Is The United States Committing Suicide?
By Eric G. Weiner
I am no historian, nor scholar, so I will leave it to more qualified people to provide supportive evidence to this highly speculative idea. I did however; work for 30 years as a psychotherapist, and so have some insight into the workings of the human psyche. To suppose this can apply to an entire nation is, of course, presumptuous. However, as there are so many idiotic claims being spread about at present — exceedingly dangerous ones at that — I feel emboldened to contribute this one — which has the one virtue, of at least, not being likely to get anyone killed.
I have been struggling to come to terms with how so many people; can believe in what seems so patently ridiculous, especially in the United States. Apart from certain vested interests that sponsor vaccine denial, as well as Donald Trump and his gang, I feel there must be something else afoot to explain the wholesale uptake of blatant nonsense.
Despite Donald Trump lying about his charity, his casino, his university (all of which he claimed “were the greatest in the world” and all of which failed or were revealed as fraudulent), despite being caught on tape bragging about “grabbing women by the pussies”, blackmailing the head of another country by threatening to hold back military aid in exchange for digging up dirt on his opponents son, calling the Corona Virus “a democratic hoax” and leading the country to the highest infection and death rate in the entire world, threatening a Republican attorney general and his lawyer (on a taped call) with “dire criminal consequences” if they didn’t help him “come up with just 11,780 votes”, and continuously lying about a supposed voting fraud without producing one single shred of evidence– and having these claims tossed out by 60 different courts including those ruled by judges he himself appointed — people still frantically believe him to the point that many stormed the Capital on January 6th in an unprecedented assault on the democratic process..
Soon after the attack, on the same day, he told the rioters in a video message:
“We love you,”
And,
“You are very special”
And,
“Your vote was stolen”.
The next day, after many of his congressional supporters disavowed him, he came out with a new statement:
“Like all Americans I am outraged at this heinous attack on the United States Capital”.
He went on to say:
“The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capital have defiled the seat of American democracy.”
How do you put these two different statements together? Both made one day apart by the same person? It is impossible. They are wholly incompatible. And yet if you scan the radio stations across the nation — especially in non-metropolitan areas, you will hear the defense of Trump and the rioters going on, and on, and on. It is surreal. Or so it seems…
The word “surreal” means strange, “dreamlike”.
Dreams are products of the unconscious workings of the brain. I suspect this is what so many of us have been experiencing collectively for the last 4 years. It is not coincidence, or just metaphorical, that we experience these years as “surreal” and “dreamlike”, because we may be in the midst of mass national working through of the unconscious.
When a person, (or a society), begins to suspect its self-concept is faulty, it either must change its belief system to incorporate the new, more accurate reality, in which case its perception grows. Alternatively, if it tries to repress the burgeoning realization, and keep it buried within, while simultaneously keeping the conflicting old belief system intact, it becomes inherently unstable and loses its moorings in reality.
This attempt to contain two irreconcilable realities will cause disorganization of the system as a whole, frequently a breakdown, and left untreated, psychosis and, possibly, suicide. This may happen to a whole nation of people, and possibly, cause a whole country to self-annihilate.
The United States (at least white America) has always thought of itself as the “shining beacon of democracy” for the world, “The shining city on the hill”, the home of the brave and the free”. Most of us relatively non-suffering, white folks, saw ourselves as the most moral of nations as well — after all, we had great free education systems, social security, old-age pensions, we spent billions every year on international aid, benevolently helping those poor backward underdeveloped countries of Africa, Asia, and South America.
I well remember my absolute rage, when as child, I first came across television reports of anti-American protests abroad. “What ingrates” I thought — “how dare they revile us when we are so, so, good to them”
My ideas eventually changed, partly as a result of the Vietnam War and my coincidental introduction to the international press, which offered different, less filtered perspectives on our “good deeds” worldwide. But most Americans still held those beliefs of our “incomparable goodness”, and no doubt a dwindling number still do to this day.
Well the last 40 or 50 years have greatly eroded this national mythology. We fought a wholly unjust, horrifying, and anti-democratic war in Vietnam, we saw an extremely popular and charismatic president (and then his brother) assassinated in very dubious circumstances. Martin Luther King was killed, we learned of our having supported murderous dictatorships not only in Vietnam but also in Indonesia, Argentina, Chili, El Salvador, and many, many other countries.
Then came 911, and instead of using it to wonder why we were so profoundly hated, we used it as an excuse for patriotic chest thumping and to create a war on wholly fake grounds. “”Weapons of mass destruction” was touted over and over again as our justification to go to war by the Bush administration, yet these weapons were never found, and the so-called “proofs” were proven to be fake. We then went on to legalize torture and the indefinite suspension of due process in this same war. The governing ethos began to wear thin. I suspect that as a people we unconsciously began to doubt our true identity and a suicidal national proclivity was beginning to form.
The increasing desperation to wave flags, strut our patriotism, and loudly proclaim our love of country and declare ourselves “the greatest country on earth” can be looked at as what in the psychotherapy field we used to call a “reaction formation”; the creation of a guise that is exactly the opposite of a truth that is being denied. Hence the very frightened child becomes the very frightening, fearless bully.
Our desperate internal conflict causes us to instinctively gravitate to monstrous leaders. This serves two functions — it more accurately expresses who we really are as a country, and, simultaneously, serves a strange paradox. It is too scary to face the truth, so we go into virulent denial.
To really think that Richard Nixon (or Bush, or Trump) could be the corrupt, untrustworthy, vicious men that they had already shown themselves to be; and imagine such men could rise to the level of possible president of our “wonderful” country, was too unsupportable and frightening a possibility. It was too out of step with our self-concept as a nation. It created what in the jargon of Psychology is known as “cognitive dissonance”.
So we convinced ourselves they must be actually good — that we must take them at their word — and voted them into office — and in the case of Nixon and Bush, we did it twice!
George Bush got us into an illegal war under wholly false premises, evaded the scrutiny of a second, even more suspect election, and was saved by the “miracle” (for him) of 911, allowing him to suspend all kinds of civil liberties, proclaim the frightening “Patriot Act”, intimidate the press into silence (who at that point had pending investigations into the election irregularities), and form the new organization called “Homeland Security” with all the resonances in name and function of Hitler’s use of the term “Fatherland”.
Electing and supporting Bush, Trump and Nixon may prove to be symptoms of self-destruction identical to the German people’s attraction to Adolf Hitler, who, on the face of things, was going to be the “Savior of the German People” — he was going to “Make Germany Great Again” (i.e. reaffirm the previous sense of self), but instead led it to ruin and catastrophe.
Is it really so far-fetched to imagine that when a nation starts to lose its sense of its own goodness and guiding principles, that it may turn unconsciously self-destructive — especially when its leaders refuse to acknowledge, address, or own the actual reality that is beginning to erode the previous illusion?
The nature of the self-destruction is revealing as well. The very methods the United States has used abroad for hundreds of years (unbeknownst to the average citizen), supporting murderous regimes, using dirty tricks to undermine and overthrow democracies, to further, and preserve its own interests, have come home to roost.
What is now going on within the United States is all too familiar to peoples around the world. What is happening domestically in the United States is exactly what was done to them by the United States in its ruthless international policies of self-interest over the last two centuries.
No sane country in the world has ever viewed the United States of America the way it has viewed itself.
But this was the dirty secret the public never really knew about. It was the unconscious, or subconscious of the United States.
As the disguises wear thinner, the desperation to keep the reality from breaking through to awareness becomes more and more pronounced. Paradoxically, the denial takes the very form of that which it attempts to suppress. This is a natural and even healthy activity if looked at in the right way. The unconscious seeks to become conscious. It labors to end the suppression, to have it rise to the surface. So all that we covertly did abroad begins to emerge at home. We embody what we try to suppress. We create fake news, undermine faith in the democratic process, elect absolutely ruthless leaders, parade righteously and violently with flags and guns, and loudly proclaim our “supremacy” while displaying (to those able to see,) our tremendous inadequacy, derangement and moral impoverishment.
Much like individuals who cannot confront their disturbed inner workings — because of lack of help, or too much fear, the organism begins to become severely divided within itself and begins to break down. The self, whether personal or national, can never be large enough to adequately contain two irreconcilable versions of its own identity. This leads to a lack of ability to discern reality itself, and may lead to psychosis, suicide or both. This process may have recurred again and again throughout history.
When the Romans could no longer easily view themselves as the most “advanced civilization on earth”; as that view became incompatible with its growing corruption, decadence and cruelty; it made itself vulnerable to overthrow and destruction. Through the system’s destruction, it is finally freed of the impossible burden of simultaneously bearing two incompatible versions of reality.
Perhaps Germany’s hatred of Jews, Gypsies, and the infirm, all stemmed from its growing disgust with its own intrinsic flaws of militarism, its loss of self-esteem after its defeat in World War 1, and its growing Prussian rigidity. Projecting its growing self-hate outwardly onto others, its goal became to destroy “these imperfections, and blemishes on the pure blood of the German people” — a thinly disguised way of paradoxically punishing unforgivable aspects of self, and ironically, inevitably bringing about its own destruction.
The need to keep the unconscious unconscious, to keep frightening self-awareness hidden from oneself, helps explain the ferocious denial of what is right in front of people’s faces right now in America. While Joe Biden won the election, 75 million people voted for Donald Trump in the face of all the blatant exposed lies, falsehoods and smarmy, transparent inventions of him and his cohorts.
Is it possible all this is because so many Americans are just that stupid? After all, the right wing establishment have been waging a successful war against the public education system in America for several decades now, resulting in the U.S having one of the lowest ratings of public education in the industrialized world.
But there may be something far deeper going on. We may be witnesses to the suicide of an entire nation.
