I think we have always expected our politicians to lie, but usually through exaggeration, omission, avoidance, associations that suggest causation, and feigned emotion. And that’s what Katie Britt did in her rebuttal to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.
She feigned outrage and fear and sorrow in a rather burlesque fashion. She omitted dates and times and geography in her stories, and managed, in the sequence of her telling, to create false associations. But she didn’t fully confabulate, invent and deceive.
Which is where I’m going with this thought.
I don’t remember our politicians, at least those in our democracies, confabulating, plain lying, as much as they do today. And getting away with it. And maybe, like many things happening today, the cause lies within our digital technologies, our internet, our social media.
When Joseph Goebbels said that if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth, he and Adolf were performing within a fascist state, with the absence of a free press and fact checkers. No one else was getting equal airtime.
But now, even within a functioning democracy, with a free press and fact checkers, his words have become prophetic. For a lie, a big outrageous lie, can be repeated endlessly, and heard by all. It can be presented with outrage, with pomp, with music, and comforting or disturbing visuals. It can be podcast, re-posted, re-tweeted, and it can even be monetized.
So now some politicians are no longer bothering with omission, exaggeration, and mere association. They simply and boldly invent, lie, and confabulate, over and over.
And though, to quote another politician, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”, Donald Trump doesn’t need all of the people, only sufficient electoral college votes to give him a win.
The only answer to this, that I can think of, is that for democracies to survive, we need our education systems to keep pace with digital technology. And I don’t mean we all need to learn about and fully understand this technology, I mean we need a larger percentage of our populations fully educated, educated in critical thinking, history, governance, geography, biology, public health, and science. Otherwise they will be misled by the fictions concocted by autocrats and tyrants, psychopaths and zealots.
Since October 7, we have been faced with an unprecedented level of anti-semitism which continues to grow. The left and the young seem to have forgotten what precipitated Israel’s attack on Hamas and blame Israel and most Jews. Israel is not waging war on Muslims but on the terror group Hamas based in Gaza, the West Bank, Qatar and supported by Iran.
I don’t wish to get into an historical and political discussion with this post but to concentrate instead on reactions. The latest odious anti-semitic insult was graffiti placed on a Toronto bus stop. Someone had written “no service for Jew bastards”. The photo of that was tweeted out on X by Michael Geist, a law professor in Ottawa. His words accompanying that picture were:
“I used to think of these as black and white images telling a story of my grandparents that I thought was a horror in the past. To see this appearing in colour today on the streets of Toronto – the city where I was born and raised – shakes me to my core.”
His tweet and the picture were part of an article in the National Post about the shameful actions of the Toronto Police Service for allowing Pro-Hamas protesters to prevent Prime Minister Trudeau and the visiting Italian Prime Minister from attending a banquet in her honour at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Video of that event showed police on horseback sitting and watching. In my personal history of picketing the US Consulate on University Ave against the War in Viet Nam, the police were not passive. Having a police horse moving sideways towards a crowd is very effective.
The next day, the protesters went to visit a large synagogue in Vaughan north of Toronto. One of the women protesters assaulted a cop but after the crowd of Hamas types starting yelling to let her go, York Regional Police did just that. Watch the video. That was just the most recent assault on the Jewish community which has involved invading Jewish neighbourhoods, vandalizing a book chain owned by Jews and even attacking the Mt Sinai Hospital to name just a few. In that incident, a female doctor’s car was surrounded by angry crowds and she was trapped until rescued.
Those of us who are appalled by the Hamas attack, rapes and murder of women, children and the elderly on October 7 do not attack Muslim businesses or demonstrate and terrorize Muslim places of worship. If these protestors are not happy with Israel’s response, let them protest at the Israeli consulates and embassies. That’s where they should be. Torching a Jewish deli as they did in Toronto makes no sense even if they did not like the pastrami.
When I was growing up in Toronto, there were areas that Jews did not go to and beaches we were not welcome at. There were quotas on how many Jews could get acceptance to university faculties like medicine and dentistry, and earlier the Mt Sinai Hospital came into existence because Jewish doctors were not allowed privileges at most hospitals. With time and advocacy, we became a tolerate and multiculturally diverse society but it seems we are losing that.
I was so outraged by this particular bit of anti-semitic graffiti at a bus stop that I posted it on Linkedin with “Graffiti on a Toronto bus stop reported on X by Ottawa law professor Michael Geist. Shades of Germany in the 30’s”
Within less that half an hour, I received a note from Linkedin that they removed my post as it was fomenting hate. I appealed and I just as quickly lost.
Who was my hate directed against? The moron who wrote the graffiti or Germans in the 1930’s?
I suspect the Linkedin decision was made by a bot which just goes to prove the old joke about computers from many years ago that seems to be still valid. In that anecdote, a computer was programmed to translate from English to Russian. What was fed in was “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”. What came out in Russian was “the wine is good but the meat is off”.
I wrote the blog, re-posted below these comments, almost 7 years ago. It ends with my naive assessment that Donald Trump’s attitude and behaviour toward women is diminishing his chance of being elected President.
I should have remembered Barnum (of Barnum and Bailey) and H.L. Mencken saying something about never losing money by underestimating the intelligence of people, or Carl Sagan’s updated version, changing the word “intelligence” to “critical thinking”.
But now, having watched the disheartening spectacle of CNN’s town hall with poor Kaitlan Collins going up against Trump with fair, quiet, soft, reasoned argument, fact checking and moderation, I think our problem is not critical thinking or intelligence, it is rather our susceptibility to performance art and the self-righteous, angry, pouting, vengeful teenager lying dormant in each of us. Trump taps into this naturally and instinctively, and dangerously. How else to explain the laughter from the audience when he makes fun of a woman accusing him of rape?
And perhaps, more than ever before, in our minds, the boundary between exciting theater and reality has blurred. Trump may have been right when he said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
So it’s deja vu all over again, with all of Trump’s new legal problems only providing more fuel to the paranoia of his base. “Witch hunt!”
October of 2016:
The recent revelations about Donald Trump, especially his barging into the dressing room of pageant contestants, left me wondering about emotional and mental age; specifically, at what age in a boy’s development would we find some of Trump’s behaviour, if still not laudable, at least common?
1. Peeking in the dressing room to get a glimpse of girls in partial dress: age 13 to 15
2. Complaining that the moderators are unfair and gave Hillary more time: 6 to 12 (preteen sibling rivalry)
3. Name calling repeatedly: age 6 to 12 (the school yard taunt)
4. Use of single word hyperbole to describe something: Age 14 to 16 (“It was like horrible, horrible.”)
5. Lying even when it is not necessary: 14 to 17 (Some teens get so used to shading their responses to questioning by parents that they lie even when the truth would get them kudos). Donald could have said, truthfully, that he decided, within a year or so of its onset, that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, and he would have sounded thoughtful and mature.
6. Never taking responsibility; it is always the fault of someone else: age 10 to 15. (“The teacher hates me, I wasn’t doing nothing when…”.)
7. Boasting about sexual prowess: 16-18 (Actually at that age males usually boast about sexual prowess to an audience of peers who know the story is fiction. It’s more of an in-joke than a real boast. We all understand the deep level of insecurity that lies behind a real boast.)
8. Groping or kissing women without consent. Perhaps 15 to 25 but only if the young man is brain damaged, severely inebriated, or mentally handicapped.
9. Denying the obvious truth. Perhaps 13 to 16. (“The marijuana you found in my sock drawer – it’s not mine. I have no idea how it got there.”)
10. Broadly lashing out at unfairness when challenged. Perhaps age 3 to 10, and beyond that into teens when the boy has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FASD) or Autism Spectrum Disorder.
11. Just a few days ago, Mr. Trump said something I haven’t heard since I was privy to post football game teenage drunken banter: “Look at her.” he said, implying clearly that he would only consider assaulting a more attractive woman.
12. And he keeps giving us fodder to think about. The latest: “I think she’s actually getting pumped up, you want to know the truth.” Now beside the bizarre accusation (he’s referring to Hillary) he uses one of his favourite phrases, “you want to know the truth.” There are many variants to this: “To tell the truth.” “I have to be honest.” “If you want to know the truth.” “Gotta be honest with you folks.” Now these kinds of qualifiers are not limited to adolescents, but they are precisely the phrases boys between the age of 14 and 19 use just before they lie. And addicts of all ages.
Fortunately Donald Trump’s candidacy is floundering on his behaviour and attitude toward women. The threat of having him in the White House is diminishing. But really, by my calculations, if Donald Trump were to be elected, we would be giving an immense amount of power to someone with the judgment and emotional age of a 7 to 15 year old boy, and not a sober, stable, empathic, conscientious 7 to 15 year old at that.
For more about Trump, Two Years of Trump on the Psychiatrist’s Couch is available in print and e-book formats.
One of the self-appointed political commentators with his own podcast, after interviewing Trump supporters, asked if some of these people were mentally ill. He was referring to a surprisingly large number of people who hold obviously erroneous beliefs (or delusions) about such things as voting machines, pedophile rings, and the resurrection of JFK junior.
Is the debacle of Kanye West flowing from a mental illness or that not uncommon human trait of generalizing from a single experience and converting his own sense of failure or disappointment into hatred of some imagined enemy?
As I write this slowly and carefully I am aware part of this problem is the very contemporary phenomenon of people with less than stellar knowledge, wisdom, and judgement being able and willing to share their random thoughts with very large audiences.
I did, I confess, watch the Tim Pool interview of Kanye West. Kanye was mildly hypomanic; in fact he did admit at one point that his brain was generating seven thoughts at the same time. There was often no link between one thought and the preceding thought he shared, and with the slightest pushback he abruptly left the studio.
One hallmark of delusions generated by psychotic illness is that they are usually, if not quite always, self-referential. That is they do not declare that the FBI is controlling people; they declare that the FBI is controlling me, my thoughts, or watching me, looking in my windows. They don’t say song lyrics are about my neighbours; they say the song lyric is about me, written for me. They don’t say the television is sending messages to other people; the television is sending messages to me. They don’t say there will be a second coming; they say I am the second coming.
The brain is an organizing machine. It constantly seeks meaning. And by “meaning” I mean organizing principles that offer some degree of predictability. What might happen next? What are the reasons I feel this way? Who is mine enemy? Who is my friend? Where lies safety? Where lies danger? What control do I have? What power? What or who is causing my limitations? Where might I find love?
At its best the brain contains sufficient information, filtered knowledge, wisdom, well-functioning cognitive processes and well-functioning sensory, perceptual processes to arrive at some, at least satisfying and pro-social, organizing principles. At best it is also flexible enough to alter some of those ideas according to new information. Three very specific skills in this process are: noticing patterns without inventing them, ignoring irrelevant information, and accurately reading non-textual interpersonal communication.
When the brain itself is impaired, be it by schizophrenia, mood disorder, cognitive impairment, or dementia, the need to answer the questions in the bolded paragraph remains. The impaired brain still seeks answers even when over-alert to patterns, unable to read the intent of others, unable to sort the wheat from the abundance of chafe, unable to link one thought with the next, or overwhelmed with emotions of elation or depression. The organizing principles this impaired brain arrives at may be drawn from recent news, new technologies (a common delusion of yesteryear was of being controlled by xrays – today it is implanted microchips), religion and various real and perceived power structures. (Being Queen Victoria is passe, but being a messenger of God is still with us.) These delusions are the product of brain impairment from illness (also injury and toxicity) and are self-referential.
Intelligence and education play a role here: The delusions of a mentally ill but highly educated and intelligent person can be complex, subtle and well defended. The delusion of the not-so-smart ill person is usually blunt and straight forward.
And once any of us answer those existential questions we proceed to seek evidence to support our conclusion and ignore or avoid evidence that might refute it.
But of course even with a fully functioning brain it is quite possible to become deluded.
We are social creatures. We depend on others for information and understanding. We instinctively look to leaders to provide this. Some of us look to these leaders more fully and willingly than others. Hence the power of a cult leader, be he a true believer or a psychopath.
We need social information to inform our organizing principles. Hence social isolation breeds delusions, or, at least, strange and eccentric ways of understanding the world.
Information silos and social media algorithms control the information we receive and thus reinforce specific patterns we rely on for meaning.
And to find equanimity (and not resort to a delusional explanation) in a world without absolutes, a world and universe in which nothing is fully understood or explainable (time, black holes, infinity, what did exist before the big bang, spooky action at a distance, death, consciousness, human behaviour…..) we each need a degree of security, social membership, purpose, trust, flexibility, and an acceptance of our own limitations.
When delusions arise from factors apart from mental illness they are not usually self-referential: “Hilary Clinton runs a pedophile ring.” “God talks directly to my cult leader.” “Jewish space lasers started the forest fires.” “Trump will be reinstated as president in August”.
And then we have moments when the two collide: the non self-referential religious/political delusion and the mental illness derived self-referential delusion.
“Hilary Clinton runs a pedophile ring in a pizza place.” “God has assigned me the task of righting this wrong.” “Jews, Arabs, Mexicans are replacing us.” “It is my mission from God to kill some of them.”
For what it’s worth, Kanye West appears to suffer from a self-referential bipolar mania- induced delusion and the other kind as well.
Assuming the translator got it right, Putin used a chilling phrase in his football stadium rally: “the necessary cleansing of society”. And those to be cleansed he referred to as “scum.”
And it occurred to me that that phrase is a step beyond what we think of as racism, or “supremacy.” And even a step beyond psychopathy and narcissism.
It speaks to an assumption of God-like powers, of Old Testament wrath, of a self-assumed identity beyond human.
Hitler used such phrases. And Pol Pot did as well.
I suppose it is a natural progression when a narcissistic psychopath retains power for more than a few years.
Other wars and other attempts at genocide may have been just as morally bad, but this is 2022 and it is happening among the very countries that could ensure a future of democracy, climate control, and health and welfare for the entire world in the years to come.
So, I pray, (that is I earnestly hope) that behind the scenes, our Western Governments are doing everything possible, apart from nuclear war, to ensure Putin fails and is replaced.
Written for MacBush, the Musical, and the war in Iraq, but now tragically topical again.
Music by Charles Humphreys
Performed by Wilhelmina van den Aa and Charles Humphreys
We have maybe 15 years before we reach a point of no return.
Our current focus on reducing reliance on fossil fuels world wide is a slow, oft interrupted process.
The other possibility, that of carbon capture, would be very difficult and expensive to scale up. Outrageously difficult and expensive. How could we commit trillions of dollars and resources to such an endeavour? Where would the money come from? What would we do with the carbon?
And then I watch the war in Ukraine and I listen to talk of those inexpensive Turkish drones (about 1 million apiece) compared to the American drones and missiles (about 3 million apiece) and the destroyed 3 million dollar tanks, the 10 million dollar helicopters, the 100 million dollar planes. I imagine the cost of this war each day, and then the ultimate cost of rebuilding Ukraine, and the formidable cost of stabilizing a destabilized Russia.
If we didn’t go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now in Ukraine, and if we didn’t have those enormous defense budgets, and if we actually put all those uniformed men and women to work building things……..
Carbon Capture infra-structure around the world.
New industries to use the captured carbon.
And alternative energy sources from wind to solar to wave now powering all our electric grids, along with batteries that charge quickly and last longer.
And we would still have a habitable planet for my grandchildren.
Music by Charles Humphrey Lyrics by David Laing Dawson Written for MacBush, The Musical But suddenly, unfortunately, very topical
Language is important. Words have meanings. They are symbols with referents. And specific words used also imply the exclusion of other words or meanings.
When we say something is red, we also are saying it is not blue or yellow. When we label a tree as being a Maple Tree, we are also saying it is not a Fir tree.
Words and phrases, in this day and age, become quickly fashionable and then get overused. There was recently a period of time when I could not read or watch any news report without encountering the word, “iconic.” (I think it has finally faded in popularity)
My current irritant is the redundancy of “the images we are about to show you are graphic.” or “warning, these are graphic images.” Doh. Graphic means image. It does not mean the phrase that would take more effort, “Warning, the images we are about to show you could be upsetting to you.”
Of course then we might be shown a corpse lying on a street in a village in Ukraine with the actual disfigurement and/or sexual parts blurred.
Another irritant is the ubiquitous term “innocent”. Always placed as a qualifier when reporting that women and children were killed. “Innocent women and children were killed”.
Which to me implies that there are other kinds of children and women, not so innocent, and that it would not be so bad if we killed them. And it certainly implies that it would have been fine if the bomb had only killed men.
And of course we label the people doing the killing as cowards. A cowardly act. Which does seem to imply that if we kill in an heroic fashion, that would be okay. If we go to war in an heroic fashion that would be okay. If we only kill one another at high noon, face to face, at the count of ten, that would be okay.
(As I recall Bill Maher pointed out that the perpetrators of the destruction of the Twin Towers were many things, but “cowardly” was not one of them, and lost his job because of this.)
But back to my first statement. I understand there is a history to this, and perhaps creating conventions to be followed in war and trying to draw a fine line between acceptable and unacceptable brutality was a good thing. Perhaps. Or did it make conventional, nice war, more acceptable in our minds?
War is the crime. If we go to war people are killed, both the innocent and not-so innocent. And atrocities occur. Let’s not pretend war is a sport with a referee.
The Canadian Trucker protests, the “Freedom Convoys”, are a good illustration of why no form of governance will ever be calm, agreeable to all, and certainly not perfect. We are an egocentric species finding grievances easily. We lack perspective often. We are short sighted. We are always conflicted.
This latter trait, the conflict we carry in each of us between our own welfare, survival, and comfort, and that of our families, tribes, and fellow humans, is probably one of the human traits that took us to the top of the food chain. A fluid balance between self-preservation and concern for the welfare of others is a very good evolutionary survival instinct for any species.
We humans are probably at our best when our concern for the welfare of others dominates, or is at least in sync with our instinct for self preservation. And as a species we do celebrate this in others. It was a fine moment when Mr. Zelenskyy told the Americans that he didn’t need a ride, he needed weapons.
The fact we can think in symbols is another trait that took us to the top of the food chain. But of course we can distort this ability, as when somehow in the minds of some, a public health mandate to wear masks during a pandemic in certain public circumstances is akin to, or symbolic of, a total loss of FREEDOM, and evidence of a fascist government.
Still, after two years of a deadly pandemic that is now winding down, with mask mandates probably loosened or discarded within a couple of months, with about 90% of eligible Canadians vaccinated, and now the sudden and unexpected destruction of Ukraine by another country with a truly poor form of governance, an actual fascist state, and the suddenly serious threat of nuclear war hanging over all of us – surely at this time even the most selfish, egocentric person among us might notice that his grievance about having to wear a mask in COSTCO is rather petty. A small thing. An irritant. An inconvenience at worse.
This is actually an opportunity, if a terrible, unwanted one.
The Spanish Civil war was a complicated affair which began with a military coup led by Franco (the Nationalists) against a Republican Government. It quickly became an international conflict between the left and the right and a dress rehearsal for World War Two. The Nationalists were supported by conservatives, monarchists, and religious groups with help from Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. The Republicans were supported by Russia, socialists, anarchists and an International Brigade of volunteers from many countries including the Mackenzie Papineaus from Canada, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the US and many European groups. One of those fighters was our own Norman Bethune, a Canadian surgeon who developed mobile blood transfusion units.
Western governments were ambivalent, perhaps as spooked by communism as by fascism, maybe more so.
Hitler’s Germany and its Luftwaffe destroyed the small town of Guernica at the behest of Franco. It was most notable for its direct aerial assault on civilians, essentially an act of terrorism.
I came to know of the Spanish Civil War, like many of my generation, through the writings of Hemingway, Orwell and Lorca, and Picasso’s painting of Guernica, and some fascination with Dr. Bethune (a very early advocate for national health care).
But I also had the unusual opportunity of spending an afternoon in 1970 sharing some Spanish Brandy at a sidewalk cafe on the Mediterranean coast with a village policeman, a Guardia Civil, who had fought for Franco, and then fought in a Spanish Brigade for Hitler in the second world war, spending the last year of that war as a prisoner of Russia on the eastern front. (One of the odd things I remember was that he told me the Russians treated the Spaniards much better than they treated the German prisoners)
Though men from Canada, the US, and every country in Europe fought in that war, mostly on the side of the Republicans, our Governments remained on the sidelines. Six months after this war ended with victory for Franco and the fascists, Hitler invaded Poland.
Had the democratic countries of Europe and North America ensured the defeat of Fascism in Spain in the years before 1939 how might history have been changed?
And now. Ignoring China for a moment, the most important and powerful non-democratic country in the world, essentially a fascist state, is engaging in the destruction of a neighbouring nascent democracy. If we allow this to happen we may be back in 1939. This time our ambivalence does not stem from a fear of communism, but rather of nuclear weapons and some pain at the gas pumps.
The threat of nuclear war will not recede with the defeat of Ukraine. And some economic pain may be a small price to pay for what would otherwise come next.
But maybe, if we take this opportunity to ensure the survival of Ukraine one way or another, and the collapse of Russia which will follow, then maybe we can enter our version of 1939 with one less brutal dictatorship in our world, and more chance of maintaining peace and getting on with the task of saving the planet.
We had a similar opportunity in 1936 and did not take it.
I have, in these blogs, described both Vladmir Putin and Donald Trump as narcissistic and psychopathic. These are not meant to be simply pejorative terms. Nor are they diagnostic labels. But as a psychiatrist I should explain what I mean by them.
In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov is an impoverished student who talks himself into committing the murder of a nasty old pawnbroker for a few shekels. In the very Russian, dark and complicated story that follows one theme is constant: Raskolnikov is consumed by guilt and eventually confesses to his crime.
Raskolnikov is fully human. He talks himself (rationalization, projection, self-delusion) into a way out of his pain and impoverishment that includes murdering a person whom he has convinced himself is unworthy of living. But he has empathy for others and he is capable of shame and guilt. He is fully human and he will suffer. He has imagined that he could be as grand and ruthless as Napoleon but finds he cannot and is not. He is just not that narcissistic or psychopathic.
But there are men who are that narcissistic, who have themselves photographed naked, muscled, astride a steed, who spend an hour each day colouring skin and hair to appear as bronze Gods, and there are men who behave with no empathy for others, and who never lose sleep doubting themselves and their righteousness, and who do not suffer shame and guilt for their words or actions. And men who feel comfortable living in palaces, waited on by serfs, while surrounded by suffering.
These men exist, and perhaps there was a time we needed them to send our young men into battle, to ruthlessly build our kingdoms and corporations. But not now, no more, no longer.
I don’t know how we keep these men from positions of power. Democracy to start, plus an educated population, good social programs, free, critical, and ethical fourth estate, limited tenure, checks and balances, limited election spending, independent judiciary……
I do have a fantasy of finding a few hundred qualified men and women who do not want to become president or prime minister, who strongly doubt their abilities to assume those roles, who really don’t like hurting other people, and then run a short inexpensive election to chose one of them for a limited period.
Or maybe just let the good stand-up comedians and satirists run for office. We do know they at least have the skill of seeing through all the bullshit of politics and their own unwholesome instincts.
Mind You Reflections on mental illness, mental health and life 