The Perpetual Twilight of Our Times

Sundays

May 19, 2024

I’ve been noticing that collectively we seem to be trapped in an amorphous state of malaise. We are discontented, but we do not know why. We are so broken that a significant number of us believe they were better off four years ago than we are now.

Stop for a minute and consider that.

More people think jobs and the economy were better during the Trump administration than under Biden despite ample evidence to the contrary. More people think Donald was a stronger and more decisive leader than Biden is. More people think it was Donald who displayed good judgment in a crisis and that he was better at managing the government effectively.

In what universe is this even possible? How could so many people believe that the man who killed hundreds of thousands of Americans with COVID, who incited an armed insurrection against his own government, and who has been engaged in the big lie for almost four years in an attempt to break Americans’ confidence in the very concept of free and fair elections is a better alternative to President Biden?

I’m tempted to think it’s mass delusion, but the explanation is much simpler.

Recently, clinical psychiatrists George Makari and Richard A. Friedman wrote in The Atlantic:

[W]e see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger—exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.
When faced with an overwhelming and painful reality like COVID, forgetting can be useful—even, to a degree, healthy. It allows people to temporarily put aside their fear and distress, and focus on the pleasures and demands of everyday life, which restores a sense of control. That way, their losses do not define them, but instead become manageable.

Yes, there is forgetting. That is often how human beings move forward. For example, mention of the 1918 pandemic in literature or elsewhere is practically non-existent. Currently, there seem to be two things going on simultaneously. First, as hard as it is to believe, things didn’t get better after Joe Biden won the 2020 election, they got worse. It started with Donald’s failure to concede the election, continued with January 6^th, and worsened when almost all elected Republicans decided to keep Donald at the head of the Party by backing the big lie and then pretending the insurrection, during which their own lives were in danger, wasn’t really a big deal after all. Second, you cannot heal from your trauma if you’re still in the midst of being traumatized—or re-traumatized, as the case may be.

Those of us paying attention—because we care, because we must, because we are too afraid to turn away—spend many of our waking moments freaked out about November and the potential aftermath. It’s exhausting. So, the malaise permeates all aspects of our lives. We experience and evaluate everything through the veil of our unprocessed complex trauma. We are so turned around that many of us blame the man who has actually tried to fix the horrific damage his predecessor inflicted on all of us while giving a pass to the man who landed us here. And not only is Donald getting a pass; tens of millions of American want to give him almost unlimited power which he will wield in ways that will destroy us. We know this is what will happen because that is what he and his co-conspirators are telling us, loudly and clearly.

The trauma we experienced during COVID was quiet and slow, occurring over time in a tense drama of sameness, of hopelessness, of unbearable isolation and loneliness, of helplessness.

To be traumatized is to be initiated into a world without trust. It is to be burdened with all of the darkness the world contains and deprived of its considerable light. If we fail to identify what is being done to us, (and during the first months of COVID it was impossible to identify almost anything) our post-traumatic wounds get buried. But no matter how deep down they’ve been submerged, they inevitably surface, taking us by surprise and forcing us either to confront them at long last or to get out our shovels to dig them under again.

To be human is to be oriented in time and space. During COVID, time ceased to behave according to the rules we’ve always tried to impose upon it, it often felt like we were living in a perpetual present of repetition, sameness, and a lurking terror that intruded into our dreamscapes. In addition to the uncertainty, we were stalked by the constant fear of exposure, isolation, sickness, and death which subjected us to traumatic stress. Over time, when everything we feel or think or experience gets exacerbated by the slow boil of that stress, it becomes undesirable and even impossible to stay in the moment.

Traumatic time destroys in both directions—past and future—and the truth of that can be hard to face, especially for the unpracticed. The pull to forget becomes even stronger than the pull to run. Forgetting makes us complicit with the trauma we’re trying to escape, and by ignoring the experience of it and, more important, the way the experience made us feel, a part of us, in some cases the most vital part of who we are, remains tethered to the past. By cutting ourselves off from that emotion we shut down access to the full range of who we are. But the price of release is steep, and it’s so much easier to live our lives pretending we’re whole.

It’s remarkable how desperately we want to move on from the unexamined pain, as if the only way to give meaning to it is to lie. It’s counterproductive, of course, but the desire to move on, especially after large-scale betrayals, is irresistible. As soon as the dust clears, the people in power tell us everything is fine; there is no need to look back. After all, who doesn’t want to put the atrocities behind us? What crimes against humanity would we like to dredge up?

When the traumatizing circumstances are made gratuitously worse by the people who (1) are responsible for them and (2) could have done something to mitigate them, the experience of betrayal, symbolically at least, is akin to being in the presence of another human being who, though witnessing the extremity of your situation, even though it could result in your death and despite having the power to render you assistance, refuses. When your life is endangered by the person who could save you, the sense of betrayal can be unbearable.

One of the very few mitigating factors of mass trauma is the sense that we are all in it together. Members of the Trump administration made that impossible not because they were incompetent but because they thought dividing us was a winning strategy. My fear is they were right.

Promoting divisiveness among us suited their purposes, just as setting up a false dichotomy between the pandemic and the economy did. In real time it could be hard to gauge how cynical and cruel this ploy was, but in retrospect the extent of the deliberate sabotage is breathtaking. It’s hard to grapple with what was taken from us and even harder to fathom the depth of depravity required to do the taking.

And yet, given the failures to grapple with the betrayals and the source of them, we are close to putting back in the Oval Office the man who created the circumstances of our malaise, who killed many of us and cynically manufactured the horrible divisions among the rest of us, and who will, if given the opportunity, break us. It is quite literally stunning.

The impact of unacknowledged trauma can be catastrophic—at both the personal and the societal levels—and by failing to invest in the infrastructure necessary to prevent or at least mitigate these kinds of disasters in the future, we leave ourselves open to long-term damage that could be irreparable.

Trauma can never be outrun, but it is a human impulse to try. If we want to avoid a future in which we continue to put ourselves at the mercy of anti-majoritarian authoritarians, then we need to stop and take stock of how we got here. The truth is that only remembering will heal us. It could save us. And it might even set us free.