In past articles, I have elaborated on how people in the U.S. are getting more and more numb as a result of the increasing fictionlessness in their living environment stemming from a growing use of screens, Internet of Things, 3-D printing, and Artificial Intelligence in everyday life. All these modern technological phenomena end up putting people into an experiential vacuum from which there is no easy exit. The longer that people are immersed in an experiential vacuum, the more that there will to do things is diminished. When this happens, it can be said that a person is experiencing conative anesthesia or the numbing of the will. As people lose their will to do things, it makes them feel very vulnerable to the free-floating figures in the vacuum, of everything from annoying irritations to major crises. So it is in this situation that people start to become susceptible to those few individuals who become surrogate wills for the masses. The numb masses give themselves over to these fascist leaders, who basically tell them how to conduct their lives. And the masses become incipient zombies – will-less people who do exactly what they are told to do by their surrogate wills, the fascist leaders.
This is the dynamic that is as work among the followers of Donald Trump. He literally gives these people the will to live. People who are not a part of the Trump cult can’t understand how his followers are able to tolerate his vulgar and racist language, but they miss the point. The more shocking the language, the more his followers are able to be pulled out of the vacuum. Out of numbness and into a situation where they feel more fully alive. And they are able to be pulled out of their numbness without having to resort to violence against others or against themselves.
In most situations, people who are part of the Trump cult are able to express their angry aggressive violent sentiments without actually committing physically violent acts and putting themselves in a situation where they are liable to be hurt or else, put in jail. Here I am thinking of people who go to all the Trump rallies and J.D. Vance rallies and MAGA rallies and participate as best as they can in different MAGA activities. People who are unable to, for whatever reason, latch themselves onto a cult figure like Trump in today’s modern technological society, are liable to get involved in activities that could be considered self-destructive or else destructive to others. Using harmful recreational drugs like the opioids. Cutting one’s wrists. Committing suicide through a myriad of different ways. Or getting involved in mass killings. Their violent activities are triggered by some event, action, or process in the external world, some abrasive stimulus, that, in turn, cause them to respond with an expression of anger, hatred, aggression, or violence, either directed outward towards the external world or inward towards themselves. Now interestingly enough, up until now, participation in Trump’s cult has actually served to help most members to properly channel their destructive tendencies in such a way that just a relatively few have actually gotten physically hurt. Some notable exceptions have been Charlottesville, the attempted kidnapping of Gretchen Whitmer and, of course, the siege of the Capitol after the last presidential election. But given the fact that about 47% of the adult American population support Trump in the presidential election, the number of these people that have actually committed some form of destructive action is quite low. The key qualifier here is the phrase “up until now”. An awful lot of political observers feel that no matter what the actual outcome of the election is, the members of the Trump cult, in particular, are going to be stimulated to carry out a violent response. And this is particularly because according to polls, the American electorate is so evenly divided between Harris and Trump. But unfortunately, if ever there was an ideal trigger for violence, it is the American presidential election of 2024. And because the election is going to be so close, an awful lot of people are likely to become fully activated zombies. And then look out. If we think that the siege of the capitol was scary, in retrospect, it will appear to be a romp in the park by comparison.
And all this relates to the fact that more and more Americans are sinking deeper and deeper into an experiential vacuum and use the intermittent abrasive stimuli as triggers to temporarily pull out of it.
The only realistic long-term solution is to have people today break their addiction to all the mediated technological stimuli to which they are constantly exposed and find a way to reconfigure their fields of experience in such a way that what they are exposed to is based more on the organic stimuli for which their mammalian nervous systems were built.
©2024 Laurence Mesirow
about such random comments about how people in the U.S. are getting more and more numb as a result of the increasing fictionlessness in their living environment, I think it’s wrong. It’s like saying that technology is bad, bad things happen when people are not well educated, it’s like saying that children who go to school are going to be drug addicts… right? , then everything that happens in the USA and in Mexico and around the world depends on PARENTS and how they educate by example and teach values to their children, not on governments, nor on stimuli, nor on information that comes from outside, from friends or from the television, no matter how many centimeters it has, NO ONE can tell you how to live your life, if you have enough self-esteem and education to decide, that is nonsense.