The "them" in We Can't Let Them Do this are possessed by demons. Demons? Really? Levitating and vomiting black puke? No. Not that kind of demon. It's even worse . I posted this last year as an effort to make sense of the world I see, and reposting here, as everything goes steadily downhill. It's not wonderfully written, but whatever. I don't have time to make it pretty. And the 2 people who read it won't care. ahhahahaha A Brief History of Demons We are seeing in the U.S. an apparent descent into borderline social psychosis -- where monsters are made from shadows and empirical facts cease to exist. The phenomenon -- like a virus or plague -- seems to transmit invisibly and presents through symptoms that vary within a broad pattern. Heart-rending stories -- even seen here in comments -- of family members estranged and angry in siloed realities are examples. Wikipedia defines psychosis as "an abnormal condition of the mind that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not real." Our current predicament is due in part to news industry methods, but those can be seen two ways: 1) as a cause and 2) as a consequence of a larger phenomenon. "Reality" is a slippery concept. The scientific revolution brought epistemological clarity to the physical world, which peaked with the grandeur of Newtonian mechanics. Quantum theory demolished certainty and put probability in its place. But probability remains measurable and physical reality remains objective through empirical experiment. Human psychology has no such objectivity. Going back to Greek thought and proceeding to now we see a sequence of speculations. The ancient world saw man as playthings of gods -- which the Greeks called "daimons" -- who would interfere in human affairs, steer actions and results. Daimons were disembodied but quite real beings who could act for good or bad. Christianity, in its monotheistic enthusiasm, repositioned these beings as "angels" and "demons" and moved them off center stage. I recall one Roman historian (whose name I've forgotten) observed there were over 1 million gods in ancient Rome. It's far easier to keep track of one god and one devil than sort out millions! Maybe monotheism is the first triumph of managerial efficiency in human history. LOL. Human thought in "the West" focused for centuries on systems of ethics and political theory, giving man free will to act on a fixed point between two poles -- Jesus and Satan. It was the Christian writer Doestoevsky in his 1860s novel "The Possessed" who rehabilitated the daimons of ancient Greece for our age, largely in the form of demons. My intellectual hero Albert Camus observed that "The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx." Camus' own novel "The Plague" and the playwright Eugene Ionnescu's "Rhinoceros" were two artistic attempts to catalog the same phenomenon. 20th century psychology pursued demons only tentatively and through three systematic methods. One -- by noting that groups seem to become possessed by an animating power independent of any single constituent -- was group psychology through French sociologist Gustav Lebon's 1895 book "The Crowd" and later in 1921 by Freud in "Group Psychology and the Analysis of Ego". I'm not aware of much beyond that, as pyschology "advanced" through behavioral theories and neurologial explorations -- although it may exist and I'm uninformed. The second was objective mental illness, focusing on biochemical etiology; this was a clarifying and ethical achievement that has done enormous good. But the underlying mechanisms remain hidden in mystery and these conditions apply only to a small subset of humanity; they do not explain broad social phenomenon. The third path was an atavistic return to daimonic theory, perhaps most evident in Swiss psychologist Carl Jung's archetypes, but also in the cartography of universal mythic structures seen in James Frazer's "The Golden Bough" and in the popularized treatment through Joseph Campbell best-selling books. Jung's idea of a universal mind composed of psychic forces called "archetypes" that drive human perception and action closely parallels the "forms" of Plato and is perhaps the Greek daimons renamed. The path from Doestoevsky, through LeBon and Freud, energized by Jung's archetypes seems to me the most analytically fruitful in interpreting our current situation, explaining motivations and perceptions, and bringing the unconscious -- "demons" or "daimons" or "archetypes" or what you will -- into a clarifying consciousness. All provide a vocabulary and analytical structure that elevates and illuminates thinking far above the fruitless slogans and spitting sputtering bewildered stammering that passes for critical commentary. The ancient Greeks placed the command "Gnothi seauton" (Know Thyself) on their temple of Apollo at Delphi. But, even so, the Athenians killed Socrates -- for talking. It's hard to take your own advice. But it's good advice. "Civilization" has made some progress since then, but progress is easy to lose.