My theme this week is “possession,” which may strike some readers as off the beaten path. But it is actually as timely as the day’s headlines—pretty much any day’s headlines, really. Something irrational has arisen from the depths of the collective mind and taken possession of as much as a third of the population of the United States, with similar symptoms elsewhere in the West. What has understandably frightened many people about this eruption is not so much the will to overthrow democracy and install some kind of fascist authoritarianism: naked self-interest is always understandable enough. But what mystifies and demoralizes is the uncanny affect that accompanies it like the luminous tail of a comet—that age-old omen of social disaster. We are witnessing a wave of uncontrolled anger, resulting in death threats to public officials and various forms of antisocial behavior, occasionally violent, combined with extreme delusional thinking and paranoid conspiracy theories. People we thought we knew—family members, friends, colleagues—are in the grip of unshakeable convictions that have nothing to do with reality. And the affect is contagious: we are in the midst not of one pandemic but two. Some cases are relatively mild, stopping at “vaccine hesitancy.” Others go full-blown QAnon. Education helps but does not always prevent breakthrough “infections.”
January 14, 2022
January 14, 2022
January 14, 2022
My theme this week is “possession,” which may strike some readers as off the beaten path. But it is actually as timely as the day’s headlines—pretty much any day’s headlines, really. Something irrational has arisen from the depths of the collective mind and taken possession of as much as a third of the population of the United States, with similar symptoms elsewhere in the West. What has understandably frightened many people about this eruption is not so much the will to overthrow democracy and install some kind of fascist authoritarianism: naked self-interest is always understandable enough. But what mystifies and demoralizes is the uncanny affect that accompanies it like the luminous tail of a comet—that age-old omen of social disaster. We are witnessing a wave of uncontrolled anger, resulting in death threats to public officials and various forms of antisocial behavior, occasionally violent, combined with extreme delusional thinking and paranoid conspiracy theories. People we thought we knew—family members, friends, colleagues—are in the grip of unshakeable convictions that have nothing to do with reality. And the affect is contagious: we are in the midst not of one pandemic but two. Some cases are relatively mild, stopping at “vaccine hesitancy.” Others go full-blown QAnon. Education helps but does not always prevent breakthrough “infections.”