Our schizophrenic President (2019) presides over a schizophrenic American community. How else could he have gotten elected? The easy part of writing this essay was to illustrate the President’s schizophrenia. The challenge for the rest of us in reading it will be admitting the part we all played in the fiasco. We are just crazy enough ourselves to fail to recognize the symptoms in others. What are those symptoms and why are we unaware of them?
Schizophrenia or schizophrenics …
is a chronic and severe mental disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels and behaves.
distorts the way a person thinks, acts, expresses emotions, perceives reality and relates to others.
causes hallucinations, delusions and extremely disordered thinking.
interpret reality abnormally.
are unable to distinguish between real and imaginary experiences.
Most of us are unaware of these symptoms because everyone behaves this way. Just as the frog, swimming in the pot of water doesn’t detect the gradual increase in temperature, doesn’t realize that he will soon be the soup of the day, few of us realize that we are toast.
We don’t live in the real world nor does the President. “If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation, then, it’s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want?” (1) In the more profound context of Simple Reality the question would be: How would the schizophrenic false-self behave in the paradigm B narrative?
What does the TV (false self) want? “It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full.” (1)
The paranoid schizophrenic is terrified of the ubiquitous other. To the President, virtually anyone qualifies as the threatening other: women, immigrants, people of color, business competitors, and anyone who disagrees with him. “As The Times has reported, before taking office, he told aides to think of every day as ‘an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.’” (1)
Click on the link below to find the escape hatch that will reveal the route out of the world of reality TV.
Insight # 144: It always seemed strange to me that the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feelings are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, great acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the product of the second. —John Steinbeck
Link:
- “Schizophrenic Identity” in this blog and also in the print version, Who Am I? (2013) by Roy Charles Henry, page 56.
Reference:
- Poniewozik, James. “The Real Donald Trump Is a Character on TV.” The New York Times Sunday. September 7, 2019, pages 4-5.
