Location 66-70 “The most important and hopeful antidote to our current predicament is psychological awareness, awareness of the nature of the mind itself and an awareness of the forces that have so distorted our American character and mental stability. Do not gloss over the significance of psychological awareness, because of the word’s common, everyday usage. When we understand the nature of our mind we see that awareness itself can be profoundly healing and can illuminate the constructive things we can do to restore the American mind to rationality, tranquility, and vibrancy.”
Location 72-73 “Awareness, deeper psychological awareness itself, must become America’s new Manhattan Project.” !!!!
page 3 “the inherently vulnerable, increasingly traumatized, and badly manipulated American mind has reached a point that now threatens America’s democracy, maybe even our survival. Focusing on Donald Trump’s obvious impairments is a dangerous distraction that keeps us from attending to this real problem.”
page 4 “Rational behavior is difficult for the human mind even under normal circumstances, but today’s American minds are also suffering from vastly under-recognized psychological trauma from multiple sources, not just the political. As a result, many Americans’ mental capacity to create and sustain a stable reality sense, to determine what is true, what is not, and to make healthy decisions in their own best interest has been severely impaired. Above all, in this state, for reasons I describe, tolerating other people’s opinions is very, very difficult for the mind. That is why we are “so divided.”” !!!
page 4 “Trauma undermines the attention our mind needs to function, to create a viable and rational reality sense. It undercuts our very awareness itself. It does nothing less than dismantle our ability to self- regulate and to make ourselves feel good. And, it is rampant in America. Most of us are suffering from it to some extent, whether we know it or not.”
page 4 “trauma—whether it comes from poverty or privilege, from a family splitting apart, the death of a loved one, or daily violence—saps our energy to engage in healthy mental functioning and wildly distorts our perceptual apparatus. It is a profoundly stressful experience that has a significant impact on our entire nervous system and even our overall physical health, putting us at risk for cancer, heart disease, diabetes and other diseases. We do not just get over it.”
page 5 “Neuroscience and clinical experience make it abundantly clear that our mind requires stable connections to others in order to function effectively and to experience enduring happiness. All across America those connections have been increasingly challenged in so many ways. The breakup of the extended family was difficult enough. Now, even the nuclear family is becoming an anomaly. Trauma is this rupture in these connections, both to supportive others and, ultimately, to our very ability to connect with our own self. It creates a profound unease inside us and shakes our confidence in our common sense, in our own perceptions, and our most basic personal wholeness. Without the stimulation and security from others with whom we are intimate, our inner experience loses its vibrancy, its security, and its tranquility. Without these qualities we do not do so well. We disconnect from our very self and are no longer fully aware of the experience our very own nervous system is having. And what we do see is wildly distorted from reality. We do not even have a language for many of these internal subjective experiences. Unable to recognize and identify our situation, we become helpless to do anything about it. It is an undeniable path to self-defeat and human suffering the likes of which is unimaginable. This is what has been done to the American mind.” !!!
page 5 “Tragically, minds in trauma seek and create still more trauma in their attempts to get away from the painful states of the original wound and provide alternative stimulation. Studies show that the familiar surge in dopamine, the brain’s reward system, caused by trauma, is compulsively regenerated in the escalation of terrifying movies, dystopian books, and addiction. Trauma begets more trauma in ill-conceived efforts to escape the emotional predicament it creates. This is why America went on a wild goose chase in Iraq that led to the formation of ISIS and why we bombed Afghanistan. Each misadventure adds to our agitation and our urge for further stimulation. It is also what has created a climate ravenous for non-stop “breaking news,” on news networks that have divided us like nothing since the Civil War.”
page 6 “We are wired to require secure contact with safe and loving human beings. When we do not have that or lose it suddenly, the pain can be excruciating.”
page 7 “As a country we have had a very hard time acknowledging the true role of trauma in our lives. It is, however, a paradoxical, colorless, odorless substance that now permeates all we experience, think, and do. We must begin to provide a language for it.” !!!!
page 7 “The psychological infrastructure of our people is the most neglected resource in our country. In large parts of our culture, the most important aspects of our lives, the strained quality of our own and our children’s inner experience, are off limits for discussion. As a result we are largely alone with our trauma. It is difficult for trauma to heal in isolation.”
page 8 “Unfortunately, we are in a heavy state of denial about the dysfunction this widespread disconnection and psychological trauma is causing in our national capacity to address our problems. Financial insecurity is everywhere. Insomnia and the psychological instability arising from the tortured nervous systems of the sleep deprived is a national epidemic. These are just among the many everyday conditions that have made the American mind ripe for the irrational behavior we have been witnessing.”
page 8 “Some people are exploiting these vulnerable minds of ours for their own political ends, and they are making us all sicker. They are what I call gaslighters”
page 8 “The sixty million American minds that elected Trump leader of the most powerful nation in the world did not do so primarily as a matter of conservative political ideology. Sixteen relatively more qualified GOP candidates vied for the nomination. Instead, it was because Trump offered them the false hope that by believing in him they could lay down the burden that their psychological confusion and unrecognized trauma was causing them. For so many Americans, Donald Trump’s prominent invitation to drink the temporarily magical elixir of complete self-absorption is an alluring respite for the difficulties of the real world and the terrible internal discomfort it creates inside the battered American mind.”
page 9 “Millions of Americans outsourced the tasks of forming a reality sense and generating an internal sense of vitality to Trump, and so he gladly helped them fill in the gaps by conjuring a simple, clear, and highly cathartic worldview in which people of different color were eroding their opportunities, men were losing their power, gay people’s rights would mean theirs would be trampled, and he, Trump, was the only one who could restore their jobs and their lost retirement security. Trump was the only one who could give them an internal state of vitality by touching the deep emotional layers of their neglected and un-championed innermost experience, primitive hatreds like misogyny, racism, and envy. It is the management of these deep psychological states that is the great challenge facing America.”
page 9 “Trauma did not just impact Trump supporters. Those of us who opposed him did not function so well psychologically either, did we? Our understanding of the American mind was so limited we misread the threat Trump posed to America and its traditional values, and, psychologically, we were not able to organize ourselves politically to defeat him. Our minds were distracted at a time when focused awareness was required. We cannot continue to live in such a state.”
page 9 “The true battleground states in America are states of mind, psychological states, over which subliminal psychological wars are being fought in the inner recesses of American minds.”
page 10 “There are three main psychological battlegrounds in this war– paranoia, sex, and envy.”
page 11 ““The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” ― Hannah Arendt” !!
page 12 “In the mental health profession, gaslighting refers to a series of mind games that prey on our limited ability to tolerate much ambiguity or uncertainty about what is happening in important areas of our lives.1”
page 13 “what we psychologists see with patients in psychotherapy is a mind made up of a series of loosely associated symbols, feeling states, fears, and wishes that are connected in highly idiosyncratic fashion. Our mind moves from one to the other according to each person’s own rules and oftentimes in a seemingly chaotic manner. At their core, most people are driven by very primitive feeling states—fear, sexual perplexity, and envy, for example—of which they are at best only dimly aware. These are the things that shape people’s view of reality and are driving America’s political behavior. They transcend logic and even financial self-interest. These minds are like snowflakes. People walk about in far more different realities from one another than they realize. In marriage therapy and in politics, I have seen in exquisite detail two people who think they know one another talk right past each other, often with disastrous results.”
page 15 “Trauma is a gaslighter’s paradise.”
page 17 “The political use of gaslighting has led to a psychologically impaired and unstable American electorate. The resulting policy decisions have had devastating implications for all Americans and the world.”
page 17 “Once Americans adopt the irrational beliefs and become dependent on the gaslighter, they are highly unlikely to reconsider their beliefs, no matter what the consequences and no matter what the evidence to the contrary.”
page 18 “A fundamental aspect of human psychology is the mind’s effort, its outright need, to have a reality it feels certain of. The reality it creates may or may not be accurate. That is less important. From the point of personal psychological need, it is better to feel certain than to be right. The mind simply cannot function well without this certainty, and, if it feels uncertain, it will seize on almost anything for help. This is the pressure point of maximum vulnerability in the human mind, a point that right-wing ideologues have learned how to press—and that progressive liberal forces are only recently even addressing. American politics is now a battle to shape what Americans perceive as reality.”
page 20 “Because the mind is able to turn away from conflict that is unpleasant, it is as if these people are able to erase part of their own memory and avoid confronting reality. Needless to say, this is not a healthy coping mechanism because, for reasons I will discuss, each time the mind turns away from reality, it becomes weaker and functions less effectively. Unfortunately, this approach to psychological conflict is now rampant in contemporary America.”
page 22 “today’s gaslighters have extended their reach throughout American society in multiple ways to increasingly control information Americans receive about the world. They have invented a 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week cable pseudo-news channel, courted and co-opted evangelical religious leaders, and viciously attacked their opposition with smear campaigns. At the same time, professions that have historically played important roles in helping us define our political reality are all under attack; mainstream media, law, education, and even science have all suffered a precipitous decline in influence. Thus, the American mind is on one hand assaulted by powerful new forms of deception and, on the other, abandoned by traditionally supportive institutions. Given the complexity of our present situation, this could not have occurred at a more difficult time. The most recent assault on the American mind has taken place in three specific emotionally charged psychological states: paranoia, sexual perplexity, and envy. These are the true “battleground states” in American politics today. Whoever carries the day in addressing and harnessing these psychological states will control and shape the American political landscape for the coming decades. Any political party or movement that fails to consider them in its campaign strategy handicaps itself significantly.”
page 23 “The genie cannot be put back in the bottle. The methods of gaslighting are now deeply and permanently ensconced in our political system and will not go away. The forces are there, the techniques operative. Unless we learn about these techniques and how to defend against them we will continue to suffer from them. But when we do understand how the mind works—how certain states of mind affect us in our political behavior—it provides us with a powerful and consistent explanation for America’s behavior in today’s political world.”
page 23 “American politics now and for the future will be the politics of reality. Any party that does not try to articulate a reality that appreciates the needs and complexities of the human mind will become increasingly obsolete.”
page 27 “For the fundamentalist, for instance, the secular humanist reality feels profoundly nihilistic and devoid of meaning. It feels like a rationale for hedonism stripped of moral values—indeed, of any value at all. Above all, it is a world sapped of the experience of ecstasy that religion with its celebratory joy brings to many fundamentalist Christians. For the secular humanist, on the other hand, entering the reality of the religious fundamentalist is like Alice’s experience entering Wonderland—a world characterized by magical thinking not unlike a child’s belief in Superman or Merlin. To the humanist, the fundamentalist world feels as if it is built on psychological denial and driven by self-indulgent wishful thinking that is rationalized and protected from tests of reason by calling it faith. For the humanist, loving God and Jesus in the particular way fundamentalists do feels like an idolatrous affair with God and Jesus rather than a true experience of love for all mankind that makes the Golden Rule come naturally.”
page 27 “If you are a secular humanist and cannot appreciate what it would feel like to have a benevolent figure like Christ watching over you, for example, then you have missed a major part of the fundamentalist experience that you need if you are to begin exploring the fundamentalist mindset and what creates, affects, and motivates it. Similarly, the reality of a secular humanist offers rewards different from the fundamentalist’ reality. Human love becomes all the more poignant and tender by virtue of the seemingly nihilistic background. In secular humanist reality, to love thy neighbor is not just important—it is life’s highest meaning, the precious substance that gives life its value.”
page 28 “First, if the external world undergoes rapid and significant changes, then the mind has to integrate the new information into the person’s reality sense. As a general principle, the more significant and extensive the change, the more difficult it is for some minds to accommodate. For some, change is almost always bad for that reason. It is too taxing and stressful. Second, if there are threats to one’s feelings of self-worth, personal security, or sexual adequacy, the reality formation process is similarly burdened because the mind has to manage these as part of its reality creation process. When the mind has been traumatized by these things its ability to formulate an effective and rational reality is greatly compromised.”
page 29 “They are looking for greater simplicity and clarity, not greater complexity. In a world that is growing increasingly complex, this makes them very vulnerable. And therein is the rub.”
page 29 “The problem with the mind is this: the mind’s strength—the power to weave a coherent reality out of the booming, buzzing, multifaceted confusion we live in—is also its shortcoming. The mind not only can create a reality sense; it must do so. When it cannot maintain a comfortable sense of a cohesive world, the mind—and the rest of the person along with it—becomes very agitated and perplexed. And it is here that the mind gets into trouble, submitting to irrational beliefs, implausible explanations, and illogical solutions.” !!!!
page 30 “Perplexity is the mind’s heart of darkness. It is the emotional result of not being able to distinguish with confidence what is real from what is not. In a state of perplexity, the world is frighteningly chaotic—without rationality, predictability, or safety. The victim of perplexity feels that they have no ground to stand on, as if they are in a panicky free fall. The reality sense the mind provides is what separates us from that psychological abyss. When the mind is perplexed, to stave off its own disintegration, the mind begins to manufacture, piece together, edit, delete, and selectively attend to reality in whatever way it can to shape a reality sense that it can convince itself is “true.”” !!
page 30 “Perplexity is difficult to tolerate in its own right, but it is especially so if it arises in areas of insecurity such as people’s understanding of important events in their external world or their feelings of self-worth, their sexuality, or their personal security. We do not tolerate uncertainty or perplexity in these areas well at all.”
page 30 “In psychological regression, the mind unwittingly returns to earlier developmental levels of mental functioning that are less demanding. We revert, or regress to what we have already mastered and what was much simpler. One’s thinking is more concrete, like a child’s, is more likely to be ruled by superstition than logic, and is less likely to be analytically sound. People are literally more simple-minded. Some who have noticed this phenomenon refer to a “dumbing down” of America. This is psychological regression.”
page 31 “When people regress, they also become more dependent on others for the exercise of judgment, for an interpretation of external events, and for a moral code.”
page 31 “People plagued with self-doubt about what is real and what is not crave three things they are unable to provide for themselves: certainty, simplicity, and stimulation”
page 31 “When people escape from stressful perplexity, they are loath to revisit it.”
page 31 “The more irrational people’s thinking, the more rigid they are in defending it.”
page 33 “True paranoia is a fascinating form of mental confusion over psychological boundaries that occurs to some extent in all of us. Ironically, paranoia uses the same mental mechanisms that let us empathize and understand one another. Under stress, those mechanisms run amok, and the mind confuses emotional experiences that are actually inside us with experiences that are outside us.”
page 34 “A perplexed mind, instead of staying perplexed, will “resolve” the distress of an unknown enemy by finding an enemy, even if it is not the real one. The perplexity, at least temporarily, is over.”
page 35 “Paranoid mechanisms play a very adaptive role in the world. For example, they are at play in all forms of human empathy. To understand other people and anticipate what they will do, we have to “read them.” We have to take our own mind outside itself and put it in them. We have to empathize with what it is like to sit inside the other’s mind. To do this well requires an exquisite sensitivity to the other person. We must let our protective boundaries soften to let our experience of the other in. That requires a certain confidence and sense of security.”
page 35 “people see other people through a prism of what is happening in their own mind. This potential for confusion, between what is us and what is someone else, is the core mechanism at play in paranoia”
page 38 “One of the most difficult and important jobs in psychotherapy (and all intimate relationships) is sorting out exactly which feelings are truly in the patient and which are in the analyst. This is also an important exercise to perform before a nation goes to war. Because of the fact that everything we experience, whether it is from outside us or inside us, we experience in the same mind, there is much greater confusion between what is inside us and what we think is outside us than we recognize.” !!!!
page 39 “Having a target for the paranoid fear and rage generated by 9/11 was more important than having an accurate rationale for the particular target America selected.” !!
page 39 “In paranoia, the critical point for understanding is the line of demarcation between the inner world and the outer world, the line between what is in me and what is outside of me. This line is the point of maximum sensitivity in all of our relationships, for better and for worse. It is called a psychological boundary. Our psychological boundaries raise fascinating psychological issues. They are the point at which all human intimacy and understanding occurs. They are also the point at which we experience other people as annoying, hostile, and intrusive. They play a large role in paranoia and can be very dangerous if not appreciated and respected. For example, most Americans for decades underestimated the psychological impact our military bases in the Middle East had on people in the Middle East. Americans would not take well at all to having Saudi Arabian military bases in Nebraska, Ohio, New York, and Colorado. Planting a military base in another’s country, when understood in the context of the paranoid nature of the mind, especially the extreme sensitivity that exists around psychological boundaries, is the equivalent of poking a sharp stick in the other’s eye.”
page 39 “Because the mind needs to be open to the external world in order to understand the world and to connect with other people, we have sensitivities at the boundary line between what is us and what is the external world. This is how we make meaningful contact with others and absorb the world around us. This sensitivity can vary greatly from person to person.”
page 40 “Problems in boundary relations will preempt the effective functioning of the mind, making one feel threatened and needing either to withdraw or attack.”
page 40 “This is why boundaries and the space between people are hazardous to negotiate and require much caution. They must be open so people can connect with others and understand the world, but because of this very openness they can make people feel very vulnerable. This is why all cultures have customs designed to “detoxify” the tension that people’s hypersensitivity to boundaries creates.”
page 41 “Americans were so susceptible to Bush’s arguments in support of war with Iraq because psychologically they were using Saddam Hussein as a bromide, an attempt at relief from anxiety at not having the real external target to fight back at “over there.” Hussein became the enemy and the uncertainty was at least partially resolved.”
page 42 “what is not fully appreciated by either side is the degree of terror pro-war advocates feel over having their psychological boundaries penetrated. This gives the war an added urgency and has contributed in no small measure to America’s irrational national response to post-9/11 events. It also made it difficult for America to admit its mistake in Iraq. Today, this paranoid problem has escalated as we find enemies inside our own boundaries and make Latino and Muslim immigrants seem dangerous. We are anxious and need to find a concrete representation of that anxiety to calm the mind. We simply ought not confuse that need with rational behavior.”
page 43 “We all use paranoid mechanisms to explain away many of our vague and unpleasant feelings. Enemies play a very important role in this because people can attribute all manner of unpleasant feelings they have to an enemy. As strange as it may seem, our enemies actually help us maintain a cohesive sense of reality. They serve as a holding container for many of the unacceptable or confusing feelings we either do not want to own or need to explain away. To avoid the burden of many unpleasant feelings, people project them onto an evil other.”
page 45 “For the mind, it is often more important to have a firm reality sense than to have a correct one.”
page 45 “In a paranoid state, people are vulnerable to strongly asserted, confident statements from others who sound superior (and who pander to people’s own need to feel superior), especially if those messages tend to support the ongoing paranoid mechanisms in their mind.
page 46 “Authoritarian voices and personalities reflect, and actually command by their demeanor and tone, the self-indulgent way people unconsciously want their own minds to work.”
page 46 “Any voices that are inconsistent with the paranoid reality are met with contempt and disgust. Contempt and disgust are especially important feelings in paranoid states because with contempt and disgust people turn up their nose at other people (often literally) and do not have to actually see them. Thus, they are quite handy to a paranoid defensive reaction.”
page 47 “Unfortunately, contempt has now become an integral part of the tone of more traditional members of the independent press as well. This provides a protective cover for the more targeted gaslighting media. It is now true that at least in intonation, when it comes to biased media, “everyone’s doing it.””
page 47 “Unfortunately, for people to adapt to the world successfully, reality needs to be continuously assessed and re-assessed, taxing though that certainly is to a mind already under stress. When people wall off their receptiveness to new information and cling to their fixed perceptions, they stop revising their reality sense to incorporate new information. Instead, over time their perception of the world is increasingly and disproportionately dominated and colored by their own internal emotional states, especially the fears and vulnerability inside the now-closed mind. Paranoia breeds this defensive isolationism.”
page 47 “There is another ill effect of paranoia, however, and that is grandiosity. Fear and powerlessness are critical elements of people’s retreat into paranoia, and one of the temporary advantages of that retreat into the paranoid’s world is that paranoia lets people recreate who they are with an unrealistically grand self-assessment that is in contrast to how they feel about themselves otherwise.”
page 48 “Given the grandiose dimension to paranoia, truly paranoid people do not necessarily appear scared. More often they come across as superior, even haughty.”
page 49 “the more the mind itself is under pressure, the more its own fears, wishes, and needs shape the view it has of external reality.”
page 58 “People hate what makes them anxious, and many become indignant about sex for that reason. Sexual issues are highly explosive and can be very powerful tools for gaslighting, whether they pertain to heterosexual or homosexual sex.”
page 63 “One of the most important things our reality sense has to do is tell us who we are and how we fit into the world. There is nothing more fundamental to that process than our sexual identity, that is, our sense of maleness or femaleness (not whether someone is straight or gay). Gender identity is a critical element that gives definition to people’s sense of who they are. This is why one of the strongest needs of childhood is to emulate an adult male or an adult female. Being like mommy or daddy or some similar role model is extremely important. One is a male, or one is a female. This gender identification forms the scaffolding for one’s sense of self, on which one can eventually build an adult identity. Without that solid identification with gender—whether male or female—we feel confused and disoriented.”
page 64 “lack of certainty creates some understandable tension for a mind that requires self-definition to feel secure.”
page 64 “ambiguities in sexual identity create three basic challenges for people sexually. First, are they fundamentally adequate in the way they play their sexual role as men or women?”
page 64 “Second, the problem of gender adequacy infects relationships between the sexes by burdening them with questions of superiority and adequacy. Given people’s tendency to project and confuse their inner with their outer, trying to stabilize a “balance of power” between men and women is understandably very difficult”
page 65 “Just because white males have had the upper hand, however, does not mean that they are free from worries about adequacy and competency. Far from it. Paradoxically, there is nothing that makes this clearer than spousal abuse.”
page 70 “The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy exposed the fact it is not the homosexual who is not fit for duty; instead, it is the heterosexuals’ reaction to gays that is problematic. Heterosexual homophobia is by no means an untreatable illness, but it is hard to treat if it is not identified as the true problem. Identifying the homophobic response would also ease the frightening burden of homophobia for heterosexual members of the armed forces. Equally important, desensitizing heterosexuals to their fear could help the military take advantage of the skills that uncloseted gay men and lesbians could provide to the military.”
page 72 “Since one’s sexual orientation is never an absolute, many Americans are very frightened by homosexuality because it raises the specter of losing the important mental security of a clearly defined and firm sexual orientation. Clinging to a member of the opposite sex in an exclusive marital club of heterosexuals is a palliative for individuals who are made fearful by the existence of an alternative sexual orientation. Gay marriage smashes that protective buffer and creates considerable perplexity for heterosexuals.”
page 73 “In the mass media, movies such as Brokeback Mountain and television shows like Six Feet Under and Brothers and Sisters depicted explicit gay sex. This has two very different effects on viewers. Those people whose anxiety is not so intense that it prevents them from watching the shows gradually find that their homophobic anxiety is reduced. Others, in contrast, are repulsed and turn away. Their negative attitudes toward gay men and lesbians are only intensified.”
page 73 “The dividing line of political correctness has become clearer and more absolute for many Americans. The problem is that now Americans are fighting over which side of the line is virtuous. In truth, however, this is a war over emotional experiences, not moral values.”
page 76 “One primary reason negative campaigning works because it harnesses the enormous blind energy of envy and greed. The ads simultaneously loosen people’s inhibitions against rage and stimulate an underappreciated, often totally unrecognized latent need people have to hate. The hatred is rooted in envy.”
page 76 “Melanie Klein, a British psychoanalyst (1882–1960), was the first psychoanalytic theorist to write extensively on envy.2 When she tried to introduce her work in the United States, she was greeted with hostility from her colleagues in the American Psychoanalytic Association and her important work was both denigrated and dismissed.”
page 77 “envy is frustrated psychological hunger.” !!
page 77 “Greed is the flip side of envy. People try to assuage their envious rage by getting what they want. This is greed. When people acquire something, their greed is temporarily satisfied and the envy abates. But the ongoing paradigmatic response to deprivation is ingrained and plays out over and over again in people’s daily lives. The extent of anger it generates will vary according to the individual and to the individual’s circumstances, but it is always there.”
page 77 “the economic system depends on a whole culture in which people are made to feel there is something they want but do not have, so they will buy it. All experiences of emptiness are turned outward for resolution. It is not greater self-connection or connection with others we need, it is material goods.” !!
page 78 “Envy bears a direct connection to self-esteem.3 On its most primitive level, feeling full and good is being full and good. If hunger is being constantly stimulated, people are in a constant state of agitation and their self-esteem is in a constant state of flux.”
page 78 “Being cool, physically attractive, and sexy are all attributes that people are made to feel over and over again they must have in order to feel secure in the world. And, judging just by television and the movies, most people in the world are remarkably more attractive than we are.”
page 78 “envy a powerful source of latent hatred. Unmet self-esteem wishes lead to frustration and rage. And there are a lot of unmet self-esteem wishes in the American “culture of narcissism.” Envy also extends to people who conspicuously move in different circles than others do, who appear more “with it.” The intense rage directed in some circles at “liberals,” for example, reflects a feeling, actively encouraged by hate-filled radio, that some liberals feel superior and have something others do not have. Thus, people are encouraged to resent them. The political consequences are obvious.”
page 79 “Many Americans, as events and issues become more confusing, feel envy about the understanding others appear to have but they lack. In today’s world, people can be envious of others who appear to understand the world better than they do, who appear more certain of their place in the world, or who appear more confident of their ability to exert control over parts of that world. Not being able to understand the world and the events that are happening evokes powerful surges of envy and inferiority. It gives people a vague sense of there being something wrong with them when they feel confused or uncertain. This is the source of the latent need to hate that is created by envy. As the world becomes less and less comprehensible—which Americans are feeling to an ever greater extent—we inevitably develop a particularly aggressive set of feelings toward others who seem to understand this increasingly complex world, or at least act as though they do.” !!
page 79 “If a powerful spokesperson attacks the scientist whose superior intellect makes us feel inferior and offers us a simplistic alternative to the complexity, coupled with a moralistic rationale for hating the scientist, it is a very tempting package to accept psychologically. The defiance it expresses also gives one a self-injected shot of superiority that will often look a great deal like smugness to others. This dynamic is at play in the often arrogant repudiation of scientific warnings about the environment.” !!
page 82 “In some organizations, the clever and ruthlessly ambitious, if they understand envy well enough, manipulate the envy of others, enlisting them in their own palace intrigues against those who are making the organization successful and adhering to its objectives.”
page 82 “successful politicians have learned that negative attacks must be answered right away no matter how absurd they are. The poisonous messages are being sent to a typically uninformed audience that has a very malleable, often limitless, supply of negative energy that is yearning for an outlet. Envy is an angry posse that’s just been told the bad guys “went that a-way.””
page 84 “K Street Project, the name referring to the part of the project designed to encourage Washington lobbying firms to hire only Republicans.7”
page 84 “Envy is very difficult for people to acknowledge in themselves because it is an acknowledgment that they feel inferior.”
page 85 “Feeling deprived in a context in which someone appears to be getting what another person covets for himself is the cornerstone of envy. By envying someone, people tell themselves they are not as good as someone else, and so envy eats away at their self-esteem and makes them resentful of what others have. In turn, this makes it hard for them to form solid and enduring relationships. What they admire and what initially attracts them to the other person becomes the source of envy that ultimately makes the relationship intolerable.”
page 85 “Envy, born out of one’s self-esteem problems, by its very existence makes those self-esteem problems worse and creates an increasing reservoir of pent-up resentment and rage that is difficult for most people to address and acknowledge directly. Thus, a pool of latent envy is present in highly variable degrees in many people. And it clamors for expression.”
page 85 “Hitler himself resonated deeply with the German feelings of shame and inferiority between the two world wars and was able to use his own understanding of envy to manipulate and maneuver German throngs. He understood envy because he lived with it and was driven by it himself. The German public mirrored his own envy-filled inner world so powerfully that he could use them to wreak havoc on the rest of the world.”
page 86 “Envy’s target is remarkably nonspecific. A very young infant will accept feeding from any source. Envy is so critical to a child’s survival that to to some extent it supersedes the infant’s attachment to its own particular mother. If the infant cannot alert the world at large to its hunger, it is in trouble. Since it is the infant’s first communication to the world, the target for that communication is not well differentiated. Thus, the object of the rage born of envy is very transferable. If one is frustrated, the anger can be directed just about anywhere. Envy, formed from an accumulation of frustrations, can be channeled or discharged in almost any direction.” !!
page 86 “Since it is humiliating to experience envy, people will do anything to disguise their envy, even to themselves. Converting it to self-righteous feelings of superiority is one particularly effective way to avoid that feeling. People can obscure their envious feelings from themselves as well as others if they can convert their envy into a moralistic position that the other is evil, and they are virtuous. Thus, people are particularly vulnerable to a gaslighter who gives them a moralistic justification for discharging the primitive feelings of hate that the negative political ad, for example, seems to justify and even encourage. In effect, people substitute feelings of self-righteousness for feelings of envy and inferiority.”
page 86 “People are understandably grateful to anyone who can help them channel their envy into a more palatable outlet and facilitate this transition. Because of this, envy readily converts to an important energy source to tap for fundamentalist religions and ideologically inclined groups of all kinds. It is also the raw material of demagoguery.”
page 87 “The projection makes the target appear to be doing what the listener really wants to do himself, namely, indulge himself in an emotional bath of aggressive, greedy feelings.”
page 88 “Freud described this tension over whether reality should succumb to short-term emotional convenience or to the person’s long-term best interest as a conflict between the mind’s wish to pursue pleasure, the pleasure principle, and the mind’s tendency to acknowledge reality, the reality principle. For Freud, the single most pivotal aspect of the developing mind was its ability to acknowledge painful reality. In confronting reality and the demands it makes, the mind matures and maximizes its ability to function effectively. Developmental maturity for Freud consisted of tolerating anxiety and uncertainty without resorting to temporarily expedient, but ultimately self-defeating, distortions in reality.”
page 89 “Envy is an energy source the management of which often determines public policy. The spoils will go to the side that harnesses envy more effectively.” !!
page 92 “So long as one has a minimal set of material needs met, the overwhelming variable predicting happiness is not satiation of our envy and greed. It is our sense of loving connectedness to others and our capacity to enjoy the richness of our own inner experience. Pleasure or happiness comes from serving others to whom we are connected. It is only when we pursue these things we can find happiness. Material goods can often divert us from these experiences and when they do, no matter how much money we have we are unhappy.”
page 92 “Progressive forces did not understand Trump’s appeal. He appeared to be an obvious buffoon. But that buffoonery is a tremendous asset when it comes to managing envy. George Bush benefited some from this as well as noted above. But Trump took it to a whole new level. His profile that many see as a self indulgent buffoon is a perfect prophylactic against being the victim of envious rage in a political environment where the targeted constituency is awash in envy.”
page 95 “If we threaten people in the areas of sexual identity, then swamp them with feelings of envy and paranoia we can do a pretty good job of disabling their mental apparatus.”
page 96 “Losing special status is painful, unpleasant, and shamefully exposing. Naturally, most men who feel this way do not acknowledge or even understand the feeling.” !!
page 97 “Hillary’s “sin” is not just her feminine status. It is also her competence. That is what drives the envy. Donald is, for all his presumed material goods, a bit of a buffoon and as such does not make people so envious. In fact, his foibles reduce the envy and make him less objectionable to his supporters. But Hillary, in contrast, at the psychological level, first robs them of the scaffolding a sexist culture provides for their identity, and then, when she appears better than they are, the initial resentment is amplified by envy. Strike two. But the hatred grows further. In our dynamic it is difficult if not impossible for relatively rigid minds to tolerate and constructively channel the accumulating anger and resentment white males, especially, in America feel toward Hillary. Instead, they become paranoid, projecting their own angry feelings onto her and then imagining the vicious things she will do to them if she is elected their President. Major sectors of Middle America were truly terrified of a Hillary Presidency because of their own projections. This was strike three.”
page 97 “Many members of both genders have a vested interest in our sexist culture. If we look at the mind’s need to establish a reality sense, having one’s gender role behavior laid out by society, no matter how unfair or repressive, can let the person’s mind off the hook from having to struggle with the complex decisions that come from gender role freedom. The mind does not like perplexity, and an already traumatized mind, in a weakened condition, in particular will often avoid it given the opportunity to do so.”
page 98 “The primary reason Hillary Clinton was so hated was because she is a woman who is exceptionally competent in a world of human minds that have become increasingly sexually perplexed, envious, and paranoid.” !!
page 98 “If one considers the power of the three battleground psychological states, one can see that anyone who understands these forces and is inclined to manipulate them can create great confusion and great evil. However, it is also important to notice that these forces in and of themselves are not necessarily evil. Paranoid mechanisms are what enable us to understand one another. Sexuality is the means by which we love and create our children. And envy creates our motivation to work and be productive. If Americans have the wisdom to select leaders who want to harness these forces to make us a better country, there is an enormous opportunity the battleground states provide.” !!
page 100 “Paranoia, sexual perplexity, and envy are emotional states that can fluctuate dramatically and tax the mind’s already limited ability to maintain a stable reality sense during times of crisis. They make people ready targets for gaslighters. Historically, the study of these deeper dimensions of the mind, psychoanalysis, and the art of manipulating them, public relations, are closely intertwined”
page 100 “Freud’s model of the mind, with its unconscious level of activity and its emphasis on defending itself from conflict by distorting reality, is increasingly borne out by technologically advanced studies of the brain, some of which can actually measure the brain’s resistance to political information that is inconsistent with the person’s preexisting political point of view.1”
page 102 “The medium was not the message; it was simply bypassing the conscious, rational part of the mind and delivering the message to a deeper and more powerful stratum, which greatly expanded the potential power of the spokesperson.” !!
page 103 “Marketers learned to address the mind on the more primitive level that becomes apparent in psychoanalytic treatment. Neither rational nor logical, it is associative or what some call symbolic. When ideas or things are associated with one another in the mind at this level, there is a spillover of qualities attributed from one to the other. This is what makes symbolic marketing so effective. It creates feeling states in the viewer and then connects them to a product or candidate who otherwise has little to do with the actual emotional state.”
page 103 “from a mental health perspective, marketing seductively disconnects the mind from reality and actively encourages it to engage in fantasy. The mind is encouraged to let that fantasy predominate over reality in making decisions. This combination of loose symbolic thinking permeated with fantasy is the essence of psychological regression. It undercuts the rational functioning of the human mind.”
page 104 “Nixon retained a very young television producer, Roger Ailes, for his 1968 campaign.”
page 103 “The advertising firm Doyle Dane Bernbach created an ad for Johnson attacking his opponent Barry Goldwater in which a young girl was pulling petals from a daisy as a voice in the background counted down from ten. When it reached zero, the picture of the girl dissolved into a mushroom cloud.3 Bill Moyers, who was in charge of television advertising for the campaign, ordered that the ad be run only once, but that was sufficient to create a huge outcry.”
page 104 “The formula for the sexual assault ad is to create perplexity and make sure that one’s own candidate appears to offer the solution.”
page 106 “The mind’s sensory overload alone creates a fertile loam of perplexity in which gaslighting can take hold.”
page 106 “While the mental health community has commented on gaslighting primarily in the context of marital and family relationships, gaslighting permeates our culture.”
page 106 “Since employers are much more restricted legally in their ability to arbitrarily fire employees, many CEOs and employers use their power in deceptive ways to achieve what would be otherwise illegal or politically costly job discrimination.” !!
page 109 “there are often two sets of victims to gaslighting. There are, first, the specific targets of the assault and, second, the audience whose reality is toyed with.”
page 110 “Ironically, to avoid the unpleasant conflict with the gaslighter on whom they have become dependent, these participant-observer victims of gaslighting repudiate the very parts of the mind that create their vital reality sense. Compliance with a “reality” that is not firmly rooted in significant part in one’s own independent mental processes leads to a psychological atrophy in their all-important reality sense. This causes a global reduction in effective psychological functioning. Each time a person accepts a gaslighter’s reality, he or she weakens the independent functioning of their own mind and becomes more and more vulnerable to the gaslighter. The victim will become increasingly disoriented and his or her mental functioning and behavior will tend to revert to childlike patterns. This psychological reaction occurred in post-9/11 America when Americans’ inability to detect political manipulation caused them to fall out of sync with the rest of the world by blindly accepting the Bush reality.” !!
page 110 “While gaslighters themselves come in many different sizes and shapes, in my experience, it is helpful in political contexts to divide them into two prototypes of gaslighters: the authoritarian and the paradoxical. The authoritarian gaslighters typically stay out of the public eye and are manipulative and psychologically coercive in the development and implementation of their political strategies. They are the powers behind the scenes that exert enormous control, often without leaving their fingerprints on any of their work. Their personality profiles show some striking similarities to one another. Childhood abandonment, family secrets, and social ostracism are frequent parts of their history. Many have a social history of not being well liked and a preoccupation with sexual and sadistic pranks from an early age. While many use moral concerns to advance their goals, a startling number have histories of addiction disorders and sexual impropriety. Underneath their bland façade, they typically have fantasies of enormous grandiosity in which they vanquish the many people in their lives by whom they have felt slighted. Paradoxical gaslighters, in contrast to the authoritarian, are prototypically beguiling, clever, and deceptive. They are also decidedly asexual and, most importantly, rarely evoke envy in others. For example, they may be quite small in stature or bumbling in speech. This causes them to be underestimated by their adversaries and provides a protective camouflage when their victims cry out in outrage about their behavior. Whether it is his slight physical stature, his unsexy appearance, or his difficulty articulating a complete sentence, he does not appear to be someone who would be able or inclined to do something as sadistic or diabolical as gaslighting. This can make him difficult to expose.”
page 112 “The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality— judiciously as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”” RON SUSKIND !! Speculated to be quoting KARL ROVE
page 116 “Gaslighters are notorious for suffering fools well because for the gaslighter, all relationships are merely opportunities for manipulation. The typical boredom that sets in for many people in suffering fools is less of a problem for the gaslighter. For the gaslighter, people are very fungible anyway, although his or her seductive charm rarely betrays that fact.” !!
page 117 “People are especially vulnerable to gaslighting because most people do not think that someone would be trying to manipulate their reality in this way. If they did, the uncertainty that would create would itself be very perplexing. People could never have a reliable sense of what is real and what is not real in the political world. Eventually if people become convinced that they cannot tell what is real from what is false, many will give up, feel vaguely demoralized, and simply become passive and compliant. The truth quickly becomes a casualty of gaslighting. People who see through gaslighters like Dr. Frank feel a deep antipathy toward them. Those who do not, however, are puzzled by how anyone could be so mean-spirited as to speak critically of such a “harmless,” “gentle,” or “kindly” soul. Because of this, ultimately, paradoxical gaslighters become highly divisive figures who must vanquish anyone who sees through them in order to preserve their façade.”
page 117 “Gaslighting comes directly from blending modern communications, marketing, and advertising techniques with long-standing methods of propaganda. They were simply waiting to be discovered by those with sufficient ambition and psychological makeup to use them. Once the genie is unleashed, no one can put him back in the bottle.” !!
page 117 “significant in terms of American political trends is the announcement in early January 2007 that John McCain had hired to represent him in his efforts to secure the 2008 Republican presidential nomination the very same PR firm that in 2000 had smeared him.20”
page 118 “One of Karl Rove’s reported tricks was to make it appear he has himself been “victimized” by an opponent’s dirty trick to make his opponent look bad. In the 1986 Texas governor’s race, for example, Rove discovered that his office was bugged on the very day his candidate was to have a debate in which his candidate was not expected to do very well. The alleged bugging raised the suspicion that the opponent had been caught in skullduggery. It also deflected attention away from the debate.23”
page 119 “What is most striking today in contrast is just how quickly many minds succumb to the indulgences offered them by the gaslighters. This reflects the weakening of many American minds in their abdication of responsibility for independent thought and their willingness to experience emotional catharsis in the regions of the battleground states.”
page 120 “Many Americans were stunned to hear Kellyanne Conway refer to “alternative facts,” not appreciating that it was an invitation to the beleaguered American mind to simply dismiss the psychological effort it takes to compare conflicting explanations for events and to go with whichever case feels on a primitive level of the mind easier or more gratifying to accept. Discernment is no longer a psychological requirement of the mind for millions of Americans.” !!
page 123 “Advertising succeeds on the basis of repetition. Assert the reality you want over and over again. Be absolute and never tentative. Tentativeness encourages independent thinking. The more people think independently, the less malleable they are. If there is a gap between your position and common sense, simply rewire the connection with “associational logic” that obscures the gap. Associational logic, described more fully below, creates the illusion of logical connections where there are none.” !!
page 126 “A study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the more kids viewed the anti-drug advertising, the more likely they were to use drugs. The GAO stated: “[G]reater exposure to the campaign was associated with weaker anti-drug norms and increases in the perceptions that others use marijuana.”3 The tobacco industry knew what they were doing in telling people “not” to smoke.”
page 127 “If the trusted therapist’s suggestion helps to organize a series of still unexplained, vague, or inchoate bodily experiences, it can start to feel very compelling.”
page 128 “When the therapist raises the possibility of incest, the patient has a fantasy of incest even if it is just part of the process of determining whether in fact it actually happened. That fantasy imagery can take on a life of its own and in the mind become as much a reality as any other life experience. Because of this, it is not as hard to create mental images in someone’s mind as one might expect it to be. Once the image is there, it is surprisingly close to being experienced as a reality. Our reality sense is formed in our mind, not in external reality.”
page 129 “George Lakoff writes: When a word or phrase is repeated over and over for a long period of time, the neural circuits that compute its meaning are activated repeatedly in the brain. As the neurons in those circuits fire, the synapses connecting the neurons in the circuits get stronger and the circuits may eventually become permanent, which happens when you learn the meaning of any word in your fixed vocabulary. Learning a word physically changes your brain, and the meaning of that word becomes physically instantiated in your brain.5”
page 129 “Repeating over and over does not simply persuade someone that what is being said is true; it actually makes it true in the inner workings of the mind.” !!
page 129 ““If you accept my reality, you can resolve your perplexity and bask in the reassurance that comes from my power.”” !!
page 130 “William James said, “People often think they are thinking when in fact they are just rearranging their prejudices.””
page 133 “If stimulation is more important in attracting a larger number of viewers, stimulation becomes the new criterion for “newsworthiness,” replacing the public’s need to know.”
page 133 “Fox News, in its battle with traditional television news media, fights on a very uneven playing field, not unlike the one that parents confront each evening in fighting with their children over whether to do their homework or play video games. The video games are more stimulating and have the joy of an escapist fantasy. Homework is, well, homework, and it is decidedly less stimulating. It is not surprising that Fox News has gained market share in media news.”
page 135 “For people suffering from the self-esteem deficits caused by confusion and uncertainty, the disdain and superiority Hannity exudes can provide a temporary but welcome relief. They are for them a balm of relief from the narcissistic burden of envy and pervasive perplexity.”
page 136 “Fox News gave its viewers the visceral experience one gets when experiencing righteous indignation—the “harrumph” response. This component to indignation for many is a pick-me-up for flagging self-esteem and an outlet for envious rage masked as contempt and disdain. I am superior to them.”
page 136 “When Murdoch first bought Fox Network, some of its staff reported that they were frequently ordered from on high to espouse particular points of view and ordered literally to create stories that suited Murdoch’s political objectives.”
page 136 “Fox encourages a self-indulgence that has a regressive impact on people and encourages them to accept psychologically simple, emotionally cathartic solutions to problems,”
page 137 “Former CNN correspondent Bob Franken says, “We historically are not supposed to be popular, and it’s almost our role to be the bearer of bad news.””
page 141 ““Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” ― Seneca”
page 141 “For the growing number of Americans that now embrace fundamental Christian and Pentecostal beliefs, religious faith is a radical psychological experience. It establishes its own reality, logic, emotional priorities, and set of criteria for determining what is politically relevant. This has made the religious right especially fertile ground for the gaslighters.”
page 142 “In the 2004 presidential election, George Bush used fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches to disseminate campaign literature and to get out the vote in an organizational structure very similar to the sales and distribution model of Amway soap.”
page 142 “Freud, for example, dismissed religion as an illusion: “It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an afterlife; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.”4”
page 142 “if one looks at what the mind has to do to create a reality that leaves people comfortable, the expansion of religion, or more precisely fundamentalist religion, is not so surprising.”
page 142 “Religious fundamentalism plays three psychological roles, all of which reinforce one another to make fundamentalist religion very appealing for millions. First, it fills in important gaps in our reality sense, and in doing so it eases the perplexity that the mind feels from uncertainty. Second, religion provides support for the mind as it struggles with the three battleground emotional states—envy, sexual perplexity, and paranoia. Finally, and least apparent to those who are not part of Pentecostal or fundamentalist religion, it provides an ecstatic experience that is a powerful antidote to the fears and stresses of modernity.”
page 143 “if people need a comprehensive view of reality, and if religion alone addresses many of the things that are uncertain, it is not surprising people fight to defend their religion. Those are the parts of people’s reality that are most easily threatened and, from a psychological perspective, the most perplexing.”
page 143 “To say people go to war over religion is really incorrect and misses the point. People go to war because of the vulnerabilities and limitations of their mind. Religion is simply one of the vessels that can make these shortcomings more apparent because of the subjectivity and uncertainty of its subject matter. If an important part of one’s reality sense is called into question, as when people’s religious beliefs are challenged, it is not just an arid dispute about an empty ideological issue. It goes to their basic sense of anchorage in the world. The infirmities of the mind, however, are the enemy—not religion. Most Americans supported the war in Iraq to support the illusion that they had found the enemy in the form of Saddam Hussein. Of course, they had not, but for a while they had the comforting illusion that they had. It was a costly illusion. Whether it is in religion or politics, it is the mind’s inability to tolerate uncertainty that is the real problem.” !!
page 144 “Jesus’s love is potentially an important antidote to the self-esteem problems and feelings of unworthiness that lead to envious rage. An everlasting life after death puts the issue of envy onto a whole new plane, making a lack of material goods and other insults suffered on Earth less relevant. Religion can reduce envy by promising future rewards for one’s forbearance and deprivation in this world.”
page 144 “When it comes to concerns with sexually perplexing matters, religion answers every question one could possibly have about sex. Nothing is left to doubt or uncertainty.”
page 145 “while one may be inhibited sexually by the prohibitive nature of religious control of sexuality, fundamentalist religions leave little unexplained to a mind uncertain about how to manage the complexities of human sexuality.”
page 145 “Oftentimes the young adults that I work with in therapy try to harness the awe they feel in early adolescent religious experience to stem the tide of sexual longing. This can lead to a choice of careers as priests or nuns, for example.”
page 146 “If one wants to understand the changes in the role of religion in American political life, they have to understand both the psychology and the theology of religious ecstasy.”
page 147 WILLIAM JAMES – “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” BOOK
page 148 “It is important to recognize, however, that ecstasy as an emotional experience is not limited to religious contexts. Sales distributorships like Amway draw on this same form of ecstatic experience to keep their sales force narrowly focused on their sales objectives. The Bush campaign was heavily supported by Amway interests and made extensive use of the Amway communication technology throughout the 2004 campaign.7 Bush’s phrase “compassionate conservatism” appears to have come from a book by Amway founder Rich DeVos’s Compassionate Capitalism.” !!! JAMON
page 148 “By the year 2016, the Amway family, in the form of Trump’s Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, was running our government’s programs for educating our youth.”
page 150 “The priority given to the Holy Spirit in the Pentecostal faith is absolute. The Holy Spirit is inviolable, and respecting the Holy Spirit is even more important than respecting God or Jesus. As Jesus said, “Whoever blasphemes against the Father will be forgiven, and whoever blasphemes against the son will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either on earth or in heaven.” (Gospel of Thomas verse 44, New Testament Apocrypha; also see Mark 3:20–35, KJV)”
page 150 “If there is competition for one’s attention to God, people’s experience of God will be diluted, and they will be less able to achieve the experience of the Holy Spirit. To experience the Holy Spirit, they must have an experience of absolute thralldom. When people are enthralled by something, they are captivated by it; it intensely and exclusively occupies their mind whether they want it to or not. This is the first rule of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish religions: believe wholeheartedly in God. If the goal is to give one the experience of the Holy Spirit, this is sound advice. It also, however, discourages flexible and independent thought.”
page 151 “The mind is constantly threatened with a loss of the religious attitude. The mind projects blame for its own wobbly ability to maintain the religious exuberance onto an external enemy. It is not that my faith is faltering; it is that infidels or liberals hate my religion and are out to destroy it.”
page 153 “Delegating reality testing to another is debilitating and facilitates gaslighting. People who begin to accept another’s version of reality in some areas start to defer in other areas as well. Because of its potential for encouraging people to forfeit independent thinking, religion can also cause psychological regression. The psychological regression that can occur in a religious context can be dramatic and even alter the very standard for logical thinking.”
page 153 “Information preached to believers by clergy in religious settings is far less likely to be assessed with critical rigor by someone pursuing a state of ecstasy and in the process of surrendering themselves to the Holy Spirit. In some cases, the speaker’s message is much less important than the fact that the audience is being offered the opportunity for a religious ecstatic state, which they crave. With”
page 154 “George W. Bush was the closest thing this country has had to an elected spiritual leader in the White House.”
page 155 “Because religious thought permits looser forms of logical connections, the economic theories of conservative-interest groups when they become associated with religious concepts take on a quasi-religious aura. In effect, the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith begins to feel like God’s will rather than an economic system that like all others has its strengths and weaknesses, requiring assessment on an issue-by-issue basis. If it, too, is God’s handiwork, it is not to be questioned. It is accepted as an article of faith.”
page 156 “Pundits were incredulous in recent elections when millions of Americans seem to have voted against their own economic interests. In truth, however, the electorate was not casting a vote; it was reflecting the decision that had been handed to them by a team composed of politicians and clergy operating to support one another. The electorate was in effect voting to maintain their defense against perplexity by reliance on faith-based reality. Gaslighting permeates the relationships that neoconservatives have formed with religious groups,”
page 159 “For many, Trump is a bastardized Christ who encourages them to throw off the yokes of oppression that weigh on their minds, those of having to hold politically correct views that thwart age old indulgences of frightened minds including racism and tolerance of differences of all kinds. It is a state of exaltation that made Trump rallies often appear to be religious revivals. Because in fact from psychological perspectives they were. The mind feels uplifted by shedding the burdens of rationality, fairness, and decency.”
page 159 “religious fanaticism can shed its Christian virtues in pursuit of the ecstatic experience through the government in the form of a charismatic leader.”
page 163 “The recurring message from the new, neoconservative media is that if news is perplexing, psychologically demanding, or inconsistent with short-term American business interests, people do not have to accept it. They never have to assess or confront the actual issue. Global warming is just one case in point.”
page 164 “One of the things the professions subject to these attacks have in common is that they are surprisingly ineffective in defending themselves. It is as if their status as professionals has left them assuming that their authority would never be challenged, and so they are unprepared to fight for their autonomy.” !!
page 164 “one of the most disturbing aspects of the Dan Rather CBS episode is that it did not evoke much protest from the independent media. How can one confidently report the news that really needs to be reported if one mistake in an otherwise correct story leads to professional execution?”
page 164 “What is especially telling about the Rather incident is the way his replacement, Katie Couric, was immediately subjected to concerted right-wing accusations of liberal political bias led by the Media Research Center.”
page 165 “The media defied the White House’s own self-congratulatory messages that they were doing a “heckuva job” in responding to Katrina by picturing the reality of what New Orleans and its people stranded on their roofs really looked like. In doing so, for the first time, many began to conclude that the Bush administration, whether it was evil or not, was certainly incompetent. As with 9/11, it took a violation of America’s psychological borders, an invasion that laid waste to American soil, before minds were sufficiently disturbed to be open to a new reality sense. One of the most chilling aspects about the American mind today is that when something similar happened in Puerto Rico, there was no shock of recognition. The American mind was so enfeebled, traumatized by multiple environmental events that it simply went onto the next news cycle.”
page 166 “To the extent it slides unrecognized into the place once occupied by professional journalism, infotainment is another serious threat to the effective functioning of the traditional independent press and, ultimately, to the American mind. Infotainment shifts the focus of the news from information to stimulation, particularly a passive form of stimulation that operates on much more primitive aspects of the mind.”
page 166 “more mentally taxing forms of self-stimulation that come from thinking, study, discussion, and independent reflection, the exercises that maintain and strengthen the rational faculties of the mind. Depending on the relative balance between active and passive forms of stimulation, the mind will either stay toned and conditioned, or it will atrophy and become increasingly dependent on the source of passive stimulation.” !!
page 167 “Info-tainment’s appeal is that it provides passive stimulation, requiring less mental effort from the listener in order to feel stimulated.”
page 168 “Mental dysfunction and vulnerability are no longer corrected by the news; instead, they are indulged and even cultivated.” !!
page 168 “Today in America one can only reap an understanding of the different realities at play in America if they watch two different news outlets such as CNN and Fox News. Because of the discordency we feel at experiencing such diverse realities most of us literally do not have the mental strength to tolerate doing that.” !!