When I started this column on mental health in America over a year ago, I started it with the assumption that my own mental health had caused the collapse of an important relationship. As I learned very quickly after the fact, in roughly two weeks or so, the relationship was not real — neither was it particularly important. I’d been in a codependent “love affair” with a mirage.
It would be very easy for me to cast off any responsibility at this point, and loudly proclaim that I was the poor little victim here, and move on, in glorious vindication.
But, of course, that’s not what you do when you’re an adult. This meant, as I had previously written, confronting my problems, changing my habits, getting on medication, going through difficult but necessary EMDR sessions, and otherwise owning up to the fact that I had made poor choices in the past, including blowing past more red flags that a communist convention when I chose to enter a serious relationship after leaving my (arguably much more fraught) marriage.
Part of that frequently frustrating process was exploring why I had fallen the way I did, while observing a portion of my own country become more and more entangled with its own mirage — that of the greatness of Donald Trump. It felt pretty ironic to me, at times. And the dire effects of our national love affair with that con artist are also well known, and plenty continue to linger.
This is why I have tried to approach the subject of Trump worship with a degree of humility — and also why I am cautious when it comes to making snap judgments about how this country can best move on now that Trump is out.
And for me, it comes down to this: the recovery process for our society’s general mental health cannot be expected to be a perfect one. We can’t set unrealistic goals for our fellow citizens. We have to remain true to our moral foundations while recognizing that we do not live in a utopia, and that utopia-building is, furthermore, dangerous.
This is why I am bothered both by rapturous applause from people when Biden does so much as sneeze, and equally bothered by the, “It’s March 2021 and all of my problems aren’t solved yet, Biden is a joke.”
Instead, maybe it’s time to stop and think about more practical solutions to the post-Trump era, and the looming threat of a smarter and craftier demagogue arriving on the scene now that the GOP has embraced demagoguery almost completely. Our institutions held the last time; but there’s no guarantee as to what may happen in the next election cycle.
Addressing this problem as adults means making more empathetic connections with others, creating better tools for addressing disinformation — at the root of which should be the assumption that feelings do, in fact, defeat facts for people who love an illusion — and understanding, for example, the reason why Tucker Carlson is so successful at what he does when it comes to warping minds. It’s all part of the illusion industrial complex, and frankly, Carlson could be even better at it than someone like Trump is.
People turn to illusions and other forms of con artistry when they’re lonely and scared, and, more importantly, angry and seeking an outlet for that anger. The anger may be justified or unjustified (think about racists’ anger at seeing someone like Obama win, an anger that gave rise, at least partially, to a figure like Trump), but either way, it is real.
Less moral grandstanding and more engagement with this reality is a good — still imperfect, but good — way to go forward.
Image credit: Ali Edwards