“The way I see it, if we don’t all march in step, if we don’t do as we’re told,
if we don’t follow our leaders blindly, there’s no hope of saving our freedom.”
Major Frank Burns in M*A*S*H
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Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, in 2016, famously proclaimed, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Over subsequent years, Trump’s voluminous pronouncements, screeds, and lies leave many convinced his thinking, indeed his grasp on reality, cry out for serious scrutiny. Nevertheless, “I wouldn’t lose voters” proves prescient. Donald’s current tally of supporters is little changed from the day of that astonishing assertion. Why?
Each of us needs resources which seem best to serve and protect our needs. A well-defined cohort ameliorates this need. Globally over human history, tolerance of other cohorts has proven optimal in preserving our overall interests, sometimes our survival. When one group views its beliefs and values as superior, and seeks to impose, or imposes, them on others, suffering ensues.
Often, members of a threatened cohort yearn for a Savior, a Messiah! Socialist, Capitalist, Communist, or Fascist, people support a leader who pledges to ameliorate their plight. Such a group may evolve into a Cult: exhibiting “great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work.” (Merriam-Webster)
Cults range in size from Adolf Hitler’s millions to Marshall Applewhite’s 39 Heaven’s Gate disciples. Their impacts include: millions of dead in World War II; 909 of Jim Jones’s People’s Temple devotees drinking cyanide-laced Flavor Aid; 82 members and 4 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents dead in a fifteen-day standoff and subsequent conflagration with law enforcement at Vernon Wayne Howell’s, “David Koresh,” Branch Davidian compound.
The roots of cults motives are instructive. In The True Believer (1951)longshoreman and social philosopher Eric Hoffer argues that, “mass movements arise to challenge the status quo . . . (and) the sense of individual identity and the holding to particular ideals that can lead to extremism and fanaticism among both leaders and followers.”* (My emphasis)
Two decades after Hoffer, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction The Denial of Death (1973), anthropologist Ernest Becker “argues most human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death.”*
Reflecting Becker’s premise, in The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (2015) Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Psyzczynski postulate, “terror management theory” (TMT) were, in addition to religious beliefs, cultural values—including those that are seemingly unrelated to death—offer symbolic immortality. For example, values of national identity, identity, posterity, cultural perspectives on sex, and human superiority over animals, have been liked to calming death concerns . . . symbolic immortality.”*
Without further belaboring or pretending to understand what I don’t, personal observations may prove instructive. Sitting in a SE Portland parking lot, over maybe fifteen minutes I saw maybe two dozen shoppers entering or leaving Walmart. Nine in ten was black, brown, or Asian. A few days later, sitting in an Oregon City parking lot, over a similar amount of time, I saw a similar number of shoppers entering or leaving Safeway. None was black, brown, or Asian.
In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, fearful of what I’m not first to label “the coloring of America,” a white woman pleaded,“I want my country back!” Conservative, white, “Christian,” Americans desperately cling to their self-avowed Savior and Messiah, Donald J. Trump!
*Wikipedia
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