The Slow March to American Fascism

The "very fine people" massed in Charlottesville, 2017

I'm a sucker for a Hitchcock picture and, watching "Marnie" a few days ago, I caught a mention by the lead male of The Undiscovered Self, Carl Jung's slim volume about Western civilization's fate.

Rereading the book after four decades, I'm flabbergasted at its immediacy―and no longer optimistic about our nation's ability to escape fascism.

Just as German business- and clergymen tolerated Hitler in the 1930's, greedy Republicans in the past four years have enabled Trump to rally the mentally diseased 60 percent―Jung's estimate―of our electorate.

Trump has brainwashed their already-unhinged minds―you merely have to listen to what the 60 percent are telling us, to know―and there's no "curing" them now. They're like the silent super-spreaders of Covid-19, only the disease they're carrying is Trumpism.

We're on the slow march to American fascism.

"Everywhere in the West," Jung writes, "there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population.

"One should not, however, overestimate the thickness of this stratum. 

"It varies from country to country in accordance with national temperament. Also, it is regionally dependent on public education and is subject to the influence of acutely disturbing factors of a political and economic nature. Taking plebiscites as a criterion, one could on an optimistic estimate put its upper limit at about 40 percent of the electorate. 

"A rather more pessimistic view would not be unjustified either, since the gift of reason and critical reflection is not one of man’s outstanding peculiarities, and even where it exists it proves to be wavering and inconstant, the more so, as a rule, the bigger the political groups are. The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional state should succumb to a fit of weakness. 

"Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic. 

"In this state all those elements whose existence is merely tolerated as asocial under the rule of reason come to the top. Such individuals are by no means rare curiosities to be met with only in prisons and lunatic asylums. 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. There are, of course, no medical statistics on the frequency of latent psychoses―for understandable reasons. But even if their number should amount to less than ten times that of the manifest psychoses and of manifest criminality, the relatively small percentage of the population figures they represent is more than compensated for by the peculiar dangerousness of these people. 

Trump campaign ad

"Their mental state is that of a collectively excited group ruled by affective judgments and wish-fantasies. In a state of 'collective possession' they are the adapted ones and consequently they feel quite at home in it. They know from their own experience the language of these conditions and they know how to handle them. 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. 

"They are, therefore, despite their small number in comparison with the population as a whole, dangerous as sources of infection precisely because the so-called normal person possesses only a limited degree of self-knowledge."

Unless the 40 percent of us who harbor no grievances, no "fanatical" resentments, come to grips with our unconscious―"the undiscovered self"―there is no resisting Trump or his mass movement. 

Trump's madness will sink its teeth into our unconscious―like Covid-19 sinks its hooks into our lungs―and his authoritarian and tyrannical ideology will overpower us.

Flow

In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.

― Robert Louis Stevenson

Not a few friends of late have suggested pot, now that it's legal, but I have still-life painting to turn me on.

Even when the outcome is fish-wrap―as it routinely is―painting guarantees all the flow pots does, without the attendant risk I'll gobble an entire Entemann's.

Flow―what Confucius called wu-wei—is total absorption in a task. 

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “Me-high Cheeks-send-me-high”) was the first scientist to isolate flow, calling it a privileged "zone" where we leave tedium behind and become rapt with "the time of our lives."

A lecture on secularism by Carl Jung inspired Csikszentmihaly to study the origins of happiness, the end that eludes so many.

Csikszentmihalyi soon discovered that happiness was less an end than a state, spontaneous and temporary; a state people entered when they pushed themselves to work at a difficult task.

He interviewed hundreds of artists to learn how they felt when they worked. 

They told him they felt the art simply, effortlessly flowed from them; and that they felt ecstatic while working.

In Csikszentmihalyi’s words, flow is a "state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter."

"Krazy Kube" by Robert Francis James. Oil on canvas. 16 x 12 inches.

Forerunner

While the reading public awaits the tell-all book by Donald Trump's niece, another new book provides a portrait of a historical figure whose character resembles the president's in a most uncanny way.

Erik Larson's The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance during the Blitz includes a sketch of Reich Marshal Herman Göring, every bit of which feels like a description of Trump.

Göring, Larson writes, was "large, buoyant, ruthless, cruel," with an "ebullient and joyously corrupt personality."

With a "passion for extravagant sartorial display," Göring designed his own clothes, often changing his costume several times a day. Besides elaborate uniforms, he often wore gold-embroidered silk shirts, tunics and togas, painting his toenails red, dying his hair yellow, penciling his eyebrows and applying rouge to his cheeks. He also wore oversized diamond and emerald rings on the fingers of both hands.

British intelligence reports said Göring spent much of his time as Reich Marshal riding and hunting on his forested estate outside Berlin, when he should have been directing the Luftwaffe. He also devoted countless hours to running a private network of thugs, whose job was to raid art galleries and wealthy homes, stealing paintings for Göring's vast collection.

Although considered crazy by some, American intelligence reports said Göring was a "great actor and professional liar."

"The public loved him," Larson writes, "forgiving his legendary excesses and coarse personality." The American journalist William Shirer wrote at the time, "Göring is a salty, earthy, lusty man of flesh and blood. The Germans like him because they understand him. He has the faults and virtues of the average man, and the people admire him for both." Rather than resent Göring's "fantastic, medieval—and very expensive—personal life," the Germans admired it. "It is the sort of life they would lead themselves, perhaps, if they had the chance."

In the rare moments he did apply himself to his office, Göring often bungled, disregarding valid intelligence, dismissing unpleasant news, and quickly losing patience with subordinates. 

"He was easily influenced by a small clique of sycophants," one Luftwaffe pilot said at the time. "His court favorites changed frequently, since his favor could only be won and held by means of constant flattery, intrigue and expensive gifts. Göring was a man with almost no technical knowledge and no appreciation of the conditions under which modern fighter aircraft fought."

Race to the Bottom

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

— George Orwell

Realtors can no longer show the "master bedroom."

Developers can no longer add spammers to a "blacklist."

Winners can no longer claim their victory was a "cakewalk."

"America's reckoning with systemic racism is now forcing a more critical look at the language we use," reports CNN. 

"And while the offensive nature of many of these words and phrases has long been documented, some institutions are only now beginning to drop them from the lexicon."

At the risk of offending both Blacks and Asians, I'll go on record to say we're on a slippery slope when "reckoning with systemic racism" means we have to mince words.

We must call off the thought police before it's too late; before, to avoid giving offense, we're reduced to ostension—to pointing to things to describe them. That won't work well on Zoom.

Words alone—divorced from their intent—should never be policed, with the sole exception of slurs and curses; and even those have their place in the "lexicon."

I'll offer three reasons why censoring trigger words is bad:

• It crimps your style

• It beggars language—and impoverishes humanity

• It represents bad history

Take, for example, the supposed trigger word "blacklist."

"Blacklist" came into use in English through 14th century cops, who would enter suspects' names, Columbo style, in a black book, which they often called the "list." By calling the list "black," they were denoting the dreaded book's two covers, and nothing more.

When using "black," no 14th century Englishman had race in mind, as history shows. 

The word "black" in fact was borrowed ten centuries earlier from the German "blak," meaning "burned." Charcoal was black; soot was black; ink was black; coffee was black. But speakers of English at the time never referred to Africans as "black;" they described them instead as"swart," borrowed from the German "schwartz." By the 16th century, speakers of English did indeed begin to call Africans "blackamoors," but Africans—and people of African descent—weren't called "black" until the mid-1960's, when the Black Panther Party popularized that use of the word.

Besides putting us on the slippery slope to ostension, censoring trigger words challenges the censors to find "neutral" replacements, an effort doomed from the start.

Take, for example, "master."

If "master" is banished from their language, what can Realtors call the former "master bedroom?" Their association suggests "primary." That word-choice in turn makes the smaller bedrooms "secondary." Problem solved! 

Not quite. Plan to put guests, your parents or—worse yet—your grandparents in one of the "secondary" bedrooms? Better not, because that word dishonors them by implying, "You're second-rate."

And if "master" is banished from sports, what will the PGA call "the Masters?" "The Apprentices?" I hope not.

I suggest were replace "master"—in every industry—with "biggly."

Then, you can kick off your shoes and tell your wife you're going to lie down in the biggly bedroom and tune into "the Bigglies."

Problem solved—unless a veiled reference to Trump triggers your wife. Then you're safer just pointing to the large bedroom and watching the golf tournament on mute.

Unconditional

Graphic courtesy of juneandteak