THE NIGHTMARE OF HISTORY--RIGHT BEFORE OUR EYES:
Will we Awaken? Or Continue Fast Asleep.

Richard Koenigsberg

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have done me (and everyone) a tremendous favor. For years, I (and a few of my colleagues) have been writing about political ideas as shared fantasies or collective delusions (see below). I've been pointing toward politics as the societal location in which extreme forms of psychopathology occur.

Now, everyone can see it--right before our eyes. One politician endlessly conveying bizarre, ludicrous ideas ("lying" is such a polite way of putting it), another political leader ruthlessly murdering human beings--based on some idea or fantasy that I have not yet had the time to decipher (how about someone else taking a shot?).

And the pundits keep babbling, having conversation with themselves, smiling as if they live in a normal world. Denial reality right before our eyes. Or is it cowardice? 

Is this an ending, or a beginning?  Awakening from the nightmare or its continuation?

"ORDINARY” FORMS OF REALITY MAY GROW OUT OF PSYCHOTIC IDEAS: Reality constructed based on shared fantasy. The fact that a fantasy is shared leads us to believe that what is occurring is not psychotic, even though the results may be monumentally destructive and self-destructive. The Nazis were suffering from a paranoid psychosis. However, when many persons in a society share and embrace a particular psychotic idea, we no longer call the people who embrace this idea psychotic. We have not yet developed a way of conceptualizing psychotic ideas that are shared by many members of a society.
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Shared fantasies produce psychic pathologies which, however, are not recognized as psychopathology because everyone shares or buys into them. Leaders put forth psychotic fantasies that come come to define or construct ordinary social reality. Thus, ordinary people who share or embrace these fantasies no longer appear to be psychotic. The fantasies that define politics are contained within the ordinary structures of culture--in symbolic constructs such as “the nation,” “protecting the nation,” “the enemy,” “rescuing the nation,” etc. Psychotic political fantasies are contained within normal ideological and institutional structures.
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JAYNE LYN STAHL:  Is psychosis contagious? Oddly, though, when thinking of the concept of psychosis, and pathologies of the psyche, we think of the individual not the collective, or communal, ethos. But what happens when an entire nation, culture, or civilization develops the kind of pathology or mass delusion?
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From GENOCIDE AND MASS KILLINGS, Johan M.G. van der Dennen: We may imagine that so-called normal people could never believe in anything so ludicrous as the delusional systems of the insane. Yet, historical evidence suggests the opposite.  Whole societies have been persuaded without much difficulty to accept the most absurd calumnies about minority groups (e.g., witches, heretics, Jews, 'enemies of the people') portrayed as enemies of the majority.  Such accusations or claims originate from a particular type of fantasy.
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We aren’t used to saying that life as usual—ordinary cultural and political existence--is pathological. We shy away from conceiving of the normal historical process as a vast arena in which extraordinary forms of psychopathology occur. What occurs in history is insane, but we pretend it’s a reflection of our greatness.
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Lee Harris: “What happens when it is not an individual who is caught up in his fantasy world, but an entire group — a sect, or a people, or even a nation?
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The rhetoric of the leader articulates something that many other people would like to say or express. The ideology of the leader—contained within his rhetoric (the words that he utters) reveals the UNDERLYING THOUGHTS OR FANTASIES THAT HAVE GENERATE OR GIVEN RISE TO THE IDEOLOGY. The leader himself HAS TO BE PARANOID: He orchestrates the group paranoia. Left-wingers want to believe that the leader is rational and evil, but actually he is paranoid. He articulates the paranoid fantasy and THIS HOLDS THE GROUP TOGETHER.
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How may one characterize beliefs that seem fantastic and generate destructive acts of extraordinary magnitude—but that are embraced by many people within a society?  When an entire culture embraces an ideology that seems bizarre and is massively destructive, we don't call the people who embrace this ideology psychotic. On the other hand, their ideas and actions may possess a psychotic quality. What do we call ideas and activities that possess a psychotic quality carried out by people who seems normal because the entire culture lives within the psychosis?