Archive for category: Emotion
From above, an open-cut coal mine looks like some geological aberration, a sort of man-made desert, a recent volcanic eruption, or a kind of terra forming. When the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht first gazed at a series of such mines while driving through his home region in southeast Australia, he stopped and got out of his car, overcome “at the desolation of this once beautiful place,” he wrote in his book, Earth Emotions.
As a scholar, Albrecht was drawn to pondering language about and human relationships to the natural world. As a person, he also cared deeply for this place, which had been his home since 1982—Australia’s Hunter Region, a sublime area of dairy farms, wineries, and wallabies. The valley here offers a stopover along a flyway that runs from Alaska and Siberia all the way to New Zealand, and Albrecht’s enthusiasm for bird conservation led him to understand how coal mining was threatening the well-being of the valley’s feathered and human residents. From 1981 to 2012, the amount of land occupied by open-cut mines in the Hunter, akin to the mountaintop-removal mining that has devastated Appalachian landscapes, had increased almost twentyfold. The process leaves a permanent and raw scar, devoid of topsoil. Such mines can also discharge toxic metals into water supplies.
Albrecht understood all of this in the abstract, but witnessing it directly was more visceral—“an acute traumatic event of environmental destruction,” he wrote, air “thick with dust” and the smell of coal, a “dull roar” from a mine detonation, a “cloud of orange smoke.”
The coal industry, Albrecht felt, was wrecking his home. His observations marked the beginning of his relentless inquiry into what it means when the places we call home are remade or altered, sometimes violently.
Over a period of decades, Albrecht has devoted himself to searching for language that might describe a type of sadness, shock, and loss that now seems more and more common—grief of displacement, unease with our surroundings, a sense that damage and disaster might lie just down the road. He would feel the same rush of grief and concern in 2009 when he moved to the Perth metropolitan area in Western Australia, where he had grown up. There, thanks partly to the early impacts of climate change, regional rainfall had dropped by about 15 to 20 percent since the 1970s, and the jarrah trees he had loved since he was a child—eucalypts with lustrous wood—were dying en masse.
As he studied his own and others’ emotional responses to such damages, he was on the cusp of something, a sentiment that now might easily define our time: We live in an era of radical change, when it feels like everything is being remade and altered. What do we call this unprecedented moment of home instability?
In moments of collective distress, people have tried to name the pain that comes from the disruption of home: a complex set of feelings that includes longing, love, grief, existential angst, and even a lurking sense of dread. Loss of home can evoke the pain of dispossession, profound cultural and personal disorientation, and righteous anger, all of which can haunt a society for generations.
After the English invaded Wales in the 1200s, the word hiraeth (pronounced “here-eyeth”) became a fixture in the Welsh language, in part to express the societal disruption of living under colonial rule. “Hiraeth is a protest,” writes the essayist Pamela Petro. “It’s a sickness [that comes on] because home isn’t the place it should have been.” In 1688, Johannes Hofer, then a medical student at the University of Basel in Switzerland, assembled a set of case studies to document the pain of home disruption. Hofer was born in southern Alsace two decades after the Thirty Years’ War—a conflict that turned the region into “a smoldering land, amputated of half its population,” writes the historian Thomas Dodman, and left this part of Europe in a state of economic stagnation and political instability. Later, Hofer’s hometown became a sanctuary to refugees fleeing religious persecution in France. At the time, young Swiss mercenaries, hired out across Western Europe, reportedly suffered a common, chronic heartbreak, la maladie du pays, literally “the disease of the country” in French, or Heimweh, “home-woe” in Swiss German. Hofer gave a scientific name to the pain of home loss that he had witnessed throughout his life. He called it nostalgia, derived from Greek, “composed of two sounds, the one of which is Nosos [now more often spelled nostos], return to the native land; the other, Algos, signifies suffering or grief,” he wrote.
To Hofer, nostalgia was also a medical condition whose symptoms included fever, nausea, sleep disturbance, fatigue, and respiratory problems, along with “palpitations of the heart, frequent sighs, also stupidity of the mind.” Untreated, it could be fatal, and there were documented deaths among Swiss soldiers attributed to this malady. By the 19th century, the symptoms of nostalgia included “tachycardia, skin rashes, hyperhidrosis (excessive sweating), hearing difficulties, convulsions, heartburn, vomiting, diarrhea, and any rales or wheezing that a stethoscope might pick up in the chest,” according to Dodman. We would probably now attribute many of these symptoms to other psychological ailments, such as post-traumatic stress disorder.
[Read: The West has never felt so small]
In the 20th century, the meaning of nostalgia became more detached from home; instead, it signified a longing for the real or imagined comforts of the past.
But in discarding the original notion of nostalgia, we may have underestimated the impact that place and home have on the human body and our ability to navigate our lives. Having a home is part of human well-being; when home is disrupted, it can make us literally sick. It is a kind of trauma. The social psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove has described the pain felt by displaced communities—especially Black communities uprooted because of gentrification, discrimination, and urban development—as “root shock,” or “the traumatic stress reaction to the loss of some or all of one’s emotional ecosystem.” In an era of climate crisis, we will have to reckon with new complexities in our relationships to home, and even more people will experience the shock of being uprooted. In the long run, if we fail to address the crisis, hardly any safe refuge will be left.
Like Hofer, Albrecht thought it would be useful to name the experience of watching one’s home environment unravel. Around the turn of the millennium, he decided to coin his own word. (There are words in Indigenous languages that could have filled the gap, but none had yet migrated into the English language.) “With my wife Jill, I sat at the dining table at home and explored numerous possibilities. One word, ‘nostalgia,’ came to our attention as it was once a concept linked to … homesickness,” he wrote. Hunter Region residents were homesick, but they hadn’t gone anywhere—the place they lived in just no longer offered the kind of comfort, solace, or safety one would expect from home. Albrecht came up with the word solastalgia, using the suffix –algia, meaning “pain,” and the same Latin root in the words solace, console, and desolation. In Latin, solacium means “comfort,” and desolare, “to leave alone,” so the word solastalgia suggested the loss of comfort, the loneliness of being estranged from home. He published the first academic paper on the idea in 2005.
Some neologisms never make it out of the realm of private conversation, and some molder in the corners of academic journals as useless jargon. But occasionally a word like this catches a bit of zeitgeist, like wind, and gets borne aloft into the culture at large.
Over the next several years, Albrecht’s mellifluous word seemed to tap into a kind of angst about life on a warming planet. A British trip-hop band produced an instrumental track called “Solastalgia,” and a Slovenian artist recorded an album also called Solastalgia. At the beginning of 2010, The New York Times Magazine ran a profile of Albrecht and commissioned the sculptor Kate MacDowell to create a porcelain representation of solastalgia—a brain full of delicate trees and Australian wildlife.
The neologism also offered a useful means of describing and studying how the impacts of climate change reach beyond tangible, physical, and economic damages. A team of social scientists identified feelings of solastalgia among people from rural northern Ghana, a region devastated by climate change–related drought and crop failure. A collaboration of environmental scientists and public-health researchers observed solastalgia in communities affected by hurricanes and oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. A Los Angeles physician named David Eisenman stumbled across the idea of solastalgia when interviewing survivors of the 2011 Wallow Fire, the largest wildfire on record in Arizona. Over and over, he heard them express “the sense that they were grieving [for the landscape] like for a loved one.” He and his team found that the more uneasy they felt about the landscape itself, the more at risk they were for other kinds of psychological distress.
Writers, artists, and scholars are now talking more openly about the emotions of the climate crisis. We have even more ways to name the experiences of people living through mega-disasters and the slow attrition of beloved places—including climate grief, ecological grief, and environmental melancholia. In a 2020 survey by the American Psychological Association, more than two-thirds of American adults said they’d experienced “eco-anxiety.” We are moving into an era defined by homesickness.
Does it matter if we name or even notice this kind of angst?
Recent years have made it abundantly clear how much our actual, physical homes and lives are at risk, all over the world. In 2019 alone, 24.9 million people around the globe were effectively evicted from their homes by natural disasters and climate-change impacts. Communities that survive disasters, both large and small, face damage that is hard to even tally. Various economists have tried to estimate the harm of climate change to our societies in monetary terms. Others have made calculations of potential economic losses based on factors such as wage-earning potential and gross domestic product. The world could lose up to 18 percent of GDP by 2050 if nothing is done about climate change. But such calculations strike me as profound underestimates of a phenomenon that could easily tear apart the basic fabric of our societies, economically and physically.
In the past several years, a whole field of study has emerged to quantify the intangible losses associated with climate change. Losses related to culture, identity, heritage, emotional well-being, and the sacredness or spirituality of people’s relationship to a place or a community—not to mention experiences such as the joy, love, beauty, or inspiration found in a cherished landscape—are nearly impossible to quantify in economic terms. So scholars of intangible loss are now trying to find other ways to account for them, formally, for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “We have to find a better way to make visible what is often overlooked, ridiculed, dismissed as too personal, not generalizable, not quantifiable,” says Petra Tschakert, who is a geography professor at Curtin University, in Australia, and who has also studied solastalgia in Ghana.
[Read: Why do we remember floods and forget droughts?]
Even these measures, though, do not quite capture what I have long wondered: Have we failed in some more personal realm? Have too many of us convinced ourselves for too long that climate change is the problem of others and that the storms will never rattle our own roof? And if we all faced our grief, would we find the collective will to take the kind of drastic action required to stanch the destruction?
In 2013, I met Glenn Albrecht while I was on a writing fellowship in Perth, a city of Spanish-style architecture, white-sand beaches, brightly colored wild cockatoos, and some of the most profuse biodiversity of any city in the world. He had moved back to the country’s west coast in 2009 to take a post as a professor of sustainability at Murdoch University and was living with and caring for his elderly mother in a house about 30 miles outside Perth that they had nicknamed Birdland. He had also broadened his work beyond solastalgia and was creating an entire lexicon of polysyllabic words related to climate change. At a seminar at a local university, I watched him—a gangly, energetic man—urge the few dozen people in the room to pronounce several other neologisms, waving his arms like a drum major as we sounded out in unison “SUM-BI-OS-IT-Y,” sumbiosity, which refers to a utopian-sounding state in which people live in balance with Earth. (I had doubts about whether this word would catch on, though I appreciated the sentiment.)
Meanwhile, the idea of solastalgia has taken on a life of its own, and in the Hunter, the concept had been used in a 2013 court ruling to stop the expansion of a coal mine by the company Rio Tinto: The solastalgic pain of local residents was named as one of several reasons to halt the project. Albrecht had testified on the negative impacts on citizens and how the project would likely make one village unlivable. It was maybe the first time that something as intangible as love of home had nearly as much legal standing as pure economics. The decision was overturned again in 2015, but the community group there has continued to try to fight the mine.
After Albrecht’s mother died, he returned to southeastern Australia full-time in 2014—to a place at the edge of the Hunter Region that he and his wife named Wallaby Farm, where they could live nearly off the grid with solar power and a farm full of fruits, herbs, and vegetables. But in 2019, wildfires raged around his property—part of the massive outbreak of flames called the Black Summer that would devastate much of Australia and draw international attention. One fire ignited about a mile from Albrecht’s house. Albrecht wore a face mask much of that season to cope with the searing smoke. He kept watch for any embers that might drift through the air and alight on his property. When I spoke with him not long thereafter, he said, “We’re actually in the process of trying to sell it and move. We’re being driven out by climate change.” (I later heard that he and his wife had stayed put.)
In our interview—just after the explosion of the coronavirus outbreak worldwide—he took the same slightly detached, professorial tone that I had always heard from him. I couldn’t hear his emotion in his voice. “The bushfires were a massive psychoterratic experience,” he observed, drawing on another Latinate word he had coined. I asked him about a post he had placed on Facebook during the height of the fires. It was full of expletives and occupied some space between humor and rage. “The land that we love is being fried … because the joint is getting fucking hotter,” he had proclaimed. This post was, he said, an expression of his anger in the Australian vernacular.
When I read it, it was like hearing a battle cry in the distance—a roar about everything we love, everything we are losing, everything we must try to defend.
This article was adapted from Madeline Ostrander’s forthcoming book At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth.
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Shanée Benjamin for Vox
“Don’t sweat the small stuff” is actually great advice.
To say that our plates are full would be an understatement. The reality of contemporary living requires our attention and efforts be divided between demanding jobs, essential familial caregiving, replenishing social gatherings, and fulfilling political and community engagements — not to mention any hobbies or creative endeavors. According to Pew Research Center surveys, 60 percent of adults said they were sometimes too busy to enjoy life. Busy-ness, unsurprisingly, intensifies once you have kids: 74 percent of parents with children under the age of 18 reported being too busy to enjoy life.
There are a number of reasons people pack their schedules. Hustle culture has normalized always-on, blind ambition; society still expects women to balance the pressures of work and home life; people pleasers have difficulty saying no. Existential fears of climate change, political turmoil, and economic strain perhaps weigh less heavily when you’re distracted by a never-ending to-do list.
“We’re socialized,” says licensed marriage and family therapist Mona Eshaiker, “to care and to provide and to help. If we do it without boundaries and without limits, we’re going to be burnt out and then we’re not doing anybody any favors.”
The myth of perfectionism keeps many in a cycle of feeding into external pressures: the illusion of “having it all,” gleaning self-worth from the validation of others. Of course, it is worthy and noble to be passionate about people and causes you care about. It’s also easy to fall into the trap of attempting too much in the pursuit of trying to have it all.
Instead of being everything to everyone and everything all the time, what would life look like if you cared a little less? “What if,” says Deborah J. Cohan, professor of sociology at University of South Carolina Beaufort and author of Welcome to Wherever We Are: A Memoir of Family, Caregiving, and Redemption, “we aim for good enough?”
Manage your personal expectations
Much of our desire to take on extra tasks and responsibilities comes from a sense of obligation to others, experts agree, but even that can be self-directed. “Seventy-five percent of the time, the guilt is coming from inside the house,” says Sarah Knight, author of a series of “No Fucks Given” guides, including The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck and Get Your Shit Together. “You are making it up in your own head.”
No one’s expectations of you are as high as your self-imposed expectations. If you feel guilty about bringing store-bought pasta salad to a barbecue instead of a homemade dish, the only person who is going to shame you for that is yourself. While turning down additional responsibilities at work because your plate is already full can feel like you’re dropping the ball, most likely the asker will quickly find a volunteer who is more than eager to take on the extra project. “Nobody’s mad,” Eshaiker says. “People don’t want us to feel pressured, either, or stressed.”
Before making a decision about whether to care a little less or to turn down a favor that’s asked of you, Knight says to ask yourself whether saying no would have a negative effect or comes from a mean-spirited place. “RSVPing no to a party is not an objectively bad thing,” she says. “Saying yes and then canceling at the last minute — not because you legitimately got food poisoning but because you never really wanted to go … that’s something you can feel guilty about. Don’t do that.”
Find your priorities
Caring less doesn’t mean negligence. To care less about inconsequential matters, you need to zero in on what is worth caring for. Consider taking stock of to-do list items and obligations and asking if these responsibilities make your day feel more spacious or more confined, Cohan suggests. Does it nourish your sense of creativity? Is it the best use of your time and talent? Does it make you feel exhausted? Do you want to spend your time and energy on this?
Eshaiker says to ask yourself, “Why do I care?” about various aspects of life. “Is this something that is aligned with my values?” she says. “Is this something that I believe is helpful for myself and for humanity?” If you feel compelled to care about something out of fear or wanting to be accepted by others, it may not be worth placing emphasis on it.
Of course, there are nonnegotiable obligations — the basic functions of your job, caring for children, paying bills — which may not be life-affirming but require attention nonetheless. Once you define these true commitments, you can “divorce yourself from the concept of ‘I have to do it,’” Knight says, when it comes to other tasks you thought essential, like waking up at 5 am to do laundry when doing it after work will suffice.
When Knight quit her job as a book editor in 2015, she realized what Marie Kondo advocated for in terms of physical organization, Knight was doing to her brain: eliminating the habits and people that no longer sparked joy. Think about the instances you really didn’t enjoy or that made your life more difficult — such as attending a casual friend’s bachelor party when you really wanted to catch up on reading instead. When similar opportunities arise, you can confidently turn down things you know won’t serve you, Cohan says.
Just because you excel at something — be it creating detailed spreadsheets or making complicated desserts for dinner parties — doesn’t mean you have to agree to it every time you’re asked or volunteer to do it to impress others. “Even though I know I can make the really great, complicated cake — I’ve made them, I’m good at it,” Cohan says. “But it doesn’t mean I have to do it because maybe it’s not the best use of my Saturday.”
Zoom out
In the thick of the daily grind, minute conflicts can often get blown out of proportion: Your kid didn’t do the dishes when you asked, you were 10 minutes late to a doctor’s appointment, a friend forgot she was supposed to bring snacks to game night. People are quick to ascribe meaning to these ordinary events — jumping to conclusions and thinking a friend is inconsiderate, say, by not answering your phone call in the middle of a workday. If you pause and take a step back, none of these things actually have a profound bearing on your life, Eshaiker says. Say you find yourself constantly wrapped up in drama — consider asking yourself why you’re stimulated by the excitement of conflict or which big life decisions you’re trying to distract from. “Sometimes not reacting is the best thing to do,” she says.
The same thing goes for work. Many people’s value and self-worth is intrinsically tied to their jobs. But if you zoom out and consider who you are outside of your job, you may realize other areas of life where you might be lacking, like spending quality time with family or practicing art or music — parts of life you decided you want to prioritize.
When you’re constantly stressed and in a fight-or-flight state of mind, finding this perspective is difficult, Eshaiker continues. Every minor issue feels like an urgent fire needing to be extinguished. Instead of making mountains out of molehills, Eshaiker suggests getting to the root of why you’re negatively fixated on the outfit your partner decided to wear to a wedding, for example. “Is it because I want my partner to present well in public because then I want to get approval from others?” she says. “But that has nothing to do with my ultimate values and my goals. Again, you’re just giving up your power to other people if it’s about external validation in some way.” Relinquishing the perceived influence onlookers have over your life frees up space for you to care about things that actually matter.
In order to get to a place where you’re able to look at the bigger picture, Eshaiker says you need to prioritize rest and centering yourself, which looks different for everyone: meditation, taking a walk, no email before bed.
Set boundaries
Once you’ve defined what is and isn’t worth your time, you’ve got to set, and express, boundaries. Boundary-setting can seem like an amorphous buzzword, but it isn’t as simple as learning how to say no. According to Knight, boundary-setting is outlining what you need and what is important to you and protecting those desires. This can be as simple as writing a list of things that make you happy (reading, going to the gym, cooking, a life with minimal stress), allow you to earn a living (your job), and other areas of importance (friends, family, getting a good night’s sleep).
Then ask yourself what you need to do to protect these things. Maybe you decline invites to weeknight social activities in order to prioritize good sleep. Perhaps you need to spend less time with a friend who invites conflict.
“If they really sit down and think about it for five minutes, they’re gonna realize the biggest, unwanted drain on their time, energy, and money,” Knight says. “It could be a relationship in their life — it could be a parent, it could be a friend, someone they’re dating — and that the boundary that you need to set to preserve your time, energy, money, sanity, mental health, is to basically fence that person outside of all of that.”
Another way to set boundaries, Knight says, is to ask yourself, “What’s wrong with my life?” and then to identify why. For example, you might feel depleted after hanging out with a certain friend. Why? Are you giving more than they’re willing to reciprocate? Do you no longer have much in common? “It all comes down to identifying what you want, the need, what’s important to you, and then what you have to do to protect those things,” Knight says.
Time is finite and shouldn’t be dictated by others or how you believe others to perceive you. If caring a little less means not immediately volunteering to lead every new initiative at work or skipping a few PTA meetings, you’re saving time and energy for the things that matter.
“It’s like trimming the fat,” Cohan says, “off of a day or a week.”
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Simple logic tells us that those atop a societal hierarchy will provide rewards for professionals—be they clergy or psychiatrists—who promote an ideology that maintains the status quo, and that the ruling class will do everything possible to manipulate the public to believe that the social-economic-political status quo is natural. If a population believes that its More
The post Marx, Spinoza, and the Political Implications of Contemporary Psychiatry appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
American schools are soft, you say? I know what you mean. I taught college for 15 years, so I’ve dealt with my share of still-teenagers fresh out of high school. Many of them inspired me, but some had clearly earned high marks too easily and needed remedial help in math, English, or other subjects. School discipline had been too lax perhaps and standards too slack, because Johnny and Janey often couldn’t or wouldn’t read a book, though they sure could text, tweet, take selfies, and make videos. Oh, wait a sec, that’s not what you meant by “soft,” is it? You meant soft as in “soft target” in the context of mass school shootings, the most recent being in Uvalde,… Read more
Source: Why Going “Hard” Is Taking the Easy Way Out appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
A layperson’s overview of pain channels and how painkillers interefere with them.
It’s a paradox worthy of Joseph Heller’s classic 1961 novel, Catch-22. Donald Trump’s deeply problematic state of mind made him unfit to be president in 2017. He got elected anyway, and now that same mental impairment, several legal experts say, may disqualify him from being held accountable for the crimes he committed in the Oval Office.
The brazenness of Trump’s insistence, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that he won the 2020 election is a continuing theme for the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack, which held its fourth public hearing on Tuesday. “The president’s lie was and is a dangerous cancer on this body politic,” said Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California. True enough.
But what if Trump believes his election lies? Writing in Politico, Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor, says that Bill Barr’s statement to the January 6 committee that Trump was “detached from reality” about the election “might be his best defense against a possible criminal prosecution” for conspiring to overturn it. “The key,” Daniel L. Zelenko, another former federal prosecutor, told The New York Times, “is having contemporaneous evidence that he was saying that he knew the election was not stolen but tried to stay in power anyway.” Daniel Richman, a third former federal prosecutor and a professor of law at Columbia, writes in Lawfare: “Delusional pigheadedness is indeed a defense.”
It seems strange that discussion of Trump’s legal exposure should focus on this obstacle, rather than on the much larger one that no president has ever been tried for crimes committed while in office. Legal objections to such prosecutions may be spurious, but that doesn’t mean Attorney General Merrick Garland relishes the prospect of a prosecution that would invite constitutional challenge and rally Trump’s base to the 2024 Republican nominee—possibly Trump himself. Of all the reasons why Trump won’t likely be held legally accountable for his attempted coup, that’s the biggest.
But setting such practicalities aside, I can’t accept what Richman calls “the difficulty of a trip into the head of someone who has had a troubled relationship with expertise, precedent, and reality.” I’m not a former prosecutor, nor even a lawyer, and Richman is a very smart one. (I knew him in college. Hi, Danny!) Still, this deference strikes me as grossly misapplied to someone whose head I was forced to live inside—whose head we all were forced to live inside— for four very stressful years.
The argument against holding legally accountable a person with Trump’s feeble purchase on reality turns on the question of mens rea, or “guilty mind.” Does Trump believe his own lies? If he does, he lacks mens rea. To nail Trump, you need to prove that he didn’t really think he won the election or that he didn’t really think saying, for instance, “When the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised,” as we learned Tuesday he said to a Georgia elections investigator named Frances Watson—whom he never should have been speaking to in the first place—constituted a directive to commit voter fraud. I’m not yet prepared to believe no evidence exists that Trump acknowledged privately that he did lose the election, because Trump is no paragon of consistency. He uses words not to convey truth but to make things happen, and sometimes what he wants to happen is that this or that reasonable-seeming person be mollified with a reasonable-sounding remark. (This is something I learned about Trump—perhaps you did, too— while we lived inside that head of his.) Maybe Trump made one such mollifying remark to some reasonable-seeming person from whom we haven’t yet heard.
But let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that Trump really does lack mens rea. He seems these days to be working overtime to demonstrate he does. That means, among other things, that Trump’s Cabinet ought to have invoked the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to remove Trump from office. Early in the administration, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said he thought Trump was suffering from early stage dementia, according to Ira Rosen, a former producer for 60 Minutes, and tried to enlist Republican donor Robert Mercer to urge the removal process along. Like later internal discussions about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, this one went nowhere. Two efforts to impeach Trump also failed, even though Congress needn’t consider a president’s state of mind to remove them from office.
In both instances, the problem was that Trump’s mens rea deficit was contagious. First congressional Republicans caught it, including Senators Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, who previously had denounced Trump as “a pathological liar” (Cruz), whom “we should have basically kicked … out of the party” (Graham). Next came Trump voters, who in 2016 harbored few illusions about whether their man was “honest and trustworthy” (more than 20 percent conceded he was not). Over time, Trump supporters adopted a more favorable view. Despite the ample opportunities his presidency gave them to learn how very dishonest he really was, by 2020 only 14 percent of Trump voters conceded that Trump was not “honest and trustworthy.” Does Trump say Biden was not elected president legitimately? Then 70 percent of Republican voters agree. An entire political party accepts Trump’s alternative reality. If Trump is delusional, then so are all those voters. You can’t diagnose all of them. We don’t have enough Thorazine!
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine applying mens rea to the bloodiest tyrants of modern history. Did they possess guilty minds? Not so’s you could tell. It wouldn’t be very difficult for a defense lawyer to demonstrate that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, who between them murdered about 65 million people, suffered from severe mental illness that prevented them from feeling guilt about their butchery. Now imagine going back in time and putting these three in the dock at Nuremberg or the International Criminal Court at the Hague. Would any such proceeding even consider that delusional pigheadedness shields them from the consequences of their crimes? “When Herr Hitler said the Jews were ‘a race-tuberculosis of the peoples’ and must therefore be eliminated, he was stating his sincere, albeit erroneous, opinion.” Merely imagining such talk feels obscene.
Granted, Trump was not a mass murderer; he merely tried and failed to pull off a coup d’état. That makes him much less of a problem than the twentieth century’s big three monsters. (I’ve long been persuaded by arguments that the head of state whose character most resembled that of Trump was Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II.) But Trump’s small stature in the annals of tyranny also makes him, may it please the court, less obviously deranged for the purposes of our proceeding.
Trump has, perhaps, an innate ability, derived from extreme narcissism, to believe anything he wants to believe. But how different, really, does that make him from many other successful people in business? Does mens rea render America’s entire executive class unprosecutable? If so, we’ve got a bigger problem than I thought.
Trump may be a sociopath, but I can name several others in the upper reaches of corporate America who share his belief in the malleability of truth. So, probably, can you. With enough lawyers, Trump believes, you can create whatever reality you want. This, I’ve often been told, is an approach that’s widely shared within the upper reaches of the real estate industry. Trump is not impaired. He’s just a rich asshole who believes what he wants because he can. For heaven’s sake, don’t make that a reason not to put him on trial.