The Progress of America's Social Disease

 

What is happening now in the USA tracks closely the dynamics of a dysfunctional family.

1. Someone gives in to temptation and sins. In this case, we are talking about the “sexual revolution.”

2. Rather than repent, they allow this to develop into a settled vice. The legalization of abortion probably marks that social threshold. Instead of realizing the original idea was wrong, once confronted with its consequences, Americans moved on from lust to murder.

3. As guilt feelings grow, the guilty party begins to construct a “narrative” instead of facing the truth; a pleasant fiction, in which they are guilty of nothing. They become insane in the proper sense of the term: their thinking and their claims are no longer in accord with what is real. We see this in postmodernism: there is no truth. We can simply “construct” any truth we want.

4. In the next phase, the pretense that truth is random and arbitrary is replaced with the conviction that truth is the enemy. Rather than having the right to choose one’s own truth, one must deny objective truth. Here is where Trump Derangement Syndrome begins: he was too prone to bluntly say what he thought.

5. Now comes the scapegoating phase: anyone not in step with the general denial of reality will be accused of the sin of which the guilty party feels guilty. Trump’s supposed sin, for example, is that he is a “liar.” Within a family, this becomes the habitual scapegoating of one or more children.

6. Over time, as the situation grows more extreme and the truth risks becoming obvious to all, the insane party will then accuse the scapegoated party of themselves being insane. We are seeing this now with the drive to have Trump removed from power with eleven days to go, by declaring him mentally incompetent. The demand is in itself obviously insane.

Within a dysfunctional family, this is generally where it ends. By general consent, the one member of the dysfunctional family who is not, or is least, insane, will be declared insane, and sent off for psychiatric treatment. So the family can go on as always. The child themselves will accept the diagnosis as necessary for survival. 

But where does it end when it happens to a whole society?

Nazi Germany perhaps gives us our most obvious model.