I picture a new kind of virtue, created by today’s Republicans not from inspiration but from their progressive, collective disturbance. It is a virtue where lying is diamond-strong and radiant. It creates a new world they want to live in, minds and mindset that can’t be moved by reality. It makes them men and women of perverse mystery, eliciting the other side's secret impotence and awe and the sense that the world has become fantasy, that reality has failed. We can't grasp how M.T. Greene speaks pure gibberish and doesn’t collapse altogether in her fake life. We don’t know how George Santos the life-faker lives, an exotic new breed that thrives without oxygen, on an empty inner core, something that should be impossible. We know that people deny all thirty-thousand-five-hundred-and-seventy-three lies* that Trump told over his four years. We once thought that being earthbound, honest and decent in the world was implicit. This may have been the child's bedrock assumption, but it held through time the way bedrock holds beneath skyscrapers. We “sane” ones can grieve this loss, but ultimately we may need – to co-opt Greene’s dream – a “national divorce,” not a political or geographical divorce, but a psychological one.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.