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The Metamorphosis Is Nearly Complete: the GOP, Mass Psychosis & Menticide

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About ten days ago, I posted a piece about Liz Cheney that I thought was topical and hopefully interesting.  I worked on it with excitement, and when I read some of the feedback, I found that some people appreciated my attempts at forewarning what may be ahead of us but also that others kind of patted me on the head.  Well, of course we’re at the stage of mass psychosis, they seemed to say.  Try to keep up. 

Whether or not this is an accurate reading, it’s what came across, and my excitement was a bit sapped in the next handful of days.  I had looked forward to working on a follow-up piece, but now I wasn’t sure if what I’d say would be useful or even interesting.  I couldn’t figure out the best angle through which to enter the essay.  What new could I say?  And how could I actually contribute while the story was still relevant?

I figured it out.  The first diary in this series, I basically wrote the piece to put my thoughts in order.  The piece was for an audience, true, but it was also for myself.  So that’s what I’ve resolved to do here.  This part of the series will be about a portion of a quotation that was left off in the first piece.  The portion deals with how the populace transforms when it undergoes the process of mass psychosis.  I mean here to draw parallels between those general exhortations and examples of our contemporary moment, to illustrate the degree of danger in which we find ourselves.

We learned previously that ‘mass psychosis’ is interchangeable with the term ‘totalitarianism’.  Academy of Ideas tells us:

[I]n the modern era, it is the mass psychosis of totalitarianism that is the greatest threat.  ‘Totalitarianism,’ writes Arthur Versluis, ‘is the modern phenomenon of total centralized state power coupled with the obliteration of individual human rights:  in the totalized state, there are those in power, and there are the objectified masses, the victims.’” (Academy of Ideas, “The Manufacturing of a Psychosis:  Can Sanity Return to an Insane World?”, 1:09)

Additionally, ‘mass psychosis’ is synonymous with ‘menticide’, which was the term favored by the medical doctor Joost Meerloo.  So, ultimately, by the transitive property, totalitarianism as a system is one wherein the masses undergo widespread (i.e., shared) psychosis and suffer a corresponding menticide, a condition which allows the minority party in power to consolidate its power base and to rule over these psychically lobotomized subjects: 

When a mass psychosis occurs, the results are devastating.  [Carl] Jung studied this phenomenon thoroughly and wrote that the individuals who make up the infected society become morally and spiritually inferior.  They sink unconsciously to an inferior intellectual level.  (Academy of Ideas, “Is a Mass Psychosis the Greatest Threat to Humanity?”, 3:18)

In a totalitarian society the population is divided into two groups, the rulers and the ruled, and both groups undergo a pathological transformation.  The rulers are elevated to an almost-godlike status, which is diametrically opposed to our nature as imperfect beings who are easily corrupted by power.  The masses, on the other hand, are transformed into the dependent subjects of these pathological rulers and take on a psychologically regressed and child-like status. (Academy of Ideas, “The Manufacturing of a Psychosis:  Can Sanity Return to an Insane World?”, 1:43)

Meerloo continues:

The comparison between totalitarianism and psychosis is not incidental.  Delusional thinking inevitably creeps into every form of tyranny and despotism . . . Evil powers from the archaic past return.  An automatic compulsion to go on to self-destruction develops, to justify one mistake with a new one; to enlarge and expand the vicious pathological circle becomes the dominating end of life . . . This [delusion] starts with the leaders and is later taken over by the masses they oppress. (Academy of Ideas, “The Mass Psychosis and the Demons of Dostoevsky,” 9:35


On the heels of ousting Liz Cheney from her leadership post of the Republican House caucus, members of the House GOP have begun spinning strange tales about how there was no insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, no riot, no rioters, just orderly tourists taking in the sights.  This has infuriated their Democratic counterparts, who were there on the House floor--literally, crouched on the floor--when the building was stormed and Congress had to evacuate to escape harm, or worse.  Those Democrats were there with the GOP members, so they must be baffled as to why the Republicans are gaslighting them and pretending that violence did not occur at the sacking of the Capitol.

The question must come back, ultimately, to why?  Why are these Republicans flat-out lying (and to the faces of their colleagues, who certainly know as well as they do the truth of what transpired January 6th)?  What purpose do these lies fulfill?

These more recent lies spouted by Trump and his allies appear more and more outlandish as time goes on.  The first skyscraper of a whopper is, of course, what the media has called by shorthand “the Big Lie”, that somehow the 2020 election was riddled with fraud, which is what kept Trump from re-assuming the presidency.  This claim has been debunked, declaimed, and decried since November, but especially after culminating in the storming of the Capitol.  But the claim enjoys wide purchase among the Republican rank and file.

Liz Cheney was forced from her leadership role by simply stating that the election was secure and that Trump lost fair and square.  She was the only one of the leadership who openly defied Trump’s narrative about the election and the events that happened in its wake.  Thus, as she was the public symbol of dissent, she had to be excised from leadership.  This excision accomplished two things at once:  first, the leadership would from then on all be Trump allies and all would be reading from the same hymnal; second, by excommunicating Cheney for daring to utter facts, the Trump circle is indicating that no one will be seen as sufficiently loyal to him unless they also either publicly accept his narrative or at least refrain from publicly denying it.  He knows their restraint in the face of this lie ultimately serves as support, as silence is complicity.

The Big Lie becomes converted, then, into an article of faith.  The idea that Trump secretly won the 2020 election becomes the cost of admission to the party, an oath one must undertake.  I’ve written elsewhere about what I term the Trio of Ideas, the three strong, false claims that the Trump team appears to be backing (the Big Lie, the False Flag/Cuddly Coup, Chauvin miscarriage) in the wake of his election loss.  It is the Big Lie, that he somehow was the victor in the 2020 contest, is what gives life to the others and what undergirds the subsequent mental contract Trump has extended to his followers.  For they are now joined together in a cult.

Trump’s following has long been called a cult, if only for the idea of his cult of personality.  While he can clearly be called a polarizing figure, on his side of the aisle he is without question appealing to the masses; he is considered by his admirers to be clever, charismatic, even crafty.  Aspects of his personality draw others to him.  Indeed, it is this tendency that engenders the danger surrounding Trump’s acquisition of power.

Now, however, with this new twist of absolutely denying the reality captured on live television on January 6th, we have these House members claiming that the marauders were peaceful, though we could all see they had malicious intent.  This blatant reality denial is, on the one hand, entirely laughable for those of us outside of the conservative media silo; on the other, though, the outlandishness can be seen precisely as the measure of one’s party devotion:

To announce loudly that you accept the proclamations of the Church of Trump, no matter how false, contradictory, or exaggerated, is to identify yourself as a member of that faith community[.]

With the incorporation of the Big Lie into Trump’s overarching worldview, his constituency has metamorphosized into a full-blown cult.  Their initiation rite is the swallowing whole of this bevy of lies, even as the swallower is aware of the lie during its consumption.  In fact, it’s to Trump’s benefit if the initiate knows about the falsity.

Trump has learned the lesson of previous demagogues: the bigger and more flagrant the untruth, the better to prove the fealty of his Party. After all, it actually demands more loyalty to follow your leader into an absurd conspiracy theory than it does to toe the official line when it doesn’t require a mass suspension of disbelief.

This active acceptance of Trump’s adherents it should hasten the onset of what Meerloo called menticide. By intentionally inhaling a lie, the follower consciously puts aside what they know to be objective reality and instead allows Trump and his emissaries to set up the dimensions of consensus reality.  The follower abdicates any responsibility toward real life and, in exchange, such social abdication provides relief, even contentment.  However, at the same time, that follower forsakes the ability to independently evaluate truth.

Indeed, truth ceases to matter nearly as much as conformity.  Conformity is highly stressed in cult situations, in all manner of custom (e.g., clothing, hairstyle, worn religious symbols, &c), but especially useful for homogeneity is conformity of thought.  In this vein, those who would disturb this illusion of uniformity of thought are viewed as troublemakers, infidels, or worse.  Those dissidents must be cast aside, and this is what has happened with Liz Cheney, whose elevated position in the party’s hierarchy made her apostasy that much more egregious.

In the 1950s, the psychologist Solomon Asch conducted social experiments to test the strength of professed shared belief.  His classic experiment involves a picture of a line which is laid side by side against three other lines, one of which is equal in length.  The subject of the experiment, joined by an attendant group, is asked to indicate which line of the latter three matches the first.  However, before the subject is able to convey this information, every other member of the group (as previously and secretly instructed by the conductors of the experiment) consistently points to the same incorrect choice.  By the time the subject is able to provide input, a significant 37% of the time he or she professes the same incorrect choice as the rest of the group, even though the lengths of the comparative lines are not similar at all and the correct choice is obvious.

The experiment further revealed that this pressure to conform emerges once at least three people all publicly agree on the same (incorrect) consensus reality.  However, once any one person of the group stands out and challenges this groupthink, the illusion is shattered and the pressure to conform dissipates.  In Asch’s experiment, the agreement rate between the subject and the coached group fell to about 5% when there was someone else present that broke the spell.  For the Republicans, Liz Cheney was that messenger, and the party insiders, already loyal to Trump, punished her for it with public shunning and removal of rank.

Excommunicating Cheney accomplishes two things at once.  First, it removes that voice in opposition calling all other party dogma into question.  Second, by such excision, the GOP gatekeepers signal to the breadth of the party that such a fate is due anyone who similarly tests party authority.  It transforms Cheney’s rejection of falsity into the standard of entry:  deny Cheney’s exposé of reality in order to be conferred party membership.

So we are at a precipice, as we witness the inchoate beginnings of the GOP’s emergent cult/party.  It is this hybrid that I hope to explore as a concept, what the formation of such a political chimera means for our culture as well as for our system of government.  As a hybrid, this new entity has the means to attack both of these societal fronts.  This is a unique danger because, at least here in America, we’ve never seen anything like this unfold here.  We need to be especially vigilant, because we don’t know the whereabouts of the landmines.  

My next installation, provided I get the hang of trying to write on some sort of deadline, will explore more about these implications of one of our major political parties can now qualify as a cult, especially with an eye as to how the development into this new state of being might affect how the party behaves, both as a group as well as on an individual level.  It’s my prediction that, within the next six months, we will all witness behavior emanating from the GOP that will be completely foreign and inscrutable, and the only (or one of the only) ways we’ll be able to interpret the actions intelligibly will be through the lens of the GOP operating as a cult. But above and beyond that, I predict that this new entity will use mechanisms of a political party to accomplish its cultish ends.  Therein lies the danger.


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