Cultishness is a Mental Illness

And why it leads to living in opposite-land.

Who do we believe? Both the left and the right (or rather, MAGA and non-MAGA) claim to be connected to reality while the other side is delusional.

The left claims that Trump is a fascist wanna-be dictator who is systematically disregarding the US Constitution for the benefit of himself and his billionaire friends. The right claims that everything Trump is doing is justified and necessary because the Democrats are Satanic pedophiles who run nation-wide sex trafficking rings in order to extract adrenochrome from the blood of children.

When the debate is whether or not Democrats are eating babies, both sides cannot be right and truth cannot be “found in the middle”. Either what is being claimed is happening or it isn’t. Even if the debate remained in the sane territory (if you can call it that) of arguing who is actually a fascist, both sides cannot be correct when they are both claiming diametrically opposed things.

We could turn to actual facts to decide this “debate”, but that requires both sides to agree on what constitutes a fact, and what sources of information are legitimate. And there cannot be any agreement on that either when one side calls the mainstream media “fake news” and considers uncited claims made in YouTube videos to be objective truth.

Our cultural epistemology has become so fragmented that large swaths of society are living in completely opposite realities. One where Trump represents Palpatine, by orchestrating a fascist takeover of the US government and disappearing legal residents to foreign countries without due process, and another where he is the leader of the Rebellion fighting the secret cabal who actually control the world behind the scenes.

Yes, the White House account actually tweeted this.

In one reality, Trump is seizing authoritarian control and taking away fundamental human rights (such as due process) via his frozen goon squad. In the other reality, Trump is a liberator fighting the tyranny of Marxism and “Antifa”, who are somehow fascists and secretly run the world. In one reality, words have established meaning and facts are facts, while in the other words are used to mean whatever people want them to mean and facts are whatever people believe them to be.

At the heart of this is projection.

When two groups of people are each accusing the other of the same thing and claiming that they themselves are doing the opposite, either both groups are wrong and exhibiting the exact same behavior, or one group is right while the other is projecting.

In our current situation, the former situation objectively cannot be the case because the actions that are being taken in the world are not the same thing, but are diametrically opposed. That only leaves the second option as being possible, which is that one group is connected to reality while the other is existing in an opposite-land created by their own projections.

Projection is looking in a mirror but thinking that you are looking through a window. You think you are seeing someone else do something, but in reality that someone is you.

Projection is a psychological defense mechanism when one is doing something they cannot accept, or admit to themselves. It is one of the key tactics used by abusers in order to hide their abuse and avoid accountability for it (described by the acronym DARVO: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender). This can be a conscious strategy, but often people subconsciously engage in that tactic without even realizing it, by projecting.

Anyone can find themselves projecting when they fall into shadow behaviors or a childhood wound gets triggered. We all have parts of ourselves that we deny exist (our shadow), and when we act on those repressed parts of ourselves we psychologically cannot recognize it because of the very mental block that repressed those parts in the first place.

We all also have childhood wounds that can get reactivated when something happens that reminds our bodies and nervous systems of the original traumatic event - even without realizing it. When this reactivation occurs we find ourselves emotionally reacting to the past event and not the present one, subconsciously projecting that past event onto the present-time situation.

Those are common and normal instances of projection - still unhealthy and unfair to those who are being projected upon, but limited in scope to that particular event. When projection truly becomes pathological is when it encompasses a person’s entire experience of reality. This is not normal and only happens in situations where a person’s sense of reality gets truly upended, to the point where they are no longer able to engage with the reality that everyone else is living in.

This is precisely what happens when someone joins a cult.

It takes a very unusual situation to distort someone’s perception of reality to the point that they step through the looking-glass and start living in the mirror world full time. One of those situations is when people join a cult, as one of the key characteristics of a cult is removing its adherents from the world they knew, and immersing them into a particular worldview that doesn’t align with wider society.

Usually cults do this by convincing their new recruits to distance themselves from friends and family, and physically change their residence to a location controlled by the cult. But it doesn’t have to happen this way. The removal of members from their previous reality and isolating them within a new framework of reality can happen purely psychologically, through techniques of brainwashing and emotional manipulation.

This is how a cult can function virtually and non-locally, such as the cult of QAnon. Nowadays, as the beliefs of QAnon have become mainstream throughout the US Republican Party and the right-wing media sphere, it’s not an exaggeration to say that right-wing media now serves as the propaganda arm of the cult of Trump. Not only does it fabricate an alternate reality for its followers to live in, it exerts control over those followers by manipulating their emotions (particularly fear, anger, and hatred) and giving them a deep sense of belonging.

I’m not being hyperbolic by describing MAGA as a cult. One common definition of a cult that is used in research studies was given by Chambers, Langone, Dole, and Grice (1994), as being…

groups that often exploit members psychologically and/or financially, typically by making members comply with leadership’s demands through certain types of psychological manipulation, popularly called mind control, and through the inculcation of deep-seated anxious dependency on the group and its leaders.

The MAGA movement with its slavish love for Trump causing many working-class people to give a billionaire huge donations, along with the right-wing media ecosystem peddling outright lies and delusions, fits that definition completely.

It is extremely common in cults for members to believe that the cult is helping them while it is actually exploiting and harming them - even to the point where the cult leader murders them in cold blood while telling them it is for their own salvation. They believe it because their ability to see reality has been fundamentally compromised, and they are now living in an alternate reality constructed by the cult leader for the leaders’ own benefit.

Another key aspect of cults is an authoritarian leader who their followers have elevated to the status of a king, or even God. This leader instills existential fear in their followers, telling them that the rest of the world wants to destroy them and that only the leader can keep them safe (there are countless examples of Trump pushing this exact narrative). Blind faith in that leader is what determines whether or not a person is in that cult, as anyone who is able to question and criticize that leader is not under their influence and control.

This is what pierces through the confusion about which version of reality is the real one, and clearly identifies which group is seeing reality clearly and which is stuck in a mirror world. Only one of those two groups is in a cult, and which one is clearly identified by their steadfast adherence to a particular leader.

MAGA constantly tries to project their cultish behavior onto the left, but it falls flat immediately because of the simple fact that no one on the left worships a single leader. Liberals may support specific Democratic politicians like Bernie, or enjoy particular left-wing personalities like John Stewart, but none of those people are above criticism or followed to a slavish degree. Support for those people is also not universal among the left (a requirement for a cult), and those people do not “lead” by issuing proclamations or shaping a unique reality for their followers to live in.

And most importantly, no one has made their entire identity about following them. No one has photoshopped Bernie’s head on Rambo’s body, much less worn that image on their chest or flown it on a massive flag. Many people love Bernie but no one claims that he was chosen by God to single-handedly save America. Bernie does not even lead the Democratic party, much less a movement of tens of millions of people all united under his name.

Cults operate by reshaping reality for their followers.

Right-wing news outlets have been engaged in a campaign of mind control and manipulation going back decades. Along with the Southern Strategy, the other main tactic used by the conservative elites to regain power and get Nixon elected was to create a network of think tanks to infiltrate the media and shape public opinion. Since then, hundreds of such entities have been created, funded by oligarchs to the tune of billions.

Over 20 years ago the documentary Outfoxxed exposed the blatant lying and misinformation peddled by Fox News, which is the most-watched TV news channel in America by a factor of five (despite losing its NewsGuard certification of being “factually reliable”). Since then, repeated studies have found that Fox viewers are less informed than people who don’t watch any news at all, and that they are more likely to be misinformed than viewers of other media outlets.

When Fox was sued by Dominion for defamation, Rupert Murdock himself (Fox’s owner) admitted in court that some Fox commentators pushed lies about election fraud on air that they knew were false. The company has argued in court that they can’t be held liable for their lies because “the general tenor of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary’.”

The primary tactic utilized by Fox and other right-wing media outlets is to present mischaracterizations and outright lies as fact, and then when called on it, quietly issue retractions and clarifications. The constant admissions of lying don’t matter because few see those retractions, and the damage to their viewers’ minds is already done.

Right-wing pundits and influencers on social media face even less constraints on their lying. They utilize the tactic known as “flooding the zone with bullshit”, promoting so many lies that it’s impossible to effectively fact check and combat them all.

But how does this relate to cults, you might ask?

Cults suck followers in by lying to their followers, making them feel loved and cared for while they in fact seek to abuse and exploit them. The only way they can prevent their followers from connecting the dots and finding out the truth is by separating them from the reality that the rest of the world knows and experiences. They must convince their followers to deny even the reality they are directly experiencing, and they do that by utilizing the abusive tactic known as gaslighting.

Gaslighting is a way that abusers cause their victims to doubt their own perceptions of the world, by telling them that what they are seeing and experiencing isn’t, in fact, happening. This doubt weakens their victims’ grasp on reality itself, making them vulnerable to being convinced of an alternate reality - the one that the abuser wants them to believe.

And once someone has been convinced by the cult to embrace its delusion, they then psychologically feel a need to convince others of the same delusion, in order to resolve the cognitive dissonance that is created when they witness others asserting a different reality.

The MAGA cult has been gaslighting the entire world for years. Here are just a few of the lies they’ve been trying to convince us are real:

• Liberals are the stupid ones — even though Trump's core base is uneducated white men and higher education is strongly correlated with voting liberal.

• Liberals are the racist ones — even though Trump’s base is primarily white, many of his supporters fly the confederate flag, and every neo-Nazi in the US aligns with his party.

• The most reputable and reliable media outlets are "fake news" — because they are the only ones who are willing to fact check the President and refuse to spread his lies as truth.

• The left are brainwashed "sheep" — even though studies show that progressives are higher in critical and rational thinking vs "intuitive" thinking than conservatives, and Trump has millions of followers who call him “God Emperor of the United States” and believe he is the second coming of Christ.

• Liberals want to raise your taxes — even though in his first term Trump lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 28% and raised taxes on people making under $70,000 a year.

• Trump wants to “drain the swamp” and end corruption — even though he himself has been convicted of 34 felonies including using the government to financially benefit his family and friends (the literal definition of corruption), and has allowed unappointed goons to raid government agencies and steal data on every single American.

• Liberals want to destroy our country — while Trump has appointed industry executives to every single government agency meant to regulate those same industries, gutted hundreds of environmental and public health regulations purely to benefit corporations, is opening up our national parks to mining and oil drilling, and is rolling back the very programs that countless millions rely on to survive.

There are many more examples I could add to the list. The gaslighting is obvious, so the question then becomes: how can these people actually believe what they're saying? Are they really this stupid? Why do they insist on promoting a version of reality that's the exact opposite of the truth?

The answer is that they've been programmed to think this way, and the lies are the only way they can resolve their own cognitive dissonance, and insulate themselves from the evidence that would pierce through their delusion. It’s more painful to admit that you’ve been lied to than it is to double down on that lie.

Another classic brainwashing technique that keeps people in the grip of a cult is called "thought stopping". Cult members are taught to say phrases (like mantras) whenever anything is said to them - or presented to them - that challenges their version of reality and would otherwise cause them to start thinking critically.

The phrase "fake news" is a classic thought stopper. Have you noticed how anytime you present actual facts that contradict the MAGA narrative, the knee-jerk reaction is to claim it is "fake news"? It's such a convenient way to push aside and discredit any source of info that you don't want to hear.

Trump first started using that term to deflect any attempt to fact-check his lies, and his followers happily picked it up because it allows them to avoid the cognitive dissonance created by reality clashing with their belief that Trump is telling the truth, as well as their belief that they're intelligent, free-thinking people who couldn't possibly be fooled by a con man.

Yes, media manipulation and fake news are real things. But the terms are being used to discredit the most reliable and accurate sources of information, in order for people to continue believing in the actual fake news they're consuming. This is yet another example of projection at work.

For example, The Guardian is a non-corporate media outlet with a strong reputation for minimally-biased reporting (relative to other media sources, at least). But the same person who reads the Epoch Times (the media arm of the Falun Gong cult), watches Fox News, or shares made-up lies from click bait websites on social media, will call The Guardian "fake news" - because that's exactly what Trump does. And they never fact check what they read because the fact checkers themselves are, once again, “fake news”.

It's absolutely crazy-making to be constantly told that up is down and down is up, and it’s even more crazy-making to believe that up is down and down is up.

Cultishness is not just toxic, it’s a form of mental illness.

Cult membership doesn’t cause a person to develop a mental illness, but it impacts the psyche in such a way as to produce the symptoms of mental illness, for the time that the person remains under the cult’s influence. This influence has profound impacts not just on their daily functioning and psychological well-being, but compromises their very ego-identity and sense of self.

According to the authors of the paper An Object Relations Approach to Cult Membership (Salande & Perkins, 2011), the cult experience weakens healthy ego functioning and causes individuals to regress in their psychological defensive operations to a pattern that appears very similar to that exhibited by people with personality disorders.

In essence, the cult experience degrades the ego, effectively causing the individual to regress into a transient state of borderline personality organizational-style functioning that may resolve itself once the individual leaves the group. This assertion is based on two separate observations. The first, as mentioned before, is that cult members exhibit behavior that is strikingly similar to behaviors associated with primitive defensive operations, such as splitting (Goldberg, 1997; Whitsett, 1992). The second seems to be the activation of important object relations-level attachment needs, which helps to motivate the cult member’s behavior (Shaw, 2003; Whitsett, 1992).

We seek to shed light on some of the more puzzling behaviors of cult members in terms of their striking similarity to the primitive defensive operations described by Kernberg. The first, most apparent, and broadest, defensive operation that seems to be expressed in the well-integrated cult member is splitting. This is an observation made by Doni P. Whisett (1992) in her discussion of the cult phenomenon from a self-psychological approach based on Heinz Kohut work, “cults divide up the world into ‘we/they’—‘we’ being the saved” (p. 370). As simplified by Kernberg (1984), “the clearest manifestation of splitting is the division of external objects into “all good” and “all bad” (p. 16).

Splitting is most often referred to in the context of an individual changing his perception of and reaction to an external object from that of an “all good” classification to an “all bad” classification, or vice versa. However, splitting also may be a function of how an individual views the group he or she is part of, and that group’s relationship to the outside world. Thus, by virtue of being part of the “good” group, one is made “all good” and is thereby in serious conflict with the outside world, which is, of course, “all bad.”

You can see how that perfectly describes the worldview that is constantly promoted by right wing media and far-right influencers - including Donald Trump himself. Not only do they consider themselves as righteous and doing “the Lord’s work”, they constantly demonize and dehumanize their political and ideological opponents - even though those “opponents” are often people’s family and friends.

This separates cult members from the outside world and isolates them within the cult, as we see with MAGA family members who spend all day on right-wing internet forums or watching Fox News, and who insist on replicating those virtual conversations in every real-life social interaction

Again from the study authors:

Cult members often see themselves, and the group they are a part of, as more enlightened, informed, understanding of the true nature of things, or just better than the population at large; they may manifest this as an arrogant dismissal of more mainstream ways of thinking and acting, or express a form of antagonistic defiance in the face of what the members perceive as external aggression. In the case of the latter, cult members manifest the defensive operation of projective identification (a primitive form of the better-known defense mechanism of projection). Projective identification differs from projection in that projection involves the detection of one’s own feelings or impulses in an external object; projective identification involves an unconscious effort to elicit an expected response or behavior from an external object.

Thus, cult members expect nonmembers to be hostile or threatening to them or their group, but actually, they create the dynamics between themselves and the outside world that fits their own relational expectations. As one former Unification Church member (now cult exit counselor reported), “Whenever people yelled at me and called me a ‘brainwashed robot,’ I just took it as an expected persecution. It made me feel more committed to the group” (Hassan, 1988, p. 53).

Right-wing grifters and trolls have learned to utilize this projective identification as an ideological weapon online. They make outlandish and inflammatory statements designed to produce outrage, and then trumpet that outrage as “proof of the insanity and intolerance of the left”. And their followers eat it up, as their very sense of self becomes ever more reliant on these defense mechanisms to stay intact.

Primitive idealization is another one of the defense mechanisms that cult members regress into, defined by Kernberg (1984) as creating “unrealistic, all-good and powerful images”. In a cult setting this is expressed by idealizing the charismatic leader of the cult as all-good and all-powerful, causing followers to adopt the leaders’ beliefs as their own, and do whatever they say even when it involves harming others or allowing themselves to be harmed.

D. Shaw, a clinical social worker and former cult member writes in Traumatic abuse in cults, a psychoanalytic perspective (2003) that this primitive idealization is a reflection of the cult leader’s ability and need to satisfy their own dependency needs by “exploiting universal human dependency and attachment needs in the others. Cult leaders tap into and re-activate this piece of the human psyche. Followers are encouraged to become regressive and infantilized, to believe that their life depends on pleasing the cult leader.”

Another psychological defense mechanism that becomes necessary for people within cults is denial. In order to conform with the beliefs and demands of the cult, the members’ own subjective experience must be denied whenever it contradicts the reality presented by the cult. This can be seen in a denial of their own needs, boundaries, and well-being in the face of obvious exploitation and abuse, removing anything within their psyche that would rebel against what is happening to them.

Denial is a necessary mechanism for cult followers to remain within the cult, as without it they would stop caring about the desires of the cult leader more than their own health and well-being. They would also be able to see how the reality presented by the cult diverges from objective reality including their own lived experience. Denial is necessary in order to maintain the delusional worldview that the cult relies on to function.

This is obviously at work in society today on a massive scale. Entire swaths of the populace are being fed an alternate reality by an enormous propaganda machine, and as their worldviews have shifted to embrace it their very sense of sense has become psychologically dependent upon it. Denial is what allows them to continue believing that Trump is their savior even as he throws their neighbors in detention camps and eliminates the social safety net that they rely upon to survive.

Normally, these defense operations are expressed by adults only when they suffer from personality disorders. Cult membership is so damaging that it regresses the psyche to the point where these defenses become activated, which then further weaken the ego creating a downward spiral into mental illness.

The MAGA cult is now in charge of the most powerful nation on earth.

What does this mean for our society? What can we do to get people out of the clutches of this cult, so they can be restored back to the people they once were?

Unfortunately, cult deprogramming is a difficult process and requires removing the victim from the cult’s sphere of influence entirely. This is pretty much impossible in a world where the most-watched TV network in the United States (by a factor of five!) injects this cult’s indoctrination into businesses and homes across the country, and where every social media app has fallen under its influence and promotes it with their algorithms.

Not to mention this runs up against free will, and the legal agency of adults to determine their own beliefs and their own fate. US courts have so far considered cult members to be sound of mind and body, limiting the ability of loved ones or the state to step in and do anything to stop the harm caused by cults, outside of prosecuting the cult leader themselves.

As we’ve seen time and time again throughout history, many cult members will stay obedient to the group and cling to their beliefs no matter how many times they are proven wrong by objective reality, even following the cult leader to their deaths.

Perhaps someday we will have a legal framework in place to protect and care for people who fall under cult influence, by blocking cults from exercising undue influence over their followers and recognizing that cult members are psychologically compromised and unable to act on behalf of their own well-being. But in a world where the justice system functions to serve the interests of unjust power structures, it’s not possible to set up such a framework without it being used to oppress and harm the very people it is supposed to protect.

For now, the best we can do is to educate ourselves and others on what cults are and how they operate - not just the extreme versions we hear about in the news but the everyday version that is now permeating society. We can learn about the tactics they use and the psychological traits that make us vulnerable to them, so we can more effectively protect ourselves.

We can expand our capacity for critical thinking by learning how to think logically and rationally about things and recognize when our emotions are being activated and are influencing us in a particular direction. We can strengthen our capacity for discernment when it comes to decision-making and choosing what sources to believe and what people to listen to.

On the subject of sources, one thing that would greatly help to fix this existential crisis for our society is to restructure the internet so it can no longer be weaponized by billionaires to steal our data and control what we see, hear, and think. Of course, this would require taking political power away from the oligarchy and shifting away from the exploitative capitalist system itself, which would require a mass movement to achieve. But we can at least start the conversation!

And we can teach ourselves and others to recognize charismatic personalities for the threats they really are, shifting public perception of them from being desirable and worthy of emulation, to being inherently dangerous and worthy of criticism. Our susceptibility to charisma is the single biggest human weakness that allows cults to thrive, and normalizing “influencers” and the adoration of public figures makes us all deeply unsafe.

The inherent danger of charisma, and its roots in the Shadow

Some charismatic figures are benign and don’t harm anyone (like most celebrities), but it still isn’t safe to put them on a pedestal because we can’t guarantee that they won’t abuse that outsized influence and use it to take advantage of us. It’s the very act of giving someone that much power and influence over us that puts us in danger.

Cult dynamics are inherently toxic because of the toxic power dynamic they create, where the leader is elevated far above his followers and the followers are debased and devalued. Essentially what is happening is that the followers are giving away their personal power - the power they are inherently born with and entitled to, as humans - to the cult leader who then holds not only his own power but the power that rightfully belongs to others.

This is how power fundamentally works in a hierarchy, and it’s why hierarchies of power are inherently toxic and inhuman. Those at the top of the hierarchy are essentially stealing power from those below, and using that unearned power to dominate and oppress others (what Starhawk calls “power-over”).

A healthy society and organization is one where everyone retains their personal power (”power-within”) and shares power horizontally as equals (”power-with”). Cult dynamics are always damaging to everyone (except for the leaders) precisely because of how they disempower those who are sucked into it, and use that disempowerment to make those people vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.

One of the psychological mechanisms that causes people to hand their power over to authority figures and “gurus” is the Shadow. I’ve written before about how the human psyche creates a shadow self, by rejecting parts of who are (because we are told they are bad or unacceptable). Usually this happens through hatred, but it can also happen when we come to believe that certain good qualities we carry aren’t part of us, because we internalized the message that we aren’t creative, beautiful, strong, intelligent, powerful, loveable, etc.

When qualities that are labeled as “bad” get disowned, we see them in others as what we hate and are disgusted by. But when qualities that are labeled as “good” get disowned, we see them in other as what we love, and deeply desire. These are commonly called the Dark Shadow and Bright Shadow, respectively.

The reason why cult members love and adore the leader to the point of insanity and self-harm is because the cult leader embodies their Bright Shadow. This “glow” of the Bright Shadow seems to surround people when we see them embodying what we deeply desire but disown within ourselves, and this is precisely what we call charisma. It has a magnetic quality, drawing us towards them like a moth to a flame, causing us to see them through a rose-colored lens. In fact, the entire concept of romantic love is based on this kind of shadow projection (seen in phrases such as “love at first sight” and “head over heels”).

This charisma attracts us but it is dangerous for us, just like how the flame ultimately kills the moth. It causes us to hand over our power to the object of our love and desire, putting ourselves in a vulnerable position that they are easily able to exploit. This right here is how cult members recruit new followers: they make the leader, and by extension the group, seem fantastically wonderful by showering new recruits with attention and love (called “love bombing” by psychologists, who see this phenomenon not only in cults but also in narcissistic relationships.)

This act of Bright Shadow projection, transferring one’s disowned qualities to someone else, gives the cult leader their glow of charisma and puts them on a pedestal. It elevates them far beyond what is healthy for any human, and far beyond what they actually deserve, granting them a level of power and authority over other people’s lives that is inherently abusive.

Normal, healthy people resist being elevated like that, because they can sense how unhealthy it is, and it makes them feel uncomfortable and gross. But narcissists crave that kind of elevation, because a narcissist’s entire personality is dependent upon being seen by others as better, greater, etc than how they truly are. It’s precisely how that personality disorder works, so it’s not surprising that those who lead cults always end up being malignant narcissists.

As I’ve written elsewhere, a narcissist cannot help but exercise power in a toxic way (”power-over”) because they see the world through a lens of hierarchy and superiority. Equality truly feels oppressive to them, because their sense of self is built upon being “better” than others. As a result, they can’t help but create toxicity and suffering in every relationship they participate in.

Unfortunately, the way our society is structured benefits narcissists and psychopaths, and elevates them to positions of great power and influence. So it’s not surprising that this same culture is seeing an epidemic of cultishness, to the point where a fascist cult has literally taken control of the most powerful nation on earth.

Those who are in it have signed up to live in an alternate reality (of “alternative facts”), and they are trying their hardest to brainwash the rest of us into joining them there. The right wing propaganda machine is vast and funded by billionaires, in control of almost every major media outlet and with an army of influencers and podcasters spreading their lies.

They denigrate those of us who resist this cult influence every chance they get (most obviously on Facebook and the app formerly known as Twitter), and do their best into gaslighting us into questioning our own sanity for believing that reality is real.

We may feel isolated and alone in a sea of madness, but we shouldn’t ever forget that there are still more of us than there are of them. Every day the gap between reality and their collective delusion widens, and the justifications required to resolve the cognitive dissonance get more outlandish and absurd.

Eventually it will collapse under its own weight, as every cult eventually does. In the meantime we must hold fast to what we know to be true, and keep ourselves and each other sane and safe as best we can. Staying rooted in the natural world will keep us strong, reminding us of what is real even as those around us play-act a fantasy. We can’t pull them out of their delusions, but we can name it for what it is.

THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES.