Does America Have a Psychological Disease?
Making sense of all this senselessness is wearing thin.
I’ve never been a nationalist. Frankly, I never understood the appeal. I remember sitting in Latin class in high school when a couple of white boys from wealthy families were talking about how great America was. In their words, America was “the best.”
My friend Laura and I exchanged glances that said neither one of us understood the boys' mentality. And it seemed like a boys mentality. Something that only a 14-year-old bully would care to say.
Call me Miss Melancholy, but even 20 years ago, I had a hard time understanding folks who took such enormous pride in being American. Back then, I felt fortunate — the way you do about living in a first-world country. I spent a couple of weeks in Trinidad on a youth mission trip, and that definitely gave me a special appreciation for decent plumbing, AC, and electricity on demand.
But Trinidad had things we didn’t have. A beauty and peace. A joy. There wasn’t a ton of convenience where I stayed in 1999, but it was hardly a terrible place to live. I learned from a young age that there were upsides and downsides wherever you go.
And I still saw America for what it could be. For what I thought it would be. Although I grew up in a deeply religious and conservative home, I attended very progressive schools with large Black and Hmong communities. The downside of my education was that I grew up naively believing that America was always moving forward.
Little did I know that my out-of-touch classmates represented a darker side of the country.
In those days, I was a young vegetarian and Silk was a new soy milk on the market. On one side of their carton, they wrongly attributed a Marianne Williamson quote to Nelson Mandela. I cut it out and kept it for a bookmark.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.”
I’m not sure why that passage spoke to me so deeply when I never once feared that I was too powerful, but hey, I was an angst-filled teen who wanted to change the world. Reading that quote felt so important — especially “Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.”
Years passed and I found out that Silk’s mistake was practically everyone’s mistake. Hillary Clinton quoted Williamson but attributed it to Mandela in a commencement speech. Films like Coach Carter and Akeelah and the Bee did it too.
Still, at any rate, I found out who Marianne Williamson is... and I discovered that she says a lot of beautiful things, along with a whole lot of problematic things too. Often, she makes statements that make real-world problems sound like imaginary things all because we as individuals don’t love ourselves. Like if you’re fat, you don’t love yourself enough. Poverty, politics, racism — nearly every issue Williamson touches has boiled down to too much fear and too little self-love.
The other day, though, I was surprised to read a recent opinion piece by Marianne that struck a chord in me. I’m talking about a deep chord.
In it, Williamson writes:
“Cults like QAnon are not simply a political issue; first and foremost, they are a psychological issue. In truth, whole civilizations have been seized by bouts of collective psychosis throughout history. The Inquisition, the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide are prime examples. Although those horrific phenomena came to an end, the underlying forces from which they emerged have not been expunged from human consciousness. In fact, part of the problem is that, with the characteristic arrogance of the modern materialistic mind, too many have thought our civilization too "evolved" to have to worry about such things. Surely we’re too advanced to fall collectively for mental madness, as long as rational thinking prevails.”
And:
“The same psychological principles that prevail within an individual’s life prevail within the life of a nation. As ancients knew, matters of the psyche are matters of the soul, and a nation, just like an individual, has one. Chronic suffering is damaging to the soul, regardless where it came from. Numerous factors—despair, anxiety and fear experienced by millions of people on a regular basis as the direct and indirect results of our loveless, amoral economic organizing principles—have so destroyed our country’s psychic immune system as to make opportunistic infections, such as cults of madness, simply to be expected.”
I read those words and I couldn’t deny how real they felt to me. Not just as a daughter whose mother is deeply invested in conspiracy theories, but also as an American who is heartbroken about issues like police brutality.
Don’t get me wrong — I understand that Williamson is still saying plenty of kooky things. Yet, she was the only person on the Democratic debate stage to begin her bid for the presidency with a call for slavery reparations. We all laughed when she spoke about some dark psychic forces, but how should we describe what’s happening in America these days?
Every time a Black person is brutally killed or lawlessly injured by the police, people — mostly white ones — clamor about what they think gave the cops justification to murder. It’s the same, frightening excuses every time. Strangers across the internet insist that these shootings are just if the victim had any type of criminal history. They yell about “non-compliance” and complain that Black people wouldn’t die if they’d just comply.
For years now, I’ve been grappling with my horror at such callousness across the country. What kind of world do these people want anyway? Police in America are not justice. These are not exemplary people. Any justification we give to these senseless murders is essentially begging law enforcement to act like Gestapo.
This is what we’ve become, a nation that doesn’t balk when officers shoot to kill unarmed Black people in broad daylight, in front of witnesses, in front of children, and without an ounce of shame.
America has become a police state, a Gestapo paradise, and there are factions among us saying, “Yes, this is what we want.”
Just when I thought I’d seen everything from apologists for police brutality, from apologists for blatant racism — now there’s this. The same people who rail against Jacob Blake and George Floyd are the same people applauding a 17-year-old “vigilante” murderer.
What the actual fuck?
Let me get this straight. America is reeling from a viral pandemic we can’t control because our president and enough people believe it’s fake news. It’s not hard to look around the world and see that the countries that take COVID-19 seriously save lives. But here in America, there are these two schools of thought that have hampered our ability to fight it — the deniers and the shruggers.
The deniers are bad enough as they shout “don’t believe everything in the news,” but gobble up every unreliable YouTube video as proof of their conspiracy theories. But the shruggers are another breed. They roll their eyes and complain that nearly 200,000 deaths is no big deal and it’s the poor economy that needs our love. Profit over people has new meaning in 2020, and these folks are paving the way for a much more cold and cruel nation than we ever could have imagined.
But we’re not just dealing (badly) with the pandemic. We’re also dealing with civil unrest. Political unrest. The anger, the hatred, and the pure selfishness running through America seem to be at epic proportions with no end in sight. We can certainly hope for change with this next election, but I’m not sure who really has faith that a new administration can heal the damage that’s been done.
Of course, Trump is far from benign in any of this. It’s no coincidence that the Missouri couple who pointed guns at BLM protestors were highlighted as heroes at the RNC and that somebody decided to actually pick off protestors at gunpoint in Wisconsin. And then people like Tucker Carlson have the gross nerve to defend such violence.
What else can we call this if it’s not a collective illness and psychosis? How is this not a dark psychic force?
Yet there’s more, all linked together. The Qanon cult claims to want to save the children, but they’re busy accusing John Legend and Chrissy Teigen (among others) of eating babies and being a part of Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring.
All of it reads like a big sick joke.
“QAnon, which posits that (deep breath now) the world is secretly run by a shadowy cabal of elite Satan-worshipping cannibal pedophiles — adherents typically count Hillary Clinton and George Soros as members — who extract powerful drugs from the glands of tortured children, concealing their insidious activities via their dominion over Hollywood, the news media, and the “Deep State.” Trump himself occupies a central role in QAnon’s mythos, cast as the unlikely savior who will finally, any day now, shatter this dastardly cabal in a vaguely eschatological grand offensive reverently dubbed ‘The Storm.’”
That’s right, Trump, the man without shame who’s openly bragged about his extramarital affairs, who’s ogled his own daughter, and famously said of women, “grab em by the pussy"— this is the hero of Qanon. The one who’s supposedly fighting for goodness and who wants to crack down on child sexual exploitation.
There’s so much overlap of evil and absurdity among Trump’s followers that I’m not sure what this could be other than a collective psychosis?
It doesn’t take a lot to look around the country and see that something has gone horribly wrong. Anti-Blackness, antisemitism, conspiracy theories, fear of science, fear of socialism, all-or-nothing thinking, groupthink, and a lack of empathy are all on the rise. Black people are publicly lynched and we don’t bat an eye. The same people screaming to ban abortion because they’re “pro-life” are screaming that they don’t need to wear a mask because it’s not their job to protect you or your grandmother.
Some of the most basic conversations on social media just get so mean, so fast, like people are constantly on edge and waiting to pounce on the next available stranger.
Something is going on and it’s not going away anytime soon. And I think Marianne Williamson has a point.
Personally, I’ve been writing about my life experiences for a few years now and some of the feedback has actually touched upon our unwillingness to accept what’s happening in America. When I write about my experiences with Evangelical Christianity, some people love to tell me how stupid I was to fall for a cult. Others call me an idiot for thinking that such dysfunction exists on any widespread scale. Finally, there are people who get angry that I am discussing my poor choices at all.
What all of the criticism has taught me is that America really does have a deep-seated arrogance. We like to think we’re untouchable, which means we end up ignoring very real and detrimental problems.
If people won’t believe me about abuse in Evangelical bubbles, it’s hardly any surprise that we’re blindsided now by these cults that have been brewing for decades. We’ve failed as a nation to take care of our people and finally, it shows.
While I know there’s no excuse for such evil and hatred, I also understand that hurt people hurt people. And that plenty of folks subconsciously look for someone to blame when they are just scraping by.
I don’t have any helpful answers right now. No solutions for dealing with people who applaud injustice and murder like it’s a good thing. All I know is that I’m very tired, and my soul hurts to see the course our country has taken. Part of me thinks I don’t want to live here anymore. That I don’t want to raise my daughter in a country known for such stupidity and hate.
I wish I had more answers this week, but all I have is this question. This awkward inkling. Maybe America is struggling with a widespread mental illness.
That might explain a lot, but it also means that any treatment and healing is going to be a long and grueling road.
When can we start?
