From “How America Lost Faith in Expertise” by Tom Nichols…

In 2014, following the Russian invasion of Crimea, The Washington Post published the results of a poll that asked Americans about whether the United States should intervene militarily in Ukraine. Only one in six could identify Ukraine on a map; the median response was off by about 1,800 miles. But this lack of knowledge did not stop people from expressing pointed views. In fact, the respondents favored intervention in direct proportion to their ignorance. Put another way, the people who thought Ukraine was located in Latin America or Australia were the most enthusiastic about using military force there.

Astute comment from Dave Pell on Mark Zuckerberg’s epistle to his believers:

Earlier this year, as he set out to visit all fifty states, speculation swirled that Mark Zuckerberg might be considering a future run for president. Of course, that theory brings up an obvious question: Why would he want the demotion? He already runs a virtual nation with a population that’s headed towards the two billion mark. But like the physical country in which he resides, there is a growing divide in Zuckerberg’s online community about the role of globalization. “Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community. When we began, this idea was not controversial.” It is now. And the Internet that was designed to bring us all together may in fact be driving us further apart. As I’ve mentioned before, the open communication network we thought we were building turned into a hunting ground for trolls and spammers; unavoidable because of our ferocious addiction to our mobile screens. Social media evolved into a confirmation bias-riddled cesspool of lies, hate, and totally unrealistic versions of our lives; which would gradually amount to little more than weightless collections of Retweets and Likes. And somehow – with more tools to connect than ever before — we made our lives less diverse; racially, politically, and culturally; each of us left to sink in the quicksand that lines the thickening walls of our silos of homogeneity. So we’re left with a question. Can Zuck fix it?

Answer: of course not. But pause for a moment to think about what lies behind this. One way of viewing it is to find Zuckerberg’s naïveté touching. Aw, shucks, what a sweet guy. But a more sceptical way of viewing it would be to read his epistle as a proposition for Facebook becoming the Internet. In other words: the world wide Internet has become a nasty, unsafe place. But we can make Facebook a warm cosy place. So why not give up on the public Internet and come inside where it’s safe?

This interesting letter from a psychiatrist in the New York Times:

Most amateur diagnosticians have mislabeled President Trump with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn’t meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.

Mr. Trump causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy. It is a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill (who are mostly well behaved and well meaning) to be lumped with Mr. Trump (who is neither).

Bad behavior is rarely a sign of mental illness, and the mentally ill behave badly only rarely. Psychiatric name-calling is a misguided way of countering Mr. Trump’s attack on democracy. He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.

His psychological motivations are too obvious to be interesting, and analyzing them will not halt his headlong power grab. The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological.

ALLEN FRANCES

Coronado, Calif.

The writer, professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University Medical College, was chairman of the task force that wrote the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (D.S.M.-IV).

Lovely report from Dave Pell:

TRUMPSTER FIRE
This weekend, Saturday Night Live should just replay the entire press conference delivered by President Trump on Thursday. It was beyond parody and made one thing clear: There’s not gonna be a Trump pivot. In an unhinged performance rivaled only by Marlon Brando’s Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, the president attacked the media, repeated bizarrely false statements about his electoral win, asked a black reporter if she could set up a meeting with the black congressional caucus (“Are they friends of yours?”), continually claimed Mike Flynn did nothing wrong (“I don’t think he did anything wrong. If anything, he did something right”), described himself as “the least antisemitic person you’ve ever seen in your life” and “probably the least racist,” gave a quick course on uranium, insisted his administration is “running like a fine-tuned machine,” referred over and over to the election and Hillary Clinton, decried the nonstop fake news (“The leaks are real, the news is fake”) without hinting at what was fake about it, and actually said, “I can handle a bad story better than anybody.” This press conference should be required viewing for every American. Even Fox News couldn’t restrain their initial reaction. A few times during the press conference, people in the room laughed. This is no laughing matter. At the risk of plagiarizing the president, this situation is a total disaster. And I know, I know, forty percent of Americans will think the presser was a bigly success. But the rest of just got a serious case of PTSD: President Trump Stress Disorder.

Like I said: the US elected a flake of Cadbury proportions.

Apropos an earlier post, here’s Elizabeth Drew writing in the New York Review of Books:

Trump’s possible mental deficiencies are also a troubling question: serious medical professionals suspect he has narcissistic personality disorder, and also oncoming dementia, judging from his limited vocabulary. (If one compares his earlier appearances on YouTube, for example a 1988 interview with Larry King, it appears that Trump used to speak more fluently and coherently than he does now, especially in some of his recent rambling presentations.) His perseverating about such matters as the size of his inauguration crowd, or the fantasy that three to five million illegal voters denied him a popular vote victory (he got these estimates from a dodgy source who has yet to offer documentation), or, as he told CIA employees, the number of times he’s been on the cover of Time (sometimes inflating the actual number) has become a joke, but it also suggests that there may be something troubling about his mental state. Numerous eminent psychologists and psychiatrists have written about or expressed their concerns about Trump’s mental stability.

Another puzzling thing: many of Trump’s tweets have a slightly pathetic tone — things are “so sad”, “so so unfair”, etc. It’d be interesting to do a sentiment analysis of his Twitterstream. Hmmm…

From the historian Mark Mazower, writing in this weekend’s Financial Times:

“The European Union emerged out of the the second world war with one main goal: to ensure the peace. It has done the job so well that many Europeans now assume peace can look after itself. The same war turned the US into the world’s leading power, the creator of global institutions and norms. President Donald Trump’s executive order banning immigration from seven Muslim countries underscores his intent to turn his back on this role. The war on terror will trump international obligations to refugees; outright discrimination will trump both.”

A while back I looked up the Mayo Clinic’s list of the symptoms and causes of ‘Antisocial Personality Disorder’ (aka sociopathy). Here are some of them:

• Disregard for right and wrong
• Persistent lying or deceit to exploit others
• Being callous, cynical and disrespectful of others
• Using charm or wit to manipulate others for personal gain or personal pleasure
• Arrogance, a sense of superiority and being extremely opinionated
• Recurring problems with the law, including criminal behavior
• Repeatedly violating the rights of others through intimidation and dishonesty
• Impulsiveness or failure to plan ahead
• Hostility, significant irritability, agitation, aggression or violence
• Lack of empathy for others and lack of remorse about harming others

What was striking about the list, I thought, is how many of the boxes Trump seemed to tick. What was even more striking, though, was that there seemed to be no mention of this in the mainstream media. In part this was probably due to the reluctance of the American professional associations to get involved in the remote diagnosis of prominent public figures. But still, given Trump’s extraordinary behaviour, the absence of discussion of the president’s mental health seemed odd.

Which is why I was pleased to see that Andrew Sullivan has ventured where others apparently fear to tread. Here’s an excerpt from his new column, entitled “The Madness of King Donald”.

Then there is the obvious question of the president’s mental and psychological health. I know we’re not supposed to bring this up — but it is staring us brutally in the face. I keep asking myself this simple question: If you came across someone in your everyday life who repeatedly said fantastically and demonstrably untrue things, what would you think of him? If you showed up at a neighbor’s, say, and your host showed you his newly painted living room, which was a deep blue, and then insisted repeatedly — manically — that it was a lovely shade of scarlet, what would your reaction be? If he then dragged out a member of his family and insisted she repeat this obvious untruth in front of you, how would you respond? If the next time you dropped by, he was still raving about his gorgeous new red walls, what would you think? Here’s what I’d think: This man is off his rocker. He’s deranged; he’s bizarrely living in an alternative universe; he’s delusional. If he kept this up, at some point you’d excuse yourself and edge slowly out of the room and the house and never return. You’d warn your other neighbors. You’d keep your distance. If you saw him, you’d be polite but keep your distance.

I think this is a fundamental reason why so many of us have been so unsettled, anxious, and near panic these past few months. It is not so much this president’s agenda. That always changes from administration to administration. It is that when the linchpin of an entire country is literally delusional, clinically deceptive, and responds to any attempt to correct the record with rage and vengeance, everyone is always on edge.

There is no anchor any more. At the core of the administration of the most powerful country on earth, there is, instead, madness.

Yep.