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Dear Colleague,
Please scroll down to read my observations on collective or societal delusions.
It seems it's finally happening. Free at last, thank god almighty, free at last. Ideas I've been writing about for years (for you) suddenly don't seem so obscure or fantastic.
Thanks to Donald Trump and others, the world is going crazy. They call it a "post-truth" world. However, it's not like the world of the past was constituted by truth (and now there is no longer truth).
It's not like Hitler's ideas were permeated with truth, nor the ideas of Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao. Perhaps we were living endlessly within a world of psychotic delusion--but didn't call it that.
We called it "history." Life as we knew it. Insane and normal at the same time. Solid stuff. "And that's the way it is" (Walter Cronkite).
Now, the madness is in front of us every day: a new world enveloping us in our bedrooms, our living rooms, walking on the sidewalk. "Where id is, there shall the Internet be." Massive breakdown of "society." Yet presenting endless opportunities to re-evaluate culture and history--from the perspective of this new, bizarre world.
Regards,
Richard Koenigsberg
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COLLECTIVE DELUSION: On the one hand, one may say that if certain forms of behavior occur with great frequency in society or history—however bizarre, weird or destructive they may be—these forms of behavior are normal simply because they occur frequently. Or one may view recurring episodes of warfare, genocide and mass-murder as profound forms of collective psychopathology.
Perhaps “madness” is a central characteristic of the domain of politics. 200,000,000+ million deaths in the 20th century as a result of warfare and genocide. Psychosis lies at the heart of historical process.
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SOCIETAL DELUSIONS
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV, 2000, cited in the “Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy”) defines a delusion as a
false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person’s culture or subculture.
Delusions are beliefs “held with great conviction in spite of little empirical support.” A delusion is a “false belief based on incorrect inferences about external reality that is firmly sustained.” A person is deluded when he hold a particular belief with a “degree of firmness utterly unwarranted by the evidence at hand.”
Hitler and the Nazis embraced a delusion about the Jews and Jewish power, believing Jews were acting to destroy the German people and civilized world; asserting Jews were equivalent to bacteria or viruses; claiming that “international Jewry” stood behind Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin--who were acting to unite these leaders and their nations in a conspiracy to cause Germany to disintegrate.
Hitler and the Nazis created a collective delusion that came to define the "reality" in which Germans lived, 1933-1945. War was waged to destroy the delusion of the omnipotence of Germany. When Hitler died, the delusion disappeared ("gone like a cool breeze"--Chuck Berry).
The term “delusion” usually refers to a clinical syndrome associated with paranoid schizophrenia. What are we to say, then, about a delusion that comes to dominate an entire society?
I was at a Holocaust Conference where the Jeffrey Herf and I had just presented our papers. Herf illuminates Nazi anti-Semitism and the Holocaust as few other historians do.
We were rapping in the back of the auditorium. He was pleased that I agreed with his hypothesis that the Nazis' perception of Jews--the danger they represented to Germany--represented a collective delusion.
I said, "So you could say that the Nazis were psychotic." Suddenly, he walked away. The idea that the events he studies--our precious "history"--may be manifestations of (a shared) psychosis was difficult for even one of our greatest of historians to put his head around.
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