Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Professor is disoriented by Trump

From a kooky leftist psycho analysis professor in a NY Times op-ed:
Now many of us throughout American society at large, after an interminable electoral campaign and transitional phase into the presidency of Donald J. Trump, have experienced a form of disorientation and anxiety ...

But in an important sense, anti-fact campaigns, such as the effort led by archconservatives like the Koch brothers to discredit scientific research on climate change, remained within the register of truth. They were forced to act as if facts and reality were still in place, even if only to subvert them. For example, when they attempted to undermine the findings of legitimate scientists, they often utilized rational arguments concerning certainty, probability and proof. ...

But Donald Trump and his operatives are up to something qualitatively different. Armed with the weaponized resources of social media, Trump has radicalized this strategy in a way that aims to subvert our relation to reality in general. ...

As long as Steve Bannon and his colleagues continue to destabilize our sense of reality, and their opponents fail to recognize how these techniques work, those who oppose him will continue to stumble. ...

On the hopeful side, there has recently been a robust and energetic attempt not only by members of the press, but also of the legal profession and by average citizens to call out and counter Trumpism’s attack on reality. ...

Joel Whitebook is the director of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program at Columbia University. His latest book is “Freud: An Intellectual Biography.”
The Koch brothers are neither archconservatives nor Trump supporters. They are libertarians.

Apparently it really annoys Prof. Whitebook that his political enemies use rational arguments and facts.

You might expect ivy league professors to believe in facts, but Freudian psychoanalysts have their own "relation to reality", and they get very annoyed when anyone subverts it. For Freud, dealing with reality was the exception, as his famous quote "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" indicates.

At least he admits that Trump-haters like himself are suffering "disorientation and anxiety".

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