The Undermining Madness

 For everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled,
and he who humbles himself shall be exalted.

- Luke 14:11

Whenever a person quotes a Bible verse as a maxim, there is a very natural tendency among those who hear him to regard his words as mere moralizing that have no immediate bearing on physical reality.  The effect is similar to the effect on people who hear exhortations to quit smoking or to start exercising because of the bad consequences that will come someday - someday... - if they don't.  But I have argued in several places on this blog (such as here) that the "someday" consequences of moral choices begin right now, the moment the choices are made, and that they can be observed and empirically measured just as physical phenomena in the natural world can be observed and measured.  Therefore it should be possible to observe objectively the outworkings of the Divine humiliation of a person the moment that person begins to exalt himself.  

I have also argued that these outworkings (known in this blog as the outworkings of damnation) are now being seen in the United States of America, and that these outworkings can be objectively traced.  The United States is a nation that made itself great by oppressing and/or dispossessing people who were poor and nonwhite.  But the United States has gone through periods of awakening of conscience in which many of its citizens sought to right the wrongs that were done by the dominant culture against other people.  The efforts of these awakened people were, however, opposed and often thwarted by those members of the dominant culture who wanted to remain dominant at all costs.  Thus the nation endured a civil war in which Southern plantation owners were economically wiped out because they had built their wealth on the backs of slaves.  These Southerners refused to learn the moral lesson of their suffering, and went on to try to recreate as much of their old supremacy as possible.  So the United States had to go through a second struggle of conscience, namely the 1960's Civil Rights struggle.  However, the gains won during that struggle were again seen by certain members of the dominant culture as an unacceptable threat to their dreams of domination at all costs.  For the Civil Rights struggle sought to create a nation (and eventually a world) in which everyone on earth shares the earth on a basis of equality.  Those members of the dominant culture who felt threatened by such a world therefore engineered a social movement designed to undo all the progress made by the Civil Rights struggle in order to create a world in which one group of people gets to Make Itself Great Again by trashing everyone else on earth.

And so we come to the present time in which Donald Trump has lost the 2020 U.S. Presidential election by almost five million votes and counting, yet both he and his supporters refuse to concede his loss.  The reactionary social movement which put Trump into office in 2016 has been over 40 years in the making.  Some of its heavyweight architects include people like Rupert Murdoch (media mogul and owner of News Corporation and the Fox TV network), Ralph Reed (chairman of the Georgia Republican Party and former president of the "Christian Coalition"), Ronald Reagan, and the Koch family.  Some of its most influential mouthpieces include Wally George (Blast from the past! Anyone remember him?), Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Tucker Carlson.  Donald Trump, therefore, is not just a great big problem, but he is a symptom of a much larger problem.

Rupert Murdoch has famously called Donald Trump an idiot.  Note that Murdoch's exact words included an unprintable expletive before the word "idiot", thus signaling Murdoch's extreme distaste and disgust for Trump.  But Rupert Murdoch must realize that Trump is a creation of Murdoch and of his media empire.  Has Trump played fast and loose with reality and truth?  So has Murdoch, whose media outlets have lied about everything from anthropogenic climate change to the effect of bovine growth hormone on humans who drink milk to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic and on and on.  And not only has Murdoch created a head of state whose relationship with the truth is "relaxed" (to quote one of Trump's fellow Republicans), but Murdoch's media empire has created an entire population whose relationship with the truth is similarly relaxed.  In fact, it is so relaxed that the sole basis on which these people choose what they will believe is whether or not a statement of fact makes them feel good or grants them their hearts' desire.  That desire is for supremacy at all costs.  Without these people, there would have been no President Trump.

But reality does not make concessions, which is why, according to the Associated Press, in the 376 U.S. counties with the highest number of new COVID-19 cases per capita, 93 percent of registered voters voted for Trump.  Also note that although Trump tried to use his recovery from COVID-19 to assert that the pandemic is no big deal, an analysis by Business Insider reveals that the treatment he received would have cost the average American $650,000 out of pocket.  That means that a lot of diehard true believers in Trump are going to die soon.  And the attitude of Trump supporters concerning the pandemic is a symptom of their self-destructive attitude toward reality itself.

For it can be argued that malignant narcissism is a progressive disease with an ultimately terminal outcome in 100 percent of cases.  The first stage begins with callous disregard of the rights of others and of our duty toward others.  The last stage begins with flagrant, self-destructive disregard of reality itself.  This is illustrated beautifully in a paper I read a few months ago titled, "Why Tyrants Go Too Far: Malignant Narcissism and Absolute Power."  The abstract to this paper begins thus: "This article explores the puzzling behavior of tyrants who undermine themselves once in power..."  The author, Betty Glad, outlines the following progression: 

Stage 1: A narcissism which aspires for greatness, yet which is held in check by the reality of the challenges of climbing a ladder of success.  

Stage 2: The diminishing of the narcissist's ability to test reality once he reaches his desired level of supremacy.  

Stage 3: The narcissist's acting out his fantasies of greatness instead of grounding his actions in a reasonable response to reality.  

Stage 4 (the final stage): The narcissist's crashing and burning against that cold, hard reality which he refused to acknowledge.  

I would argue that Trump and his supporters are now somewhere between stages 3 and 4.  I would like therefore to use an example from my own personal history to sketch how I think the Trump presidency might end.  

As I mentioned way back in the early days of my blogging, I used to be a member of a religious cult (or if you want to be euphemistic, an "abusive church") known as the Assemblies of George Geftakys.  George Geftakys was, of course, a classic malignant narcissist.  And as such a narcissist, he soon passed into stage 3 of the progression I outlined above.  That stage for him consisted of pretending that he and his family were the picture of perfection even though he was forcing young women in his assemblies to become his personal secretaries so that he could force himself on them sexually, and even though he knew that his oldest son was a wife-beater and child abuser.  His crash-and-burn phase came when the sins of his family became widely known to the members of the cult he had built.  What is interesting is what came afterward, when many members of the cult confronted George, and eventually forced his excommunication.

These members (many of whom became ex-members like me) thought that by confronting George and his henchmen we could get them to acknowledge their wrongdoing and repent.  THAT NEVER HAPPENED.  For it would have required George to admit that his whole life as he had presented it to us had been a fraud.  Instead, he and his wife moved to an upscale retirement community in the California Inland Empire, where he continued to advertise himself as a great missionary and pastor, adding to this that he was a native of Greece even though he had told us that he was born in the U.S.A.  To the very end of his life, George continued to live in a bubble of self-aggrandizing fantasy.  Given the parallels between the demise of George Geftakys and the current state of Donald Trump and his supporters, I expect something similar to happen now.  We should prepare ourselves to deal with it.

P.S. If you want to hear more about George's final crash-and-burn phase, click here.