For those of you who have been reading my column regularly, I am sure that the shift of focus to my articles has to be quite apparent. The whole reason that this column was started was to explore the effects of modern technology on living environments and the effects of these transformed living environments on human behavior. This is a topic which has interested me for over fifty years. So, I have had this notion that sensory distortion generated by modern technology has created a lot of pathological behavior among humans and that it increasingly threatens the very foundations of modern society as well as the capacity of traditional natural living environments to endure. This has been the theme that I have chosen to explore over and over in various different ways throughout my columns.
Nevertheless, recently, there has been, at least on the surface, an apparent shift in focus away from general discussions about different forms of sensory distortion in modern technological society and more towards discussions about the modern political scene, particularly as it relates to Donald Trump. Granted I have brought up the notion of Donald Trump as the head of a cult that gives people a false sense of grounding in a living environment where people are floating in an experiential vacuum. But increasingly the focus has been away from Trump within my philosophical model and more just discussing the evils of Trump on his own.
The truth is that it is very hard to stop thinking about this man and what he is doing, given that his policies threaten to destroy the democratic framework of this country, creating ripple effects that will have influences on the whole world. Nevertheless, I am going to try and focus more on the connections between Trump and sensory distortion, because it is in that space that a greater understanding can be obtained, both of what is motivating him and ultimately some ideas of what we can do to undermine him and stop him.
Right now, I want to focus on a behavioral trait of his that has always been present, but that seems to be becoming more pronounced as time goes on. I’m talking about his growing cruelty. His disdain for the plight of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, caught in a dragnet accidentally and sent to El Salvador, when he had not been sentenced to prison for any crimes. So, when this was pointed out to Trump, he refused to do anything to help Kilmar return to the States to his wife and family. Trump was paying the president of El Salvador six million dollars to take all the criminal migrants that he was delivering to him. Certainly, Trump could prevail upon him to return one man who had been sent to him in error.
Cruelty may be the most extremely abrasive emotion that exists. There are other abrasive emotions that exist in the panoply of human emotions, but none that elicit such painful responses from the people against which they are directed. Perhaps one could include sadistic as an extremely hurtful emotion, except that all too often, it is associated with masochism, which means that many people who experience sadism have a perverse enjoyment of it. Now Trump has a perverse enjoyment of his cruelty, but from the point of view of the giver and not from the point of view of the receiver. So, one could say that he is sadistic in his expression of cruelty to others.
At any rate, there is a strong correlation between Trump’s growing expression of cruelty and his growing immersion in his numbness. In Trump’s case, apart from his general absorption of numbness from the modern technological living environment in which he dwells and apart from the numbness that he absorbed from the experiential vacuum in which his immediate family was immersed, there is the numbness that has been generated to avoid feeling all the shame that he must be experiencing as a result of having been the first American president to have been impeached twice as well as the first American president to have been a convicted felon. So, in Trump’s case, numbness serves as an emotional wall against the pain of shame. At the same time, Trump creates another level of emotional defenses using his natural expression of cruelty. If numbness is an emotional defense of understimulation for Trump, the increasing augmentation of his expression of different acts of cruelty becomes an emotional defense of overstimulation for him. It seems like lately he is getting great joy from doing lots of different grotesquely cruel things like hollowing out the Social Security Administration, firing a lot of the staff, and making it more and more difficult for elderly people to get the social security checks that they need to survive. So in order to function, Trump alternates between extreme understimulation and extreme overstimulation, between a vacuum state of mind and a tension-pocket state of mind. He uses the vacuum state of mind to blot out the shame he feels from his impeachments and his felony charges and the tension-pocket state of mind to pull himself out of his numbness. Back and forth like a yoyo.
© 2025 Laurence Mesirow
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