Pessimistic Delight: Trump owns the United States

 

I think Donald Trump owns the United States now and forever. It is clear that the foun­dation of this nation is rancid. The Democrats are in a lost war that could be called The War of the Inner Children. They are the confused, passive inner child (love and pain intermixed), the Republicans are the burned, corrosive inner child (hurt and hate intermixed). I believe this had to happen. It is more difficult, at least in our country and probably in the whole world, to be emotion­ally healthy than to be emotionally sick. One might assume that I’m extrapolating from the therapy client population, but that isn’t true: The airborne poison of sociopathy, regres­sion and personality disorder has tainted an entire land­mass, as a drop of India ink stains a slide of micro­organisms.

One of the great delusions that has blinded humanity from ancient history to the present is the conceit that adults are more “arrived,” more self-actualized, more got-it-together than chil­dren are. In fact, adults are the never-arrived, the sad, angry and deluded marion­ettes bent and controlled by their past, by their childhood loss and pain. They, ignorant armies clashing by night (Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”), have the false ego of someone who needs to feel important or superior. Their false super­iority is: They are no longer children.

Lloyd deMause* concluded that the history of humanity is founded upon the abuse of children. Our ancestors are the dysfunctional original sin, the soil in which we continue to grow future history. Peter Levine** has explained the difference between animals in the wild that do not absorb and spread trauma and human beings who do. Arthur Janov*** described how early pain will cause damage for life if it is not expelled from our bodies and brains. We are born and raised likely to be bleeding and lost. Many of us – the political right – tend to project these failures into other people. Others – the political left – tend to internalize or sublimate them. My belief is that the common base of injury, the base that underlies and undermines all of us, will inexorably lean toward destruction and that destruction’s acceptance by the confused.

Donald Trump, like Adolf Hitler, was one of millions of burnt souls, and the one who got to the podium first. But the rally audience of pain and projection has always been there, for him and for his successors, and always will be.

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* https://psychohistory.com/articles/the-history-of-child-abuse/.

** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waking_the_Tiger

*** http://cigognenews.blogspot.com/.