Stew

“The wall is a messianic promise, and there is deep confusion in both Trump and his followers between the physical entity (a barrier between Mexico and the United States that will never be built) and the metaphysical vision of safety and racial purity.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“The individual then responds to the manipulations through developing what I shall call the psychology of the pawn. Feeling unable to escape from forces more powerful than any individual, one subordinates everything to adapting to them.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“Donald Trump is a special kind of cultist. He is in no way totalistic—his beliefs can be remarkably fluid—nor is he the leader of a sealed-off cultic community. Rather, his cultism is inseparable from his solipsistic reality. That solipsism emanates only from the self and what the self requires, which makes him the most bizarre and persistent would-be owner of reality. And in his way he has created a community of zealous believers who are geographically dispersed. A considerable portion of his base can be understood as cultist, as followers of a guru who is teacher, guide, and master. From my studies of cults and cultlike behavior, I recognize this aspect of Trump’s relationship to his followers. It is evident at his large-crowd events, which began as campaign rallies but have continued to take place during his presidency. There is a ritual quality to the chants he has led such as “Lock her up!” and “Build that wall!” The latter chant is followed by the guru’s question “And who will pay for it?,” then the crowd’s answer, “Mexico!” The chants and responses are less about policy than they are assertions of guru-disciple ties. The chants are rituals that generate “high states”—or what can even be called experiences of transcendence—in disciples. The back-and-forth brings them closer to the guru and enables them to share his claim to omnipotence and his sacred aura. Trump does not directly express an apocalyptic narrative, but his presence has an apocalyptic aura. He tells us that, as not only a “genius” but a “very stable genius,” he alone can “fix” the terrible problems of our society. To be sure these are bizarre expressions of his extreme grandiosity, but also of a man who would be a savior to a disintegrating world.”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry

“This biomedical vision was part of a more general mysticism that was as described to me and observed firsthand by an American psychiatric colleague, Albert Stunkard, who, as a schoolboy, lived in Germany during the 1930s because his father’s scientific fellowship had brought the family there. Stunkard was astounded by the behavior of many of his student friends; formerly serious and rational adolescents, they became ecstatic Nazi supporters at rallies and in their everyday demeanor. Their intense idealism seemed to him to be transformed into a mystical sense of being part of a new movement that gave meaning to their lives and promise to the human future. (Stunkard was to learn, with some sadness, that most of his friends were eventually killed in military combat.) The larger truth here is that movements that kill great numbers of people are likely to do so with the claim to virtue—and that virtue tends”
― Robert Jay Lifton, Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry