President Trump had laid the groundwork for the above by repeatedly telling his followers that the election was “rigged” before the first votes had ever been counted. And he had conveyed the same message in the run up to the 2016 election as well—the results of which surprised not only the pollsters, but Trump himself.

During the last year or more of his presidency, many had warned of the likelihood that Trump would refuse to leave the White House, should he lose the 2020 presidential election.  The hints of a feared attempted coup to come—or at least, Trump testing how much he could get away with—were also telegraphed in the run up to the 2020 elections when he’d employed federal forces to come down on those protesting the killing of Blacks by police, and by erecting barriers around the White House, tear-gassing protestors, and bringing the military to bear against American citizens. (An unsightly tableau that was to be immediately followed by the obscene photo op of Trump standing outside a nearby church holding up a Bible).

And at the time, this prompted further warnings from the nation’s former military leaders, followed by a public apology from current Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Millay (for his having accompanied Trump and William Barr during the photo op). Warnings of a related sort had also come in the Trump regime’s attempt to eviscerate the post office’s capacity to convey voting by mail in a time of pandemic, as well as a bevy of other attempts to restrict voting. Which should tell you who truly was attempting to “rig” the 2020 elections.

Rather than for the framers of our Constitution, Trump’s true admiration had been for autocratic leaders who rule without checks and balances—or any time limits placed on their rule. But none of these warning signs were taken seriously enough, but more as the paranoid conjectures of America’s progressive left wing.

For such a thing as a president refusing to leave office after a defeat had never happened before in the history of this nation. In fact, one of the initial and signal aspects of American democracy was, in 1797, the then novel experience of a political leader voluntarily leaving office, and providing a peaceful transfer of power to his successor—a process which had continued ever since.

It was thus taken for granted that such a refusal to step down could never happen here, but only in third world banana republics, and other nations not based on the rule of law. Also not taken seriously enough was another player in the dark history of these last four years.

For sowing divisive seeds of doubt about the integrity of elections—and about the viable nature of democracies themselves—had been part of the thus-far successful game plan of Vladimir Putin. And thus the true, victorious beneficiary of Trump’s four years in office has lived, and will continue to live—in Moscow, not in Washington D.C., or a pricey golf resort in Southern Florida.

*

Like a football team engaged in a nail-biting, game-ending goal-line stand, American democracy remained intact—if just barely and inconclusively. For a fundamentally corrupt president who’d gone AWOL in response to the pandemic, and in response to Putin placing a bounty on American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, as well as Russia’s recent hacking of our governmental agencies and major businesses, still garnered over 74 million votes for another four years of his kleptocracy, and his self-serving, if not delusional failures to address the central issues of our time—the rule of law, and an adequate response to a pandemic, and global warming.

Many had feared that the way the Trump regime had stacked the courts—especially the Supreme Court—with conservative judges, would come to Trump’s rescue in a contested election. 

Trump and Senate Majority Leader McConnell had telegraphed this also in the frantic, last minute attempt to nominate and confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the highest court in the land just prior to the 2020 election. But to their credit, the nation’s judges repeatedly shot down Trump’s attempts to get the election overturned by the courts.

Having now lost in the courts, in the popular vote, and in the Electoral College, Trump’s last stand in obstructing Joe Biden’s installation as the nation’s 46th president was left in the hands of the angry, unruly mob of lunatics who stormed the Capitol.

Even a much-abbreviated account of these polarized recent times must now focus on the shameful role of the Republican Party—who until the last days of Trump’s presidency continued to aid and abet the most chaotic and destructive president in the nation’s history.

Source: little green footballs

Two months after he’d lost the 2020 presidential election, Trump continuously tried to coerce Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “to find” the 11,780 votes needed to overturn his state’s election results. This coercion was also exhibited by Lindsay Graham (R, South Carolina) who, Raffensperger later revealed, had also tried to coerce him to find the needed votes.

For those not suffering from political amnesia, it might be remembered that this kind of coercion is the same as the attempt to coerce the Ukrainian president to exonerate Vladimir Putin’s role in the American presidential election of 2016, and instead, to “dig up dirt” on Joe Biden and his son Hunter. This coercion had also been in play when Trump and his twin consiglieres Rudy Giuliani and William Barr required the Ukrainian president to cave to their demands in order to release the funds already appropriated by Congress to the Ukrainians, who were badly in need the funding due to their hot war with Russia.

And it was this very coercion in the attempt to extract a political gain that directly led to Trump’s 2020 impeachment trial. (A trial by the Senate that was to prevent fact witnesses and their documentation from ever appearing—and this, in the most important trial of our time). A trial in which only one Republican senator—Mitt Romney (R, Utah) voted in favor of finding Trump guilty as charged. Had other Republican senators been less cowardly—or more faithful to their oath of office, we might have been spared so many deaths from the pandemic, and the continued degradation of American democracy that had prevailed before the 2020 impeachment trial, and ever since.

Raffensperger and Romney—Republicans both—are notable exemplars in this account. But they are also notable exceptions. And they were notable for their courage and their faithfulness in upholding their oaths of office—the vow to protect and defend the Constitution of this nation from its enemies, both foreign and domestic.

Yet the vast majority of Republican politicians had caved in to the coercion of Trump. After he’d succeeded in a hostile takeover of their party, they then failed to stand up to him out of fear of the revenge he would take on anyone breaking ranks. In this cowardice, they had failed in their oversight duties, and broken their vow to defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. In this, they had also failed to embody the till-now prevailing idealization of America, as “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” 

And if the past four years have taught some of us anything, it is simply this: The greatest enemy of America over the past four years has been, arguably, the American president himself. And the plethora of elected officials and cabinet members who’ve either resigned or broken ranks with Trump only since the invasion of his mob at the Capitol are a little late in evidencing any courage or integrity. They’re just covering their ass now, as they had for the previous four years. What they provided to the nation wasn’t leadership in any real sense, but rather the obsequious nature of cult-followers.

Two and a half millennia ago, the Chinese moral philosopher Confucius noted that when societies begin to flounder and devolve, it is in part due to their having given the wrong names to things. In such times, cultures must thus begin to employ what Confucius termed “the rectification of names.”

In this light, it would be completely wrong-headed to regard as “leaders” the 147 duly-sworn lawmakers in Congress still objecting to the 2020 presidential election results, even after the attack on the Capitol—or for that matter the dozen and a half cabinet or sub-cabinet appointees who resigned only after the attack. And bestowing a Freedom medal—the highest civilian award in the nation—to Devin Nunes, is analogous to placing a Bible in Trump’s hand while protesters had just been tear-gassed.

Those whom I mention above have, throughout the last years been more self-serving and concerned with defending a corrupt president, who in turn had coerced and corrupted them—rather than serving and defending the nation. Collectively, their keen nose and hunger for power had gnawed at the very foundations of our democracy. In no sense are they patriots. What is it then that they more truly resemble?

Rats, leaping from a now sinking ship...

In it Hillman writes: “The recognition of the intimate and subtly differentiated connection between myth and pain, between the gods and diseases and politics, is the greatest of all achievements of the Greek mind: the perfection of tragedy…”

“In the Greek sense,” he tells us, “we are today in just such a tragedy as Thebes under Oedipus Tyrannus: the king is sick. And in the madness of his sickness, in his profound unconsciousness, the tragedy of the nation lies — its poverty, wasted youth, the degeneration of its crops and soil, its water and forests … And all this because the king is blind to his own nature.”

And the above — published in America in 2004, with George W. Bush in mind — could have as easily been written today with Trump and our threatened ecosystems and wasted lives from the coronavirus in mind — or in Nazi Germany in the early 1940s. For each cultural era was deeply tinged, if not defined by the unconscious actions of a sick king blind to his own nature.

*

About midway in the essay, Hillman bends back (a favored move) and re-visions the very psychological method he pursues, in following the footsteps of C.G. Jung and Joseph Campbell. He calls attention to the fact that it gives “scant attention” to the historical timeframe of the myths themselves, the geographic locations from which the myths arose, or the authenticity of their transmission.

Instead, archetypal psychology attempts to uncover the presence of ancient myths in our own behavior and in what passes as an ostensibly un-mythic, consensual reality. In the process, those who likewise pursue this methodology “ravage the scholarship of others and pilfer whatever we can, justifying these violations in the name of bringing deeper understanding to psychological afflictions.”

For Jung and Campbell, and those who work in this tradition, attempt to show how Western antiquity can be relevant to modern psyches, and how our contemporary psyches can vivify Western antiquity (as the archetypes, on either hand, are as alive today as ever). For otherwise, “when scholars speak only to documents and psychologists only to patients, culture languishes, its soul shallow and unrooted in historical knowledge, and its knowledge without soul.”

And then, I would add, not only may we be suffering from a sick king, but a sick culture, one suffering from a tragic developmental arrest; one failing to develop a wider sense of inclusivity, a wider capacity for empathy. And such a culture lacking in historical knowledge, and dissociated from myth, is more apt to produce a sick king. For, as Aristotle suggests, hubris is perpetuated by those lacking a knowledge of history.

As remedy, we might think to kill the king, or exile him, a remedy humans have employed since antiquity. Those of us in the helping professions often witness a similar, inadequate, and confused sense of remedy in our patients, our clients, our brothers and sisters, or however we think of them.

Their own executive functioning, their own inner king — their own notion of what would cure them — is often part of the problem. For this reason, it’s often helpful to ask them what they think would rectify the problem. It will show you what hasn’t worked. For they’ve been looking under the wrong street light for where their own keys have been lost. And if they’d discovered a key or true cure for what ails them, they wouldn’t be showing up for therapy in the first place.

Today, we could indict, replace, or attempt to incarcerate the sick king, laying all our woes at the king’s door. Or we could hope to revive the sick king, supporting him to the end — while blaming the prevailing sickness all around us on those who have opposed him. While we, the people, could remain as shallow, our knowledge as lacking of soul, as blind to our own nature as the king.

We’ve had the warfare of a tribal psychology — whether civil, hot, cold, or proxy — for millennia; revolutions and elections for centuries. And have yet to fight, elect, or argue our way to wisdom. We’re so far from anything even vaguely in that direction, that I find myself binge-watching The West Wing for the third time in the last four years, just for a dramatic portrayal of something less appalling when I turn on my television.

Normally, political change in a culture happens in excruciatingly slow increments before the change becomes psychologically internalized. The American Civil War ended 155 years ago. Yet we are still divided over the power of the federal government to control or lead the states, and still suffering from racial inequality. And normally, individual development also doesn’t leap frog overnight. But these are not normal times. And that could change the calculus — or not.

Today, tomorrow, or in the months and years after the 2020 election results, whether we’ve replaced the sick king and his equally ill court or not, we could remain no wiser than before. So, isn’t it time to begin thinking: what are we going to do about that?

Wearing a mask and social distancing aren’t radically liberal, expensive, or complicatedly high-tech. You don’t need a privileged status to employ them. You don’t need your own helicopter and a dozen doctors monitoring your every breath, nor a cocktail of experimental drugs that are not widely available to anyone else, in order to protect against the ravages of COVID. Even poorer, densely populated countries employing these simple practices — like a disciplined herd under competent leadership — had managed to control the virus’s spread far better than the United States.

It was the partisan nature of the crowd in the Rose Garden — its “herd mentality” following incompetent leadership — that was to prove so lethal in the U.S. And the term “herd mentality” bears further reflection.

For it’s a term that Trump — and apparently his followers — now confuse with “herd immunity.” And herd immunity — that is, allowing a population to become so infected by a virus that those who survive it might acquire immunity — was also Great Britain’s initial strategy toward COVID. And it turned out to be a failed and deadly policy. One that had also left its leader — Boris Johnson — infected.

Yet in lieu of better leadership, this is the strategy the Republican Party has gravitated toward now: Isolate the more elderly — as if this were doable — and allow younger people to get the virus, and hopefully thus gain herd immunity (until a vaccine becomes available — though even once such a vaccine has been adequately tested and approved, it could still take another year before its roll-out fully unfolds).

Clearly, 7.5 million Americans infected by COVID (with over 212,000 now dead) hasn’t yet led to herd immunity. But a year down the road, if we just stay the course, and quadruple those infected, we might just get there. Then the virus might just go away — like a miracle! As the president has been telling us all along.

But the survivors would have all manner of pre-existing conditions that could lead them to lose their health care. (This is about to be decided by the Supreme Court.) So, if we can just pack the court with another conservative judge, we might get rid of Roe vs. Wade as well … What could possibly be wrong with any of this?

***

Meanwhile, it would be premature to refer to the above-mentioned members of Trump’s White House as “The Rose Garden 11.” For daily now, the number needs to be changed. But to put the above number into perspective — 11 new cases in the White House in a single week is more new weekly cases of COVID than in the following countries: Taiwan had 8, Vietnam and Cambodia even fewer.

This is a pandemic, a global problem — no single nation is responsible for it, but the United States didn’t have to follow such an irresponsible course — such that a nation with 4% of the world population, a nation with some of best-trained doctors in the world, now has 20% of the world’s COVID-caused fatalities, with its White House now become the pandemic’s epicenter, and the most infected house on the face of the earth.

Dr. Jonathan Reiner — Dick Cheney’s former cardiologist, a CNN medical analyst, tells us that in all likelihood Trump was already infected by the time of his first debate with Biden. Yet the rules of the debate required both candidates — and all of their attendees — to submit tests documenting they’d been tested within the past 72 hours.

Reiner says there’s no chance that happened. And that the reason the White House has refused the offer by the CDC to conduct contact tracing, and review every case of those who came down with the virus after the Rose Garden event — is their concern that the “patient zero” might be the President of the United States.

After returning from the hospital, Trump remained as impulsive. grandiose, and reckless as ever — posing in a triumphant series of salutes toward no one but those videoing him — and reminiscent of him holding a Bible up for the video op a few weeks earlier. Such pathetic buffoonery ought to be institutionalized, not re-elected.

Yet the good news here is that 21% of Americans are now more likely to wear a mask after the president’s positive diagnosis. Inadvertently, this has been Trump’s most singular contribution to limiting the spread of the virus.

It also echoes a famous Sufi saying: Learn to behave from one who does not.

Membership has its privileges, as well as its downside. For example, what do Donald and Melania Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Thom Tillis (R-NC), former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), and Notre Dame President Rev. John Jenkins all have in common?

These dignitaries all attended the Rose Garden ceremony at the White House on October 3rd, where the president officially nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court.

It must have felt like an honor just to be invited to that garden. And as if to honor Trump—and the occasion—90% of those gathered weren’t wearing masks or observing the social distancing recommended by the regime’s own science advisors. And the downside was that within 5 days the two senators, the two Trumps, Conway, Christie, and Jenkins all became infected with COVID-19. And since the virus often takes between 5 and 12 days to make its presence known, we still didn’t know how many other Rose Garden attendees would become infected from this “superspreader” event. 

And sure enough, by the next day other Republican dignitaries—Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien, his top aide Hope Hicks, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel—plus 3 White House journalists had all tested positive. And the day after that, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany became the latest member of Trump’s inner circle to test positive. To some, this outcome seemed not only the virus, but poetic justice at work.

***

 Putting the virus aside (as Trump had been trying—for months now to do) he could have done far worse in whom he selected to replace a revered justice—Rudy Giuliani, perhaps. But Amy Coney Barrett is no buffoon—though many Democratic senators refuse to meet with her. By all accounts, she’s a bright legal scholar—and one who had earlier survived COVID herself. Yet there’s something diseased surrounding her nomination. 

And this is a “disease” that’s been infecting our country far longer than COVID—though its toxicity has peaked during the Trump years. For the intensity of the nation’s political polarization really is a disease. And arguably a greater national security risk than any once posed by al Qaeda or ISIS. 

This brings to mind a few lines from a 7th century Zen master—that is also part of the oldest existent Zen document—Sengstan’s Verses on the Mind of Faith. 

The Great Way is not difficult 
for those who have no preferences.
When neither love nor hate are attached to
everything becomes clear and undisguised. 
Make the smallest distinction, however, 
and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.

If you wish to see the truth, then hold
no opinions for or against. To set up
what you like against what you dislike 
is the disease of the mind. 

From the point of view of Sengstan’s enlightened mind, the toxically polarized political climate in the U.S. today would seem that very disease. And if spiritual enlightenment is the only real cure, that would take an almost unimaginable, unprecedented shift in our collective awareness. Maybe though, our increased evolutionary necessity for something in that direction can bump just enough people a notch farther in the developmental spiral that we might avert the calamity, that otherwise, seems just ahead. Yet neither of America’s political parties have given much thought about how to achieve this—they’re too preoccupied with defeating each other. 

Yet a similar collective shift—one that out-prioritizes the current polarization—will be required to better handle the challenges of COVID, as well as climate change. And while COVID rages, the devastations of the latter are already upon us. (Two “500 year floods” have already put Houston under water twice within the four years of Trump’s presidency; a billion animals burnt to death in the last Australian summer.)

And in the past 3 American summers, wild fires in California, Oregon, and Washington have produced the most toxic air quality on the planet. (As I’m writing, only intermittently do I notice the white noise of the air purifying machine—which is on because where I live, about 5 miles from Berkeley, California, the air quality is 4 times more toxic now than what’s considered “healthy.”) And for the past 4 weeks, this has become the new normal. Perhaps we’ll soon be buying space suits and head capsules on Amazon—to walk more safely through the towns where we live. As it is, American democracy staggers, just barely alive. 

All of this seems inter-connected. And how bad does it need to get before we realize these are not normal times, but a pivotal epoch, requiring a massive Awakening. (Or, at the least, a trigger-switch kicking in by humanity’s survival instinct—if  it’s still working).

For while our 45th president has told us that both global warming and COVID are hoaxes, climate change scientists are telling us something else. Namely, that we have barely a decade to clean up our act, before we reach a point of no return.  Yet what science is also saying is that changing our current president is not nearly enough.

As a species, WE need to change—both fast, and profoundly. That’s what the science suggests. For it also tells us, that if we don’t change something in ourselves, and in our priorities, by 2070 our grandchildren will inherit a world where a third of the planet that is currently habitable, will be so no longer. 

Mexico and Central America will have populations even more desperate to flee North. But even a massive, militarized wall along the Southern border won’t change the fact that Texas and the American South will become hot boxes themselves.

Arizona will grow parched, its golf courses no longer attracting retiring snowbirds. The once green fairways that had been watered by the aquifer will dry up. For as precipitation dwindles, so will the aquifer. The landscape will become a giant sand trap that only appeals to lizards and cacti. 

Our coastal cities will suffer from flooding, the wild fires will get worse on the west coast, and the nation’s bread basket—the Midwest—will suffer crop shortages. This is the scientific forecast of a probable future—not a dystopian science fiction movie. And human beings will face the largest mass exodus in the past 6,000 years.

Already, nearly half my friends are thinking of leaving California. But where do you go when this is the only planet you have? Now, another verse comes to mind—a haunting one, from the great Spanish poet Antonio Machado:   

“What have you done with the garden entrusted to you?”

Though psychopaths and narcissists share central traits in common — egocentricity, lack of empathy, being interpersonally exploitive — I’m quite used to encountering narcissism, and much more frequently than the estimates provided by the American Psychiatric Association.

But psychopaths are a different, more rarely encountered breed. There’s something distinctively missing in their foundational makeup. The kind of socialized human restraints and accountability you’d expect as a given in another human being, just aren’t there, and it can be palpable, shocking.

And so, whenever a psychopath has entered my life, however briefly, it’s been unsettling. It scares me, and can keep me up at night. Similarly, the therapy clients I mentioned in my book’s prologue — who were having anxiety-filled reactions in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election — weren’t freaking over his narcissism.

Though under-reported at the time, the psychopathy about to emerge didn’t escape the notice of Oxford University psychologist Kevin Dutton — though it wasn’t able to be adequately identified by many others, from the manual left to them by the American Psychiatric Association. For its manual, the DSM-5, had totally eliminated sociopaths, and couldn’t bring itself to even utter the term psychopaths — having replaced them both with its own self-created construct: “Antisocial Personality Disorder.”

But as the election of 2016 was drawing toward the homestretch, Dutton wanted to explore the extent to which those running for president resembled psychopaths. As reported in “Of Psychopaths and Presidential Candidates,” a “Mind” guest blog by Claudia Wallis, published in Scientific American, Dutton compared Trump and Clinton, as well as each party’s runner up (Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders) to 16 historical leaders in terms of their scores on the short form of the Psychopathic Personality Inventory, which measures individually and in composite, eight central psychopathic traits.

For the historical leaders — some going back over 2000 years — the form was completed by biographers or other scholars, and for contemporary candidates by a seasoned political reporter. In terms of the contemporary candidates, Trump outpaced them all in the composite scoring of psychopathic traits, just as he wound up outpacing them in the election.

And for one of the traits, “Machiavellian Egocentricity,” (where narcissism can place a bit of a thumb on the scale) he was almost beyond compare, and bested only by Adolf Hitler, while outscoring near rivals Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, and every other world leader over the past 2000 years. (Since I’d expect a correlation between psychopaths and autocrats, I’d be curious to see how Trump fared, if competing with Vladimir Putin and other autocratic leaders today).

Though in fairness to Trump’s psychopathic attributes, in his total score when all eight traits were combined — and as close as psychopaths come tohaving a decathlon, its Olympic equivalent — Trump outdid even Hitler, though the gold medal here was carried away by Saddam Hussein. But it’s possible the scoring was skewed … or as Trump might say, “RIGGED.” For Trump deserved a higher score than a 4th place finish.

He actually tied for the gold with Idi Amin in CN (Carefree Nonplanfulness: difficulty in planning ahead and considering the consequences of one’s actions). This has been evident in most of his foreign policy decisions, and quite evident in his handling of the COVID pandemic. And for SI (Stress Immunity: a lack of typical marked reactions to traumatic or otherwise stress-inducing events) only two historical world leaders scored higher.

Yet what truly skewed the composite results was the score given to Trump for Blame Externalization (BE: inability to take responsibility for one’s actions, instead blaming others or rationalizing one’s behavior). His score here seems artificially low — a mere 17 points, the same awarded to George Washington, a horrible conclusion.

Remember — Saddam had led his nation for decades, while Trump hadn’t been given equal time to show what he was made of. If scoring had been done later, and not before his presidency even began, the ways he blamed all but himself for his failures, would have placed him at the upper reaches of Blame Externalization, thus bringing home the silver for psychopathy as a whole, rather than a lackluster 4th place finish. (Just in the early months of the COVID pandemic, he lied about the lethality of the pandemic, and blamed his failure to respond to it on the Obama administration, the Chinese, the WHO, CDC, the Press, and states that have complained too much).

Trump never admits fault; to him that conveys weakness. Blame Externalization is actually a central feature, if not the central feature of his narrative. He’s really off the charts here, and at least the equal of Emperor Nero, rather than equated with the lowly George Washington. UNFAIR!

In the composite scores of the women — Elizabeth I, Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton — all finished in the bottom half of the 20 contestants. My takeaway is, that though I’m a big fan of equal opportunity, women simply can’t compete with men when it comes to psychopathy. (Though in truth, none of the women came in last).

For bringing up the rear — as if competing in events for which neither had adequately trained — there was a tie between two men: Abraham Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi.

Key to Abbreviations:

Social Influence (SI)
Fearlessness (F)
Stress Immunity (STI)
Machiavellian Egocentricity (ME)
Rebellious Nonconformity (RN)
Blame Externalization (BE)
Carefree Nonplanfulness (CN)
Coldheartedness (C )

Never have so many Americans been so aware, so engaged, so enragedwith what’s unfolding politically. But all seem to agree about one thing, and one thing only — that the presidential election of 2020 will be the most pivotal of our lifetime. And catastrophic, apocalyptic forecasts have been made by both sides, should the opposing candidate win the presidency.

In response to the New York Times article from August 31, 2020, “Trump Books Keep Coming, and Readers Can’t Stop Buying,” I agree with the quote from historian Jon Meacham: “It’s an inherently dramatic moment, it’s tribally fierce, it’s urgent, so there is this amazing appetite for all things political.”

However, reflecting this moment from a largely political angle — which is what all these books have in common — keeps our view (of Trump, and of our unique epoch) somewhat narrow. Aside from politics, there are important mythic, psychological, spiritual, and evolutionary elements at work here, that for the most part are not adequately expressed in these books, or by the talking heads discussing them on television. And that’s as true for Fox News as it is for MSNBC or CNN.

Given all the attention surrounding the November 2020 election, there’s been a central factor almost universally overlooked. Namely, that the polarizing tribalism that Meacham and others have alluded to, will not be resolved, cannot possibly be resolved, by purely political means.

As a species, we’re needing to become less polarized, and more objective — we’re needing to evolve and become wiser. (While no platform for how to achieve this has been offered by Democrats or Republicans, who are both only focusing on the upcoming election). Though the findings of climate change scientists should suggest that a rapid uptick of consciousness will need to happen — rather fast — as an invisible clock ticks ever closer to a deadly midnight.

Further highlighting the difficulty of our current challenge is that our polarizing tribalism has quite a lot of momentum behind it. It’s been with us for 70,000 years, ever since human beings began to band together in small tribal groups in order to oppose other tribal groups, each following and promulgating their own mythic narratives — and each believing that their narrative, their cause, is right; and the only “correct” way to be thinking.

These narratives have become increasingly intractable. People cannot be argued away from the position they already have. Facts don’t matter. Or move the needle much in opinion polls. For even facts can’t be agreed upon now.

This represents a significant cognitive loss of the fact-based world viewthat came in with the 18th century’s Western Enlightenment — an “Age of Reason” that was to give us democracies, and our various forms of science, and which was to prove capable of putting men on the moon. But in just a few years, approximately a third of the American population has regressed to a pre-18th century world-view, which is not only pre-scientific and oblivious to science, but also has regressed to the pre-democratic “divine right of kings.” (The former is unhelpful in responding to pandemics and climate change; the latter inimical toward the preservation of democracy).

Aside from a rather urgent evolutionary imperative, what else is different now is that in an Internet age, the “meme warfare” of what were once small, isolated tribal groups, has now spread to global proportions, while their mythic narratives have become increasingly weaponized. And these weaponized narratives conscript almost any significant element being discussed — from climate change or wearing a mask in the midst of a pandemic, to ritual acts occurring before sporting contests.

To free ourselves from the polarizing narratives of meme warfare — a cold version of civil war- — it would be helpful to re-vision narcissism itself, and its mythic, spiritual, and historical roots, aspects of which have been largely ignored.

Forgive the plug — but I started research and writing Re-Visioning Narcissism: Healing Heresies for Polarized Times several years before Trump’s presidency had even begun. It offers a wider historical perspective on its various topics. This includes “taking a history” of narcissism itself. And how earlier epochs conceived, and attempted to counter it. The book provides a spiritual perspective, as well as a body of practices that sub-cultures of adepts have employed for millennia that would be valuable adjuncts for modern psychology, in treating a condition that has become pervasive, if under reported.

The book also offers a countering view of American psychiatry’s view of other personality disorders as well — principally toward sociopaths and psychopaths. (Both were thrown overboard in 1980 by the official manual of the American Psychiatric Association, as if they no longer existed; and replaced by the APA’s self-created construct of Antisocial Personality Disorder).

This left American psychologists less able to recognize it when a Trojan Horse had entered our Gates — a psychopath running for president. Re-Visioning Narcissism: Healing Heresies for Polarized Times is not yet available in bookstores — you can purchase it online at ReVisioningNarcissism.com.

If narcissism has its political features and consequences as I’ve attempted to evoke in previous posts, a growing incidence of narcissism had been showing up in American psychotherapeutic consulting rooms long before Donald Trump, long before 9/11, long before even Christopher Lasch’s seminal book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations was published in 1979.

Not surprisingly, over the succeeding decades we’ve thus had a plethora of books published on the topic of narcissism. Yet they don’t seem to have helped us much. For as a psychotherapist in private practice, I’ve seen absolutely no diminishment in what’s walking in the door for treatment.

In fact, the longest running study of narcissism that had been conducted by a group of social psychologists (between 1982 and 2006 with American college students) indicated that the trend toward narcissism has been steadily increasing (by 30% over the duration of the study). And by the study’s end, approximately two thirds of the students were scoring highly on a narcissism index.

Yet weirdly, when the latest version of the official manual of the American Psychiatric Association (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition) was preparing for its release in 2010, it had decided to entirely eliminate Narcissistic Personality Disorder as a potential diagnosis.

When this was announced, the uproar that resulted from many psychological professionals led the DSM-5’s personality disorder committee to reconsider their stance. And when the DSM-5 was finally published in May of 2013, NPD was retained as a potential diagnosis.

Yet the estimate given for Narcissistic Personality Disorder amongst the American population was then listed as a dubiously low 0% to 6.2% — which also proved to be controversial.

Certainly, the enormous statistical discrepancy between 0% NPD at the low end or even 6.2% NPD at the high end, and two thirds of a population being studied is quite glaring. And it seemed to reflect a polarized confusion in the minds of even many mental health professionals sent out to treatnarcissism — a confusion of what the term “narcissism” truly means, or should refer to.

My view is that there’s really quite a wide spectrum in narcissism — from a horrifically toxic version at its most extreme (as in a malignant narcissism portrayed by Erich Fromm as “the quintessence of evil”) — to what’s now become normative, “the narcissism of everyday life.” The DSM-5 recognizes neither. In essence, we’ve had dueling views of the same syndrome — and thus, widely ranging estimates of its prevalence.

The lack of coherent agreement in our understanding of what narcissism truly is has limited both our recognition of this widely suffered syndrome, and what will be required for its healing. The need for a deeply considered re-visioning of both seems timely for us now. And that is what this book — Re-visioning Narcissism: Healing Heresies for Polarized Times — will provide.

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was published in 1851. Akin to the tragic figures of ancient Greek drama, Captain Ahab is a figure who seems at first larger than life, a man who has been struck by lightning and lived, yet who is brought down by his own hubris. For he is “an ungodly, god-like” man who does not worship, or even recognize the superiority of forces beyond himself. His grandiosity is such that Ahab himself tells us he “would strike the sun if it insulted me.” Yet he has the power to move people with charismatic persuasion. And through rousing speech — and the promise of gold — he solicits the support of his crew for his obsessed mission: to hunt down a white whale. For he believes there is a force within the whale that wants to injure or oppose him, to limit his role in the world. And so, he strikes out against the elemental powers of nature, and the universe — which he cannot possibly defeat — and which finally bring him down.

Yet we can track Captain Ahab farther back still… For without overlooking their “clear-running” high mindedness, nor the noble documents they left to guide us, we might also remember that even many of our founding fathers had a bit of Ahab, a bit of Trump inside them too, a part that was “muddy and foul.” For Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe — to pick just four — were slave-holders all.

And who but a version of Ahab was at the helm, as the U.S. government plowed its sea-like prairies, stole the land from its native peoples at our beginnings as a nation, and forced them onto reservations? (George Washington himself later came to regard this as the greatest failure of his presidency). And who but a sub-culture of Ahabs were responsible for sailing ships with Africans in chains in their holds; bringing them to swelter as slaves in a nation whose Declaration of Independence proclaimed in 1776 that all men were “created equal” and entitled to the rights of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But that high-minded Declaration was to have no legal effect. And when the status of slaves — are they people or property? — became debated during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the compromise that was reached was that each slave was to be counted as three-fifths of a person. And the southern delegation had only granted slaves that fraction of person-hood once it became clear that the number of representatives that each state would be granted in the new Congress would be based upon population.

And so, gerrymandering and attempts to suppress and restrict voting rights of dark-skinned people is nothing new. A selfish, grandiose, and calculating meme has been with us forever. It comprises one of America’s “twin tributaries.” And this contrary pull of opposing currents has created the ongoing condition that sea captains term “confused waters.” And they’ve made it hard to steer the ship of state on a clear, and coherent democratic course.

We might then jump to the 20th century, while repeating the current refrain: Who but an Ahab following an obsessive, and ultimately self-destructive mission, would ever think to start a bloody, long-running war based on fake naval data in the Gulf of Tonkin, and then rain Agent Orange down upon the brown-skinned people and their families in Southeast Asia, as if they were threats limiting America’s role in the world? And who or what was the archetypal source that sentenced hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to their deaths based on charges cooked up by the neo-cons in George W’s White House — as if it had become a death-spewing Meth House — and prosecuting yet another war for charges against a nation in which neither its people, nor its leader, were ever culpable?

From Ahab’s whale boat, through these examples, it’s not a far jump to Trump’s White House. Trump’s just the latest of our Ahabs, an American son. (And we’ll need to own him, as the Germans did Hitler).

For our problem is deeper than Trump. And whether we call it Ahab-ism or narcissism, a militantly obsessed hubris that lacks empathy has been a near continuous stream running through American politics, and unfortunately, at times at its helm.

And long before Trump, people from outside the U.S. have viewed America as a crazy, gun-toting, dangerous place. And in other countries — long before Trump — the “Ugly American” had been a familiar and shadowy figure. And not only ugly, but (also like Trump) a dangerous bully, due to our outsized military that spends more on armaments than the other 8 or 10 most heavily armed countries combined.

All these unsavory traits need to be made more conscious — individually and collectively — for a people to become truly “great.” That is the true opportunity Trump offers America. And you can’t elect that kind of greatness — or even recognize it, if it remains largely obscured in yourself. And so, it’s going to take a lot of collective effort, and not only politically. It’s going to take a lot of soul searching, an increase of discernment, and a lessening of our psychological, spiritual, and political naiveté. We have to own our own shadow.

For Trump is an exaggerated mirror of what’s false, polarized, obsessed, and corruptible in a human soul; and the dire consequences that can result when that polarizing corruption is not adequately recognized, let alone opposed.

Opposing that is the true American jihad. Yet without adequately confronting these features in ourselves, as well as externally, we could just swing to someone “more liberal” in the next election cycle, while leaving the nation as gullible, and as vulnerable to a toxic divisiveness as ever.

There are thus enormously important lessons to learn from this presidency — an evolutionary challenge, really. And if we don’t learn them and evolve now, we may remain subject to the next Ahab, the next Trump in waiting, the next Joe McCarthy, the next Nixon, and be no wiser than before.

In a global world, the rising tide of the sea change of Trump’s election was shockingly noted — not only in the hallways of the world’s governments, but in the consulting rooms of American psychotherapists.

Not even 9/11 provoked such a collective wave of anxiety as I saw showing up for therapy in the first weeks of Trump’s presidency. For many, even those not in Hillary’s camp, were having post-traumatic stress reactions, as if they awoke on the morning of November 9th 2016 in a living nightmare. Only the nightmare continued… day after day, week after week of appalling falsehoods, tweets, appointments, and executive orders; plus the mounting evidence of corruption. For many, CNN at almost any hour of any day, seemed must-watch television. As with jihadists appearing on the world stage on 9/11, here was another player on the stage trying to undo the world as we’ve known it.

The mythic nature of American comic books had anticipated such a nightmarish figure for years, in portraying such outlandish villains as Lex Luthor, the Penguin, and the Joker. Here were malignantly narcissistic figures — grandiose and entitled, unprincipled and obsessed with power and world-domination. These “arch enemies” seemed the shadow of Superman and Batman. For they were thoroughly lacking in empathy for the rest of humanity, and trying to change the world into one more akin to their own darkened sensibility.

Yet if central traits of narcissism are said to include a hubristic grandiosity, the sense of entitlement, and a lack of empathy, these traits were already politically and culturally surfacing in America long before its comic books, and long before Donald Trump.

A governmental appropriation of the lands of its native peoples certainly evidences America’s sense of entitlement — an entitlement that was still being acted out in the 20th and 21st century in the hubristic regime changes America felt entitled to, and which were enacted in Iran (in 1953) and Iraq (in 2003).

And the mass abduction of Africans into slavery is earlier evidence of a historical lack of empathy, one that was also to polarize the nation. A lack of empathy that would only be continued by an immigration plan, and a plotted “Muslim ban,” that would restrict displaced peoples from the Middle East’s war zones from entering our country; war zones that only ensued in the wake of America’s disastrous military invasion of Iraq, an invasion that was based upon lies and false premises: the putative existence of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction;” and the equally putative collaboration between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

America’s founding fathers were concerned about this very thing. Having faced an armed colonial occupation force at the inception of our republic, they were concerned that America not follow the same path by engaging in unnecessary military adventures. Thus, Benjamin Franklin had argued against adopting the Roman legion’s martial eagle as our national bird, suggesting the turkey instead. Franklin’s concern turned out to be prescient. For America has been engaged in some form of warfare for every decade since its founding.

Yet like individuals, America is neither solely all light, nor all shadow. We’re more like a river that contains two tributaries, one clear running, the other muddy and foul; a nation both noble and culpable. (And often rent apart between its better and worse angels). America is a conversation between these two, and not just that “shining city on the hill.” We lose our bearings when we lose sight of one — or the other. And when we confuse one for the other.

And the rise of Trump puts that conversation — and that confusion — squarely before us. If narcissism is in part an identity confusion, a confusion about who we truly are, Trump represents not only a crisis for our democracy, but a national identity crisis. For he leads us to ask: Who are we as a people? (And it’s not a bad question).

However, that question has really been with us for as long as America has existed. And though much of our media has portrayed Trump as an outlier, an alien menace — as if an autocratic dictator transported from a third world banana republic — what has been lost in a psychologically naïve nation with a diminished sense of history, is that Trump also embodies an archetype as American as apple pie.

For something Trump-like is not only found in the obsessive quests of recent comic book villains, but was already spotted in the similarly obsessive quest of the monomaniacal, one-legged whaleboat Captain Ahab, portrayed in one of the first great American novels (Moby Dick), which was published in 1851.