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eeverything is strange and everyone is ruined. This is perhaps the biggest and least recognized truth about life in the United States and many places outside of it right now. This is the pandemic; the eight years of Trumpism; the distortions, disruptions and corruption that Silicon Valley has announced and other looming threats, including climate chaos. We all know this because we live it, but perhaps we should talk more about the fact that our political catastrophes are inseparable from the widespread psychic devastation, that the public and the private, the political and the personal, are intertwined—or rather, that the former has caused havoc of the latter.
The wisest people I know are aware that the tensions, cruelties, divisions, and deviations from the norm in recent years have left them (and everyone else) exhausted and fragile. The less wise, but no less fragile, either lash out with the feeling that what’s wrong must be someone else, or take refuge in cults and oversimplified versions where they at least control what it all means.
Public life has a private impact; some of them break our brains and some break our hearts. Not to leave our consciences out of it – to witness so much malice and willful destruction, to witness so much injustice, from genocides around the world to gross injustices at home, takes its toll. This impact is probably best described as moral injury, which veterans’ organization determines as “the psychological, social, and spiritual impact of events involving the betrayal or transgression of one’s deeply held moral beliefs and values occurring in high-stakes situations.”
Most of us have an idea of what is reasonable or possible based on what has happened before; but now we are lost in a sea of unprecedented. We haven’t had authoritarian threats like this occur in all three branches of the federal government (if you count a former president who aspires to be a dictator, as well as the Supreme Court and Congress). Before, we didn’t have the wild corrosion of information and our ability to pay attention to it the way we do now, thanks to an internet dominated by corporations that want to feed us addictive social media and skewed search results and algorithms.
For those paying attention, climate change is also a huge moral harm, a reminder that we are part of a system that is shredding the beautiful tapestry of life on earth and devastating beloved species. Even though Covid was a scourge around the world, many more people – around 8 million – die every year from breathing air polluted by burning fossil fuels, and that’s just one aspect of the devastation, and only for our species.
Nevertheless, the pandemic was devastating. I was surprised when the fourth anniversary of the global coronavirus pandemic was largely met with silence. Apparently, almost no one wants to remember it, and of course it’s not over, as people are still getting sick and dying from this new disease. Trauma, a term that is constantly bandied about these days, is an experience so devastating that you cannot forget it; it dominates you. The reverse of trauma, where you refuse to remember and process an experience, is also devastating, if not in the same way; you repress experience at the cost of working with a diminished sense of self and reality.
One of the positive aspects of many types of disasters is the sense of shared experience. But we have had wildly different experiences of the pandemic: it has killed some of us, grieved some of us, bankrupted some of us, made some of us front-line workers facing danger and death, or unemployed, or suddenly isolated from the sociality of a school or work. and everyday life outside the home. The impact was vastly different depending on your age, financial circumstances and home situation, among other factors. I hear a lot from teachers and educators about how their students have not recovered well from two years of isolation and online learning, which often involved too little learning and too much online.
It is hard to imagine how different the Covid pandemic could have been had the country not been led by someone who has himself become a major source of divisive Covid misinformation. In the US, a huge factor in the crisis in our psyche is Trump’s four years in power, followed by nearly four more years of Trumpism. When the most powerful people in the state speak and do whatever they want with mostly no consequences, we are driven into futility and senselessness.
A US flag has flown upside down outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for several days in early 2021, ostensibly in support of the January 6 uprising, but he has refused to recuse himself from issues related to Trump. Judge Clarence Thomas, whose wife was an active part of this uprising, also refused to recuse himself or account for outrageous gifts it is adopted by billionaires. The evangelical Christian turned House speaker is appearing to support Trump in his criminal election fraud trial over hush money paid to a porn star and condemn his conviction and, with it, the justice system. Corruption is exposed and loyalty to the former president rather than the rule of law is evident.
In any former age these outrages, and scores of others, would have been treated as shocking scandals; now each outrage seems to supersede the next, so, for example, Trump’s dinner with fossil fuel executives at which he he asked for a $1 billion campaign contribution in exchange for scaling back climate legislation, was reported almost smugly. It was also normalized for a man who was found liable in a civil court for rape to be a leading candidate for the presidency.
The examples are well known – but perhaps more needs to be said about the impact. Trumpism has inspired Trump followers with the transgressive courage he demonstrated first and best: that you can actually say anything you want, damn it, deny you said it, or contradict it. And with enough accumulated power, you can break the law with impunity.
Authoritarian rulers want control not only of the economy, the military, the courts, and the media, but also of facts, science, history—of meaning itself. To violate the independence of truth and fact, to insist that they be what you want them to be, is to enter the realm of meaninglessness. Authoritarianism is nihilism. Like Hannah Arendt said“The result of the consistent and complete replacement of factual truth with lies is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and the truth will be vilified as a lie, but that the sense by which we navigate the real world – and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to that end—is destroyed.”
Another crisis of our time is that the Internet has isolated us, shattered our ability to concentrate, undermined existing news media, and created fertile ground for the spread of hate, misinformation, and propaganda. The Internet it isolates us from more forms of face-to-face contact and places us in spaces where battle cries are normal and emotional honesty is risky and rare, where group performativity is everywhere and dissent is dangerous. The Loneliness Epidemic Vivek Murthy, the US Surgeon General, has spoken about it has everything to do with the internet and the way it has absorbed us in ways that have made other forms of contact disappear.
That’s my diagnosis. My prescription may be simple: be kind to one another, remembering the suffering we have all experienced; defend the facts with fervor; fight fascism and climate chaos in the ways you are best equipped to do (and if you’re lucky, it will connect you with other good people doing this important work). And if you are lonely, know that even in this you are not alone; millions are, largely because of how our world has rearranged itself. But diagnosis is the first step to treatment or cure, and just talking about how personal the impact of this chaotic new era is matters.
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