What the Delusions of Trumpers and the Fall of France Have in Common – And What Doctors Need to Do
By
David Gottfried
Everyone, with the exception of Trump supporters and morons (Sorry for being so damn verbose, Trumpers are morons), realizes that this country is suffering from an epidemic of political delusions that seems almost as fulsome and fearsome as the delusions very much in vogue in Nazi-dominated Europe.
Marjorie Taylor Green, who managed to get elected to the United States Congress, said that the fires in the Southwestern United States were caused by Jews who were operating lasers in outer space. Q anon, as we all know, has had a hard-on about fantasies that Hillary captures babies in a Washington DC pizzeria and then drinks their blood. A father recently killed his baby son and daughter because he thought they had “serpent DNA.” And of course tens of millions of Americans think that vaccines against Covid are bad, that Covid is a myth, and that Donald Trump really won the election. (Man, where can I cop some of this groovy acid ?)
I cannot prove that we have a greater propensity to believe utter bullshit, but I somehow recall that up until recently, when politicians told lies they tried to make their bullshit seem plausible. Richard Nixon donned a conservative suit, a white shirt, got on TV and looked you straight in the eye with all the glumness and propriety of the manager of a funeral parlor. However, when the Rush Limbaughs and Tucker Carlsons spew fabrications, they act as if they are about to segue into a rendition of “It’s Howdy Doody time.” Their lies are so hysterical, hyperbolic and practically hebephrenic (In the American Psychological Association’s diagnostic manual of 1968, known as the DSM 2, hebephrenia was described as a type of schizophrenia in which the patient, among other things, behaved in a stereotypically crazy manner) that some right wing idealogues seem to have walked off of the movie screen of the “Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
I think it is high time that doctors conduct research to determine if various environmental factors are making America more disturbed. Psychotherapy and the consumption of psychotropic meds are at all-time highs, but people seem crazier than ever. The suicide rate is increasing. Every other day, mass shootings occur. Seemingly unprecedented numbers of young men are violently macho – and seemingly unprecedented numbers of men are calling themselves transsexuals. And, as I said at the opening of this essay, political debate now seems to have become a form of show and tell in a Mental Hospital as politicos say more and more bizarre, incredulous things.
In the past, American and British doctors concluded that the West was suffering from certain medical and emotional problems, and their advice prompted Winston Churchill and Franklyn Roosevelt to implement immediate dietary changes to augment the health of the West.
The Fall of France, in May and June of 1940, startled England, America and the Soviet Union. The French army was perceived as one of the most powerful armies in the world. In World War One, the Germans were able to cross the French frontier, but for the most part they had only nibbled on the Eastern frontiers of France. However, in World War Two, the whole of France was conquered by the Wehrmacht. The Germans started their invasion around May 10 or May 12 of 1940. After Sedan fell on May 15, 1940, the French military largely concluded that the war was lost, French lines buckled, and German Panzers raced across the verdant countryside like bacteria coursing through a patient’s bloodstream, bequeathing septic shock and midnight fevers of 107. On June 16 or 17, 1940, Paris fell.
Western doctors wondered if the West were becoming weaker or softer or, as Hitler would put it, more decadent.
Western doctors decided that the West may have been suffering from nutritional problems. They noted that German bread and pasta was made from flour which was not highly refined or, to be more precise, did not suffer from a refining process which extracted the B vitamins from the flour. German flour may have been coarser, but it was healthier.
By contrast Frenchmen, Brits and Americans “enjoyed” super fine, ultra-refined white flour whose only nutrient was carbohydrates. The flour was wholly denuded of B vitamins.
Of course, Americans and other westerners were not suffering from patent Vitamin B deficiency disease. When one’s vitamin B levels are very low, a vast array of fairly malignant symptomology may ensure. However, Americans, Brits and Frenchmen had suffered from SUB CLINICAL DEFICIENCY DISEASE. When one does not have an illness, but instead has an illness “halfway,” we sometimes call it a subclinical variant of an illness.
The B vitamins are absolutely essential for the proper working of the nervous system. A lack of B vitamins can result in a) delayed reaction time, b) increased emotional volatility, c) compromised coordination and d) intellectual torpor or decline.
If one’s reaction time is impaired, one might be a bit too slow in pulling the trigger on a gun. If one’s coordination is impeded, one might become a clumsy oaf on the field of battle. If one becomes as Emotional as Freddy in “The Godfather,” one may become the sort of ass who believes whatever garbage one hears on Fox News. If one’s IQ falls into the double digits, one will become paranoid of the Covid vaccine, having forgotten that one wasn’t the least bit distraught at taking the polio, pertussis, smallpox, diphtheria and tetanus vaccines when one started school.
American and British doctors said that neurological health and homeostasis may have been been undermined by an insufficient intake of B vitamins because our highly refined flour was robbed of nutrients. The United States and Great Britain swiftly compelled manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers to enrich flour, baked goods and pasta with B vitamins. In those days, government made business snap to attention. Today, when alarm bells are rung, the big men of government just turn off the alarm clock and rule like somnambulists.
I am not contending that America’s problems today derive from a deficit in B vitamins. We solved that problem during World War Two. However, there are many, many things in the environment which may adversely effect our emotional health and given that Americans seem to have gone off the deep end – One trump rioter tried to gouge out the eyes of a Capitol Hill Policeman, but a GOP congressman said the Trump rioters were like tourists – it is time for us to ask ourselves WHY and WHAT is in the environment.
Now, I am going to say something which will probably make me lose half my audience. In the preceding sections of this essay, I discussed psychosis on the Right. Now I am going to discuss weirdness on the Left. There is a theme that unites the weirdness on both ends of the political spectrum: We must be mindful of the possibility that various environmental phenomena are changing our nation’s character and behavior.
The weirdness that exists in, for want of a better phrase, the left end of the social-political spectrum consists of this: Birth control pills contain estrogen and/or derivatives of estrogen. Since the advent of birth control pills, the amount of estrogen in the environment has soared as women who take birth control pills excrete more estrogen in their urine. More estrogen is coursing through the waterways of this country.
In the Great Lakes, various forms of aquatic life are becoming, or are at the time of this writing, extinct because the males have been neutered, presumably by estrogen in the water.
Testosterone levels in American men have been declining.
Sperm counts in American men have been declining.
Gynecomastia, or man tits, have been on the rise among American men.
Transsexualism may be on the rise (Of course, to the extent it is on the rise among people born female, my thesis might be undercut)
In any event, these indicia of a diminution of American maleness suggests that increased levels of estrogen in the environment, caused by birth control pills, may be responsible for a dramatic alteration of American human behavior.
Of course, history is replete with incidents in which new environmental phenomena caused new physical and psychiatric ailments.
In Italy, in the Middle Ages, some milliners started to use mercury to make hats. (I have no idea what they used mercury for) Mercury is a notorious neurotoxin. Many hat makers went mad from the mercury in their sweat shops. Hence, the many centuries old expression, “mad as a hatter.”
After World War Two, the drug Thalidomide was synthesized to help women with morning sickness, or the tendency of women to get nausea in the beginning of pregnancy. As such it was thought of, perhaps, as something that might effect the gastrointestinal tract, or those portions of the brain responsible for how we perceive and feel our GI tract. Not long after it became commercially available, we realized that it very often caused exceptionally severe birth defects.
In the 1950’s, the term “better living through chemistry” came into vogue as we delighted in the cornucopia of compounds that could give us pep, put us to sleep and put a smile on our increasingly plastic and pre-packaged faces. Our love affair with the artificial and manufactured world receded somewhat in the 1960’s as we recoiled from the poisons of chemical modernism, such as crop defoliants, agent orange, napalm and the aforementioned drug thalidomide. However, sometime in the 1980’s, getting back to nature was dismissed as the drippy pastime of holdover hippies who were so thoroughly out of favor in the dress for success era of Ronald Reagan and his successor, Bill Clinton.
Nowadays, we are altering our lives with chemistry with a vengeance. To combat hair loss, some men are taking a drug which modifies the way the body uses testosterone. To “help” males transition to the “female” sex, pre-pubescent boys are given testosterone blockers. To be forever young, people are taking human growth hormone, which by increasing cell replication will ensure that we are forever being
“born again.”
The human body consists of billions of different cells and processes most of which we only dimly understand. One change can induce a plethora of changes we can barely comprehend. It is quite possible that the technological innovations of recent decades are effectuating changes in human behavior of which we are oblivious.
Science has done a great job at changing the way we live. Now Science must investigate how these changes may be changing the sort of people we are and are becoming.
MAJOR QUALIFICATION:
In this essay, I noted that American and British doctors hypothesized that the French collapse, in World War Two, was occasioned by the decreased consumption of B vitamins.
However, I should advise my reader that in a prior post on substack, I noted that France suffered from a certain political pathology that may have contributed to the fall of France. In “The Stench of Vichy in the Regime of Donald Trump,”
(Posted on Substack on October 18, 2020), I explained that the 1936 election, which enabled a Jew, Leon Blum, to come to power in France, ignited the rage of the right wing which could not stomach the increasing diversity and tolerance of French progressives. Many rightists said, “Better Hitler than Blum,” and their half-hearted support for the French Republic may have aided and abetted the Nazi conquest of France and the formation of Vichy, the fascist French government which collaborated with Hitler. In this essay, I said that Trumpism, and the intense fury of the far right, might be analogous to what happened in France. In France, the right was incensed that a Jew had come to power. In America, the right was incensed that a black man, Obama, came to power.
Of course, today’s American political pathology might be caused by both a) intense rage that a black man, Obama, became president and b) environmental pathogens, etc. Some people seem to insist that a problem can have one cause and only one cause, but their thought is disabled by a philosophical error which is the legacy of Immanual Kant: Kant said that a thinker must search for the “Ding in sich,” or the “thing in itself,” which was the thing which made something tick. The ding n sich was perceived as a singular entity. And so a succession of Central European philosophers thought that the world turned because of one overriding thing and one thing only:
For Schopenhauer it was the will to live, for Nietzsche it was the will to power, for Marx it was material conflict, and for Freud it was sex.
Hopefully we have finally transcended the confines of this sort of rigid, reductivist, Germanic thought and can realize that a phenomenon may be the product of more than one cause.