Thursday, February 11, 2021

Cultic America: A Post-Presidential Legacy. Four Concepts & Five Books explain How we Got Here.

The Orange Crush may be in Palm Beach. He may be vilified by some as the "worst President in American history." I don't like being an alarmist. But he has left America with a cultic legacy that will take years or even decades to work through. IF America does not go the way of Russia in 1917, Germany in 1933, and China in 1949.

Or America itself in 1861.

Because the cat is out of the bag, the gloves are off, and the model is now conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, imprintedsocialized, habituated, a-CULT-urated, and normalized into a default mode network in the brains of about 75 million Americans on an immense Cultic Pyramid.

And there are about 230 US Senators and Congress members who are afraid of the consequences of defying the will of that... cult.

Four key concepts:

Mutually intolerable, polarized and polarizing, noisy extremism (on both ends of the political spectrum);

Emotional Intelligence, and lack thereof in an addiction-prone population;

Reciprocal Reactivity; and...

Divide and Conquer.

Five Books:

Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalism

Eric Hoffer: The True Believer: On the Nature of Mass Movements

John Dean & Robert Altemeyer: Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers

Steve Hassan: The Cult of Trump

Bandy X. Lee: Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind, America’s Soul


The "Outro"

1 comment:

  1. All political systems have cultic attributes. The alarmism over Trump cultism is also a form of cultism. To be blind to the cultism of left wing ideology is sad, considering your apparently exhaustive knowledge and firsthand experience with cults. To be blind to the psychological abuse of left wing ideologues and totalism in American media is just....baffling. because I've followed your blog for years.

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