Five years after his last podcast, Steven Reisner returns, reporting from Berlin – the city that unleashed the devils of the 20th century – to explain how, today, America is losing its mind. Drawing on Freud, Shakespeare, Heidegger, Elon Musk and Marc Andreesson, Reisner traces the collapse of the enlightenment values that once held fascism at bay: conscience, guilt, empathy, self-reflection. According to Reisner, the second coming of Donald Trump threatens to transform America into an extension of his own mind, heralding a great cultural transition: the age of psychosis.
Hello everyone. I’m Steven Reisner, and this is Madness, where psychoanalysis and fascism collide. It’s been five years since my last podcast. Five years. And in these five years, the world has changed so radically that I can imagine future historians looking back at this time, not simply as a time of turmoil and anxiety, but as the Great Transition, the years when what it meant to be human changed.
Every notion I had about what makes human beings human, our capacity for self-awareness and reflection, our ability to override our animal instincts for a higher purpose, our unique capacity to experience suffering as a basis for compassion and morality, and the idea that we are each responsible ultimately for one another.
All of the values of the Enlightenment and the ideals of Plato, and Kant, and Freud seem to have evaporated in these five years. Even our ideas of what it means to be sane and what it means to be insane have switched places. I realize that this process actually began about forty years ago.
But as Hemingway said about bankruptcy, the Great Transition happened in two ways, gradually and then suddenly. Gradually, we lost our Enlightenment ideals, and suddenly, Donald Trump changed everything. Suddenly, we have left the Age of Enlightenment and entered what I can only call the Age of Psychosis.
And so, to help understand and navigate the Great Transition, I bring you another season of Madness.
Five years ago, when I recorded my last podcast, we were all breathing a sigh of relief. Donald Trump had just been defeated. America and the world had won a reprieve. It was a brief time of hope. Hope that during a Biden administration, there was still a chance to create an America that might finally live up to its principles.
An America where political action and street protests, Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders could still be mobilized to fight the economic and political forces that had given us Trump, the neoliberal corporate capitalism which controlled both the Republican and the Democratic parties. We all know how that ended.
Our reprieve was short-lived. Neoliberalism was indeed vanquished, but not by us. It evaporated so fast that most people still haven’t even noticed. But in the blink of an eye, Trump and his family and his cronies have replaced the economics of profit and faux meritocracy and globalism with something much simpler: an economics of tribute.
Most world governments and corporate leaders have rushed to participate because they understand what coastal liberals and Beltway conservatives refuse to face, that in the age of the new Trumpism, Power doesn’t come from connections with legislators or legislation. It doesn’t come from Ivy League law degrees or private equity. Those halcyon neoliberal days when democracy quaintly served as the cover story for massive corporate wealth, those days are gone. Power now emanates solely from the White House.
Trump and his family now manipulate the extraordinary power of the United States government, a power that includes the military, the nation’s vast security apparatus, the courts, the legal system, election policy, trade policy, financial markets, international treaties, as well as the influential might of social media and much of legacy media, and they do it for one single purpose: to expand the Trump family’s brand, its power, influence, and wealth.
Trump’s signature on American currency says it all. The United States Treasury is Donald Trump’s checkbook.
I am coming to you today from Berlin, where I now spend the late winter and early spring. Yes, Berlin, the storied city of Cold War intrigue and Holocaust horror.
Berlin, which gave us the model of fascism, philosophy, and technology conspiring to destroy the values of the Enlightenment and to transform what it means to be human. Berlin, the city that gave us the Reichstag fire and the Wannsee Conference, where the plans were made that led in a few short years to the murder of millions.
Among them, my grandmothers, Ida and Feiga, my grandfathers, Groynum and Zisha, My aunt Dora and my uncles, Shmuel, Jacob, and Jonah. When I tell people that I spend the winters in Berlin, the response is always the same.
Not, “How can you, a Jew, spend time in Berlin?” But, “How can you, a Jew, spend winters in Berlin? Winter is the worst time in Berlin. It’s dark and cold. You never see the sun. Everyone leaves Berlin in the winter.” “Yes,” I answer, “but when spring finally comes, and the sun starts to get higher in the sky, and the light starts to creep down along the walls of the buildings toward the earth,
And the sprigs of grass and yellow flowers and green shoots start to reach up to the sunlight, it gives me hope, Because I am reminded that there is one place on Earth where, after the worst side of humanity was unleashed into the world, the next generation actually acknowledged what happened and tried as best they could to reckon with the world they had been born into, to put the demons unleashed by their ancestors back in hell and prevent their return.
Today, every street in Berlin has a reminder of those horrors, a warning of what happens when human beings abandon their moral responsibility and fall in love with the power of a charismatic tyrant.
On every street, the names of those deported are literally embedded into the pavement. Schoolchildren light candles and place flowers to commemorate the anniversary of their deportation.
The high school in the neighborhood where I’m staying is called the Sophie Scholl School, Named for a student, a member of the White Rose who was executed for opposing the Nazi regime.
The vocational school nearby is named for Anna Freud. and in front of the grammar school down the street, there’s an educational sign that reads, “In 1939, half of the students had to leave this school because they were Jewish. In addition, 110 Jewish neighbors are known to have disappeared.
They were deported and murdered. No one claims to have seen anything.” And in the square in front of the University of Berlin, now called Humboldt University, there is a hole cut into the ground like a window into hell.
If you look down into that window, you will see a white room of pristine but empty bookshelves, a barren white library. It marks the spot where on May 10th, 1933, university students and professors together lit a bonfire, igniting the flames of what would become a national book burning.
The window is a memorial not just to the destruction of books, but to the destruction of the ideas contained in those books. A memorial recalling the day when students and professors all over Germany gleefully burned the works of Stefan Zweig, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, Thomas Mann, H.G. Wells. 20,000 books from the university library were burned that day in that square. Books that were considered morally degenerate, not only because they were written by Jews who had the audacity to consider themselves German, not only because Marxists wished to undermine the distinction between classes, but because the universal values of the Enlightenment that influenced these writers, Jew and Gentile, literary and political, were now understood by Nazi propagandists and academic moralists alike to be un-German in their essence.
The greatest German philosopher of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, rector of the University of Freiburg, cheered them on. “Oh, flames,” he announced, “proclaim to us, shine for us, show us the path from which there is no return. Ignite the flames.
Let hearts burn.” Not surprisingly, among the writers whose works were burned that day was Sigmund Freud. And not just Freud. The students burned what they called all of the scriptures of the school of Sigmund Freud. As they threw these volumes into the fire, the student leader uttered what came to be known as the Feuersprache, the fire speech, the condemnation as if in a court of law of the work, its ideas, and its author.
For the works of Freud, the leader intoned, “Because his soul-degrading theory insists that human drives are base and aggressive, and because we stand for the nobility and purity of the human soul, we consign these writings of Sigmund Freud to the flames.” News of the book burning soon reached Vienna, and when he heard it, Freud responded with his usual wry humor, “What progress we are making.
They are content simply to burn my books. In the Middle Ages, they would have burned me.” But alas, history shows that Freud was too optimistic about modernity. If he hadn’t been ransomed with his family in nineteen thirty-eight, they would have burned him, as they did his four sisters, Marie, Pauline, Rosa, and Adolfine.
It turns out that Freud’s literary hero, Heinrich Heine, was more prescient than Freud. In his play, Alansor, also burned on that day, Heine had written, “Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.” Where they burn books, eventually they will burn people as well.
The truth is, those students and professors who favored the muscular clarity of fascism over the humiliating moral demands of the Enlightenment, they were onto something. The Enlightenment, after all, introduced the disquieting notion that all people were equal in value and that all actions regarding other human beings were moral actions.
It demanded individual ethical responsibility, not before some mystical spirit, but before one’s own conscience. And then Sigmund Freud came along and shoved the psychological consequences of these new values right in their faces. Shame before others and guilt before our inner judge.
Freud understood that the self-judgment of the Age of Enlightenment led directly to the psychology of neurosis. Without tyrants to lord over us, Freud taught us, we required our own self-censorship, which came in the form of repression. To quote Freud, “Unconscious guilt leads to the paradoxical proposition that the normal man is not only far more immoral than he believes, but also far more moral than he knows.”
That’s because in an enlightened society, the tyranny of the king and the tyranny of the priest are replaced by the tyranny of the superego. This news that the Enlightenment that made us compassionate brought with it the experience of guilt that made us neurotic was exactly what the Nazis tried to burn, along with the Jews who reminded them of that fact.
Heidegger rejected the idea that Germans repressed their base and aggressive nature. Jews in general, and Freud in particular, he believed, threatened the romantic spirit of the German Volk. “The Führer himself,” Heidegger proclaimed, “and he alone is the present and future German reality and its law.” With the burning of the very notions of repression, the Nazis glorified the base instincts they purported to condemn, unleashing a tempest of violence the likes of which the world had never seen before.
Shakespeare described such unleashed horrors in a single sentence in The Tempest: “Hell is empty and the devils are all here.” Under the Nazi regime, we could say the gates of the unconscious had been thrown open and all of its horrors unleashed upon the world And when it was over, when the Reich was defeated and the death camps were liberated, and the photos of the bodies and the mass graves and the emaciated survivors were published worldwide, the entire world was faced with the consequences. The entire world was forced to look upon what happens when humanity unleashes its base and primitive instincts into the world.
What happens when the very concept of the unconscious is abandoned and collapses? The horrors of the Nazi period produced a sense of moral shame so profound that even the victors experienced it, because it revealed that the human capacity for sheer evil is contagious and spreads rapidly like a virus.
In response, I believe, to their own sense of shame, the victorious powers worked to reinstate and universalize the values of the Enlightenment. A new enlightened definition of criminality had to be invented to account for such evil: crimes against humanity. A new entity was created to cope with it, the United Nations, and a new worldwide constitution was instituted and posted on the gates of hell to keep those gates sealed once and for all, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
for a brief period in human history, tyranny was combated with conscience. In America, fascism and racism were for a time answered with the still small voice that is connected to the better angels of our souls.
I think the distinction here is that when one breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, he must do it openly, he must do it cheerfully, he must do it lovingly, he must do it civilly, not uncivilly, and he must do it with a willingness to accept the penalty. And any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail in order to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for law.
If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I would do so. I like to think I’m a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me Mr. Chairman Senator Well, let’s, let’s- You’ve done enough. All right. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency? I know this hurts you, Mr. Welch. I’ll say it- But may I, may I say, Mr. Chairman, as a point of personal privilege-
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My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man
But here we are again, a new century, and the people have already forgotten the lessons of the old century.
The people of America have found their tyrant leader, a leader who alone is the present and future American reality and its law. And the powerful, knowing which way the wind is blowing, have again turned against the values of the Enlightenment.
Empathy, responsibility, guilt, those essential human qualities, in the new America, they just make us weak. But don’t take my word for it. Take it from Elon Musk, who believes that for Western society, empathy is a fundamental vulnerability.
The, the, the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re, they’re, they’re ex- they’re, it’s, it’s they’re exploiting a, a, a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.
Guilt too for Musk is an unnecessary liability.
“The Germans,” he said, “made a mistake in feeling guilty about the past.” Here, listen to him address members of the AfD, the German political party that is so far to the right that the German government keeps them under surveillance for Nazi sympathies. I’m very excited for the AfD and, um, I think, uh, I think you are really the, the best hope for Germany. The German people are, are, are sort of really, really an ancient nation, goes back thousands of years. You know, as even, uh, you know, you sort of read, uh, Julius Caesar’s, uh, account of like first encountering the, the, um, German tribes in the Gaul campaigns, and he was like, “Wow, very impressive.” “The- they– these are str- these are very, very powerful warriors.” Um, so like, you know, I think there’s like frankly too much of a, of a focus on, on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.But okay, Musk may be the richest man in the world, and he himself has been known to give Nazi salutes, but you don’t take him seriously when he recommends that Germans should stop feeling guilty about the past and celebrate their mythic military victories.
You don’t take him seriously because he is on the spectrum. He controls two-thirds of the world’s satellites and the world’s most influential social platform, and he manipulates AI on that platform for his own political ends, And his aborted DOGE project has been responsible for the preventable deaths of half a million children worldwide.
But we enlightened liberals conclude that he’s just too weird to really be taken seriously. So let’s listen to another of the Silicon Valley oligarchs, Marc Andreessen, the billionaire founder of Netscape, who is not on the spectrum.
Andreessen also claims that conscience is our problem and that successful people don’t look inward. And like the book burners of Bebelplatz, Andreessen blames the Enlightenment and Sigmund Freud for giving us those ideas.
I’ve just found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It’s, it’s just, it’s a real problem, and it’s, it’s a problem at work, and it’s a problem at home.
like before a hundred years ago, it never, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective. Like it’s the, the whole idea of, I mean, just all of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy and all the things that kind of result from that are, you know, kind of manufactured in the 1910s, 1920s.
Great men of history didn’t sit around doing this stuff at any prior point, right? It’s all, it’s, it’s, it’s all a new construct. It was, it was, you know, it was… Well, so first Western civilization had to kind of invent the concept of the individual, right? Which was like a new concept, you know, so, so a hundred years ago.
And then, and then, you know, for a long time, it was all right, the individual runs, right? And like does, does all these things and builds things and, you know, builds empires and builds companies and builds technology, does all these things. And then, you know, kind of this kind of guilt-based whammy, you know, kind of showed up, uh, from Europe, from Europe, uh, a lot of it from Vienna, you know, 1910s, 1920s, Freud and all, all, all, all that, that entire movement.
And, and kind of turned all that inward and basically said, “Okay, now we need to like, you know, basically second-guess the, the individual. We need to criticize the individual. The individual needs to self-criticize,” right? The individual needs, needs to feel guilt, needs, needs to look backwards, needs to, you know, dwell in the past. It never resonated with me.
“Ah, yes, there it is again, Freud’s soul-destroying theory of conscience and responsibility. It simply gets in the way of the superiority and nobility of the entrepreneurial soul.”
i-i-in fairness, um, you know, the, the, the introspection is probably linked to the, the personality trait of neuro-neuroticism, right?
Um, so you know, a lot of, a lot of the best founders are, you know, I think like zero percent neuroticism. Like they, they just don’t get emotionally phased by things that happen, which is a superpower when you’re an entrepreneur.
But having said that, some of the great entrepreneurs are in fact very neurotic.
But we just have this like fundamental view that technology is like, on balance, an enormously powerful force in the world, and that basically, that the big problem with the world is that there’s, you know, there’s not enough technology, there’s not enough information, There you have it. The new world order all over again.
Too much guilt and not enough technology. And if you scratch beneath the surface, you’ll find that for America’s techno oligarchs, the wars of the soul have taken on an extreme religious fervor. They are devoting enormous resources toward a single goal, the preparation of the world for a technological messianic era, led CEO style from above, Where AI helps to free us once and for all from egalitarianism, human rights, and democracy. It is not a coincidence that their intellectual leaders, Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel, term the new age they are trying to create the Dark Enlightenment.
But we can call it what it is, the Fourth Reich.
But America, please don’t be so quick to blame the great transition, the transition that shuns shame and conscience. Don’t be so quick to blame it on the libertarian techno-oligarchical religious right.
Yes, it has been helped along by Project 2025 and the Catholic domination of the Supreme Court. And yes, Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk and their ethno-nationalist turning point incels sound exactly like the students and professors at Bebelplatz. But the great transition could not have happened without you and me.
It could not have happened if we hadn’t been sleepwalking through the last forty years while neoliberalism, social technology, and psychotherapy stripped us of our souls. We, too, transformed so completely that we instantly blame others for what we are responsible for.
We, too, turned away from our inner experience, our inner values, while we basked in the late twentieth century comforts of consumerism, postmodernism, medication, and self-pity. We didn’t notice as the Enlightenment values we claim to hold dear, the pursuit of knowledge, the appreciation of beauty, the moral example of nature, transformed in the age of Reagan and Thatcher from being ends in themselves, pleasures in themselves, and they became something we accrued.
Our homes, our children’s education, our health, art, beauty, all became investments.
Neoliberalism was the first step of this transformation, training us to look outside ourselves for what had value, shifting our identities from who we are to what we have. And so the post-war generation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of the International Criminal Court, of anti-war and civil rights protests was unable to protest neoliberalism because, to quote David Foster Wallace’s iconic joke, neoliberalism became the water we were swimming in.
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
The neoliberal waters we swam in signaled a change of focus to the outside, not only in what was supposed to bring us happiness. It also signaled a change in how we understood our unhappiness. Subtly and inexorably, we began to experience mental distress too in neoliberal terms. Insight went out of fashion.
Psychoanalysis went out of fashion. Sigmund Freud was condemned again starting in the 1980s, not because he underestimated the nobility and purity of the human soul, but rather because he was seen to have denied what during neoliberal capitalism came to be seen as the true source of our pain and struggle: trauma.
It started in the ’80s with a legitimate focus on the traumatic effects of war, genocide, rape, and early child sexual abuse. But like everything in the 1980s, trauma too became commodified. It shifted from being understood as an experience to becoming a kind of status. The traumatized demanded and for a time received special treatment, and soon what constituted trauma expanded.
Experiences of social inequities and political injustice were recast as psychological harms. Advocacy groups coalesced around shared traumas rather than shared injustice.
Political action became less about expanding universal rights to the marginalized and oppressed, and more about specific fights on behalf of particular victimized groups. Today, America has become stratified into identity factions demanding recognition and redress for their particular history of victimization and guarantees of protection against re-traumatization.
Prevention of trauma became the justification for the restriction of other time-honored American freedoms, including speech, assembly, and debate. This tradition has become so pervasive that today even young white males, a group once deemed the most privileged and protected, now lays claim to being a victimized identity group.
And not surprisingly, psychotherapy changed along with the rest of the culture. It is no longer about unconscious splits and defenses, but about vulnerability and identity. We no longer speak of patients who seek understanding of their suffering, but of clients who seek affirmation of their identity from therapists who share their identity, since only people with similar traumas, they believe, can understand their experience.
And since it has become a truism in the popular press that seventy percent of Americans have been victims of trauma and adverse childhood experiences, The biggest American problem is not fascism or violence, but the lack of trauma therapists Neoliberal consumerism trained Americans to seek happiness outside of ourselves, and trauma therapy trained us to find our misery there as well.
And now we live in a world turned upside down psychologically. What once gave pleasure has become a source of anxiety. This thing that I want, is it worth the effort? can I add it to my resume? Will it increase in value? How soon can I check it off my bucket list? And at the same time, suffering has become a kind of satisfaction, a badge of honor we lord over others.
And so in some essential and tragic way, Andreessen and Musk are correct. The era of looking inward, of guilt and self-reflection and responsibility, which gave us extraordinary literature and art and a sense of wonder at the depth and breadth of human subjectivity, of aspiring to universal good and accepting the noble limitation of those aspirations, that era is over.
The age of neurosis is over. We are now fully in the era of looking outside ourselves for our happiness and our misery. Welcome to the post-enlightenment, post-neoliberal, post-postmodern, post-neurotic age of American psychosis. But please understand, I do not mean anything pejorative when I say psychosis.
If there’s a pejorative in the phrase American psychosis, it doesn’t come from the word psychosis. It comes from the word American. for those of you who have followed Madness, you know that for some time I have been trying to explain psychosis, not as a diagnosis and certainly not as an insult, but as one of the two dominant ways people’s minds are organized.
For too long, we have looked at the other of these two dominant organizations, neurosis, as normal, but those times are gone. The new normal, I am arguing, at least in America, is psychosis. And no, I’m not talking about delusions, hallucinations, or gross disorganization. Those are the symptoms of a psychotic breakdown.
I’m talking about the non-pathological version of psychotic thinking. And what differentiates the psychotic mindset from the neurotic mindset is that the psychotic personality focuses on the external world as the source of experiences in the internal world. For neurotics, it’s the opposite. Neurotics look inside.
They construct internal models to find the truth of what they perceive outside. people who function in a psychotic mode tend to believe that whatever they’re feeling physically or emotionally must be caused by something outside themselves. And so if they have strong feelings or confusing bodily sensations, they instinctively look for some powerful external cause. They don’t pay much attention to subjective experience, their own or other people’s. As a result, they are not empathetic.
But while psychotics have difficulty holding onto subjective structures, they can be very good at mastering objective structures and forms. What neurotics see as their lack of logic, they see as freedom from rigidity.
And in fact, they can be our most creative musicians, artists, philosophers, programmers. They believe that they are simply not susceptible to the made-up stories that neurotic people like to tell themselves about the world. And so they believe that while neurotics are fooling themselves, they see things as they really are, which is why they make excellent intelligence operators and code breakers.
They just refuse to take norms for granted. They are constantly challenging those norms, testing them, and finding their weaknesses. The strongest among them manipulate those weaknesses to bend reality to their own will. At its extreme, when reality doesn’t match their ideas, psychotics can become aggressive and paranoid.
They pull themselves out of confusion by creating theories of causality, conspiracy theories based on very little evidence and with very little need for consistency. What feels right at the moment must be the truth Trump is the poster child for this kind of psychotic reasoning, and he uses it to his advantage.
What once in the era of neurosis was pathologized as loose associations and flight of ideas, Trump has normalized. It’s now called the weave. But Trump’s superpower is that instead of becoming confused or disorganized when his sense of reality is challenged, he organizes himself with aggression.
Trump attacks first and responds afterwards. He provokes the external world to respond to him, inducing confusion and fear and anger in others, and in this way, he creates the reality that proves that his suspicions were right in the first place. Trump has the sociopath’s instinct for power, and he has transformed government policy and international relations to mirror that sociopathic instinct.
He provokes fear by making outrageously violent threats that he actually has the power to carry out. And then after the attack is felt viscerally by his opponents, he reduces the threat. This is what he calls negotiations, the art of the deal. Lawsuits, federal investigations, tariffs, and now war. Trump is unparalleled in this century in his brazen capacity to instill real fear and capitalize on relief.
What is terrifying is how much Trump is succeeding this time around in making American culture an extension of his mind. Every day, he turns conspiracy theories, emotional logic, and aggressive psychosis into the waters we are swimming in. He has already succeeded in transforming much of the government, much of the press, the techno oligarchy, the military, the entirety of Homeland Security, and much of the country into thinking and acting the way he does.
he has appointed a cabal of like-minded psychotics to every leadership position in his cabinet, leaders who promote violence on the streets of American cities, violence against not only illegal aliens, but American citizens who stand with them. He labels all citizen protesters domestic terrorists and the enemy within. He has freed violent criminals and criminal politicians so long as they believe what he believes and acts the way he acts. He sends his cabinet ministers into congressional hearings like soldiers into battle, soldiers trained to take no prisoners, and he’s clearly planning to treat the election process exactly the same way.
And all the while Trump has been fomenting an American culture that aligns with his own psychotic mindset, liberal Democrats have been responding neurotically. They have managed to completely join the psychotic culture of polarization and insult in their rhetoric while remaining neurotic in their personalities.
They fear, like children, that if they were to see the reality that is happening in front of their eyes, actually see the chaotic cruelty of their parent-like leaders, they would, like children, lose all hope.
so liberals retreat into fantasy and self-delusion, consoling themselves with bedtime stories about the future, believing that if they share just the perfect meme that exposes Trump’s irrationality and hypocrisy, the American people will finally come to their senses.
They believe that because of the war and rising gas prices, Americans are turning against Trump, and that these last tweets about Jesus and destroying Iranian civilization, even Republicans now see how insane he is,
And look, even MAGA supporters like Tucker Carlson are now turning against Trump, and He can’t last. But they just don’t see that none of this has stopped Trump from moving ahead on every front, and that the more they join the aggressive psychotic culture, the more power they give Trump and his cronies
Because Trump and his cronies are the masters of acting on paranoia and aggression, and they understand that neurotics are afraid of the sight of blood. Liberal Democrats just can’t see what they are up against, and what they are up against is the inexorable momentum of psychotic politics.
The greater the chaos, the more unpredictable the violence, the more difficult life becomes for the people, the more psychotic America becomes. And the more psychotic America becomes, the more Trump is seen as the answer. The same was true of Stalin and Hitler and Putin. When the whole world is turning upside down, the people demand a strong leader.
And so in the twenty-first century, with the radical change human beings have wrought upon the world and the threatening disasters the world has given us in response, it may be that psychosis, that directing our focus outward is inevitable.
It may even be that a great transition is needed to navigate the dangers of a radically changing world. But at least here in Berlin, there is a reminder on every street of what happens when a psychotic leader mesmerizes a frightened and angry population. Berliners know how easily psychotic culture shifts to paranoid culture, and in paranoid culture, the people don’t blame the powerful, they blame the weak and vulnerable.
It’s time for Americans to start placing memorials on every street,in front of every school and every immigration office. the memorials need to state who was deported
from our neighborhood, who was murdered for standing up. A reminder of how easily psychosis can slide into paranoia, and paranoia into hatred, and hatred into cruelty. a reminder of how easily a people can be led into fascism.
What I am saying is that this is the moment to stand up to fascism. We must give up our own psychotic hatreds and our neurotic delusions, and then the hard work begins. We ourselves must begin again to take responsibility for what happens on our streets and to our neighbors.
We have to risk once again taking risks for what we believe in,
It’s time to stop blaming the others because there is no one to blame for our turn to fascism, no one to blame but ourselves.I’m Steven Reisner, and you have been listening to Madness, where psychoanalysis and fascism collide. In the next episode, I will be introducing a lost concept of Freud’s, which he called drekology, and I will be examining the role of autism in our great cultural transition.
I’d like to thank my producer, Ted Strauss and the Tiger Lilies for giving me permission to use Hell is Empty
I hope you will subscribe for future podcasts, and if you like what you’ve heard, please share it with friends, colleagues, and on social media. Thank you.
