Temporary Insanity

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A young woman makes a foolish marriage to an inappropriate man.  Six months later, the marriage collapses.  You ask her why she did this.  She replies: “Temporary insanity.”

Many of us, especially when young, make foolish mistakes that can be best explained as the result of temporary insanity.  I don’t know if “temporary insanity” is a proper psychiatric term, but it’s a label that accurately describes many foolish things we have done.

If individuals can suffer from temporary insanity, so can larger social communities and political societies — for example, Salem, Massachusetts, during its witchcraft panic of the 1690s.  A more momentous example was Germany during the Nazi era (1933–45).  And there have been many further cases in which an entire society seems to lose its collective mind for a few months or a few years. 

When this happens, not everybody in the society goes crazy.  Some Salemites refused to go along with the frenzy, and many Germans refused to go along with the Nazi madness.  But for a few months or years, the “crazy” people are in control, and the non-crazies, with only rare exceptions, are afraid to express their dissent.

We Americans, I suggest, have been going through such an era, an era of collective temporary insanity, for the past few years — ever since the death of George Floyd in May of 2020.  Many among us, especially the politically and culturally dominant (e.g., leaders of the Democrat party and leading members of print and electronic journalism), have embraced the rather weird belief that the United States is an essentially, “systemically” or “fundamentally” racist nation. 

One version of this weird belief holds that it is virtually impossible for a white person to be other than a racist.  For whites are taught to be racist from the cradle, and little white kids soon learn that, because of their whiteness, they are entitled to many unearned benefits and privileges.  Fortunately, however, a morally heroic fraction of all whites regret their whiteness.  These people become liberal anti-racists.

Now, it is not “weird” to believe that the USA has had a long racist history, for that is a plain truth.  What is weird is to assert that the USA continues to be a racist nation even today.  To assert this, you have to ignore what may be called a “great awakening” or “great conversion” that took place in the decades immediately following World War II, an awakening that reached a dramatic climax in the 1960s, thanks especially to the leadership offered by Martin Luther King and President Lyndon Johnson.

Beginning at that climactic historical moment, the practice of racism (AKA discrimination) was made unlawful, and racist thoughts and feelings (AKA prejudice) were considered shameful and even immoral.  Americans generally became ashamed of their racist history and resolved that racism would have to be abolished from American life. 

The amount of racism in the USA didn’t immediately drop to zero, just as the degree of Nazi sentiment in Germany didn’t immediately drop to zero following Hitler’s defeat.  But the back of racism had been broken.  What remained — e.g., the hard-to-change racist feelings of many old people (who would soon die), or the racism of low-status whites who gained psychic satisfactions from the thought that they outranked blacks, or the obnoxious racism of delinquents who delighted in shocking respectable people — was no serious social threat.

Not all of us have gone along with this crazy belief that the USA remains a racist nation.  But for the most part, those of us who disagree have kept quiet about our disagreement.  For if you disagree publicly, your spouse may hate you, you may lose friends, your neighbors may write letters to the editor denouncing you, and you may even get fired from your job.

Prior to the apocalyptic death of George Floyd in 2020, certain groups were preparing the ground for this national descent into madness.  Three groups especially come to mind.

1. White liberals.  They were quite sure that they themselves were not racist.  And so if racism was a horrible sin, a sin still being committed by typical white Americans, they (white liberals) were exceptionally virtuous persons — indeed, extraordinarily virtuous.  Further, being so morally good, they deserved the many material advantages they enjoyed in life.  For in a just universe, goodness is rewarded.

2. Black demagogues.  Martin Luther King was a great man, and it is thus not surprising that those politicians and preachers who wished to be leaders of black people would try to imitate King.  But how to do so?  Well, King orated against white racism, didn’t he?  And so the aspiring new Kings, would-be MLK imitators, would have to orate against white racism.  But what if white racism has largely disappeared?  No problem.  Pretend that it hasn’t disappeared.  Tell the world that it is as bad, or at least almost as bad, as ever.  Otherwise, you’ll be out of a job. 

3. Black underachievers.  While blacks have been very high-level achievers in some arenas of competition (sports and entertainment especially), they have generally been under-achievers in many other fields of endeavor (e.g., law, medicine, science, engineering, business, finance, higher education).  This is not to mention that they have high rates of crime and imprisonment, or that black kids very often do poorly in school and behave badly.  By blaming this on systemic American racism, they avoid the need to blame themselves, and above all they avoid the need to address the defects of a black subculture, which is dysfunctional and tremendously self-destructive.

How long will our temporary insanity last?  I think it shows signs of fading.  But it won’t disappear anytime soon, and it still has a tremendous capacity for doing harm to American society, including the one eighth made up of blacks.

David Carlin’s most recent book is Atheistic Humanism, the Democratic Party, and the Catholic Church (Lectio Publishing, 2023).

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