Corruptive Knowledge: American Conservatism, Q Anon, The Shadow, and The Necronomicon.

A few thoughts recently occurred to me that I wanted to follow through. I’m highly concerned at the state of our nation, and the clinician in me keeps trying to conceptualize diagnosis and treatment of the destructive ideologies that have served to empower such disturbing levels of hate and ignorance in our country. In analyzing the unique perspective of American political conservatism, I’d like to focus on the theme of “corruptive knowledge.” In this post I’ll be talking about the American conservative mindset at length. When I use the term “conservative,” I am referring primarily to those that espouse socially conservative opinions but I’m aware that social and economic conservatism in this country have merged into a single ideology and cannot be easily separated.

The following argument rests on what may perhaps sound like a radical proposition: that the conservative mindset is akin to a kind of willful ignorance. This does not mean that conservatives are unintelligent or lack capacity for insight, but that they are engaging in an at least semi-conscious attitude of denial toward realities that may make them uncomfortable. I understand that many will see this as a biased or partisan position; however, I believe that America needs to come to a reckoning concerning certain uncomfortable truths about its ideologies and I can support this position rationally. The plain, objective, verifiable and scientific truth is that we know that the “War on Drugs” was a failure (gauging by the rise of drug use and addiction) that COVID-19 is a real and deadly threat, that conscious life does not begin at conception, that climate change is a very real danger to the entire human race, and that Donald Trump lost the most recent election. The above are facts, not opinions, and it behooves us as responsible citizens to stop treating them like ideological preferences. And while these are only a handful of political stances, they are heavily represented in The Republican Party and may constitute tenants of belief for conservatives. As disinformation and authoritarianism threaten the existence of an American democracy, it is becoming clearer and clearer that we cannot afford to mince words about political truths that threaten the livelihood and safety of all American citizens.

 The conservative mindset prioritizes feelings of comfort and ethical superiority above facts or logic. Politics in this country have ceased to be addressed on a rational basis; emotions and beliefs are now much more central now. At this point, we have all witnessed firsthand that rational arguments and scientifically verified facts do not make a dent in delusional political beliefs. When a conservative person is presented with evidence that contradicts their beliefs, their immediate and unconscious reaction is to resist it as an attack on their very person. Considering evidence in an unbiased manner is not part of how they interact with the world so a reasoned and rational approach based on presenting evidence is fruitless. In their book Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest, professors of political science Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins come to the conclusion that “Consumers of conservative news media and think-tank reports are exposed to a steady flow of content that further promotes that perspective.” Recently, this process is ramping up even further in the exodus of faithful viewers of Fox News to fringe outlets such as One America News Network and Newsmax due to Fox’s failure to support the baseless accusation that the recent presidential election was rigged in favor of Joe Biden.

As what I am proposing falls under the category of what Jung would call a mass projection of The Shadow, I’d like to focus on how conservatives view liberals; their perceived enemies or “opposites.” The conservative view of the individual liberal or progressive is marked by conflicting concepts; that they have access to much more education and knowledge than the average conservative but that they live in a bubble and are out of touch with the realities of modern America. I believe this to be a case of projection based on insecurity and fear. If an individual grows up with a conservative mindset, they are by definition viewing the world in much simpler terms and have blinded themselves to much of the complexity and subjectivity of political realities. I propose that conservatives are not conscious of this, but that their unconscious minds (perhaps even a “conservative collective unconscious”) are very threatened by the reality that other people know more than they do in the political sphere. The fear and anxiety generated by this unconscious process leads to the stigmatization of knowledge itself. What might be conceived of as a “loss” or case for inferiority becomes something like a Pyrrhic victory, a deep validation of not only lack of knowledge, but anti-intellectualism. Whereas lower-income, less privileged, or more sheltered conservatives may not have access to or may outright reject access to higher education, more financially successful and even highly educated conservatives have chosen to enter into a belief system often at odds with the world around them; one that selectively filters the realities they are exposed to. This filtration system (what one Vox reporter cleverly refers to as “tribal epistemology”) manifests itself at lower and higher levels of wealth and privilege, where people may build entire communities that revolve around promotion of a more comfortable worldview over the messier and dirtier reality. The small town conservative with limited access to diverse ideas and stories is just as stunted as the wealthy suburbanite who only associates with people of their socio-economic status. I want to stress here that while I’m speaking of conservatism, this kind of ideological filtering is not limited to political affiliation. Indeed, one can argue that at least some of the criticism of liberals or progressives as sheltered and out of touch is valid and in need of addressing. However, much of it is also a process of conservative individuals unconsciously attributing their retreat from reality to their perceived enemies.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, an elected member of Congress who has repeatedly voiced support for Q Anon.

I write about this process of projection because I believe it’s becoming a larger and larger problem in our society. As our nation faces more stressors and tragedies, this projection becomes more and more amplified, resulting in a higher frequency of violent behavior. The more mild “liberals are overly educated and out of touch” message has now become in many instances “The Democratic Party is part of a Satanic cabal of pedophiles that secretly controls the world” as the Q Anon movement alleges. And as a reminder to the reader of the measure of Q Anon’s very substantial political influence, a third of Republicans rate its claims as “mostly true,” its online groups now endorse millions of members worldwide, and multiple elected members of congress have promoted its belief system. Despite how tragic this set of delusions is, we can see in its amplification a more transparent process of fear and insecurity among American conservatives. What are in reality uncomfortable but ultimately acceptance truths about race, immigration, science, legislation, fascism, democracy and The American Dream become more and more sensationalized as dark, destructive, and inherently corruptive knowledge. The semi-conscious perception is that if a conservative were to authentically approach these concepts without the ideological shield of their biases, they themselves would be fully corrupted or destroyed. It sounds dramatic, but this explanation accounts for the far-flung nature of right-wing conspiracy theory and its growing power as well as the highly troubling covert and overt themes of “White replacement” in conservative and right-wing circles. Such a dramatization is also a familiar process for any mental health practitioner; a marker of an irrationally distorted belief system that over-emphasizes potential threat and causes higher than necessary levels of distress. When further “threatened” by reality, conservatives are demonstrating that they will only cling tighter to their ideals to the extent of merging their personality and very identity with them. So let’s address this theme of dark, destructive, or corruptive knowledge through exploration of the images that it projects on the face of our cultural consciousness.

H.P. Lovecraft was a horror fiction writer in the 1920s who, although not widely recognized in his day, has since become one of the most influential fiction writers of the modern world. Not only through his secondary influence on highly regarded authors such as Stephen King, Alan Moore, and Clive Barker, but now more directly through overt pop-culture nods and several loose TV and film adaptations. The crux of Lovecraft’s stories is that there exists a parallel reality to ours in which “Great Old Ones” dwell; beings described as horrific, alien, and god-like, but not essentially evil. The philosophy of Lovecraft’s fiction is that human beings live in a kind of blessed ignorance of this shadow-reality, and that exposure to it, even simply viewing one of the Great Old Ones or their progeny, will drive a human being insane. His protagonists almost categorically end up driven mad or dead by the end of his stories. Now lets contrast Lovecraft’s fictional world with his real-life worldview. Lovecraft was a self-described “antiquarian,” which entailed not only a love of older things but a high degree of racism, xenophobia, nationalism, and ethnocentrism. Even by the standards of 1920s America, Lovecraft was right-wing. He often used themes of racial “miscegenation” in his stories by highlighting the horror of humanity interbreeding with monstrous or alien races, and he overtly denigrated African-Americans and Jews. Lovecraft even endorsed an admiration for Hitler as he rose to power, although he didn’t live to see the outbreak of The Second World War. Lovecraft’s complicated legacy is now being addressed in HBO’s Lovecraft Country, in which cosmic horror is battled from the perspective of pre-Civil Rights Era African-American characters.

A creative depiction of The Necronomicon - artist unknown

One of Lovecraft’s literary inventions was that of The Necronomicon, a fictional book that contains occult knowledge of such bizarre and world-shaking import as to drive any human reader insane. In a sense, The Necronomicon encapsulates the most pervasive theme of his work, that of corruptive knowledge as a threat to sanity and even human existence. Although The Necronomicon is maybe the most blatant example of this, it harkens back to a tradition of deep distrust toward new knowledge, a book being the ultimate symbol of knowledge and education. In a sense this theme can even be traced back to the story of Pandora’s Box or Eve offering Adam the forbidden fruit, although for the purposes of this article I’m going to focus on the symbol of the book and its significance in myth or cultural consciousness. And honestly I can’t recall ever having read a story that included a book filled with good magic, yet the trope of a grimoire or book of spells that threatens to corrupt the reader suffuses both fiction and folklore.

Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel states that fiction allows us to “try on different mental states” and “pushes to its tentative limits our mind-reading capacity.” Lovecraft obviously shows a phobia of this, and despite his self-identifying as a “bibliophile” (a term he coined) one suspects that he may have also struggled with bibliophobia. I’d argue that we can attribute mind-expanding qualities to any form of literature, fiction or non-, as education by definition seeks to expand one’s perspective. I imagine that, being a reader, Lovecraft must have continuously brushed up against the possibility of trying on the perspectives of people very different than he was, and that he may have needed to semi-consciously “guard” himself from losing his very elitist worldview. He was living on the edge, in a sense, of what he considered acceptable, and the vitriol of his prejudices may have been the energy that kept him from going over to “the dark side.” In Lovecraft’s fiction and especially in the symbol of The Necronomicon, I believe the conservative mindset is showing its hand in an imaginative and potent process of psychological projection. Lovecraft’s attribution to his Great Old Ones of a highly threatening strangeness that is not necessarily evil shows his unconscious grasp of the situation. I believe that on an unconscious level he knew that he was intentionally engaging in a process of willful ignorance to avoid discomfort or loss of ego-strength. Despite the conscious threat he saw in it, on some level he knew that contact with “strange” knowledge gained from cultures and backgrounds foreign to him would drastically expand his worldview. This is essentially the psychological reaction of the conservative mind. This is why conservatives tend to look on universities, intellectuals, and bookish types with suspicion, condescension and derision. They are afraid of leaving the intellectual nests and caves to which they’ve become accustomed, only sensing the true “power” of outside knowledge as a manifestation of something destructive. Another profoundly influential writer and staunch social conservative C.S. Lewis expresses this in his quote that “the love of knowledge is a kind of madness.”

Thus, I believe that modern conspiracy theories share in the same process of stigmatizing and avoiding “corruptive knowledge” that is so visible in Lovecraft’s fiction. In an odd sense it seeks to inoculate the mind against more complex truths in its process of “red-pilling.” This term refers to the film The Matrix and is indicative of the experience of “waking up” to a higher reality proposed by a conspiracy theory after having been deluded or sedated for most of one’s life. It’s extremely telling that belief in a world controlled by an evil cabal of Satanic pedophiles is more acceptable to adherents of this belief system than a world where no single group, good or evil, is really “in charge” (although of course some individuals and groups exercise a disproportionate level of political influence). I see “red-pilling” as a process that apes and supplants the necessity of true and unbiased reckoning with reality. It pretends to confront corruptive knowledge while ultimately hiding from it, more akin to hiding a pill in one’s cheek than swallowing it. True acceptance of reality is hidden in this message in the form of the corruption that has proportedly taken hold of our system of government; something so unspeakably evil that one recoils to even consider the perspective of a child-eating devil-worshipper. This adds a further layer of threat to the Q Anon belief system in its dehumanizing its perceived enemies, which paves the way for justifications of violence against them. As soon as one accepts a worldview that includes corruptive knowledge, one is firmly and innately on the side of Good against the forces of Evil. This process may be conceptualized as a form of Shadow-projection in Jungian terms and can be characterized as both defensive and offensive in nature.

I understand that the message I’m crafting here is very stark, but I believe that the extreme nature of our political environment calls for us to be blunt about political realities. This is by nature not a message crafted to provide comfort to anyone, but to more accurately diagnose a mass dysfunction in the American psyche. I believe that a psychological approach to such societal issues can yield new perspectives and ways of understanding it in the public consciousness, which gives us a leg up when it comes to treating the problem.

So what does treatment for this problem look like? It’s difficult not to be reductive when speaking about it, but in order to de-stigmatize knowledge the foreign has to be made more familiar. Or, in other words, the unconscious has to be made conscious. Rigid ideas of black and white or good and evil have to be dropped and the “evil” has to be transformed into “good.” This is a process that Jung would call “individuation,” the highest work that a human mind can strive to and the goal of Jungian approaches to psychotherapy. Ironically enough, I believe the symptom is again aping the cure in Q Anon culture’s thematic refrain of “dark to light.” Instead of representing a true transformation, this phrase is obviously interpreted to mean a complete erasure of the “dark” in order to be replaced with “light.” The belief that unconscious and disturbing psychic contents (representative of our own human flaws) can be somehow purged, destroyed, or done away with is a fallacy, and a human being can waste mental energy on this quest ad infinitum. The point is that until America embraces rather than seeks to eliminate its problems, it will be chasing its own tail. Or worse, it will be engaging in an unwitting process of self-harm. And I believe that self-aware citizens are responsible for watching and understanding this process and helping where we can to address and counter beliefs of “corruptive knowledge.”Because if we don’t, this set of delusions poses a threat to not only our existence, but the existence of a functioning American society.

Save the Inner Children: What Q Anon Tells Us about Collective Dysfunction.

A recent “Save the Children” Q Anon rally - Stephanie Keith / Reuters

I’m returning to the subject of conspiracy theory for this post, and more specifically Q Anon. I admit that some of my impetus to write about Q Anon is morbid fascination, but a substantial portion of it is grounded in what I see as the vitally important act of monitoring a highly destructive set of fascist myths that is gaining political power around the globe, and is more recently masking itself by co-opting the phrase “Save the Children.” I also believe that taking a psychological perspective when treating what is essentially mass delusion can tell us a great deal about what is dysfunctional in our society, and maybe even in ourselves.

Q Anon is, in essence, a conspiracy theory that arose from internet message board 4chan that claims Donald Trump is waging a secret war against a cabal of Satanic blood-drinking pedophiles in The Democratic Party. It’s a story as bizarre as it is antiquated, and can be traced back to “Pizzagate,” The Satanic Panic of the Eighties, and even further to the medieval “blood libel.” Despite its bizarre belief system becoming more ornate and all-encompassing over the years (including now elements of time travel and alien contact) it has seen a disturbing rise of adherents, not just in America but around the globe. Recent rallies co-opting a message of “Save the Children” have taken place in London and Berlin as well as Los Angeles, and the movement is now supported by multiple individuals likely to soon become members of congress. The crux of what has made Q Anon so appealing to so many people lies in its stance of protecting the most vulnerable people in our society - children - from the most powerful people in our society - politicians and the wealthy (almost categorically cast as liberals in this right-wing drama). Disguised as a child advocacy movement, it can bring in a much wider range of adherents who may initially be unaware of the ideology attached to its “Save the Children” demonstrations.

A woman offers a child to The Devil in goat form in Goya’s The Witches’ Sabbath

I see this movement’s focus on child welfare and abuse as especially interesting, and I think there’s a good case to be made that it’s key to understanding why so many people seem so ready to believe such bizarre and unfounded claims. There is of course no evidence that “Q,” the movement’s anonymous leader, is actually a government insider as he claims to be, there are no records of children claiming to have been abused by the alleged cabal, and there is no scientific evidence that consuming the blood of children can produce a high like a drug or make one appear perpetually young (another central claim of the movement). So, what is it about these stories that allow them to fly under the radar of rational scrutiny and exploit what appears to be a huge blind spot in human consciousness? What is the unconscious power of this narrative that it holds such allure for such large groups of people? It is patently obvious that the appeal isn’t rational; although lack of critical thinking skills likely plays into Q Anon delusions, I don’t see it as likely that their draw is logical. Rather, I believe there is something symbolically significant in the claim of mass child abuse. I’ll preface this by saying that of course child abuse does occur en masse and is very often covered up or ignored, but in this article I’m focusing on the story element of children being abused by a secret Satanic government cabal as alleged by Q Anon. An example of how the movement embellishes this narrative is the recent addition of “mole children” to its mythology. A few months ago, Q Anon adherents began to spread the claim that there are networks of underground tunnels containing masses of abused children, some having been experimented on genetically. This belief has led to the arrest of an Illinois woman who traveled to New York City with a trunk full of knives claiming that she was acting on orders from Donald Trump.

Approaching Storm by Railway, Jeffrey Smart

If we are to believe that Q Anon is what Jung would call an unconscious “irruption” resulting in mass delusion or moral panic, then we can view its symbology as psychologically significant. As such, I believe the more outlandish elements of the mythology to be the most telling of the mental state of those that adhere to it. I want to focus specifically on the “mole children” element as a potent symbol of collective trauma, and its connection to the Internal Family Systems concept of an “exile.”

Internal Family Systems is a unique therapeutic approach pioneered by Richard Schwartz in his book of the same name.

Internal Family Systems is a therapeutic modality that takes the perspective that we are all made up of sub-personalities or “parts,” and that these parts of ourselves have different jobs. Some parts of ourselves are “protectors” whose job it is to shelter other parts that they perceive as vulnerable. This can be done in healthy and unhealthy ways. However, there is another classification of sub-personalities deemed “exiles” that I’d like to focus on in this post. An exile is a part of ourselves that we have deemed repulsive, weak, pathetic, or generally disagreeable, and have dissociated from our conscious persona. Exiles are born in trauma, particularly childhood trauma, and very often take the form of weak and vulnerable children. In a therapeutic or artistic setting, exiles are often seen as children who are locked away somewhere like a basement, cave, attic, or even underground. I believe that the “mole children” element of the Q Anon belief system shows itself to be a projection of many traumatized individuals’ exiled parts. Projection is of course the most common psychological defense mechanism, and enables an individual or group to imagine the elements of themselves of which they aren’t conscious are being embodied in an outside source. Believing that others are demonic feels much less threatening than facing one’s inner demons, and believing that children are abused in secret underground facilities by the thousands is easier for many to believe than the idea that they themselves may have suffered abuse. The hellish underworld the mythology places these abused children in is a symbol of dissociation. I think that this unconscious attraction to an irrational belief system is due to its articulation of a hidden and deeply powerful battle in the human heart. The seed of an ideology finds fertile ground when a person believes that it can tell them something of which they are not already conscious. This creates a mysterious and even sometimes religious or spiritual allure.

Exiles can often be conceptualized as a repressed version of an “inner child,” and when such a spontaneous, joyful, fun-loving and sensitive element of the human psyche is locked away, its absence is sorely felt in the conscious life of the individual. It becomes even more telling when we take into account the Q Anon mythology that such vulnerable children may be eaten - bodily consumed - and thus taken away forever. This is the unconscious fear of the individual who has been traumatized; that they have irrevocably lost their inner child to shadowy and corrupt forces. I believe this explains some of the fervor behind such a push to “save the children” among members of the movement.

To clarify, when I speak of childhood trauma I am not proposing that all adherents to Q Anon have suffered sexual or physical abuse as children - although it is statistically likely that some have. Various forms of abuse are downplayed or normalized in childhood, leading to under-reporting, and this especially holds true in the case of emotional abuse, which I imagine most Americans would struggle to even define. When a society neglects education and mental healthcare, then a higher rate of abuse will occur among its families. However, I wonder if there might not be a form of mass trauma at work here on a societal level; trauma that may have began as uniquely American, but at this point has affected most of The Western World. My theory is that Western culture conditions its citizens with a certain set of messages or beliefs that denigrate and harm any healthy concept of self-worth. We can find such messages in the narrative of The American Dream, the Puritan work ethic, and “bootstrap” economics. We are brought up to believe that anyone can achieve any degree of success in this country if they are only willing to work hard at it. The corollary of this is that if you aren’t successful, then there must be something wrong with you. You aren’t working hard enough, or your work isn’t good enough. This leads us to identify our own value as human beings with the perceived quality of what we can produce for others. This commoditization of merit can be hideously destructive because behind it is a simple message: when you take away what a human being can produce, that human being is essentially worthless. There is no room for the innate dignity or worth of humankind in this message, and it is especially corrosive to the wellbeing of a child, who naturally does not produce labor for the benefit of society and shouldn’t have to. I suspect that this factors into the arduous difficulty that many of my clients show when trying to practice self-love.

Damage done from such societal messages may run counter to what many people think of when they hear the word “trauma,” and some may find it hyperbolic to label it as such. However, beliefs about one’s self-worth are so innate to who we are and so elemental in any form of psychological stability that I can’t think of anything more traumatic than believing oneself to be worthless. In working with trauma in session I often find that, although abuse and traumatic memories themselves do a huge amount of damage, they are not as pernicious or destructive as the beliefs that spring from traumatic experiences; namely that one’s own life doesn’t have worth or value. When we conceptualize a child being conditioned with these messages, it becomes more understandable how the child may deaden themselves to the emotional sensitivity of such a “truth” and “mature” too quickly in order to be seen as a productive member of society. Thus the child grows into an underdeveloped adult without ever fully having experienced childhood. The inner child, the exile, is locked away, deep in the unconscious mind - and here we see the image of “mole children” living underground in slave-like conditions, being abused and killed in large numbers without America’s conscious awareness of such an act. The outward mythology mirrors the inner turmoil.

I touched on this American, and perhaps more broadly Western, perception of conditional self-worth in a previous post, but I believe it to be an important and vastly under-studied phenomenon. Of course income inequality, political corruption, and heightened consciousness of systems of oppression all play a part in societal trauma, but these external forces alone may not induce a state of trauma without a corresponding system of beliefs that make individuals more vulnerable. In other words, there are many Americans who may lose their job but have the psychological resilience to not let it put them in a dejected and defeatist mindset. But if an American who believes that they have no inherent worth apart from their job is laid off, it is much more likely that they will experience this loss as traumatic. If this is behind even a fraction of what is causing thousands of people around the globe to impose their delusional and violent fantasies onto their system of government, then we cannot afford to ignore it any longer. When we see such large numbers of people eschew reason entirely, who represent a threat to the safety of their neighbors and the stability of world governments, it becomes necessary to assess and treat the illness that is causing such symptoms. I know through my work that it’s possible to reverse the damage that messages of conditional self-worth wreak on an individual level, now it’s just a matter of doing it on a societal level. America, and the rest of The Western World, has to look itself in the mirror and reassess its values before we fully regress to a psychic dark age. If we can show the emotional fortitude to examine and change our beliefs as individuals, it must be possible to do it as a nation.

Thoughts on Societal Paranoia and Mass Diagnosis

Photo of a Q Anon rally from CNET.com.

As an American therapist, it’s hard for me not to try and diagnose en masse. I become so familiar with individual problems that I start to see them playing out in society at large, and the sociological implications of this fascinate me. For example, as individual human beings have trauma, can we conceptualize a society to have collective trauma? Would war, inequality, corruption, and oppression be symptoms of this? More specifically, could the paranoia that we see fueling American politics be a symptom of some collective dysfunction? It becomes more and more difficult to avoid feeling a responsibility to address it the more I see how paranoid delusion affects political discourse in this country and how it has to a large extent gone “mainstream.” I, like many other Americans, am horrified and morbidly fascinated that our discourse has made a place at the table for extremely racist, xenophobic, homophobic, and transphobic vitriol as well as the surreal accoutrements of such belief systems. I’m referring primarily to the influence of the Q Anon conspiracy movement both in America and across the world, but I’m also thinking about 9/11 “truther” movements, Flat Earthers, and a host of anti-Semitic myths in various degrees of disguise.

    In Richard Hofstedter’s classic essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” he identifies a strain of thought that has only become more and more relevant in defining political discourse in America. Though written in 1964, its discussion of how feelings of dispossession lead to conspiratorial thought are oddly prescient. Despite oftentimes being privileged members of a first-world nation that lead comfortable lives, individuals who craft and adhere to stories like these are possessed by a notion that they are being attacked, eradicated, or undermined; usually by a shadowy cabal operating in secret. This can manifest in the overtly racist myth of “White replacement” or the more socially acceptable fear that foreign elements will somehow compromise the integrity of American culture.

Hofstadter also speaks of how paranoia leads people to “emulate the enemy” even when the enemy is imagined, echoing Freud’s classic defense mechanism of identification with the aggressor as well as Jung’s concept of The Shadow. Hofstadter says “It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him.” So if one is insecure about one’s education or influence in society, then “The Other” is seen as a group of highly educated and highly powerful people. Oddly, the more energy one puts into opposing such an enemy, the more one begins to resemble them. This becomes especially dangerous when the belief systems allege that the rich and powerful are hurting children (as in the case of Q Anon). Suddenly, the stakes are so high that violence may be easily justified in the face of such an enemy. And here we see a mass of new irrational beliefs interacting with one of the oldest irrational beliefs of humanity: that “it’s okay to hurt people if they’re hurting people.” 

This is all to say that such paranoid delusions have demonstrably done a lot of harm in America and have the capacity to do far more. One doesn’t have to be a student of history to recognize the role of conspiracy theories in the authoritarian propaganda of totalitarian states. And this capacity to do harm qualifies paranoid delusions as clinically significant. But the question becomes: what does it mean to talk about a society with a mental illness rather than an individual?

Art by Aleksandra Waliszewska

I believe that anyone conversant with the paranoid strains of thought in American culture right now has to come to a very odd conclusion. That being; groups of human beings are capable of holding on to very bizarre delusions while not meeting clinical criteria for individual disorders. In other words, we’ve come to a point where we have to admit that not every person who believes the Earth is flat or that the world is run by Satanic pedophiles who consume blood in order to stay young meets clinical criteria for a delusional disorder. This is a strange admission to make, given the bizarre content of the delusions we see gripping the American psyche. And this is where the more amorphous and less often studied concept of mass delusion comes in. The world of psychology has addressed this clinically to some extent with the “shared delusional disorder” or folie a deux of the DSM5, but this phenomenon is usually only applied to small groups. If there is a systemic and informed approach to even conceptualize, let alone treat, mass disorder like this, then I haven’t heard of it. And when I think about mass delusion on a societal level, this lack of a form of treatment is the biggest problem. I can barely describe what diagnosis would look like, and I have no idea what treatment would look like. In my own biased opinion, if everyone went to therapy individually then the world would be a better place, but I’m not sure that individual treatment is the best course of action for such a collective problem. What does therapy look like for an entire culture? For a society, For a nation? I have no idea. And although it’s scary to admit it, it may also be an indication that both therapists and American citizens are responsible for supplying some form of help for the illness that we see in our country. I try to have faith that we can develop something soon.