Most of us have some experience of removing ourselves from reality. Maybe we lose track of time while immersed in a project. Sometimes we can’t find our sunglasses, even when they’re on top of our head! We dissociate or detach from reality in small or big ways. We disengage with others – isolate or just stare at our phones. Most of us have compartmentalized aspects of life in order to survive. We all need breaks from the onslaught of difficult reality.
I get it. We’re weary. But, here’s my question: have many of us allowed dictators to run our world through our own detachment? It happens, for instance, when a family turns their heads away from the resident bully. David Brooks is spot on when he asks in The Atlantic (5/ 2/25), “Why Do So Many People Think Trump is Good?”
He writes, “There’s a question that’s been bugging me for nearly a decade. How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent? He lies, cheats, steals, betrays and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable and wonderful. What has brought us to this state of moral numbness?”
Don’t get me wrong, we need some time away from trauma. I watch Seinfeld on TV and shop to distract myself, too. Still, are we part of the problem if we disassociate too much? (According to the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, “Dissociation is a psychological phenomenon that describes a disconnection between thoughts, feelings, memories or identity.”) After all, if we’ve cut off our feelings or thinking by detaching from the world, it makes sense that we’d employ people to run our country who are removed from reality too.
I understand that the suffering around us can be too much, – whether it’s seeing animals abandoned or homeless people lining the streets. But, do we turn our heads too often? Denial can enable harm. It shows up in my counseling office too, people wondering why they do the things they do. Why did I have those affairs? Why do I eat when I’m not hungry? Why can’t I keep a job? How come I withdraw or lose my temper so often? We have all known the feeling of cutting off and not understanding ourselves in some way.
Has our shadow side shown up outside ourselves, in the form of cocky, uncaring leadership? An astonished Tom Nichols writes this month in The Atlantic, “I am still surprised and aggrieved by how quickly Twenty-First-Century Nazism has found a home in the party of Lincoln.”
Just as an acquaintance joked the other day, “I need to get my head examined,” maybe we all can reflect on our own participation in the horrifying politics we’re in. We see on the news the pain of war, body bags being laid on the ground, then we turn the dial. When our President says, “I don’t care,” does that mirror us?
Marianne Williamson, spiritual teacher, author and political activist, has noted that Trump is a symptom and not a cause. Williamson asks us to pay attention to “our own complacency, our willingness to surrender our critical thinking into the hands of people we should have known were only posing as the adults in the room, our own compromises with the imperatives of conscious citizenship.”
Can we do our own inventory? Notice our own disengagement from life around us. Can we find something do-able – helping our neighbors, writing legislators, attending city council meetings, joining Knitters4peace, journal writing, talking openly to a friend. Are we civil? Can we find ways to stay awake, create new paths to move forward. Finally, David Brooks pulls a punch, writing, “Few of us escape the moral climate of our age… And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.”
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