In the wake of the Democratic National Convention, the media has been working overtime reporting Trump’s meltdowns, rants, and increasingly alarming fascist proposals. This has been balanced by a great deal of hand-wringing about how close the election will be, along with a daily ticker tape of polling reports (including an official betting site in the UK). Many bloggers and other Substack commentators are telling us that this isn’t a normal election and are reminding us what is at stake should Donald Trump win.

Day after day, I scan all this reporting and commentary and ask:

“How can so many people still be supporting this guy?”

An Extraordinary Delusion

I can understand that some of the MAGA multitude are captured in a cult-like rapture and are closed and blind to any other possibility. I also suspect there is a fair amount of potential embarrassment for some that they’ve been sucked into a position that is hard to give up without losing face.

What I don’t understand is how so many—indeed any—of our elected leaders can continue to kiss the ring of the wanna-be king. Have they no shame? No integrity?

Even harder to understand is how the media can continue to cover the election as if it’s a fair fight between equally legitimate candidates. The yet-to-be-sentenced convicted felon is, in my mind, NOT a legitimate candidate.

I am not so cynical as to believe that many in Trump’s political base don’t know or don’t understand the contrast between the two candidates. I am also reluctant to simply think that all the MAGA enablers in Congress are so fixated on re-election that they’ve sold their soul for another term. (Although no doubt some of them are.) I even find it hard to believe that the propaganda power of FOX is so great that none of the facts surrounding Trump’s character, his extreme pronouncements, his increasing instability, and the tenets in Project 2025 haven’t leaked into the general awareness of the American population.

This conundrum isn’t just personal to me. From the conversations I’ve been having with my colleagues inside and outside of the U.S. these days, it appears to be widespread. Many people are asking themselves how it is that so many Americans are, apparently, still supporting Trump.

Something else must be going on to account for what could—and should—be viewed as some kind of mass delusion. 

In 1841, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay published Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. In this early study of crowd psychology, Mackay shared examples of bizarre ideas (such as the value of tulips) taking over a population, impacting collective behavior, and fuelling waves of persistent self-deception. In many ways, his descriptions reflect all sorts of movements and populist eruptions from the French and Russian Revolutions to Prohibition in the United States and the rise of the Third Reich in Germany. When these ideological ‘bubbles’ are in intractable opposition to established precedent and culture, they often lead to some form of conflict which must, eventually, be resolved. MacKay doesn’t speculate on why large populations become caught up in some interpretation of the world: he just describes the phenomenon.

I’ve considered that odd and counter-productive behavior has been documented in other species when they are under stress or when their habitat is threatened. For example, lemmings commit mass suicide when their population becomes unsustainable. Some insects eat their young. Perhaps our self-destructive shift could be related to something going on with the human species. There are examples throughout history of humans practicing mass suicides as a form of political protest, an escape from intolerable oppression, or as part of a doomsday religious cult.

Humanity today faces a plethora of existential threats, from climate change and economic collapse to terrorism and nuclear conflagration to pandemics and mass migrations. It is entirely plausible to me that our species is sufficiently stressed to precipitate all sorts of irrational behaviors at the individual and collective levels. Is mass delusion in America and other countries around the world warning signs of our current civilization’s coming collapse?

The Watchman’s Rattle

In her 2012 book The Watchman’s Rattle: A Radical New Theory of Collapse, Rebecca D. Costa shared her insights into the question of why civilizations collapse. Her research spanned the Mayan, Roman, Khmer, Byzantine, and Ming societies. Her thesis is that, when the complexity of a society’s problems become bigger than the technology and problem-solving capabilities available to resolve them, a process of decline is set in motion, beginning with gridlock of the decision-making and governance apparatus. This is accompanied by a “pass-it-on-to-the-next-generation” mindset, along with a massive shift replacing knowledge with a belief that something—anything—will save us.

It’s easy to find parallels in our contemporary world. Accelerating complexity is outpacing the rate at which our brains can develop new capabilities to think and navigate through our emerging reality. The world is increasingly confusing and divisive. Gridlock is on the rise: it’s difficult to find consensus about even the most basic challenges, such as climate change.

Costa is careful to say that her findings don’t mean we’re doomed. We must, however, acknowledge that our biological evolution is not keeping up with the pace of change.

When this occurs, it is essential to let go of our prevailing relationship to problems and cultivate new thinking patterns that foster fresh insights and ‘out-of-the-box’ solutions. In other words, we need to build new skills for navigating in what I call a “real-time world”. We need to let go of the notion that the past is causing the present. The future depends upon people and institutions that see their role as generating or creating solutions and new ways of being in the world. This would be a paradigm shift on the order of the rise of science and reason in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Let me return to the practical and the immediate.

Back to the Future

The future is still an open possibility, no matter what reasons we may come up with as to why so many people are moving toward the extreme right politically and throwing fuel on the flames of ungrounded conspiracy theories.

A Trump win in November would mean that a majority of Americans are committed to the destruction of most of the major institutions of the United States and the doctrine of separation of powers. Basically, we would be looking at the death of the American model of a free, rational, and relatively well-governed nation, a model that we fought for in two World Wars and which has been an example for most of the planet.

I just don’t believe that is what the majority of Americans want. In fact, I am having a lot of trouble imagining what our country and our world would look like should this come to pass. I am not at all sure how I would respond if it did.

And I’ll say it again: the future is still an open possibility.

Between now and November 5th, it is incumbent upon every one of us, myself included, to pause and reflect on the question of who we are in the face of our emerging reality. I propose one thing we can do is pay close attention to our everyday conversations. How we listen to each other and what we say in coffee shops, over a meal, or in business meetings can either maintain mass delusion and drive the persistence of the drift of history toward the far right and apocalyptic predictions—or it can challenge the assumptions we and others have about “the way it is” on Planet Earth and begin to offer other possibilities.

None of us know for certain where things are heading or how things will turn out. But we can ‘own’ our conversations and our relationship to the future and cultivate what I call “serene ambition”. Serene ambition combines a mood of acceptance for the “way it is” with a commitment to cultivate possibilities for a future worthy of the human spirit and imagination.

A future that can work for our species.

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Originally published September 2, 2024 on Jim Selman’s Substack “At the Crossroads“