MADNESS: When we're gripped by the soul of the propagandist...

TUESDAY, APRIL 9, 2024

...are we gripped by a form of madness? In one of Shakespeare's best-known works, a midsummer dream state—a possible near cousin to madness—seems to command the stage.

We'll let the leading authority set the scene, including some modern analysis:

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy play written by William Shakespeare in about 1595 or 1596. The play is set in Athens, and consists of several subplots that revolve around the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. 

One subplot involves a conflict among four Athenian lovers. Another follows a group of six amateur actors rehearsing the play which they are to perform before the wedding. Both groups find themselves in a forest inhabited by fairies who manipulate the humans and are engaged in their own domestic intrigue. A Midsummer Night's Dream is considered one of Shakespeare's most popular and widely performed plays.

[...]

Some of the interpretations of the play have been based on psychology and its diverse theories. In 1972, Alex Aronson argued that Theseus represents the conscious mind and Puck represents the unconscious mind. Puck, in this view, is a guise of the unconscious as a trickster, while remaining subservient to Oberon...In 1973, Melvin Goldstein argued that the lovers cannot simply return to Athens and wed. First, they have to pass through stages of madness (multiple disguises) and discover their "authentic sexual selves."

It's even set in Athens! That said, you have to go way down the page to find that single reference to madness, along with the suggestion that the lovers in question have to find a way to discover their authentic selves.

Earlier—much, much earlier—King Agamemnon, lord of men, had confessed to more than nine years of madness, tears streaming down his face, in the pages of the western world's earliest extant poem of war. For ourselves, we've begun to see near cousins to something like madness whenever our dueling American nations' "cable news" channels appear our TV screen.

Briefly, let's be fair:

As we noted yesterday, there has been a fair amount of the crazy in the politics of our flailing nation over the past many years. 

As we noted yesterday, Candidate Ross Perot puckishly adopted Crazy as his campaign's theme song at the end of the 1992 White House race. That selection involved a tad of Shakespearean whimsy—but decades earlier, President Richard M. Nixon, who "had already been drinking," had knelt in prayer with Henry Kissinger in the Lincoln Sitting Room in the White House and had "punched the floor and sobbed."

Or so it said in The Final Days, with sourcing for these claims undisclosed. So the Washington Post reported again, last fall, under this banner head:

Kissinger held a sobbing Nixon just before the president resigned

Assuming it actually happened, that was an American lord of men, possibly with a bit of clinical "madness" involved. Meanwhile, in the wider realm, were forms of madness perhaps involved in the years which followed, when children's faces appeared on milk cartons and some very disordered preschool sexual abuse cases sent innocent people to prison and drove the nation wild?

All in all, forms of madness may be where you want to find them! Was it something like a form of madness when the mainstream press corps spent several years examining Candidate Gore's troubling clothes? 

Some of the commentary was flatly insane, if only in the colloquial sense. Was it a form of madness when no member of the upper-end mainstream press was willing to stand up and speak?

Also, was this episode driven by a form of madness? Is it possible that a clinical "madness" may yet lurk within this ongoing episode?

In 2017, a Yale psychiatrist named (Dr.) Bandy X. Lee edited a book which became a New York Times best-seller, even as it was being disappeared by the Times and all other such orgs. 

The book went medically literal on the concept of "madness." The leading authority on the matter starts to offer the background:

In 2017, [Dr.] Lee organized a conference at Yale on the mental health of Donald Trump with the participation of other psychiatrists including Robert Jay Lifton and Judith Lewis Herman. Following the conference, in March 2017, the American Psychiatric Association released a statement reaffirming the Goldwater rule that restricts comments related to the mental health of public figures without their consent or evaluation. Lee characterized the statement as silencing concerns raised by psychiatrists about the Trump presidency.

Lee reconvened the conference the following month, and later in the year edited The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a collection of essays warning about the dangers of Trump's mental instability that became a New York Times bestseller. It was reported that White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly secretly consulted the book as a guide for dealing with Trump. 

So it was reported! In its original form, the book's full title ran like this: The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. The leading authority offers a fuller profile:

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump is a 2017 book edited by Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist, containing essays from 27 psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals describing the "clear and present danger" that US President Donald Trump's mental health poses to the "nation and individual well being." A second edition updated and expanded the book with additional essays. Lee maintains that the book remains strictly a public service, and all royalties were donated to the public good to remove any conflict of interest.

Synopsis

Authors argue that the President's mental health was affecting the mental health of the people of the United States and that he places the country at grave risk of involving it in a war, and of undermining democracy itself due to his dangerous pathology.

Consequently, the authors claim, Trump's presidency represents an emergency which not only allows, but requires psychiatrists in the United States to raise alarms. 

For the record, these psychiatrists and mental health professionals were alleging literal, clinical (severe) mental illness—a tragic, clinical form of what may get described as "madness" in more colloquial contexts. 

In the second edition of Dr. Lee's book, thirty-seven medical specialists offered such claims about the president's mental health. Was it something like a form of madness when major news orgs agreed that their work couldn't be discussed? Or was that a sound journalistic decision—a recognition of the fact that our American discourse lacks the maturity which would be needed to handle some such discussion within the context of major party politics?

At any rate, we've come a long way, Americas!  We've moved from the candidate whose puckish theme song was Crazy to the disappearing of a major best-selling book by acknowledged medical specialists. 

Fuller disclosure! In a few of Blue America's news orgs, claims that Candidate Trump is a "sociopath" have begun to be permitted of late. Just yesterday afternoon, for better or worse, Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a perfectly sensible person, was permitted to make that claim, with no pushback offered, on MSNBC's Deadline: White House.

(This very morning, on Fox & Friends, we saw TikTok tape of an overwrought actress accusing Candidate Trump of "mental illness." The friend who presented the tape quickly said that the actress has mental health issues. There was little sense that anyone on this Red American program had ever heard that there was any conceivable issue involving the candidate's possible mental health.)

Was what we saw on last evening Gutfeld! also a form of madness? We'll detail some of what we saw in this afternoon's post. For now, we'll offer this:

What we saw was a master class in the deeply dumbnifying consequences of "segregation by viewpoint." 

What we saw on last night's Gutfeld! was often deeply "stupid"—of that there could be little doubt. But in its basic structure, was it also something like a form of madness? Were the fairies dancing in the forest surrounding a Red American Athens as this "news" program wore on?

Larger question:

Is our current journalistic arrangement something like a form of madness? We refer to the arrangement in which pundits from Red America speak only to others from Red America, while pundits from Blue America speak only to fellow Blues.

(Standard response to every assertion: "That's exactly right!")

We refer to the arrangement in which these journalistic cadres sift facts and topics and videotape to provide reinforcement and pleasure to each of our two Americas—to Red America and to Blue. Is this hardening corporate arrangement a bit madness-adjacent too?

People who live in Blue America see videotape of police officers being beaten on January 6. People who live in Blue America are never asked to view videotape from that day, unless Tucker Carlson has clipped it. 

Instead, people who live in Red America are shown videotape of migrants streaming across the southern border—videotape which was only offered to Blue America when 60 Minutes finally bit the bullet roughly one month ago.

Is it a form of madness to construct our "national" discourse this way? Are we letting the fairies dance in our heads as we watch our carefully sifted "news shows," even as fairies dance in the dreamscapes in our heads each night when we've gone to sleep?

If so, this is more than a midsummer dream. This is now the way we construct our non-discussion discussions all through midwinter, the spring and the fall. 

Is it madness when the people we've come to trust go on the air and con us this way? We'll grant you that it's good for ratings, for profits and for salaries. But does it start to resemble a form of madness as well?

Just for the record, we the humans actually aren't "the rational animal!" And you can forget about Freud and Darwin! Writing for the New York Times, here's the way Professor Horwich summarized the work of the man who was selected, in several major surveys of academics, as the most important philosopher of the 20th century:

Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking.

This attitude is in stark opposition to the traditional view, which continues to prevail. Philosophy is respected, even exalted, for its promise to provide fundamental insights into the human condition and the ultimate character of the universe, leading to vital conclusions about how we are to arrange our lives. It’s taken for granted that there is deep understanding to be obtained...

If so, then we are duped and bound to be disappointed, says Wittgenstein. For these are mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking. 

That's the way Professor Horwich limned the later Wittgenstein's poorly formed but important work—correctly, we'd be inclined to say. At the highest levels of alleged academic distinction, it's been "linguistic illusion and muddled thinking" all the way down! 

(Just as every college freshman in history has always guessed!)

According to Horwich on Wittgenstein, that's the way it has worked at the very top of the pile! To that, we now add the tribal pleasures provided by the sifting of information, viewpoints and videotape as the "democratization of media" destructively rolls along. Are we happily locked in a form of madness, Blue World as well as Red? 

Wherever President Roosevelt looked in the 1930s, he saw a nation ill-clothed and ill-fed.

Wherever we look today, we see that modern form of sifting of viewpoint, insult and fact. Also, we see what we saw last night on the Gutfeld! clown show.

When we see this type of sifting, it seems to us that we as a nation have been gripped by the soul of the propagandist. When we succumb to that ancient impulse—when we sign on to be a Trojan, or perhaps to be an Achaean—have we perhaps succumbed to a modern form of something resembling madness? Also, can some such "people" survive?

We'll borrow from Melvin Goldstein! Like the lovers in the forest, do we need to find our authentic selves? Will we "have to pass through stages of madness" before we can dream of the (fat chance) possibility of emerging, somewhat sanely, on the other side?

Gutfeld! excerpts will follow today. Tomorrow, what you were told in the New York Post as opposed to the New York Times.

(Do you know whose version was more instructive? We'll acknowledge it right here—we don't!)

Tomorrow: The dangerous case of the $93 million