It was never really “mostly harmless”
Daniel Dale of CNN by now has got to be burned out fact-checking the firehose of false and misleading statements made by the immediate past president at every rally. Dale’s ability to do it in near-real-time has always impressed. But to have that as a job? He runs through 30 of Trump’s lies/exaggerations/misstatements from his Tuesday rally in Racine, Wisconsin in the clip below.
Even more soul-sapping, as Tom Nichols puts it, is that millions of people who live next door lap it up like cream from a saucer, “willfully blinding” themselves to the truth, as Peter Wehner put it, or exhibiting “motivated unreasoning” as I did.
Brian Klaas posted Tuesday about “service magicians” still employed in Europe in the late Middle Ages:
But what we can know is that the service magicians of the medieval period—the cunning folk who professed an ability to harness magical forces to help others—were a more rational and effective form of recourse to manipulate the world to our whims than the modern multi-billion dollar industry of manifesting, the “laws of attraction,” and costly crystals allegedly infused with magical forces.
“Visualize Whirled Peas” lampoons the notion that thoughts can manifest reality.
Close your eyes. Visualize a pizza. With green peppers, onions, and pepperoni (that’s me). It’s right there on the coffee table. In an open pizza box from your favorite joint down the street. Smell it. Taste it, in your mind. Think hard. But you’ll still have to order it and pick it up if you expect to eat it.
Globally, roughly 40 percent of humans still believe in witchcraft, defined as “an ability of certain people to intentionally cause harm via supernatural means.” Four-in-ten Americans believe in the power of psychics, with a similar number agreeing that spiritual powers can be embedded in physical objects. A quarter of Americans believe in the power of astrology and the global astrology industry was estimated to be worth $12.8 billion in 2021, growing to $22 billion by 2031.
More recently, the practice of “manifesting,” in which aspirational thoughts are said to exert causal power on the physical world, has exploded. TikTok videos attest to the power of “scripting”—similar to the usage of Abracadabra in the distant past—in which writing down desires for wealth, or a crush to text you back, is said to bend reality to the power of the word and the mystical force of mental energy. Every year, billions of dollars are spent on “healing crystals,” a practice that dates back to the writings of Plato and, perhaps, the Sumerians.
Interest in such methods of asserting supernatural control over the natural world surged during the coronavirus pandemic, as can be seen from Google search results below for, respectively, “manifesting” and “crystals.” Both spiked after March 2020—with manifesting remaining extraordinarily popular today.
It’s amazing how “Bible-believing” Christians decry witchcraft while thinking that by cranking in the right incantation from their holy book and believing really hard they can make the creator of the universe pop out of his box like Jack and give them what they want. Magical thinking is everywhere.
Alvin Toffler’s best-selling “Future Shock” (1970) postulated that “too much change in too short a period of time” leaves people (and whole societies) “disconnected and suffering from ‘shattering stress and disorientation.’ ” What I witnessed in studying the New Age Movement (circa 1993) was a subculture disconnected from the modern world and retreating into a mystical, less-threatening past:
People are desperate for something in which they can believe. Communities have disappeared, replaced by subdivisions and condominiums. Terrorism and human rights abuses are more visible than ever. Anything you eat, drink or breathe might produce cancer. Science has reduced life to a cold set of mechanistic principles, demythologizing the world and stripping life of the meaning our myths once conveyed. The world seems to be coming apart and we are powerless to stop it. Nothing feels right anymore.
Is it any wonder people need something, some way to get control in their lives, some way to overcome our sense of powerlessness and paranoia? (Empowerment has become a hot term lately, both in enlightenment and legislative circles.) But in the absence of feeling that we can affect changes in our lives, we find solace in the notion that that power might exist somewhere else. It is as if we awakened to find ourselves locked in the trunk of a car careening down a mountain road. We desperately need to believe someone is behind the wheel. Even a diabolical someone is more comfort than no one at all.
Believing in a strong man on the heels of the country electing its first Black president has appeal for another subculture. And doing “your own research” into quack remedies for during a global pandemic. Science and pointy-headed intellectuals who know things are untrustworthy. “Is it any wonder” that in a changing America that the Trump cult yearns to manifest a less-threatening world in which they are once again unchallenged atop the social hierarchy.
Trump may have learned his bare-knuckles tactics from Roy Cohn, but he learned manifesting from Norman Vincent Peale, the guru of positive thinking who officiated Trump’s first wedding and whose sermons the Fred Trump family heard on Sundays in Manhattan (Politico):
“Believe in yourself!” Peale’s book begins. “Have faith in your abilities!” He then outlines 10 rules to overcome “inadequacy attitudes” and “build up confidence in your powers.” Rule one: “formulate and staple indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding,” “hold this picture tenaciously,” and always refer to it “no matter how badly things seem to be going at the moment.”
Subsequent rules tell the reader to avoid “fear thoughts,” “never think of yourself as failing,” summon up a positive thought whenever “a negative thought concerning your personal powers comes to mind,” “depreciate every so-called obstacle,” and “make a true estimate of your own ability, then raise it 10 per cent.”
The New Age, positive thinking, etc., were once isolated to powerless subcultures and, as Douglas Adams quipped, “mostly harmless.” Not now, Klaas continues:
These practices, which some may dismiss as useless and backward, often form a patchwork of valuable, meaningful rituals for the participants. They have intrinsic value as a social bonding exercise and a way of articulating shared aspirations. It doesn’t really matter, per se, if they work.
But the crucial point is this: scared soldiers carrying talismans in trenches, or islanders constructing fake radar dishes to erect physical embodiments of their hopes, do not directly harm others, nor do they cast blame on victims for lived misfortune.
The same is no longer true of our mysticism.
This creates an upside-down interpretation of how we normally consider the superstitious past, in which we wrongly presume that we, not our ancestors, are the rational ones. But from service magicians to ordeals, medieval superstitions were both more rational and less harmful than many spiritual practices that dominate modern culture.
I once postulated:
Alvin Toffler theorized that too much change in too short a time can produce physical illness. Maybe. And maybe not just physical illness. Carl Jung spoke of a collective unconscious. If it exists, perhaps it is not so adaptable to rapid change either. What might it look like to go through life in the 21st century with a collective unconscious lagging a couple of centuries behind the times?
A lot like this.
Or Trump could just be losing what little mind he had to begin with.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.