The Mask of Sanity* (elaboration of a late-night, late comment to a slate.com article)

Maybe the greatest weapon the MAGA deranged wield against the rest of us, but are unaware of because they cannot suffer it themselves, is that they have forced us to live with their hegemonic insanity every day, and every hour of every day if we're especially tuned in. We cannot avoid observing that a toxic juggernaut of willful delusion and sociopathic agenda is moving through the country with few obstacles in its path. To normal individuals, this is as hallucinogenic-like surreal and nightmarish as if we woke up one morning to find that nearly half the country were cannibals who eat their neighbors as a matter of course, without the pang of compunction. In the early-mid twentieth-century schizophrenia literature – before the psychopharmaceutical industry tried to convince us that emotional problems are simply "chemical imbalances" – researchers were aware that parents' contradictory messages and injunctions – called "crazymaking" and "double-bind" – could over time drive their children insane. Young minds would slowly turn from reality to escape the psychic pain of their parents' nonsense. I hope something similar is not happening to us who know that the smaller inaugural crowd is not the bigger, that election results are not deniable because you want to deny them, that an insurrection is not a walk in the park.

I suspect this is what happens in any totalitarian country before the people have become lobotomized to be shells of themselves, laboratory animals with no dignity. They may wonder, How is it possible that hatred and insanity can take over, that masses of people can love a blundering psychopath, that the air can become poisoned and we're supposed to think it's clean?

As a therapist, I can see that one child whose life is undermined may grow up to swallow errant, ego-syntonic ideas, like my middle-aged client whose rage never diminished over two years, who talked about his fantasy to kill random women walking on the street. He had a kind of insanity, twisted away from love and reality in his childhood and teens, that unfortunately didn't feature florid hallucinations, command voices, bizarre delusions of aliens, body organs and impossible surveillance. Had those been his problem, we could all identify his sickness and see how abnormal it is. But there are different kinds of insanity, as Hervey Cleckley understood in his study of psychopathy. We are faced with the fact that half our population had a different life than we had, maybe only slightly different, leading them to trap helpless – unhelped – pain in their bodies, pain that must be impacted then projected into the world because they won't believe in help. They are children who continue to be undermined by their past, and the nation is their poison container.**

- - - - - - - - - - -

* Hervey Cleckley, The Mask of Sanity -- https://www.amazon.com/Attempt-Clarify-So-Called-Psychopathic-Personality/dp/B000WTUKP4/ref=sr_1_7?qid=1666667455&refinements=p_27%3AHervey+M.+Cleckley&s=books&sr=1-7&text=Hervey+M.+Cleckley&asin=B01BPMZTTI&revisionId=f4ecc417&format=1&depth=1

** Lloyd de Mause, "The History of Child Abuse" -- https://psychohistory.com/articles/the-history-of-child-abuse/