The spiritual malaise afflicting the United States is no different in kind or degree from that which rent the life of Ireland in the struggle between Protestants and Catholics. There is a smug sense of superiority among us, to the effect that "...at least we haven't descended to the level of a religious war." Why? Because here the practice of religion has dwindled almost (but not quite!) to insignificance? Because only a small minority of Americans take their religion seriously? That would be to miss the point TOTALLY.
From a mental illness point of view, both phenomena -- current political strife in the US, and the Catholic/Protestant "troubles" of Ireland -- are instances of one singular dynamic. My essay Mass Insanity concludes with the following few paragraphs:
--snip--
Freud expressed deep interest in social questions throughout his career, and in later life came to focus on those questions almost exclusively, with works such as The Future of an Illusion (1927). Younger psychoanalysts studied the events of the Thirties in Germany and elsewhere, with a focus on the so-called "mass" movements of large groups of people. I want to cite, as my text for this post, remarks by one of them, Otto Fenichel (1897-1946) from his magisterial (and finally in the public domain) The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (1945):
When the child is forced through experiences to renounce his belief in his omnipotence, he considers the adults who have now become independent objects to be omnipotent, and tries by introjection to share their omnipotence again. Certain narcissistic feelings of well-being are characterized by the fact that they are felt as a reunion with an omnipotent force in the external world, brought about either by incorporating parts of this world or by the fantasy of being incorporated by it ("secondary narcissism"). Religious ecstasy, patriotism, and similar feelings are characterized by the ego's participation in something unattainably high. Many social phenomena are rooted in the "omnipotents'" promise to the powerless of the desired passive participation on condition of their fulfillment of certain rules.
While the study of authoritarian personalities produced much sociological data, this small snippet of psychoanalytic thought provides more of a sense of what makes such personalities "tick." I submit that the last sentence, above, "Many social phenomena are rooted in the "omnipotents'" promise to the powerless of the desired passive participation on condition of their fulfillment of certain rules." can shed light on, as 1 Peter 4:8 had it, "a multitude of sins." Who could be immune to the offer of that quid pro quo?
--snip--
I can't think of anything further to say on this point.
Note on this text
Orwell wrote this retrospective meditation on the Spanish Civil War in 1942. It may be one of two pieces -- the other being the better-known "Homage To Catalonia," written in 1938 -- that comprise the only in-depth explorations of the topic undertaken by Orwell. (To the best of my knowledge these are the only two extended works by him on the war, but I could be wrong.) I have attempted to reproduce the emphases and punctuation as they appear on the Orwell Foundation's website, whose URL is below.
Excerpts from "Looking Back on the Spanish War" from A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS by George Orwell. Copyright (c)1950 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, renewed 1978 by Sonia Brownell. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.
from "Looking Back on the Spanish War"
The only propaganda line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to represent themselves as Christian patriots saving Spain from a Russian dictatorship. This involved pretending that life in Government Spain was just one long massacre (vide the Catholic Herald or the Daily Mail -- but these were child's play compared with the continental Fascist press), and it involved immensely exaggerating the scale of Russian intervention. Out of the huge pyramid of lies which the Catholic and reactionary press all over the world built up, let me take just one point -- the presence in Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco partisans all believed in this; estimates of its strength went as high as half a million. Now, there was no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a handful of airmen and other technicians, a few hundred at the most, but an army there was not. Some thousands of foreigners who fought in Spain, not to mention millions of Spaniards, were witnesses of this. Well, their testimony made no impression at all upon the Franco propagandists, not one of whom had set foot in Government Spain. Simultaneously these people refused utterly to admit the fact of German or Italian intervention, at the same time as the Germany and Italian press were openly boasting about the exploits of their âlegionariesâ. I have chosen to mention only one point, but in fact the whole of Fascist propaganda about the war was on this level.
This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish war be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books, and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never existed will become historical fact, and schoolchildren will learn about it generations hence. But suppose Fascism is finally defeated and some kind of democratic government restored in Spain in the fairly near future; even then, how is the history of the war to be written? What kind of records will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the records kept on the Government side are recoverable -- even so, how is a true history of the war to be written? For, as I have pointed out already, the Government also dealt extensively in lies. From the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that 'the facts' existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as 'the truth' exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as 'science'. There is only 'German science, 'Jewish science' etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, 'It never happened' -- well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five -- well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs -- and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.
But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future? Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can't come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn't come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday's weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can't violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist. We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief. Don't resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modern industrialized state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?
nb. The text above is based on that found here::
Introduction to Orwell Audio Clip
When Orwell returned to England after his stint in the Spanish war, it became known in political circles that he was writing a book (eventually Homage To Catalonia) about his experiences there. The Communist Party in England put it out that Orwell had once written that working class people "smell," in an effort to smear and discredit him in advance of the release of his book, which was going to be VERY critical of the Communist role in Spain. Of course he had never written any such thing. He had written that many in the middle class are brought up to believe the lower classes smelled.
The late Frederick Davidson was one of the high priests of recorded book narrators. He narrated Michael Shelden's Orwell: The Authorized Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 1991) for audible.com.
Elsewhere on this site is a one thousand word extract from an essay -- Looking Back On The Spanish War -- written by Orwell in 1942; I titled the extract Orwell On Fact and Reality. As an aid in understanding Orwell's visceral involvement in these issues, I make available a seven minute audio extract from Shelden's biography.