The Delusions of Trumpism and BARXIT — A Peak of Mass Social Psychosis
The 4 Delusions:
1: Personal Values and Conduct
2: Political/Economic Ideology
3: Public/Social Policy
4: Science and Factual Knowledge.
Delusions and Mass Psychosis
Delusions are fixed, fallacious beliefs, consisting of symptoms that, in the absence of organic disease, indicate psychiatric troubles.
There appears to be increasing evidence that large demographic groups in both America and Britain have started showing signs of a form of Mass Psychosis, which has steadily become more readily discernible. Much of the ongoing political and social debate is rooted in an underlying disagreement about what best serves national interests and individual lives, is it promoting the common good, or serving self-interest?
Psychosis: “A severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality”. [oxforddictionaries.com/definition/psychosis]
Delusion: “An idiosyncratic belief or impression maintained despite being contradicted by reality or rational argument, typically as a symptom of mental disorder”. [en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/delusion]
“Delusions are fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence. Their content may include a variety of themes (e.g., persecutory, referential, somatic, religious, grandiose). The distinction between a delusion and a strongly held idea is sometimes difficult to make and depends in part on the degree of conviction with which the belief is held despite clear or reasonable contradictory evidence regarding its veracity”. [5th Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)]
Two brilliant, iconic writers, Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of this type of Mass Psychosis and curiously, mention of those names is most likely to give rise to predictable levels of anger and contempt from those most susceptible to behaving in the manner described below.
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951, Ref. 1).
In particular, Hannah Arendt’s insights into an increasingly distant and historic mass psychosis that gripped Central Europe for a few decades in the first half of the last century now seem perfectly apt to describe our present time of alternative facts and information overload.
“The battle of competing beliefs in a person can easily be settled by falling in line with what is most practical or what they most desire to be the case. Sometimes, we call this wishful thinking. Sartre called it living in ‘bad faith’ and thought it was very much part of human reality.
It is well demonstrated that those who have a higher opinion of themselves often fare better and become more successful than those who are inclined to be modest. In times of crisis, they may fall back onto their capacity for self-flattery and self-reassurance, using bombastic and self-aggrandising tactics. It would not be hard to illustrate this contention with many examples from the past three years in British politics.”
It is becoming increasingly clear the internet is influencing delusional thinking, at least from the perspective of psychiatry. For example, a relatively new phenomenon, the “Truman Show Delusion” has emerged, consisting of the belief that one is constantly being filmed for a reality TV show (Ref. 5).
The ubiquity of technological themes among delusions does not necessarily mean that technology or the internet causes people to become delusional however, rather that such delusions are merely drawn from and echo popular cultural themes. However, if delusions are just by-products of popular culture, what makes them pathological?
Normal human beings believe in many things for which evidence and counter-evidence are lacking, such as whether or not God or an afterlife exist. It can therefore be difficult to assess levels of delusion, so in the absence of objective evidence, psychiatrists often assess this based on how much a belief differs from popular opinion, with the most readily identifiable delusions being the most preposterous, implausible and difficult to share, but which are nevertheless held with extreme conviction. Such beliefs often have a self-referential quality.
A belief which is increasingly able to be shared detracts from its delusionality, especially when objective evidence is lacking, but the internet has created a space for false, unreliable information and unsubstantiated opinion to masquerade as objective evidence, even when good evidence to the contrary exists. Internet hoaxes abound and online information is replete with subjective bias and incendiary commentaries, thus laying the groundwork for delusional thinking.
It is increasingly the case that the way information is consumed can also lead to unwarranted levels of conviction associated with beliefs. People tend to access information that conforms to their own belief systems, ignoring or rejecting the remainder and sharing within homogenous groups of like-minded individuals most likely to agree, thus creating “echo chambers.”. This is an online demonstration of the brain’s inherent tendency for “confirmation bias and there is a tendency in some groups to avoid exposure to different viewpoints, limiting learning potential along with the opportunity for critical feedback that might temper unrealistic beliefs.
In addition, searching for information on the internet tends to inappropriately boost “cognitive self-esteem,” inflating confidence about what is thought to be known well beyond what is actually known. The internet can become almost a portable “one-way transactive memory bank”, providing the false impression that information is contained inside minds, rather than simply accessible online, an effect known as “The Google Delusion.”
Such biases are built into the online programs that we use online. Google searches, Facebook feeds, and Amazon recommendations all tailor information to perceived personal preferences, effectively “showing us what we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see, equivalent to a narrowing of exposure to online information to being trapped inside a “filter bubble”.
The shift of news and media to the internet years ago widened the river of accessible information, which created muddied waters that contain unconventional beliefs based on little evidence alongside more reliable, fact-checked information. With biased brains operating in online echo chambers and filter bubbles, our convictions about our personal ideas, which have always included a range of unconventional and false beliefs, have soared, which has resulted in a kind of folie à mille.
An ideology has held sway in Britain and America for decades that the primary pursuit of self-interest best serves the wider public interest, personal success and the pursuit of dreams and objectives Greed, self-centeredness and materialism have become regarded as a holy trinity of public and private conduct, but these attitudes seem to be generating a growing “social psychosis.
Both societies appear to have started living through growing, massive delusions about new global realities and how to deal with them effectively, which is highly dangerous for society and our personal lives. These are not delusions in the clinical sense of the word. The internet does not make individuals mentally ill or psychotic. The internet itself is wired to make confirmation bias even more likely, potentially hiding information that might dampen our convictions and give us a healthy dose of cognitive flexibility and the ability to take on other people’s viewpoints.
The social psychosis that has taken root across political, economic and social landscapes appears to contain delusions within four areas (Ref. 2):
Delusion 1: Personal Values and Conduct;
Narrow self-interest and self-absorption equate to a successful, stable life. by defining psychological health in terms of giving primacy to self-interest in careers and personal relationships. However, even when long term social conditioning through such values and behaviour fall short of narcissism, this invariably ends badly if conflict or loss appear and the intrinsic need to support a larger purpose is ignored due to excessive over-reliance upon one’s own needs and desires.
This values breakdown became reflected by an era of “get-rich-quick” and “something-for-nothing”, but in a world where everyone has access to everything, values matter more than ever. Serious problems develop such as a decline in education standards, reduced competitiveness and infrastructure conditions, an over-dependence on hydrocarbons for life and developing climate change. The dangers inherent lie in an expectation that “all solutions must be painless” and the problem of having no sense of having to sacrifice or postpone gratification. These values are also undermined by reactive fears of the “other;” the person who’s different from me and may take from me what should be “mine”.
Delusion 2: Political/Economic Ideology
A common political/economic delusion is that it’s possible to cut deficits without both tax increases and spending cuts, and also wage expensive wars without some kind of sacrifice in our way of life. In this delusion, Political right-wingers denounce Keynes’ views, despite the fact that Keynesian theory is universally embraced and given this contradiction, this sort of denunciation has a flat-earth feel to it. Keynes described more or less precisely what happened: the financial crisis caused a spiral of falling demand, investments and employment and a sudden rise in savings among anxious consumers accelerated the decline, yet the delusion that non-government action would help persists. The alternative is that “the government can do nothing, so human misery will continue.
Delusion 3: Public/Social Policy
Essentially, this is the delusion that government is bad for you, unless of course it has organised tax cuts for you. This false portrayal of the “badness” of government, per se, pointing out that the Republicans are mired in a delusion about American history. He writes that our history is not just about limited government, but about “energetic governments that used a fairly aggressive elected governmental power to promote growth and social mobility. Leaders have treated government as “a useful tool when used judiciously and a dangerous menace when it gets out of control. The issue is not whether government is big or not; it’s a means, not an end.
The growing wealth gap is dangerous. The top-earning 20% of Americans receive roughly 50% percent of all income generated in the US. The last time wealth was concentrated this much at the top was just before the Great Depression of the 1930s A high concentration of wealth at the top hurts everyone, and the inevitable result is slower economic growth and an economy increasingly susceptible to booms and busts.” Yet the delusion persists that this gap is somehow good policy. If all government action is automatically dismissed as quasi-socialist, then there is no need to think.
Delusion 4: Science and Factual Knowledge.
The delusion here is that a society can progress — or even hold it’s own, by embracing an anti-science position and glorifying ignorance. The delusion consists of the belief that denying scientific evidence or knowledge of facts in general is a good basis for making decisions that affect the public. Whether in the halls of Congress, in the media or on Boards of Education, the delusion of the anti-science/pro-ignorance crowd have increasing influence and impact, as polls indicate. It includes denial of evolution, rejection of the evidence for human-created rise of carbon emissions that creates ongoing climate change, and a general embrace of ignorance as a virtue; that it trumps the usefulness of empirical facts.
Psychosis is a mental state or disorder where a diminished sense of reality which may subsequently lead to delusions are demonstrated. If these become shared at a larger scale they can be difficult to recognise. Individuals may share a mass delusion without being psychotic, but the social psychosis itself intrinsically is. Proposals for dealing with social, political and global realities might be flawed from the start if based on delusional thinking and can lead to increasingly destructive outcomes.
An internal battle between competing beliefs can easily be settled by falling in line with what is most practical or most desired to be the case, sometimes referred to as wishful thinking. Sartre called this living in ‘bad faith’ (mauvaise foi), the habit some people have of deceiving themselves into thinking they do not have the freedom to make choices for fear of the potential consequences. By choosing safe, easy, default ‘choices’ and failing to recognise the multitude of available alternatives, one may become at the mercy and ultimately a victim, of circumstance, thus more akin to an object than a conscious human, or in Sartrean terminology, more akin to a ‘being–in–itself’ than a ‘being–for–itself’. People may pretend to themselves that they do not have the freedom to make choices by pursuing pragmatic concerns and adopting social roles and value systems that are alien to their nature. However, to do so is in itself choosing and so acknowledging conscious human freedom .Sartre thought this was very much part of human reality.
Individuals with a high opinion of themselves often become more successful than those inclined to be modest. In times of crisis they tend to fall back onto a capacity for self-flattery and self-reassurance using bombastic and self-aggrandising tactics. It would not be hard to illustrate this contention with many examples from the past three years in British and American politics.
The current wave of social psychosis and delusional thinking may last a few years but is destined to fade. Prior to the current thrashings of an old patriarchal order, there was a growing recognition of interconnection, coupled with the embrace, particularly by the young, of values and conduct serving the common good. These shifts are steadily if slowly becoming increasingly visible in all sectors of society. They include the impact of diversity; near-majority support for unconventional relationships and sexual orientation; acceptance of non-conventional definitions of family; a rising business model combining profit with social benefit; the view that empathy, now known to be hard-wired, should drive personal behaviour and public policy and career paths based on the impact they enable you to have on something larger than personal power and recognition. The peak of the harsh reaction to this has been a mass psychosis phenomenon, which approached fast, but things can only improve after that peak, “once they have gone “.
References
1. Arendt, H. (1951), “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, 2nd Edition [1958], Meriden Books.
www.azioniparallele.it/images/materiali/Totalitarianism.pdf
2. Psychology Today (2010), “A Growing “Social Psychosis” Clashes With Serving The Common Good”, 3rd October 2010.
3. Outre Monde (2011), “Jean-Paul Sartre on Bad Faith“, 29th March 2011.
outre-monde.com/2011/03/29/jean-paul-sartre-on-bad-faith/
4. Psychology Today (2016), “Does the Internet Promote Delusional Thinking?”, 25th January 2016.
www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-unseen/201601/does-the-internet-promote-delusional-thinking
5. Vice (2016), “Unwrapping the ‘Truman Show Delusion’, Where You Believe You’re Being Watched By the World”, 31st August 2016.
www.vice.com/en_uk/article/jmkp44/truman-show-delusion
6. Hudsonvalleyone (2017), “How a 66-year-Old Work of Political Theory Can Help Explain Our Times”, 1st February 2017.
hudsonvalleyone.com/2017/02/01/hannah-arendt-origins/
7. Wehner, P. (2018), “Why People are Wired to Believe What they Want to Believe”, 14th May 2018.
Knight Foundation (2018), “Trust, Facts and the Post-Truth Political Moment”. p.17.
8. Byline Times, “Brexiter Psychosis: Delusions, Self Deception and Britain’s Political Disorder”, 7th May 2019.
