As someone of an intrinsically philosophical nature, I spend an inordinate amount of time compared to most people thinking about the sticky quandaries of our time.  These are questions humanity has wrestled with since the advent of language, in all likelihood, and it is bizarre living in a time when so many of them seem to have reared their heads in unison.  Questions of judgment, questions of morals and ethics, questions of good and evil, right and wrong, questions of righteousness.

Along with millions of others, I watched in horror as a figure of reckless malevolence was elected to the White House in November 2016, but it was with an even greater level of horror that I watched public support of this person rise and swell with a fervor I didn’t think was possible in America.  I just couldn’t fathom how so many millions of people could swallow the endless stream of lies and deception that flowed from this person.  Not just swallow them, but merge and amplify them into even more streams of sociopolitical and cultural filth such that it was nearly impossible for the rest of us to overcome.  We are still ankle-to-hip deep in the river of shit unleashed by Trump and everyone who conspired over the previous decades to trample upon what are supposed to be the values of our country.

Regrettably, the most insidious aspect of this morass is the fact that we all now have different ideas of what those values really mean.  The words used on all sides are the same, but they now have entirely different meanings.  A Republican talking about freedom and individuality doesn’t mean the same things as most of the rest of us.  Their version of those things includes the mass oppression of whole groups of people they deem as being morally unworthy of the basic needs of a secure, happy life.

Having taken more than a passing interest in psychology over the course of my life, I am horrified to see some of the psyche’s most intractable neuroses being displayed by such a large mass of people.  In the future, after this mess has passed by and those with the appropriate learning are analyzing this time period, I have no doubt they will label the phenomenon we are witnessing as a form of mass hysteria, something that Carl Jung predicted in the 1950s.

A great deal of my inner questioning comes from not knowing what to do with people with whom there is no longer any possibility of rational discourse.  They are suffering from such a massive wall of cognitive dissonance that any and all arguments against their position are used to fortify that wall, and in fact, the more irrefutable the evidence is against them, the harder the fortification becomes.

From a more compassionate and educated perspective, this is actually quite understandable.  Most people are ego-based in their everyday dealings with the world, meaning that their individuality and sense of self-worth and determination are completely tied up in “I” statements: I believe this, this, that, and other things.  Soon the “I believe” statements become “I am” statements.  There is no longer a separation between what they believe and what they are, and so when their beliefs are attacked, they feel attacked on a personal level.  From their individual psychological perspective, they feel entitled to fight back against this perceived attack.

In the case of Christofascist Republicans, who come preloaded via church and family with a whole host of beliefs regarding blacks, women, the poor, and other groups of people deemed “unworthy”, they are suffering from the concerted application over a long period of time of an effort to use cult programming on an entire segment of the population, designed to produce exactly what we have today: a political and cultural war fought with words and dollars and periodic mass shootings.

Cult programming is notoriously difficult to overcome, particularly if the person is deeply committed to the ideals of that programming.  Most people of a relatively enlightened viewpoint who have had to deal personally with someone who has drunk the Republican Kool-Aid can tell you that there is absolutely nothing that can dissuade these people from their staunchly oppressive and cruel viewpoint on the world and our society.  More frightening is perhaps the zeal with which they uphold their beliefs.  They have what, to them, is a perfectly logical response to any argument, and when they run out of responses, they get angry.

The trouble is that, from each side’s perspective, we are equally guilty of at least some of the same things.  Each sees the other as equally “insane”, though for different reasons.  This raises questions of the relativism of things like “good” and “evil”.  If, from the outside, one can make a case for the evil and insanity on either side of a conflict, who then becomes the arbiter of what we are all seeking: justice.  What defines justice and its ancient Greek counterpart, mercy?

That’s where the American Republican stance diverges from the rest of us.  They’ve been taught that justice includes a whole host of transgressions based in reckless hate and that mercy is a bad thing.  Their entire value system based in words that are used for positive qualities has been twisted, reversed, and inverted to mean concepts that are the polar opposites of the words that represent them.  It is the “doublespeak” of 1984 executed more masterfully than Orwell predicted.

From one perspective, we are witnessing an entire segment of the population slowly lose their minds as they are surrounded by one example after another of how they have been lied to systematically for generations.  Because of that ego-based “I” thinking combined with the inverted Christofascist ideals they have been raised with, they literally see themselves as being buffeted on all sides by forces that threaten their very existence.  Like the Borg from Star Trek, they have no true sense of individuality.  They have no concept whatsoever of happy life in the absence of the religious framework in which they have existed their entire lives.

A great deal of what’s wrong stems from values propagated by Christianity since its inception, values that have steeped generations of people in beliefs that claim peace and compassion with one hand while psychologically whipping them with the other in the name of “sin”.  Early Church leaders knew that if they could actually make people believe and identify with the concept of sin, they would have virtually absolute power over them and their assets.

That’s what everything happening now is about: power and who has it.  Religious and political leaders have carefully engineered their policies since the end of World War II to exert as much power and influence over people as possible.  Those who retained the values of the Nazis, however openly or secretly, who also stayed in power following the war made sure to quietly put forth one “enemy of the people” after another so as to distract attention from their own efforts to be exactly that some day.  First it was the Communists, then it was the blacks and the hippies, then it was the LGBT+ community, then it was immigrants and the poor, and now it’s science and logic and everyone who listens to them, and virtually anyone not born white, male, straight, Christian, and wealthy.

As a deeply spiritual person, I often find myself in contemplation of how to reach even one person who is a victim of this cult-thinking induced movement, and I do see them as victims, ultimately.  Human beings are not born this way.  We are social creatures hardwired for altruism, a biological kindness bred into all of us to ensure the survival of our species.  What so many of us are doing is such an abrogation of the Laws of Nature that it truly baffles the mind.  “How did this happen?” I constantly ask myself, along with “what will it take to stop it?”

I recognize that, to those who cling to the increasingly malicious values of the Republican Party, my simply asking “why?” and other questions are in themselves grave sins.  They live in a world where one does what one is told without question, like soldiers in a great religious army quietly obeying orders.  “Why” is what Eve taking that first bite out of the apple from the Tree of Knowledge represents, Christianity’s favorite story to try to dissuade people from asking that question (and to look down upon and violently oppress women).

As for how to defeat what I instinctively want to call a force of “evil”, and yet resist doing so, I haven’t answered that question yet.  As discourse is so often impossible, the only remaining peaceful option seems to be outnumbering them and voting them out of office one by one from top to bottom, since we are still a democracy dependent on the voting process.  They know this, which is why they are fighting tooth and nail across the country to enact as many voter suppression laws as possible, because they also know that we do outnumber them.  We proved that in November 2020.

The brashness with which they are executing this campaign against the greater populous is extraordinary.  They used to hide behind political curtains while they enacted their grand plan to essentially take over the government.  No more.  Any pretense at even appearing to ingratiate themselves to more progressive forces has been completely dropped.  They know exactly what they’re doing, they know we’re watching, and they don’t care.  What they do care about is making sure not enough of us know that they do indeed know precisely what they’re doing.  Too many people are probably where I still am sometimes: in shock from the last years and receiving fresh shocks from the reality that this campaign of Christofascist capitalist oppression continues.  That’s if we have the time and energy to pay attention anymore.  A human will instinctively withdraw from a traumatic stimulus, and the news is still deeply traumatizing.

Attempting to power through that shock and stay informed about current events inevitably raises questions in the mind of any relatively enlightened, forward thinking, and compassionate individual.  Questions like:

Why would so many people choose to adopt philosophies that do not benefit them in any way, shape, or form?

Why don’t people who have the means and ability to do something about suffering do so?

Why would someone have the philosophy that they have no responsibility to others?

Why is power such an intoxicating and potentially corrupting influence?

What does it take to override altruism to the extent that people become wantonly cruel to one another, even their own families?

What does it take to safely dissuade someone of harmful beliefs, or is it even possible?

What will it take to shift the tide away from unhinged capitalist greed towards a future that would be healthier for everyone on many different levels?

Why are people more willing to sweep a problem under the rug than do anything to fix it?

I’ve been chewing on these questions for over seven years, and I don’t have many answers.  Ultimately, our problem is that people will only change if they want to, and people don’t want to change unless they’re given a really good reason to, one that overrides their reasons for staying the way they are.  Appealing to the greater good should be what galvanizes people, but unfortunately we have groups of people with greatly differing ideas of what constitutes “the greater good”.  Until profit and individual morality stop being more important than the cleanliness of our air, water, and food and the collective health of all people, we’re going to keep having these problems.

Getting people to change is extraordinarily difficult.  The human psyche is programmed for individual as well as group survival, and when psychically threatened with an impending breakdown of belief structures, it will do anything it can to maintain those structures, i.e. avoid going insane.  Being faced with an undeniable set of facts that contradicts a previously held worldview, particularly one that is ego-bound, induces severe cognitive dissonance, to the extent that the person will engage in projection, i.e. “I’m not doing that bad thing, you’re doing that bad thing.”  Anything to maintain the psychic structures that hold up the person’s identity.

Ego-bound worldviews typically come from being taught controlling philosophies that contain an element of not asking questions.  If you teach people not to ask questions and control the educational input they get, they’re a lot easier to control and they’ll be much more likely to resist information that contradicts what they’ve been taught.  This is why certain factions in our society are anti-intellectual.  Keeping people uneducated perpetuates the Duning-Kruger effect, a key in the efforts to keep people uninformed and unable to have rational discourse that might dissuade them from beliefs and philosophies that are harmful to themselves and others.  Keeping people blindly obedient achieves the same ends, such as in the Allegory of Plato’s Cave: “keep staring at the wall, don’t turn around, and pay no attention to voices telling you you’re looking at shadows.”

I have been able to identify some aspects of Christofascist thinking that encapsulate the primary forces at work against progressivism.  The first is the Prosperity Gospel: the theological viewpoint that God not only wants you to be wealthy, He favors the wealthy and scorns the poor.  This is the viewpoint held by what is known as The Family, an extremely powerful group of world leaders and billionaires who are largely responsible for the sequestration of 99% of the world’s wealth.  They think that if people are poor, it’s because God doesn’t love them due to some sin or another, perhaps merely the sin of being born the wrong color.

Another major aspect of Christofascist philosophy is that of seeing the Natural world as being inherently evil and something to be dominated and transcended.  As this is also a primary philosophy held by what I call The Cabal, the ruling forces over planet Earth, it makes sense that industry is doing everything it can to destroy the planet.  These industries know perfectly well how destructive what they’re doing is, and yet they resist efforts at reform, all in the name of The Bible and profit (see the Prosperity Gospel).

A third major aspect to these people’s philosophy is a nasty case of collective malignant narcissism.  Narcissists literally think they are God’s gift to humanity and do not think that they are the ones with the problem; everyone else is.  With the wealth and power these people now wield, we’re looking at several thousand people who could be officially diagnosed with megalomania.  They honestly believe it is their God-given right to decide the fate of over 8 billion people.  This is the Christian notion of everyone being God’s ‘special child’ gone horribly wrong.

A final and potentially fatal facet of Christofascist thinking is that of eschatology: the study of the End Times.  To many of these people, they believe that since God Himself has not brought about the Apocalypse, it is their God-given job to do so.  This is an extremely dangerous philosophy for world leaders and the super-wealthy to have, and it may only be by virtue of the fact that the actual military leaders who have the power to wreak destruction are on the side of the people that we have not all died in a blinding flash of light.

How can we possibly achieve progress when the people in power over everything on our planet are actively working towards the destruction of the vast majority of the human race as well as the very ground beneath our feet, the water we drink, and the sky over our heads?  As King Theoden laments in The Two Towers, “What can men do against such reckless hate?”

I once thought the actions of these people was all about greed, but now that they own literally everything, the accumulation of wealth can’t possibly be their sole motivator.  Now it’s power; the thing all of that wealth enabled.  Which begs the question: the power to do what exactly?  Are they so deluded that they think if they bring about world destruction that their God is going to praise them?  I don’t pretend to have a 100% clear vision of the Otherworld, but something tells me these folks are going to be in for a rude awakening when they cross over.

If I have any wish, it’s to find a way to show the victims of Christofascist thinking the illusion of separateness and the falseness of the “versus” mentality that our country now suffers from.  Man vs. woman.  Democrat vs. Republican.  Black vs. white.  Straight vs. LGBT+.  Christian vs. everyone else.  The list of our society’s perceived divisions goes on and will continue to do so as long as we are all using the same words with antithetical meanings.  Hopefully one day soon, this illness of the collective unconscious we are suffering from will run its course and we can get back to the business of moving into the future, instead of being dragged back into the past.