By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire
The prospect of Donald Trump as a criminal defendant reminds me of a conversation I had once with a mental health professional. We were sitting at the back of a courtroom during an arraignment session. How many of these guys are suffering from mental illness, I asked him, and he smiled. All of them, he answered. By the time you’re getting arrested, you know. That’s a lot of water under the bridge.
He was not being nasty about it. He was merely giving his sense of the scope of mental illness in our society, and I don’t hold it against our ex-president that he is so clearly unwell. That’s his prerogative, to not get the help he needs; to stay the narcissistic course, to dance the borderline jig. What never fails to astonish me, though, is how many other souls he capsizes in his wake.
Two kinds of people get swept up by his act. The first kind are true believers; the second kind are opportunists. That latter group should hang its head in shame: McCarthy, DeSantis, Stefanik among them. But the others. That’s a lot of water under the bridge.
Writing in the wake of the Second World War, when the horrors of both National Socialism and Stalinism were still fresh in mind, the psychologist Carl Jung warned of the dangers brought about by the prevalence of mental illness in society. He wrote as follows:
“For every manifest case of insanity there are in my estimation, at least ten latent cases who seldom get to the point of breaking out openly but whose views and behavior, for all their appearance of normality, are influenced by unconsciously morbid and perverse factors… Their mental state is that of a collectively excited group ruled by affective judgments and wish-fantasies… Their chimerical ideas, upborne by fanatical resentment, appeal to the collective irrationality and find fruitful soil there, for they express all those motives and resentments which lurk in more normal people under the cloak of reason and insight…”
Certain ill people say out loud, in other words, what other ill people keep to themselves. And in so doing, they gain great power.
Jung sought to oppose this cancerous development by helping people better understand themselves. He thought that if he could only bring each person to grapple with the needs of his or her own soul, then that person would thereby gain the strength required to deny false but popular solutions. And knowing how hard a task this is for most people, Jung found great value in religion, as the time-tested repository of the type of self-knowledge he was trying to encourage.
It may sound strange to consider religion as a source of self-knowledge. We often think of it as the opposite; as a body of thought that diminishes the individual, at times even harming the individual under the weight of ancient moralities. Jung’s version of religion, though, requires the individual to stand up straight. It requires each one of us to consider his or her singular relationship to the divine.
If I see any one characteristic in the people who blindly follow Donald Trump, who wave his signs to support him, who give him money and power, who wear his colors and sing his songs, it’s how deeply these people seem to long for any sense of meaning in their lives. The universe keeps getting bigger, faith itself has receded for decades now, technology has utterly failed to replace the divinity it has destroyed with anything more than push-button convenience and plastic trash that falls apart after not many uses. And while I consider few things less worthy of an investment of the heart than this orange-haired charlatan, faith itself remains a virtue and perhaps its very existence can be turned in a better direction.
For that to happen, though, that second class of Trump supporters needs to stop playing games. Those who know better need to speak loudly and clearly; they need to offer an alternative; they need to stop being cowards. (Chris Christie: thank you.)
Easter is coming soon. It is not my holiday, which is Passover. But from what I understand of it, this observance has little truck with cowardice. It calls for bravery and faith; it calls for an individual accounting; it calls for its celebrants to both believe in and stand for something worthwhile. That each one of us contains the spark of the divine, perhaps. A fact worth remembering as Donald Trump continues to engulf our nation in his obvious personal misery.
Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka . They are available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Davidow’s Chanukah Land can be found here.