Comey and Quantico: Donald Trump’s Purple Crayon from Hell…and More
Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle, No. 25
This past week was some week: By COB Friday I had concluded that with President Trump’s unprecedented Comey warlock hunt and the unprecedented Quantico gathering of general and flag officers ordered by the Secretary of Defense, the nation, its history in train, had finally reached a “no kidding this time” tipping point. Either Trump has now gone too far and will trigger the kind of rooted opposition in the courts and the military that will make him much weaker and ultimately stop his authoritarian power grab, or else We the People are finished as a fabled democratic demos. My hunch is that Trump has overreached, and we are now at the beginning of the end of the elected coup that took place this past November 5.
I was therefore momentarily delighted to see the Bulwark headline from September 27 pop up in my email feed, “Trump Went Too Far? Comey & Kimmel Could Galvanize Americans.” Oh shucks, I soon realized, the guys got it only half right: Comey, definitely; Kimmel, meh….hardly anyone watches late-night TV stand-ups anymore…..Kimmel’s fans mostly watch him later streaming on one device or another. No, Quantico pairs with Comey, not Kimmel.
As to Comey, again my friends at the Bulwark (I’ve published six essays there, though none lately since its focus has narrowed for perfectly good reasons) did well. Andrew Egger’s piece on September 26, “Why Keep Pretending?” ran under the omnibus headline: “They Want You to Know They’re Acting Corruptly: With the indictment of James Comey, Trump drops the fig leaf.”
And sure, that is correct: We are seeing with last week’s events a revved up chest-bumping kind of standard authoritarianism-in-bloom arrogance that we have seen historically. It reminds the historically tutored—you, dear reader, I’m hoping—of an iconic event we’ve mentioned before here on TRP: The epochal confrontation between Miguel de Unamuno and Millán Astray on October 12, 1936 at the University of Salamanca, where Astray illustrated what Ortega y Gasset had called seven years earlier “the reason of unreason” common to the “crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is . . .the best guarantee of their loyalty” to the charismatic leader—that remark of Hannah Arendt from her classic The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)—for charismatic authority is the only kind of concrete personalistic authority most non-literate people can comprehend.
But Egger got only part of the essence of what is going on, and not the most interesting or important part. To communicate that essence to veteran TRP readers is easy; to communicate it to almost anyone else isn’t. So let me take the easy route, and suggest to newbies to TRP that you invest some time in the archives to get up to speed with what the rest of us are talking about here.
The Fantasist Armed
Donald Trump, in addition to being a malignant narcissist, almost certainly has a fantasy-prone personality disorder, a clinical psychiatric designation that 45 years ago applied to only an estimated 4 percent of adult Americans, but that now—thanks to the dramatic and cumulative changes in the techno-entertainment environment we have witnessed—may take in as much as ten times that percentage. [See TRP’s September 1 post, “Here I Go Again: Further Notes on the Age of Spectacle,” Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle, No. 21, for more detail.]
So many Americans today live as though they are inside a reality-TV show looking out onto a world they cannot otherwise understand, because they do not deep read and hence cannot think well enough to grasp narrative complexity or conceptual language of any kind. So habituated have they rendered themselves to dumbed-down, zero-sum, angertainment-inflected spectacalized storylines fed to them on two-dimensional screens that they will satisfice—buying the first account that claims to explain the variance, no matter how unserious it may be. Their cognitive habituation has rendered them ever in search of the next wow-in-the-now, and in Donald Trump they have found their Shaman-in-Chief. Trump is one of them in many ways, but he is also savvy enough in this singular regard—as a kind of idiot-savant—to know how to manipulate them, as magnificos have done since the Venetian city-state held sway over the Mediterranean in the 15th and 16th centuries.
More important, as a non-deep reader Trump is like his audience of loyal followers—cultic core and miasmic periphery—in that his cognitive mentality is incapable of dwelling effectively in the scientific-rational causality world that emerged in the West from the Renaissance through the epochal Enlightenment/Reformation revolution of the modern era. He is synched, as are so many others via the New Orality, with the time of mythic consciousness, with its magical form of causality in play instead of the scientific-rational conceptual kind that, I would wager, anyone reading and understanding this essay is at this moment bringing to bear.
As The Age of Spectacle argument—and that’s still the launching pad for all now 25 “Post-January 20 Chronicle” TRP essays—has rehearsed several times before, the mythic consciousness operates according to two key cognitive laws: consanguinity and metamorphosis. In summary form, following here Ernst Cassirer’s masterful The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms published about a century ago, the law of consanguinity holds that mythical thought is a world suffused with emotion, not reason. It is a world that conflates experience into a unitary sensed whole, not analyses it into reductive elements or pieces. It is a world of maximum feasible subjective immersion.
The law of metamorphosis holds that anything can change into anything else, and change back or change in some other way. That is the seed of the magic in the mythical mindset. It resembles, if one wants a familiar template, the world of the Greek myths where gods, demigods, and mortals flit about unrestrained by the limiting laws of physics and chemistry as we know them. In a mytho-magical world the sense of linear time is weak; no solid before and after exists.
These two operational cognitive laws define most of what is going on at any given time lately—his advancing dementia symptoms may or may not affect matters—in Donald Trump’s brain. He is suffused in a bubble of subjective fantasy, and he longs to change reality by projecting his own surrealist lamination of the Lebenswelt, of the world as it actually is, onto it. As we argued in earlier TRP posts, we must every day remind ourselves that the entire edifice of contemporary U.S. politics is based on the democratic triumph of a massive twin Big Lie about November 3, 2020 and January 6, 2021—namely the elected coup of November 5, 2024. Taken together, the entire effort of the MAGA 2.0 White House and world is to fabricate step-by-step an ersatz reality as a substitute for the world that actually exists. Indicting James Comey, because his guilt is necessarily congruent with the twinned Big Lies of the elected coup, is the logical next step.
The fact that it happens to resemble a theme from Lewis Carroll—the Queen of Hearts’s “sentence first, verdict afterwards”—is less funny than eerily non-coincidental. Since Trump is mostly living in a pre-adolescent fantasy waking dream, it is natural that imaginative fictive themes should be most apt as descriptors of its manifestations. Here is another: Trump’s projectile somersaulted world of credit and blame (to invoke Charles Tilly’s apt phrase) is also structurally similar in some ways to the fictive fantasy of The Truman Show. Trump has trapped himself inside a massive dome, but finds the experience feeling normal to him because he has such a vast amount of company in there who, like him, have lost track of most of the whats, hows, whens, and whys that organize conceptual life, the life involving the collective social mind, for normal people. They, all together, don’t know they are living inside an artificial dome, and don’t realize that—unlike in The Truman Show—they created it themselves, now already some years ago, in a forgotten surrealist stupor.
Best of all, in a most discomfiting way Donald Trump resembles Harold with his purple crayon. Whatever Harold drew came into being in the creative stream-of-consciousness narrative that the incomparable Crockett Johnson whipped up from his own imagination. Trump, with the support of tens of millions of post-literate screen-addled Americans, is using the Purple Crayon from Hell to do something similar, albeit something destructive rather than fanciful, something harmful rather than harmless. The main difference is that Crockett Johnson wrote books, while Donald Trump, having accumulated the power he has managed to wrest from the American agora, is re-writing American and by extension global political reality….or is trying to.
Again, we must strain ourselves to appreciate the enormity of Trump’s unselfaware presumption: The essence of it is that Trump is trying to destroy the Lebenswelt, all of it or as much as he can, that any still semi-sentient American might bump into from time to time. And again, in this unprecedented project Trump has many millions of more or less enthusiastic allies, fantasist conspiracy-addled non-readers who appear to be in willful retreat from the pesky real world in favor of a surreal one more to their liking, a world far better aligned with their eroded or never attained cognitive coping capabilities.
Just by the way, even the elected coup of November 5, 2024 is best captured in a fictional historical description that achieves something exquisitely rare: life imitating reality imitating life. Thus in 2011 Umberto Eco put these words in the mouth of his character Joly, who is speaking of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1852 transformation of France’s short-lived Second Republic into an Empire: “Tyranny, you understand, has been achieved thanks to universal suffrage! The scoundrel has carried out an authoritarian coup d’état by appealing to the ignorant mob! This is a warning to us about the democracy of tomorrow.” Indeed! And this was no lucky fluke, for a few pages later Eco put these words, including the key word “illiterate,” into the mouth of his character Goedsche: “. . . those who read books were already republicans by nature, and those who supported the dictator were illiterate peasants who’d been granted universal suffrage by the grace of God.”[1]
James Comey is guilty only of doing his job as FBI Director at a time of then-unprecedented threat to American constitutional order. (Now, of course, the threat is much graver.) There is no coherent case against him, as the unfortunate now-fired Erik Siebert well knew—and for which he has been stigmatized on Truth Social as a “Woke-RINO who was never going to do his job.” But that doesn’t matter to Trump because he “feels” that Comey is guilty, and he has the power, he supposes, to metamorphically make what is what isn’t, and what isn’t what is. This has much less to do with Trump’s wanting to flaunt corruption and his ability to get away with it than it does with the fact that he is now trapped in his own up-is-down, down-is-up fabricated world, and he must keep flowing forward lest the whole sewer of falsity be revealed for what it is. We can at least credit him with a devotion to cognitive consistency: Once having inverted truth and falsehood, he is now more or less obligated to stay true to falsehood. (I know that sounds odd; but just think about it for a moment and the notion will come clear.)
As for Quantico, this may turn out to express both Trump’s fantasy-prone personality type and his mythic/magical cognitive mentality as or even more clearly than the Comey indictment. Trump’s adopted faux-mafioso tough guy TV/WWF persona is too obvious and oft-spoken of to belabor. Trump worships power, and dictators who have cobbled together a (near) monopoly over it in their respective spheres. Like some but not all of them, Trump values cruelty and punching-down on the weak as crypto-Randian virtues because in his deeply insecure soul it makes him seem bigger and stronger to himself.
The savant part of the idiot-savant that Trump is understands the attention economy, and know instinctively the quickest path to an sub-literate person’s brainstem: repetitive lying bathed in spectacle. He gets there by deploying a cascade of astounding complexes, thus literally making a spectacle of himself. Trump claims that he is either the greatest and most powerful, the strongest and wisest genius ever, or he is the biggest, most unfairly put-upon, victim of all time (likely, in his mind, because of outsized jealousy over his incomparable wonderfulness); these are wild and polar exaggerations with nothing, ever, in between. What is that but the grandest media-fabricated two-headed carnival calf in history? At Quantico tomorrow Trump, in his fantasy-prone personality type inner world, will probably seek to augment his own perception of his power by amalgamating the entire might of the U.S. military to his personal control. If there is an analog to this somewhere in the voluminous pages of Bulfinch’s Mythology I should not be the least surprised.
But just as the Comey indictment is likely to be a counterproductive overreach on Trump’s part, so is the Quantico spectacle. Why?
The Trump 2.0 Administration, so called, has produced no shortage of outrages, each one of which has led many a naïve normie to think that Trump had overstepped and was now bound to fall. How many, I wonder, have turned to the Hebrew Bible for moral support: “Pride goeth before the fall”—Proverbs 16:18. And yet here we are; as several observers have pointed out, Trump is more popular in September 2025 than he was in September 2017, at the comparable point in his first term.
Mona Charen recently produced a nifty partial list of outrages (she left out a lot)—“Everything is Awful. And It’s Changing Us,” The Bulwark, September 23—all of which some believed would undo Trump and none of which have turned the trick. She did such a good job that I see no reason to duplicate her list when I can quote it. So:
Perhaps the abrupt and heartless cuts to international aid that did so much to bolster our global standing and cost us so little?
Or the kowtowing to Russia after interminable boasting that Putin “respected” him?
Or the bullying of Volodymyr Zelensky—accusing him of starting the war of aggression against his own country?!
Or Trump’s reckless and idiotic tariffs on friends and allies (sparing Russia) that sent the world economy into a tailspin and left everyone wondering whether we were being governed by a toddler on acid?
Or smashing a carefully cultivated relationship with India because of a petty ego injury (Narendra Modi’s refusal to nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize)?
Or the massive cuts to basic scientific and medical research—a foundation of America’s economic might—to punish universities for their political postures?
Or the grotesque self-enrichment dwarfing anything in American history? (The memecoin scam? The Qatari jet?)
Or the creation of a MAGA standing army in the form of ICE?
Or firing generals who would not proclaim loyalty to the orange king?
Or the reign of terror unleashed on immigrants, many of whom have been living and working here for decades?
Or the erection of detention camps that violate basic standards of sanitation?
Or the mass firings of inspectors general (the people who keep government honest)?
Or the summary execution on the high seas of boaters the president simply asserts are drug traffickers?
Or threatening media companies with regulatory action if they fail to settle stupid libel cases Trump has filed against them or continue to employ any critics of Trump who work for them?
Or undermining the availability of vaccines, the greatest boon to human health since clean water?
Or instructing the Department of Justice to bring criminal charges against Trump’s critics, and firing prosecutors who decline to do so, violating the most important norm in government?
Nice partial list, right? So what is different about the Comey and Quantico outrages that this time, finally, will turn the fetid tide?
All of the outrages Charen lists are general outrages. They have alarmed a lot of people, but a lot of disorganized people, according to Mancur Olson’s “logic of collective action,” can’t typically do squat in the face of a determined minority that knows what it wants. But Comey’s indictment very pointedly alarms every oath-conscious lawyer, law professor, and judge in this country. These are not, as a rule, para-literate screenheads reading at a sub-6th grade level. Those who broadly constitute the legal guild in the United States do have a potential for overcoming the logic of collective action.
It is unfortunate, true enough, that the Roberts SCOTUS is perhaps the worst in American history for its fecklessness and political irresponsibility, worse maybe even than the Taney Court. And it is sad that some lawyers, even some who have taken oaths to protect the Constitution, are willing to do Trump’s bidding to eviscerate the Constitution—are you listening Ms. Bondi? Every one them should be disbarred (if not also put behind bars) once the “corrective movement” to hopefully come sets things aright. But never mind my spleen spilling….the point here is that most of our judges at most levels of the judicial system know exactly what is going on, and being to some extent pre-organized in the legal system’s hierarchy they do not stand helpless before it. They do not even, contrary to some opinions, entirely lack the power to enforce their orders at governmental levels below the SCOTUS.
More so even the Quantico business. I have not myself served in uniform, but I have over the years worked with and gotten to know many officers, active duty and retired, in the U.S. Armed Service. I’ve worked in day-jobs, not just incidentally, for and with three four-stars: Alexander Haig, Jr., Charles Graham Boyd, and Colin Powell. I have guest ship-ridden two U.S. Navy vessels at sea, and I know some Marines, too. I do not know of any group in American society whose members are more reality-grounded, conceptually adept, patriotic, and practically minded than the officer corps of the U.S. combat arms services. I do not know of any professional group that holds itself to higher standards of personal conduct. And most of all, I do not know of any group that is braver in the face of adversity, untruth, and treason. It is possible to stage a politically twisted partisan spectacle at the Military Academy, as Trump and his associates tried to do on May 24. It is another for a genuinely weak man to suborn many thousands of much stronger ones.
If Trump tries tomorrow to do what I think he aims to do, no one should be surprised if in retrospect his fantasy-based lurch into egomaniaville turns out to have been the trigger for organizing the U.S. military against Trumpian pretensions to authoritarian self-exaltation.
I could be wrong. Maybe Comey will not only be indicted but convicted by an intimidated jury, supposing there will be one. Maybe the officer corps of the U.S. military will bend its collective knee before the Orange One the way most prestigious law firms, high-tech and media corporations, and supposedly elite universities have (which only drives further home the point made in earlier TRP posts as to the hollowness, venality, and mediocrity of the post-1970s American elite as a whole). But I do not think I am wrong. Trump is no longer pushing on open doors of diffuse discontent; he has now challenged not one but two solid locked vaults of professional élan.
As with most, but not all, things, time will tell.
On the Other Hand, Which is the Same Hand
As AoS readers know, the New Orality has not impinged only on the cognitive competency of the illiberal Right, sending it back to pre-Enlightenment forms of mythic consciousness. It has also impinged on the cognitive competency of the illiberal Left. Just the other day an old friend in Singapore, who does me the service of bringing to my attention items in the UK press I might otherwise overlook in the great flush of ceaseless political journalism, sent me an entertaining article from The Telegraph featuring the sparkling in-your-face resistance of Richard Dawkins to woke chicanery. Dawkins is apparently one of more than three dozen contributors to a recently published book edited by Lawrence M. Krauss entitled The War on Science. I’ve not seen the book so cannot say yea or nay about it en toto, but the Telegraph essay summarizing and quoting Dawkins’s contribution I can relate to.
Sarah Knapton, in her article “Richard Dawkins: ‘Trans women are women” slogan is scientifically false,” The Telegraph, September 25, 2025, quotes Dawkins several times over on this point.[2] And of course he is inarguably correct. But neither Knapton or Dawkins quite get why, just as Andrew Egger is also right about the Comey affair as far as he goes, but doesn’t go far enough.
The woke impulse to insist that the trans agenda now dominate government decisions over all of social policy is less than meets the eye. It is not mainly about compassion or equality before the law or anti-bigotry mobilization or anything so anodyne, the promotion of which is already thankfully well embedded in existing U.S. (and UK) civil rights law. For the most avid trans activists, whether they are aware of it or not, the real passion behind wishing to elevate this tiny minority via a utopian ideology to the status of a super-normal group of ideal human beings only occurs because transsexuals fit perfectly with the magical formula of the postmodern/premodern mythic premise: consanguinity and metamorphosis. Transsexuals have acquired an aura of worship-worthy avatars of postmodern fungibility. Why? Because they are as close as a person can come to being metamorphically magical—and in woke circles it doesn’t get any better than that.
The metamorphosis part of the magical mindset could not be more obvious, so no purpose would be served by spelling it out again. But certainly the law of consanguinity is hard at work, too, since to the pro-trans crowd how an effeminate male feels (like a woman) takes clear precedence over what he is (someone with male genitalia and XY chromosomes). The postmodern button gets pushed twice, since transexuals are, or so it is claimed by the anti-binary saints, entirely beyond biology, for all gender roles and identifications, including for homosexuals and bisexuals, are entirely—not partially, which is true—socially constructed.
There are serious problems with this claim. First and most obviously, as Dawkins and many others point out, it plainly flies in the face of settled science: No matter what an effeminate male thinks he is—including thinking he is a woman and not thinking he is merely “gay”—he cannot mate successfully with another anatomical male. Humans are anisogamous, not isogamous, meaning that reproduction requires the fusion of two dissimilar gametes. Believing that sex is on a spectrum is, as Dawkins put it, a “denial of genetic reality.” One cannot will one’s chromosomes to match one’s fantasies; transsexuals-cum-magical creatures function for chronologically adult bodies with adolescent leftwing minds a little like unicorns do for many little girls. But alas, metamorphic magic does have limits, at least in the Lebenswelt.
It’s not that I particularly care that some men think they’re women. The world is full of ignorable nonsense of many types, after all, and I do my part in ignoring it. But it’s hard to ignore nonsense when it begins to warp an entire culture’s sense of reality. It is true, as Dawkins said, that
so powerful has . . . postmodern counter-factualism become that newspapers refer to ‘her penis’ as a matter of unremarked routine. . . . There’s this post-modern hubris which presumptuously and falsely dismisses science as a social construct. The human conceit here is the idea that personal feelings can change reality.
So Dawkins hits upon the mythic law of consanguinity without naming it. But mere argument and logic will get him nowhere precisely because trans activists feel very strongly about this, and they ratify each other’s beliefs. So as usual, when a fiercely believed ideology knocks heads against reality, so much the worse for reality—at least for the time being.
And similarly, Trump felt so strongly about the 2020 election that he simply could not bring himself to admit defeat, and his supporters ratified his feelings. Cognitive dissonance set in big time, and once into the lie the lie became an alternative reality that no longer felt like a lie. So the lie metamorphized into an alternative-universe truth.
In both cases, the same logic holds sway: If you can’t change reality in a given universe, just shift to another one founded on any given key falsehood being true—and note that the falsehood need not be a lie, but can be sincerely believed. So we see the laws of both consanguinity and metamorphosis at work on both the illiberal mythic consciousness Left and on the illiberal mythic consciousness Right.
Wait, wait…..am I saying that Trump’s brain and a trans activist’s brain have something in common? Let me be blunt: In a different way but which to some extent is the same way, Trump insisting that he won the 2020 election is indeed parallel to an anatomical male insisting that he is a woman, and having rather too many others agree with him.
Does that make the two sides morally equivalent? Of course not, but that’s not the subject here. This is a socio-cultural analysis, not a sermon or an elevator pitch. Find the ground please, if you have misplaced it, and then resolve to stand firmly upon it.
Oh No; There’s More
A month ago I’d have been done writing on this particular matter for this TRP post. But lately a Niskanen Center colleague brought to my attention two new phenomena I had no inking of; I don’t get out to hang with the younger set as much as I once did. It just can’t be helped: What he alerted me to is directly relevant to the topic at hand.
Apparently, there is this new phenomenon of “reality shifting” from one’s “current reality” in the presumed metaverse into one’s “desired reality.” No disappointing half-measures exist in one’s “desired reality,” if one can only achieve it. Based loosely on the quantum mysticism of multiple simultaneous universes, itself a quasi-religious notion now evidently mashed up with obsessive gaming and Second Life avatar riding, “reality shifting” is the perfect manifestation of the laws of both consanguinity and metamorphosis. It is as pure an illustration of the mythic consciousness as one could hope for, so its emergence is pretty plainly no coincidence, things being as they presently are. It’s an inevitable manifestation of the revenant mythic zeitgeist.
It is perhaps more even than that. A “desired reality” sounds a lot like the old idea of heaven. The respective projected ontologies are identical: a better realm beyond one’s “current reality” in which one’s individual consciousness still exists. In a day where some people are already trying to use ChatGPT to talk to God, hints of a washed out form of immortality-seeking in “reality shifting” could hardly be more obvious.
The perfectionist/utopian woke mindset is partly religious as cognitive syntax goes; it is certainly a contemporary part of an ongoing but yet unnamed fourth American Great Awakening. But wokeism is not a static phenomenon, and it, like the culture generally, seems to be tending even more these days to retreat further into the world of the mythic consciousness, a world where what we call magic was a taken-for-granted aspect of reality. Alas, something similarly mythic-minded is happening on the Right. Let me briefly cite two recent examples.
One is Stephen Miller’s speech at the Charlie Kirk memorial/partisan-political rally on September 22. That speech, which normal people need to hear and not just read to really understand, was redolent with the cadences of the Greek myths, whose assemblage in 15 volumes in Latin by Ovid was aptly entitled Metamorphoses. In Miller’s version it merged with modern authoritarian cadences redolent of 20th-century fascism. Maybe it was just me, but when I heard Miller ranting away I saw in my mind’s eye that terrifying scene from the 1972 film Caberet, when a blonde young Hitler Youth member sings “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”[3] Miller’s is a mystical, brutalist vision whose mien is so pre-modern zero-sum, so pre-Enlightenment, that it recalls Paul Keating’s remark, aimed at a since-become-unknown person, that Miller “is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.”
The other is the recent DOD recruitment film in which the most muscular military images, fronted by a still of Pete Hegseth standing at attention, are changing over a sound track reading of the Lord’s Prayer. This is chilling, insane, and obscene in my Lebenswelt. But it speaks to the unhinged thymotic, Protean male energies so commonly aroused in today’s mythic consciousness-revenant culture. My guess is that the recruitment film will attract plenty of Kirkian Christian Nationalist youth who have been taught by Kirk, J.D. Vance, Curtis Yarvin, and others that America was never about a conceptual proposition or an idea, but rather about a blood-and-soil ethnic identity, just as has been the case with most other nations. If America is exceptional in this prism, it is because our religion is the true one and our ethnicity is the superior one; it has nothing to do with America as a rare covenantal nation, a novus ordo seclorum bound up with original Enlightenment liberalism, or anything of the sort.
Both examples bear a kindred relationship with reality-shifting. Don’t like the world you inherited and grew up in? No problem: Just trade it in, presto chango, for one you desire. Other people standing in the way of realizing your “desired reality”? Just demonize and attack them; tell them “you are nothing.” This is not your father’s or my father’s American patriotism. This is “my way or the highway” raised to catechismic status.
Beyond “reality shifting” another reported dollop of new weirdness deserves brief description. Some celebrity, or would-be celebrity, influencers on TikTok are pretending to be afflicted with dissociative identity disorder (DID)—what used to be called “split personality” mental illness. One assumes they are pretending since this disorder, as clinically defined, is extremely rare; and if they are not pretending they are either regularly stoned out of their minds or are soon to lose their grip on how to be an influencer, or both. Some call themselves “systems” and refer to their various personalities as “alters.” Apparently, so anyway I am told, some of these self-spectacalized entrepreneurs have amassed sizable followings.
Split personality cases have always focused voyeuristic interest. The 1957 Hollywood movie The Three Faces of Eve, based on an actual clinical case, was a huge hit. So it is easy to dismiss such antics as just another example of carnival-barker two-headed calf fare, and certainly that is partly what it is. But it attracts the attention it apparently does because it is, like “reality shifting,” a stellar example of metamorphosis, and, as already suggested, metamorphosis is the principal form that quotidian spectacle is increasingly taking in our revenant mythic consciousness culture.
More than that, personality spitting is the calling card of premodern shamans going back millennia on at least three continents—something anyone sufficiently educated and interested can explore by reviewing the work of a “who’s-who” of cultural anthropologists. It is charisma bait par excellance, and has been associated historically with the shamanist use of hallucinogenic drugs like peyote and the lysergic acid plentifully found in morning glory seeds. (Don’t even think about it, you old goat……) Profit-seeking “systems” are clearly playing to the appetites for mythic experience now aroused in the culture.
The real question here, perhaps, is how wide and deep can a trend illustrated by the emergence of “reality shifting” and DID “systems” extend into the culture? Is it possible for an entire civilization to disappear into an ensemble of fantasy caricatures of itself? Is this what John Barth’s 1968 invention of Ambrose in Lost in the Funhouse was pointing toward?
A Long and Winding Road, or the Highway to Hell?
What does all this tell us about the real state of the nation, not the one that gets proclaimed by any given U.S. President once each year, whether he understands it or not? It tells us that enough of We the People—the at least 60%+ who are non-deep readers—now have such a tenuous grip on reality that, based on their vast experience with imaginative fiction delivered on two-dimensional screens, they are eager to chase after all sorts of phantasms so long as they promise affinity communities, virtual mainly but sometimes actual, and quick simple(minded) “explanations” of complex aspects of reality, which these days are most aspects. As Ben Sasse argued in The Vanishing American Adult (2017), even as childhood innocence and serenity in America is being assaulted from many directions in the internet era, true adulthood is vanishing in a cloud of melting shockbar entertainment malarkey, aided and abetted by the inevitable decadence of unearned and unappreciated affluence.
It tells us, too, most likely, that in addition to community and empathy, scientific rationalism also does not scale beyond a certain point, as networked machines readily do. Technological networks in the digital era are all about scale, the bigger the better, defined mathematically in a context of ruthless objectivity. Their wealth, power, and political clout are driving the entire nation toward dysfunctional forms of gigantism—an argument we have made in the past and to which we will be returning in detail in a few weeks. But none of the finer achievements of human effort built up over time—generally called civilization—automatically lock themselves into our repertoire of culture. We must manage and work and teach and be mindful of them, or we will lose them. The attack against science in the United States, from both the illiberal mythic-minded Left and the illiberal mythic-minded Right, is a clear indication that something has gone wildly haywire in the culture so that this managing, working, teaching, and capacity for mindfulness is falling behind the endless blandishments of techno-driven entertainment and ease.
Look folks, if Trump gets away with not only indicting James Comey but getting him convicted, and if in the fullness of time he actually manages to cow the majority of U.S. officers in the combat arms services into compliance or retirement, then it’s over. America as we have known it in our lifetimes will at that point be over. The stakes and the narrowing timetable of consequence have never been clearer.
If I’m right about Trump and the MAGAheads having gone too far for their own good this time, then at the brighter end of the dark tunnel we’re in potentially joyful prospects of renewal await us. It would mean that we could perhaps build a right-sized government based on a subsidiarity design aligned with human-scale, one that allows for maximal human flourishing. If I’m wrong, well, then the Lord of the Flies will fill his larder.
[1] Eco, The Prague Cemetery (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), pp. 177-78, 191.
[2] And not for the first time; see Sarah Knapton, “Richard Dawkins vows ‘I’ll use every one’ after scientists condemn words including ‘male’ and ‘female’,” The Telegraph, February 15, 2023.
[3] The song was written by two Jews, John Kander (music) and Fred Ebb (lyrics), for the Broadway show that preceded the film. That must have been one interesting and difficult song to write.