The great catharsis

Tipping points, dams breaking, denial, gaslighting and bias

Dr. Rebecca Shatsky asked Twitter “What do you do/say when a patient won't believe you that they have #CANCER. As an oncologist this comes up every now and then and proves very difficult, looking to hear how others have dealt and what works best to help patients here.”

Image: DALL-E via ChatGPT-o. Not terrible considering how AIs tend to mess up rendering hands, though the index fingers seem to spring from nowhere.

One person shot back this answer: “if a [patient] doesn’t want to believe they have cancer, no amount of evidence will change that.”

“Facts don’t care about your feelings,” is Ben Shapiro’s shtick. But more often, facts are bent to cater to pre-existing biases and emotional attachment. It’s more rare to see people in outright denial, but that also happens. If someone is sick with a disease or a condition, “it is what it is” regardless of how we process it.

In 2000, I heard how my mother had an episode where she didn’t know her husband for a few days. Then it happened again. I was pretty resistant to the idea that it was Alzheimers but I didn’t know the whole story (my sister did). Eventually, we all had to come to terms with what she was trying to tell us: that yes, my mother had Alzheimer’s.

Denial is one of the well-documented stages of grief. It is the first stage, with the other four (according to the Kübler-Ross model) being anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. When you’ve got a diagnosis of some incurable disease, it’s pretty clear that you want to get to acceptance as quickly as possible, since time is usually the limiting factor. Dying in denial isn’t ideal, but dying angry or depressed is pretty terrible for everyone, especially the survivors. (One small silver lining of Alzheimers is that the person who has it never goes through the late stages of grief. They just fade away.)

And sometimes, reaching acceptance doesn’t lead to lying down and giving up to die. People who reach acceptance do not necessarily go gentle into that good night, as the Dylan Thomas poem rages against. I have a good friend who, as far as I know, may be the only case the Mayo Clinic has of surviving a particular kind of cancer that previous to himself had a 100% mortality. He had long ago reached acceptance, but continues to rage against the dying of the light—and with good humor.

On the way to that happy state, for most people there’s a lot of reality bending going on, and getting to full acceptance isn’t a quantum leap between stages. It’s more of a bending, distortion, twisting and grinding operation until the facts are distilled and the mind is quiet. A quiet mind is often the result of catharsis—the expunging of doubts, fears, anger, and self-delusion that directly precedes the peace of acceptance.

Let’s take that concept of bending, distortion, twisting, and bespoke reality, and drive it up to scale. Imagine 50,000 people find themselves trapped on an island with a large volcano that has begun to erupt and is about to explode, killing pretty much everyone. For example, Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic, if some promoter decided to host a Jethro Tull-themed rock festival featuring Mogwai at Edinburgh of the Seven Seas and brought in a dozen cruise ships. (Stay with me here, it’s just a thought experiment.)

Or the fictional deluded idiots who danced on top of the Library Tower in Los Angeles to welcome the aliens in “Independence Day.” But do that for the whole L.A. basin.

Those people are all going to die. The whole idea of them gathering at an active volcano or dancing on the roof with an alien spacecraft above is beyond risk-management’s ability to measure. Super foolhardy. In order to even be there they’d have to be deluded out of their noggins or deceived by someone who didn’t care if they died in a fire. They’ll reach the point of realizing their death is at hand just as the volcano spews 2.6 trillion metric tons of magma in a giant explosion, about five seconds before the pyroclastic flow traveling at supersonic speed incinerates them, or just as the aliens’ primary weapon pulses its first building-disassembly energy beam.

Of course those are extreme examples, but real world versions do exist. Cults, when cornered, do inexplicable, awful things, from whence we get the term “drink the Kool-Aid.” What corners cults? Actual reality, but it takes a tsunami of reality to unbend the powerful distortion surrounding the most durable ones.

Here’s where we get to the political situation causing unending apologies at places where non-Americans stare in disbelief at our news headlines and ask us “why?”

The Democratic Party has never really wanted to be in the business of marketing bubbles of bespoke reality, yet that’s where it finds itself now.

It’s not so much that these bubbles didn’t exist back in the early seventies, it’s just that they weren’t as pervasive. The long-quoted words of New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael goes like this: “I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.” In 2011, John Podhoretz went looking for the original version, which perfectly illustrates the self-awareness of the urban liberal bubble.

“Pauline Kael famously commented, after the 1972 Presidential election, ‘I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.'”

The difference between Kael’s world and today’s is that we don’t have to “feel them”—we have social media to bring them right up to our noses. And the level of self-awareness has evaporated: nobody lives in a special world anymore, not by their own admission. Today, we live in a world where there there’s “us”, who have it right, and “them” who are not only wrong, but also evil. The bubbles are incredibly strong, and hold the minds within them to an astonishing level of selective bias.

Thus we have some of the explanation of how—in plain sight—the media can freak out because they “suddenly” discovered President Joe Biden is old, and his mentation is in decline. From outside the bubble, nobody can claim that the same media hasn’t been reporting that Biden is old, and that his age could be an election issue. They have reported it.

But they didn’t believe what they were reporting. They refused to believe it, like the cancer patient in denial. Their own bias prevented that news, though it was in front of their own faces—that they were reading from the scripts they themselves wrote, and printing in newspapers they themselves edited and published, from getting past their cognitive filter.

Nobody can claim that the White House, and others on the left, didn’t push back against reports on Biden’s age from the mainstream press. The White House has always maintained that Biden is a vigorous and engaged president. It’s been almost Kabuki theater: a choreographed dance where these issues were brought up, the president’s staff has shot back, and the media has swallowed it and moved on.

But then the tsunami of the debate happened.

There’s a principle of action called the “first follower.” When one person or voice in a crowd is doing something or making claims, nobody seems to be following. Then, a follower joins, and the fact that another has joined busts the social bubble, leading more to join in.

Take a look at the video of “Dancing Guy”—it’s not the first guy to dance that begins the movement. It’s the first follower. One guy dancing—let’s say Fox News (not counting OANN or Newsmax here)—in the media with nobody following won’t penetrate the strong bubble. But the first follower gets noticed, and suddenly, the dam breaks.

The Biden-friendly media was well aware of his condition. But they felt some social obligation to remain part of the group supporting him, lest they be accused of helping Donald Trump. So they convinced themselves that Biden is okay, that the episodes were just examples of how the president has always been gaffe-prone, and that his age has not affected his core competencies.

Until they realized that the country had been paying more attention, that is. Batya Ungar-Sargon, writing in The Free Press, did not hold back even one drop of bile in her excoriation of those who executed what she called a “shameful betrayal of Biden.”

You don’t have to like Biden or be a fan of his presidency to find their cowardice, their disloyalty, and their humiliation of Biden appalling. Biden deserves to lose the election in November because his presidency has been a failure of policy—not because a group of rich elites decided to replace him. And there’s the rub: Clooney et al. had no problem helping President Biden win the presidency for a second term—until they thought he couldn’t. If they thought he could beat Trump they would enable him, no doubt certain that the same tightly knit group of advisers would continue running the show. 

Biden supporters in the media and in politics faced a mental crisis—a shared case of collective cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance, according to Psychology Today, is discomfort based on “new information that challenges a deeply held belief, or acts in a way that seems to undercut a favorable self-image.”

When someone tells a lie and feels uncomfortable about it because he fundamentally sees himself as an honest person, he may be experiencing cognitive dissonance. That is, there is mental discord related to a contradiction between one thought (in this case, knowing he did something wrong) and another (thinking that he is honest).

Though they’d been reporting on Biden’s age, seeing the polls about the effects of Biden’s age on the electorate, and hearing the pushback from the White House and leftists, members of Congress, donors, celebrities and others involved in helping Biden to campaign against Trump told themselves a helpful lie. They told themselves Biden was competent to run the executive branch of the government, and to continue doing that for four more years. They told themselves that Biden could take on Trump.

They knew that the last time Biden presided over a full cabinet meeting was October 2, 2023. They knew, as the New York Post reported: “Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who is not a Cabinet member but is nominated by the president, told House lawmakers Wednesday he had not met or spoken with Biden since May 2022.”

CNN in particular knew:

“There’s this general sense of just, unbelievable holding your breath every time he does an event, every time he’s with people,” one Democrat who interacts with those in Biden’s orbit told the outlet.

“This is going to get worse.”

And then the bottom fell out all at once. A good performance at the NATO conference is not enough to stem a tide that’s been rolling out for over two years. And the absolute cold betrayal of those who kept the president in the dark all that time tells of a terrible secret they’d all held inside themselves, and the catharsis they all experienced when they collectively shed its chains.

George Clooney wrote in his murderous New York Times op-ed, after attending the fundraising event where Barack Obama gently led Biden off stage:

It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe “big F-ing deal” Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.

Conservative columnist and news bloodhound Steve Krakauer posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, how cynical some Democrats have been. “Ezra Klein says Dem lawmakers are telling him off the record that actually Donald Trump isn't an existential threat to democracy, it's just something they say, another term of Trump wouldn't be as bad as... telling Biden to step aside as the nominee?!”

We can easily believe that some Democrats are simply slimeballs who, if they happened to run in a red district, would be humping the leg of Donald Trump. They don’t care who’s running the place, as long as there’s a place for them at the table. But there’s plenty of Democrats who don’t feel that way: to these, Trump is truly an existential threat to our republic, and must be stopped.

The conflict in the George Clooneys of the world is palpable. They were willing to drink the Kool-Aid for Joe Biden, as long as they thought he could lead them on a path to avoid a Trumpist hell, no matter how fraught. But now, they think Biden can’t lead, and won’t avoid the worst fate possible. Fortunately, they can spit out the Kool-Aid, but is it too late to stop the poison?

Answer: I don’t think it matters. The point is the catharsis itself.

Now, so Democrats can’t point to me and say “what about Republicans?” let me establish my bona-fides here. Thomas B. Edsall quoted me in 2016, in the New York Times: “The only hope for the GOP is to be on God’s side. Allowing the GOP to move into Trumpism will lead away from that hope, not toward it.” I still believe that.

I’ve written probably 100,000 words against Donald Trump, from his crooked business dealings, to his incompetence in office. Trump doesn’t deserve to be president. He has captured the GOP, the largely the religious base behind it, in his cult of personality. Most lawmakers, and even many Trump-aligned media, know exactly what he is.

Some are fools, some are despicable sycophants and leg-humpers of the same ilk as Democrats who plunged the long blades happily into an old man’s back. Some are real believers in various types of “conservatism,” (in scare-quotes) which may include some strains of “Christian nationalism.” Some are simply dissatisfied with the moral direction, profligate spending, and outright lunacy of the far-left progressive agenda.

And some know better, like Nikki Haley and Gov. Chris Sununu. Those two simply decided to be good Republicans, stay within the social circle so they are not accused of “helping Biden,” and remain in a kind of cognitive dissonance where they can tell themselves lies and believe them at the same time. Haley and Sununu are not the only examples of this, but their cowardice may equal—if not exceed—those on the left who have betrayed Biden.

I do believe in silver linings, and the value of catharsis. If Trump should win, and also try to implement some of the worst aspects of Project 2025, ignoring all institutions and guardrails of our government, I think there will be a catharsis. I think a kind of unmasking of his pure lust and mendaciousness would incite a first follower, and the breaking of a dam we have rarely seen in our nation’s history.

Of course, there will be the obligatory burning of certain blocks of certain cities. There will be the staged violence of the left. There will be the Chicken Little sky-is-falling invective. But the tipping point will be when en-masse the American public join together in opposition to Trump and everyone who actively supports him. Just like there’s been a tipping point away from Biden, there would be one against Trump, should he merit it. There’s also the possibility that Trump, sensing the cracks in the dam, would pull back, being the coward he is.

But that would mean Trump is self-aware and lucid. If Biden was self-aware and lucid, and not ensconced in a political bubble of bespoke reality, he would step aside on his own. The fact he hasn’t is strong circumstantial proof of his mental state. I am not sure conscience is something that affects Trump. But fear is.

The Democrats have had their catharsis. It will soon be time for the Republicans to have theirs. At least I hope for it.

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