn’t work, as long as Facebook is flooded with conspiracy theories self-revealed as a hoax, people think twice about believing everything they read.
They could start small and work up. There's a human barnacle down in Florida with only 86 neurons. Maybe.
This Hartmann Report begs the question of why some are drawn to madness. Hopefully, once we figure out the physiology and neurology of that 3 pounds of mostly fat in our heads we will have answers.
Last century we mapped the human genome---this century it's going to be the human brain. President Obama began the research and development in 2013; it's called the "BRAIN Initiative". With 86 billion neurons to map, computer storage was a problem in the past, but brilliant humans solved that issue. They did it layer by layer, further developing the previous person's work.
Conspiracies are built layer by layer, but so are solutions. The repairs will take time, and we must have reasonable expectations of the outcome. More exposure and accountability please and thank you.
How do we repair the damage? Basically impossible while we have the media such as Fox News etc. I live in a Republican neighborhood. These people are not dumb. They consider themselves to be law and order conservatives. All that they watch is Fox News or similar. They do not see any reporting on bad things that Trump and the Republicans do. They do see Democratic Reps saying to defund the police. Then It is repeated and Fox opinion is drilled into their heads. Fox News gives slanted news, the opinion it wants you to have and then repeats it. On voting rights they are told that millions of illegals are registered to vote. And that you do not have to show ID to register. They believe it because Fox says it. Also repeats it until it is believed. Thus the majority of Republicans believe the Big Lie.
This reminds me of Professor Phillip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect - Understanding How Good People Turn Evil: https://www.lucifereffect.com
"Rather than providing a religious analysis, however, I offer a psychological account of how ordinary people sometimes turn evil and commit unspeakable acts. As part of this account, The Lucifer Effect tells, for the first time, the full story behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, a now-classic study I conducted in 1971. In that study, normal college students were randomly assigned to play the role of guard or inmate for two weeks in a simulated prison, yet the guards quickly became so brutal that the experiment had to be shut down after only six days."
Yep. It's pretty surprising, really, how vulnerable we all are to this. I suspect it goes back to survival strategies involving "notice danger" and "protect the group/tribe" that go back in our DNA to millions of years before we became modern humans. And then every generation some hustler/demagogue comes along to exploit it...
Thom, you are also part of the problem. You fall in line with the Stoic Philosophers (as portrayed in "Star Trek" by the Vulcans and Spock) and with modern psychological beliefs (not science) that emotions must be managed, controlled, and regulated because they drive behavior.
I would like to bring to your attention the disempowering design of you and your viewers' linguistics of emotions. The Republican Propaganda Machine utilizes this linguistics of emotions to “brainwash” their viewers. Unfortunately, this same emotional linguistics is also used to justify current disempowering psychological and pharmaceutical therapies and severely limit their efficacy.
To understand my thesis, you must first understand control theory from an engineering perspective. “Open-loop” control is like the burner on your stovetop. The flame on a gas stove is set at a certain size and left there. “Closed-loop” control is like the oven. The temperature within the oven is used as feedback in a closed-loop process to maintain the desired temperature.
(Note: I have had over 20,000 hits on my websites from researchers from over 70 nations around the world exploring my work. Most notably is China (where I taught industrial management in the 1990's). They have no issues with appropriating ideas that are beneficial to their livelihood.)
The current psychology of emotions uses an open-loop emotional linguistics. This is the same linguistics of emotions first inscribed by Homer in the Iliad nearly 3000 years-ago and which has been used in religious and secular literature ever since and has been uncritically adopted by psychology as science. That is, destructive behavior is believed to be driven by aberrant and dangerous emotions and therefore these emotions must be controlled, even with the use of pharmaceuticals if deemed necessary. Similarly, rhetoric uses emotional fear to control, direct and drive the external behavior of their subjects. This is an open-loop emotional control system.
Whereas in a closed-loop theory of emotional control, emotions are used as feedback to control, direct, and drive an individual’s cognitive behavior which is precipitating the states and changes in the biochemical physiology of their brain and body and drives behavior. Fear, instead of driving an individual’s behavior is used by the individual to re-process their cognitive activities towards those which feel good. An empowered individual, instead of being driven by fearful emotions in an animalistic behavior as desired by our Fascists brethren, uses emotions as an evolved human to re-process, re-frame, and restructure fearful cognitive activities into those that feel better and may, eventually, actually feel good.
This is an introductory comment to bring to your awareness your disempowering emotional linguistics. My full argument can be found in my self-published text, "Emotions-as-Effect and Emotional Control Theory: The Linguistic Semantics of Emotional vs. Cognitive Dysregulation". Symbiotic Psychology Press (17,700 words). This and its application text, Cognitive-Emotional Wisdom, Education, and Training: A Primary and Secondary School Overview. Symbiotic Psychology Press (50,300 words) can be freely downloaded as a PDF at, emotional-evolution.com.
Passionately,
Andrew O. Jackson
If philosophy, religion, and law are ignorant of what drives human behavior and decision-making, how can there be but laws of ignorance and injustice (and disorder, conflict, and crisis)? Justice founded upon falsehood is itself false and unjust.
Hi Thom
You also asked today, “When will The Public good become more important than profits?” This psychosis promotes profit-over-people.
Priority of The Public Good will happen only after the oligarch, psychotic, employers are replaced by democratic groups of employees who will ensure a more democratic distribution of profits. This will happen only after The Public of our democratic political system elects politicians who represent The Public and not the oligarchs. Then a People’s Congress can pass laws that enable employees to take control of and democratize our authoritarian economic system. These new laws will promote economic democracy by taxing excessive wealth out of existence and enabling worker unionization that gives unions, and their members/workers, a controlling interest on boards of directors and by enabling the massive creation of employee owned coops where employees decide how profit is democratically distributed.
The People’s government could buy a controlling interest of stocks in Big Oil and Big Pharma, change corporate policy to support the common good by converting to Green energy and negotiating drug prices for The People, and then turn over their controlling shares to the employees to continue the new mission. The People’s government could also encourage the unemployed to create a local coops with other unemployed workers. These former employees would get their entire unemployment compensation as a lump sum to fund the startup costs of the new coop.
We need to democratize our authoritarian economic system so that it protects and empowers our democratic political system and removes psychotic oligarchs from power. Our current profit-over-people, psychotic-oligarch-run, economic system is again trying to remake our democratic political system in their own authoritarian image.
The impact of the psychotic oligarchs like DJT is powered by our profits-over-people economic system. They are using the wealth stolen via our authoritarian economic system to spread their psychosis. Their media helps spread the psychosis because it is good for their bottom line. Disempower the oligarchs by democratizing our economic system with employee-driven unions and coops.
The mass psychosis that most of the world is suffering from is an unquestioning belief in authoritarian capitalism and its imaginary, exaggerated, invisible hand.
Note: These suggestions are mostly my restatement of suggestions provided by Professor Richard Wolff who promotes Democracy at Work, https://www.democracyatwork.info
Republican maskholes battle masks in Red states. Political suicide in action. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/republicans-take-to-mask-wars-as-virus-surges-in-red-states/ar-AANdRhe?li=BBorjTa
Blaming others for their own messes, created by selfish schemes lacking self-awareness, is the first knee-jerk reaction of a narcissist. They don't assume personal responsibility for failure because they can't. In their egotistical minds, they can do no wrong because they are better and smarter than everyone else. They have to be. Admitting any perceived weakness no matter how big or small is just not in their psychological makeup unless, of course, it's an insincere ploy (an inside joke) to gain some transactional advantage by merely appearing humble.
Because it's all about appearances. To gain and maintain power, a larger-than-life facade that followers can adulate and swear loyalty to becomes all-important. And like a huge black hole, a malignant narcissist like Trump sucks in the surrounding debris of like-minded haters.
To counteract the dark gravity of Trump, the laws of political and legal physics demand a force greater than Trumpism to break up the momentum that attracts so many other anti-democratic forces, which are growing ever more effective and menacing. The U.S. Congress must step in and require the states to protect the vote and who counts the votes. The leader of the failed coup must face the consequences of his actions and must be held accountable with the heavy hand of justice that reflects the gravity of the crimes, as must all his followers and fellow scoundrels. Otherwise, Jefferson's experiment in democracy is a spectacular fail.
Peter Dinklage produced and narrates a timely docuseries on Netflix called, "How to Become a Tyrant."
https://www.netflix.com/title/80989772