Becoming A True Human podcast #19: Ours is a Book Culture – Rob Riemen

Posted on September 5, 2026 by davidrkopacz

Ours is a Book Culture: An Interview with Rob Riemen

You can also read this InnerView on SubStack

This was meant to be a Becoming a True Human podcast episode – but technology failed us and humanity prevailed. Jonathan McFarland was going to join me as a co-host, but he was exhausted from traveling from his home in Spain to England to help care for his brother whose dementia is progressing.

Rob and I made several attempts to record the session, but technology glitched every time, in multiple ways. In the end, this became an old school interview where I tried to scribble down Rob’s words as fast as he said them (which is a lot faster than you might expect from reading his writing, which is measured and rich with interconnections). In the end, I think that this interview is the interview that needed to happen – which is good, as it happened this way…

David R. Kopacz (DRK): Hi, I’m David Kopacz, one of the hosts of the Becoming a True Human podcast. With us today is Rob Riemen – Storyteller, a Gatherer of People, Scholar, Reader, Founder of Nexus Institute, Author of Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal and To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism, and the editor of the Cultura Animi Nexus book series.

I first came across Rob’s name in 2019 when I was at Taylor’s Books, in Charleston, West Virginia – teaching Whole Health to Veterans Affairs staff – when the title and style of his book, To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism, caught my eye. The first essay in the book was based on your 2010 essay published in the Netherlands entitled “The Eternal Return of Fascism.”

I bought To Fight Against This Age and read it on the flight back home – the first of a number of times I have read this book.

Your discussion of the screen word of “populism” for what should rightly be called fascism really spoke to me. In a way, you were diagnosing the social ills of our age and prescribing the remedy of humanism for the plague of fascism sweeping the globe. Your writing, along with that of Rebecca Solnit, Bandy Lee, and Robert Jay Lifton, helped encourage me to start my blog series, “Words Create Worlds,” where at first cautiously, but then more openly began to use the word fascism to describe what is going on currently in the United States. You draw frequently on the work and life of Thomas Mann and also Albert Camus, and his book, The Plague, in which Dr. Rieux works tirelessly to fight against an infectious, unnamed plague – which can be read as an allegory of the fight against fascism. I wrote about “Doctors Against Fascism” and “The Public Health Crisis of Fascism” in the Words Create Worlds essay series.

So, I’d like to thank you for your work and to welcome you to the Becoming a True Human podcast.

Rob Riemen (RR):

Okay, so well, here’s the issue, David. I wrote this essay indeed in 2010 because what I saw was happening here in the Netherlands. And I realized that if the return of fascism can happen in a very small, prosperous country as the Netherlands, that can happen unfortunately everywhere. Why was I so upset by the ongoing use of the word populism by the pundits and the academics and the politicians? Because words matter. Words matter to be able to understand what’s the case. And the whole argument that fascism is such a misused word, is irrelevant if you realize that there is one word which is even more misused, which is the word democracy. Does that mean that we stop using the term ‘democracy’? No of course not. Though it is high time that we start to rediscover what the original meaning of ‘democracy’ is – and then realize that there’s no democracy more today in the USA. Anyway, back to ‘fascism’. In my book I explain, quite clearly I think, that ‘fascism’ is a political phenomenon one recognizes by it’s characteristics. And as the saying goes: ‘If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck – the probably is a duck’. So, let’s use the term fascism to describe what’s happening in the West because this is what it is.

What is not in the book, because I came across it much later, is that in on February 18^th, 1933, Winston Churchill – the Winston Churchill – gave a lecture in London, you can find it on YouTube, where he says Mussolini is the hero of our time, he’s our genius, and fascism is the way out of all the troubles we are facing.

This was Winston Churchill in 1933, right? I mean Hitler was already in power. If somebody like Churchill can say these things, it says something about the temptation of fascism, it says something about you know the way out for people in this complicated in this complicated world. but we are supposed to know better, right? I mean we know now what fascism is all about. And I think the big mistake which was made by my friends in the academic world is that they stick to a certain scientific paradigm which does not work for phenomena like fascism or socialism or left or right or whatever. The scientific paradigm is perfect for modern nature, but the scientific paradigm does not work for us human beings in the society in which we are living.

Anyway, this was 2010. We are now in 2026. When the book was published in the United States in 2018, I got a lot of criticism from the Americans. You cannot say this. The New York Times was terrible at that time. And they told me you cannot say that Trump is a fascist because, one, he’s not a Hitler. I said, well, you know, I didn’t say he’s a Hitler. I said he’s a fascist, which is something different. Yes, but for us Americans, a fascist is a Hitler because that’s what we see in the movies. I said, “Well, what about reading books?” The second argument was, yes, but he’s not violent. And then I told him that look, if it’s in the language, it will come out. Always. Which was also an argument in my book. I truly wished that I would have been the greatest fool. Unfortunately, I was right, and all my critics were wrong. And the reason why I became really upset and also angry – look, those people, those pundits, those academics, those politicians, they are supposed to have a commitment to the truth and it is their responsibility to tell the truth.

What did the popular academics have to say? Well, they debated – what kind of populism is it? Is it extreme populism? Is it radical populism? Is it blah blah blah populism? That’s only for, you know, the new PhD they want to write to say, “I invented this term.” It’s all bullshit. So anyway, they were all more interested in staying in line, secure their own position instead of speaking truth to power.

DRK:

Yes. Which, you know, again echoes what happened in in Germany in the thirties, and in Italy too. You write about the loyalty oath in Italy – that Leone Ginzburg was one of the few academics who didn’t sign Mussolini’s loyalty oath – and I was worried that there was going to be a loyalty oath where I was working. I was at the VA, so federal federally employed psychiatrist working with veterans, and you know, when Elon Musk came in and started the whole DOGE, the Department of Governmental Efficiency, they started to just create chaos within all the federal organizations and they started having us report on ourselves. “What did you do this week?” “What did you do this week?” And then they said, “It’s optional if you’ll report on yourself, but we can’t tell you what the consequences will be if you don’t report on yourself.” Then they said we’re not going to prompt you to report on yourself each week, but you’re still expected to report on yourself every week.

Then they banned a bunch of words, but they wouldn’t tell us exactly what the words were. But there were a hundred words in listed in The New York Times, things like “women” and “indigenous,” and “Native American,” “activism,” and “climate science,” and “social justice,” and “trauma.” You know, I’m a trauma psychiatrist working with veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder, and I can’t use the word “trauma.” I was sitting in on meetings where we’re searching for words that we think we need to eliminate, we’re removing studies, like “cardiovascular risk in men versus women” for whatever. And we were told, well, we’ve got to take that out because the word “women” is in the study. The study isn’t controversial at all, it is not about feminism or trans or whatever. It’s just mentioning the word “women.” And, so, I felt that in a very short time we were in Orwell’s 1984 and I was Winston Smith, working at the Ministry of Truth and deciding which words we could use and which words we couldn’t. So, I left the VA.

But you know, what you helped me with earlier on, so going back to 2019, I started a column called Words Create Worlds. I was inspired by a Rabbi Heschel quote – it’s like what you said earlier – “if it’s in the language, it will come out.”

“Words, he often wrote, are themselves sacred, God’s tool for creating the universe, and our tools for bringing holiness—or evil—into the world. He used to remind us that the Holocaust did not begin with the building of crematoria, and Hitler did not come to power with tanks and guns; it all began with uttering evil words, with defamation, with language and propaganda. Words create worlds, he used to tell me when I was a child. They must be used very carefully. Some words, once having been uttered, gain eternity and can never be withdrawn. The Book of Proverbs reminds us, he wrote, that death and life are in the power of the tongue.” (from Susannah Heschel’s introduction to The Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays).

I saw that same thing with Donald Trump, that the words he was using were violent. They were xenophobic, they were words that “othered” people, and they created the distance and separation that can lead to violence. Apologists would be given time in the media to say, “Those are just words, that is just how he talks. He doesn’t mean those things.” And, unfortunately, we’ve seen come to pass that everything that he said – well, maybe not everything, he hasn’t taken over Greenland or Canada yet – but so much of what he said he would do, he has done.

So let me ask you this. As a psychiatrist and a doctor, I diagnose things and I say what the prognosis is and then I say what the treatment is. And reading your book, I saw the diagnosis of fascism and the treatment of humanism. But what would you say our prognosis is right now? You’ve been working, you’ve been, a Cassandra, a man crying out in the wilderness.

RR:

Well, we just finished the preparations for the next issue of my journal Nexus, which is a journal I started in 1991 with an old Jewish publisher, Johan Polak, who by miracles survived World War Two, and then after the war decided that everything he had, he had you know he read a relatively sum of money that he wanted to devote all his resources, all his energy to protect everything that Hitler wanted to destroy. So, he started the publishing house, Athenaeum, he started a bookshop. He was befriended with Max Brod, Elias Canetti, an old school publisher. Anyway, so now 35 years later, Johan never knew the Nexus institute because he died very unexpectedly by a heart attack after the first issue came out, in 1992.

But anyway, this issue is finally here, it will be presented in early October. And I gave it the titled A New Song of the Earth from the Wasteland. And it’s a beautiful book with 27 contributions from all over the world, including Wole Soyinka and many others. And I thought, well, it is exactly this – this is what we are waiting for. We are waiting for a New Song of the Earth from the Wasteland.

DRK:

Like Brecht’s “singing about the dark times.”

RR:

I guess that everybody now has a sense of how bad things are. How bad things are. And the irony of things. That you have a Jewish guy in the White House, Stephen Miller, who’s copy-pasting Eichmann all the time. How’s that possible? But it is possible.

You know, the party once founded by Abraham Lincoln is to put it mildly completely dysfunctional. And the Democrats are even more unpopular than the GOP, which is also an achievement, but that’s America. You know, if you see things happening over here, the picture is not much better. If Le Pen wins the election or Mélanchon wins the elections next year in May, the EU is over. With the new fascist party in Germany. So, we are in a very, very difficult situation and so my prognosis is pretty bleak to give your answer. I don’t see any serious developments to take this out of this mess unless we go back to the foundation.

A book you may know, that saved my life when I was at high school, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s a brilliant book. As a consolation to everybody who’s writing books who have trouble publishing, ninety-nine publishers turned it down. But this guy, the young editor who obtained the publishing rights was very smart, he sent it to the new a literary critic at the New Yorker at that time, called George Steiner, the famous cultural philosopher so often accused about being ‘elitist’ and ‘a conservative” And George Steiner saw the book, and he told his editor-in-chief look, I will review a book which is not there yet, but it should be there, so I’ll write about it. George Steiner made the publication of this book possible in 1974. It became a cult book and eventually : 25 million copies sold. It’s the story about, a man with an IQ of 174, and he got this treatment by your predecessors (psychiatrists), like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But it’s the most brilliant book I’ve ever read about the quest for quality. And what he refers to is the following because that’s the point I want to make.

The current paradigm we have demands that everything fits into a rationalistic technocratic paradigm. But it’s the rationalistic technocratic paradigm that does not recognize moral or spiritual values. It doesn’t because they are beyond that paradigm.

So quality is replaced by quantity.

Now, what is the best in quantity? It’s the bigger number. And the biggest number. So, if you understand these things, you understand first of all why everything has to be useful, because usefulness you can quantify. Then you also start to understand why the economists are the high priest of our society, because they are in charge of the numbers.

You also start to understand why everything that is not useful, which is the whole world of culture and the whole world of spirituality, doesn’t count anymore. It also explains why on social media it’s all about how many followers you have and we’re now having this new phenomenon of influencers with the most silly things, but if you have one million followers, you know you’re an influencer.

For me, it says it all because within this paradigm in which everything has to be useful, in which everything is reduced to an economic value, in which the whole education is reduced to what’s good for the economy or what’s good for the state, we have lost the quality of life. We have lost a sense of what life is all about, and we have lost the meaning of words because numbers are more important than words.

And then this – Nietzsche was for many reasons brilliant, but one of the things he understood better than anybody else is that there was one thing nobody can deal with. And you as a psychiatrist will understand it better than anybody else, which is people cannot deal with emptiness. It’s impossible. When you wake up every morning, you look into the mirror and you and you think my life is fucking empty, brother. There is only one way out. Only one way out. Well, no, there are two ways out.

DRK:

“Man would rather will nothingness than not will.”

RR:

The second way out, okay, there are three ways out.

One is you jump from the bridge.

Second is, you escape.

Third is you go to you, a psychiatrist, and they hope that you can help them! But it is impossible to deal with emptiness. Now, we have created a world which is completely empty because people cannot deal with this.

Here is where the fascist world comes in.

Because it’s the biggest mistake from the left or the liberals or the Democrats or whatever you want to call them. People cannot live by bread alone. The biggest issue is no longer or not solely an economic issue. The biggest issue is a cultural issue. And the left stupidly gave everything away to the right, and even worse than the right. Right? Because the right still wants to speak about God and religion and things of quality. So, it’s this phenomenon of how to turn this around before we are facing even more disaster. I simply do not know. You do your thing, I do my thing, but we are like little drops in a desert. because the general response, you will hear, I will hear is that many people realize – this is not going well.

But they will always tell you when they are working at the university or somewhere else, well, look, I have to pay my mortgage, you know, I’m dealing with two or three kids. What is it I can do? I cannot afford to lose my job. And it goes on to the highest levels. So, now, look, we do what we can do.

My mother, who was a prisoner of war in the Japanese internment camp during the war, always taught us, “there is no there is no energy in pessimism.” Right? And we cannot do our work when we are pessimists. Does that mean we are optimists? No, we are not optimist. I’m not an optimist. I want to be a realist. But it’s a fight and we have to continue this fight and one of the interesting things in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was to blow up an educational system. To blow up this idea that you are there to get grades. That’s why he decided, I won’t give out any grades. But then what good is the university if you don’t get the quantity of being graded? Let them do something else with their life. Go to a bookshop. Don’t go to Amazon, go to a bookshop and educate yourself. Spinoza did it that way, Nietzsche did it that way, Schopenhauer did it that way.

One of my statements when I give lectures is that the elite will not solve the crisis because they are the crisis. They are the incarnation of the crisis. So, they don’t have any incentive to change anything.

I say almost as a joke, but it’s not really a joke, if people would be a little bit less ignorant only a little bit, would any of those people still be in office? None of them. None of them. Well, maybe two or three.

And what kind of products will disappear if people would be a little bit more sensitive about quality? Well, a lot will disappear. So it seems as if it is organized to keep people as ignorant as they are. That’s what they’re doing. And it’s on and this way, and this is why I’m very angry about The New York Times. To Fight Against This Age came out in 2018, The New York Times and asked me if I could write an op ed, and in the op ed I wrote that with Trump, you have the classic contemporary fascist – and they refuse to publish it. Because the number one argument was that it goes against our business model. For The New York Times, the business model comes always first, right? So again, the people are focused on continuing the financial corruption. Financial corruption is a terrible thing, but much worse is the intellectual and moral corruption, and the intellectual and moral corruption comes from our world.

DRK:

It’s like what happened to Dr. Bandy Lee when she wrote her book about The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. The American Psychiatric Association stepped in and tried to silence her, and The New York Times wouldn’t publish her, then no paper would publish her, and she lost her professorship at Yale.

RR:

Yes, that is what is going wrong so deeply with the so-called universities. Our response has to start in the intellectual world.

DRK:

Well, you know, Rob, I’m on the steering committee for the Doctor as a Humanist, and Jonathan McFarland was going to join us today, but he’s got family issues that he’s been dealing with, his brother. Our idea, the reason we think that there needs to be humanism in medicine or what we could call the medical humanities, is because, in our focus on technology (the quantity as you say), we often lose the quality of the human being.

This happens both with the human being of the doctors, who have up to 50% rates of burnout, as do many healthcare professionals, but even worse, we lose the humanity of the patient we’re working with. In technological medicine we run people through protocols and evidence-based production lines.

So, with the medical humanities, I think of a distinction between the technician and the healer. Most of medical education is about becoming a technician. There is very little about becoming a healer. This would fit with your quantity versus quality schema – what can you put into numbers versus what is unquantifiable?

Let’s go back to the basics in our discussion. How would you define humanism?

RR:

Well, we’re dealing with the fundamental questions. The fundamental question everybody is asking, the question at the heart, is the question “Who am I?” Who am I? It’s a question everybody asks and must ask at a certain moment. Now again, if within this paradigm I just described – that’s a rationalistic technocratic paradigm.

Here is where the counter-revolution comes in, right? I mean, in the ‘60s and in the ‘70s, when they started to realize that people are being reduced to numbers, that people are being reduced to consumers, who benefited from this approach?

The financial world and everything related to it. This was so beautiful in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, when we have this reductionism taking place. and when the scientific paradigm becomes the main paradigm to look at a certain person – you start to look for this illness, we give it this name, this definition, etc. etc. But we’re forgetting the person behind it.

DRK:

That’s what we hope to do in the medical humanities – to remember the human person of the patient and the human person of the doctor.

My education included a tradition that was socially engaged, socially aware psychiatry. I studied trauma, genocide, the holocaust. Eli Wiesel came to speak at my university and we read Night with the psychiatric faculty and discussed it before his talk. Also, for instance, the work of Robert Jay Lifton, who wrote about the “witnessing professional,” the idea that as professionals we had a responsibility that went beyond the four walls of the consulting room, beyond a narrow role of being a technician, to include being a witness, bearing witness to the traumatic experiences our patients had been through.

And this I struggle with, and it is what your book, To Fight Against This Age helped me with. What are we to do? What are educated professionals to do in the face of the new epidemic of fascism? How do we fight against dehumanization and how do we promote re-humanization – for ourselves, our patients, and society?

RR:

In the 70s, in your profession there was a very famous book, maybe, I guess it was translated into English as Not Made of Wood: A Psychiatrist Discovers His Own Profession. Well, I mean, we are not from wood. You know, we are people with emotions, with feelings, with things we find very difficult to express. We are full of frustrations, we are afraid, we are afraid of ourselves. Already the Greek Socrates and all the others knew – it’s about the human soul. It’s about the human soul. And how to reach the human soul, how to be able to give expression to the human soul. Well, here’s where the muses come in, right? And this is why we need the world of literature, this is why we need poetry and music, so that you suddenly can see there is a difference between the muses and amusement. The muses will tell you something about yourself. Whereas, amusement is taking away from yourself, right?

You’re with Tom Cruise or Batman or whatever. But what the muses will tell you is to develop the imagination. But again, we have taken away the muses, we have taken away philosophy, we have taken away the concept of the soul. All these things, so the only thing we have to do is to go back to the basics. That’s all and it’s not that difficult. Is there a big business model behind it? Probably not. But it will make the whole world much more humane.

And again, one of the most frightening phenomena of our time. We see it in Israel and Gaza. We see it on the West Bank. We see it in the Ukraine. We see it with this whole AI thing, the dehumanization. The dehumanization. We’re all educated, you quoted Heschel, well, we all were all educated by Eli Wiesel and Primo Levy and we read Anne Frank. It was the main thing in our education: never again. Never again, this dehumanization because you’re a different race or a different religion or whatever. It’s the one thing that should never ever happen again. This craziness of übermenschen und untermenschen. But now in the third decade of the 21st century – the dehumanization. For me, you know, I’m 64. I grew up with the America – well in awe of Franklin Roosevelt, of Truman, of John F. Kennedy and even Reagan, we thought he was a little bit strange figure, but you know, but America was always the big brother we could count on. I mean we know the whole story, America wasn’t perfect, but a source of liberty, right? That’s no longer the case.

DRK:

Sometimes I think that we have become the barbarians we were warning others about. The Jungian shadow – what we hate in others is what we do not acknowledge ourselves. Or the old Pogo cartoon – “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

RR:

But it is not just the United States. Look what’s happening in Israel. I mean, can you imagine what’s happening over there? And, look in Western Europe – how are we dealing with refugees? How are dealing with immigration? We created the Mediterranean as a huge graveyard. And it’s politics, right? Just to make sure that those people cannot come here. So, again, this dehumanization. There are no easy solutions for things. The Palestine crisis is a big thing. How to deal with immigration? A big thing. I recognize that, right? I’m not stupid. But there is no excuse for dehumanization. That’s what’s so interesting about your profession. Again, I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m only fascinated by it. When I was much younger, I read the books of R.D. Laing – anti-psychiatry, right? A kind of movement against everything being reduced to science.

DRK:

That is what I was writing about in my first book, Re-humanizing Medicine – how to recognize the inherent reductionism of the technician compared to the undeveloped compassion of the healer.

RR:

Yes, this goes way back, already in the eighteenth century, Giambattista Vico explained that the paradigm of Descartes is a wonderful paradigm, but it doesn’t work for us human beings and it doesn’t work for society. But it’s a terrific paradigm to make a lot of money with it. You see, that’s the whole issue. And now, I mean, God knows what will happen with this artificial intelligence stuff. I always use now, in talks about this issue, I say, okay, let’s talk about artificial intelligence. What do you think about an artificial friend? Or what do you think about artificial love? Or what about artificial justice? Well, you realize it’s fake. Okay, so artificial intelligence is fake. It’s not intelligent at all. It’s a huge machinery which can make calculations a trillion times faster than we can. But a whole lot of nonsense is coming out of it. Those talk. The chatbots are completely ridiculous. But again, how to defend yourself against it? Well, the only defense is the same defense as we have with fake news. You have to have a critical mind. I mean, and so, I mean, I don’t know if I have to laugh or cry or what is acceptable, yes or no.

But when people that that that now many people already died because they start a relationship with the chatbot. Well, when you start a relationship with your chatbot, you must be very lonely and probably never read a book. Okay? So then you start to talk to the machine. And so you talk to the machine is my life is miserable, you know, I’m lonely, I hate my job, I hate everything. What shall I do? And then the chatbot said, “Well, you know, you better make an end of your life.”

And people make an end of their life. Now, to tell your audience how funny the Netherlands is. Not that long ago it was reported that a family of somebody who committed suicide because of the chatbot now wants to sue the chatbot and we have the discussion if we can put the chatbot in jail. That would be funny, right? We have a machine in jail.

It’s, again, unfortunate that the book is only out in Italian and in French. The Americans don’t want to publish my books anymore. But the longest chapter is about stupidity and lies. And this stupidity thing is a really frightening phenomenon. It’s a really frightening phenomenon. Because again the if we can stop the stupidity, we can stop a lot of things.

DRK:

So yes, I was just thinking about that article in The Atlantic on “The Age of Reading is Over.” I felt worse, as far as the prognosis goes, I felt worse after reading that. Have you read that article?

RR:

It was a brilliant article. A frightening article. It seems to me a very honest article. It only underscores what I just said about the total collapse of education in America, whatever they may call themselves or however many Nobel Prize laureates they have. But the main thing is the following.

Our culture is a book culture. And not only because the Biblical connection, the connection to our Jewish and Christian heritage, or the works of Plato for that matter, but if we if we realize that we’re human beings and you know we are the next generation or we are the generation that will be the next generation or a generation before them. What about the continuity? The continuity is a thing called the human spirit. And this human spirit continues in written works.

It’s so fascinating. Why is it that everybody wants to see the movie, The Odyssey? I haven’t seen it. I read the book, which is fine with me. But, because on a deep level, on the deep level, people have this idea that they are in need of myths. Myths are extremely important because the myths are the expression of something extremely basic. The Odyssey is the myth of going out, the quest of life, adventures, and returning home. Or Faust is the myth of trying to reconnect to the person who passed away and try to bring her back to life. Faust is the myth of striving for absolute knowledge and the absolute. Every culture has these myths.

Now, when you take away a book culture, when you take away this whole cultural legacy, you get where we are now, which is we’ve lost our ground. We’ve lost our fundamental foundation. We no longer know who we are. And this was also a famous statement by the German Jewish philosopher Max Scheler in 1928, just before he died. He said, “In 10 years, in not the last 10,000 years, the human being has become such a problem for himself. Because we no longer know who we are.”

It’s this phenomenon of what’s happening now, to the book culture, is completely self-destructive. We’ve lost the basic, enduring foundation of what it means to be human. The loss of book culture, not only in America, but all over the world is a complete self-destruction of culture and who we are as human beings. We can blame Amazon, we can blame publishing houses, for only putting out celebrity biographies instead of works that focus on what is truly important for us as human beings. All the -isms are reductionisms.

Fascism: are you in my “tribe” or not.

Communism: are you in the proletariat or the bourgeoisie?

Capitalism: do you have money or do you not?

All the -isms are totalitarianisms, they are reductionistic fundamentalisms.

DRK:

You write a lot about the soul, and spiritual nobility, and seem to favor a spiritual humanism– this contrasts to many secular humanists who veer away from ideas of the soul and spirit and say that we must be materialists and scientists.

RR:

Well, to put it bluntly, they are wrong. They are deeply wrong.

For me, it is not about a belief in this God or that God, but like Primo Levi wrote, we need the transcendent. We need the notion of the soul, the idea of spirit. Thomas Mann understood this. Nietzsche, of course Nietzsche understood this. Nietzsche’s “death of God” was not about an old man with a beard up in the sky suddenly having a heart attack. No. It was about the loss of the Transcendent and without that we are left with only the will to power, a world of power. Without the Absolute, there is no Truth, no Goodness, there is loss of the fundamental thing that makes us human. The idea of Man, or of Humankind, only that Transcendent notion can unify us as human beings. Without the Transcendent, we fall into categories, identities – we are more than our skin color, more than our gender, or pronouns. Humanism, humanity, is what we all have in common. Without the Transcendent there is no Justice, no Beauty.

The so-called secular humanists are just wrong. They miss the riddle of being a human being. They miss our Nature and our Destiny. It is dangerous when you take away spirit and take away soul – that only leads back into the reductionism and destruction.

This is why the left is so stupid – I think about writing something with that title – I mean, I am the left, I am considered a Social Democrat in the Netherlands, but the left is being incredibly stupid turning to quantity rather than quality. The left has surrendered quality to the right and the more than right. Trump has an instinct to exploit this, a cruel, evil instinct. You can’t be a fascist unless you are a populist. You have to be a demagogue.

CNN, the media, they all made billions on Trump. They could have said, “this is a dangerous guy and we’ll just ignore him,” but they amplified his destructive voice and made billions.

What makes us human is what we have in common, not what is different about us. We need to go back to school, maybe read a little philosophy.

DRK:

Nietzsche wrote about “becoming who you are” and the Greeks spoke about this too. How did you, Rob Riemen, become who you are?

RR:

In a new book – that hasn’t been translated into English yet but it is in Spanish, Italian and French (is not the Cultura Animi publication) – students in Mexico, they were reading my books, To Fight Against This Age and The Nobility of Spirit during the covid period had all kind of questions about the meaning of their lives because of what they had read in these books of my. I was most pleasantly surprised that my books – like a letter in a bottle – arrived in the classroom of philosophy department in Mexico. So I responded to their questions yet not much later I realized I had made a mistake. I should have told them: these are your questions, you have to find an answer yourself – don’t ask me. Yet as I explained in Becoming Human is an Art, I read Nietzsche’s essay, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” in which he argues that to get to know yourself starts with reflecting on the important people in your life who have influenced you. Some of the people with the biggest impact on our lives are our parents, so I began to write about my mother. When she was 12-15 years old she was in a Japanese internment camp in Indonesia. She and her sisters never spoke about it. My mother died in 2000. Then, during the Covid-era, I was talking with her sisters who were in their ‘90s and I got to know who my mother was as a person and what she had gone through. And I understood why she educated me the way she did. I grew up in what you could call a sober labor class family, with six kids. My father was a labor organizer, he organized strikes – he was always fighting for social justice and that was very ingrained into me.

My mother taught me to read when I was three years old. I wasn’t very good at anything else, I wasn’t good at soccer, for instance. But reading readily became my passion. When I read Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, I recognized myself in Hans Castorp. That book inspired Nexus – we are just a place where people from all different philosophical perspectives come to sit down to have conversations.

Books were considered holy in our family. We didn’t have much money, so we would have to save up to buy a book. To be educated is a privilege and that privilege comes with a responsibility.

High school felt like a prison to me. It took me eight years instead of six to graduate. When I graduated, I wanted to be free. I wanted to study something completely useless. So I studied Theology for ten years. I read Thomas Mann and all of those around him – Nietzsche, Goethe, the Russians. I met a publisher named Johan Polak, I mentioned him earlier, and we started a journal of European Judaism in 1988. It was difficult to get funding, but finally someone gave us a little money. In 1991 we started the journal, Nexus, but in 1992 Johan suddenly died.

I never applied for the job. Instead of being “editor,” I thought I will be the “founder” and the “president.” So, we started Nexus, and Edward Said was our first Nexus lecturer a year later Amartya Sen and then we have had former President Richard von Weizsäcker from Germany I wanted to only do things that were interesting. I didn’t want to have to rely on funding that constrained what we did. Nexus is the most independent institute in the world. We bring in people who disagree with each other. My father, a union leader, always taught me any siblings said that when the strike is over, you should be able to sit down with the other side and have a glass of wine, that they were opponents, but not enemies. I don’t believe in “cancel culture,” we all need to sit down and talk together.

DRK:

Well, Rob, we’ve had some technical difficulties, and I’ve switched to doing this old school transcription style, which is why I am furiously scribbling notes as you talk. Our video broke down, our audio broke down, our transcription broke down – so I am doing this the old school human way, like I do with Joseph Rael.

RR:

Well, sorry for my technology karma!

That reminds me, Stephen Greenblatt has a book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, where he traces the journey of a 11^th century monk from Italy to Germany where he finds a manuscript of Lucretius and transcribes it fifty times.

So, we are doing this interview the human way!

DRK:

Thank you for being patient and I think that this ended up being a good way to do this interview.

To close, Rob, we call this podcast, Becoming a True Human, and this phrase comes from my mentor Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) who teaches from his own experience and comes out of the Southern Ute and Picuris Pueblo Indigenous cultures of the Southwestern United States. We like to ask our guests, what does “Becoming a True Human” mean to you?

RR:

Once, all of us will inevitably die. Hopefully after a long life, after not too heavy of a burden of illness. And in old age we will be lying in our bed – and in those last moments – what are you going to think back to in your life? Will it be like Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illich, a life of regrets? Or, will I have lived the life that I was supposed to do, the life that I was given, that I had the talent, and that my parents had the expectation of. Or, will it be other way, the life of less than the True Human Being? Maybe there will have been money, fame, power – only to realize that you had only accumulated a whole bunch of zeros in your bank account?

Johan Polak, who helped found Nexus, he had a small fortune from his family, but he put it all in the publishing house Athenaeum and bookstore. He died in 1992.

In “The Idea of Europe,” George Steiner wrote that we are fortunate people. The only thing you have to do is find and follow your passion. You may be poor, but you will be happy.

We can still do something in which we believe.

Most people are not happy.

DRK:

Thoreau’s “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…”

RR:

It is important to realize that with fortune comes moral responsibility. This is Thomas Mann, as well. Gifts come with responsibilities.

Now, the stakes are higher than ever. There is endlessly more going wrong on the supply side than on the demand side. There are too many people afraid to step outside, to step outside of the paradigm. People focus on being popular, on numbers of followers, on being an influencer and they forget about quality. When you are on your death bed, only quality matters. The Transcendent is not to be found in quantity, in numbers; the Transcendent is only found in quality and that is the spirit and the soul – and we only find that by knowing who we are, by reading books, by having discussion with others.

Words Create Worlds.12: Caring Words/Caring Worlds, Uncaring Words/Uncaring Worlds

Posted on March 13, 2026 by davidrkopacz

What we are experiencing now is a predictable, straight line from the words that Donald J. Trump has spoken.

The uncaring world we are living in has been created, uncaring word by uncaring word of our current president and those who are drawn to him. It is as simple as that. It is as simple as that.

What we put into the world in words, what we bring forth from that deep inner place of creative power within ourselves, creates the world we live in. We are makers and unmakers of our reality.

The inspiration for this essay series, Words Create Worlds, comes from Rabbi Heschel. He said, as recounted by his daughter, Susannah Heschel:

“Words, he often wrote, are themselves sacred, God’s tool for creating the universe, and our tools for bringing holiness—or evil—into the world. He used to remind us that the Holocaust did not begin with the building of crematoria, and Hitler did not come to power with tanks and guns; it all began with uttering evil words, with defamation, with language and propaganda. Words create worlds, he used to tell me when I was a child. They must be used very carefully. Some words, once having been uttered, gain eternity and can never be withdrawn. The Book of Proverbs reminds us, he wrote, that death and life are in the power of the tongue.”[1]

Rabbi Heschel warns us of the power of words and how they can bring holiness or evil into the world. This is the power of choice that we have and the power of our breath shaped into meaning and symbolism through the sound of the letters that we string together into words.

Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) also has taught about the power of Sound – of Being & Vibration – and how the sounds of letters and words carry the power of meaning. In the Tiwa language of Picuris Pueblo, the word for God is Wah-Mah-Chi, Breath-Matter-Movement. We could say that Wah-Mah-Chi, Breath-Matter-Movement, is a Word that creates other words and these words create our world. Creator, Wah-Mah-Chi, is a Word that creates other words and worlds. Breath comes through Matter and becomes Movement.

I am invoking spiritual teachers, but the principle of words create worlds also holds for poets, artists, singers, teachers, educators, and politicians – people who can use their words for either bad or good, or as Rabbi Heschel says, for holiness or evil.

How to Write About What You Are Not Supposed to Write About (But Are Ethically and Professionally Bound to Speak)

I started this series of essays out of my concern about the rise of Donald J. Trump as a political figure. His words were so clearly uncaring: he bullied, he name called, he threatened, he spoke about America First, but he really meant Me-First. I have felt compelled to speak the truth, as a psychiatrist, but even more so as a human being.

Lies as Politics

Lies. Donald Trump lies,[2]^,[3]habitually, repeatedly, and knowingly. He is trying to shape a narrative, he is trying to create your reality, he is trying to create your world.

Lying is not just a personality quirk, there is also a history of lies as politics. Bruno Frank wrote Lüge as Staatsprinzip (The Lie as State Principle) about Hitler and the Third Reich. Frank wrote: “Never before in history has any public group lies with such absolute, voracious, and poisonous shamelessness as has this party for more than a decade;” and further that the essence of fascism is “the total deception of the nation.”[4] Lying is not just a way of life for an individual, it is a political principle for fascism.

Trump believes that he is above the law, even more so as president. “On January 23, 2016, Donald Trump notoriously declared, ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,’” quoted by Jonathan Chait in a piece entitled “The logical end point of Trump saying he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue,”[5] Trump’s words of getting away with murder are now creating our world. As Chait writes:

“That statement was understood at the time as a metaphorical expression of the depth of Republican voters’ commitment to him. Ten years and one day later, his administration’s agents shot a disarmed man on the street in full view of the public. Perhaps we should have taken him not only seriously but also literally.”[6]

The problem is, we didn’t know how to respond to Trump at the time in 2016, even though it was clear to me that his words were dangerous. As a physician, professional, and psychiatrist – I was (and am) concerned about the risk to the health of the populace and the health of our democracy, but I restrained myself out of an abundance of professional caution and also concern about the Goldwater Rule, which states that psychiatrists cannot “diagnosis” a public figure they have not met with clinically. But to warn about dangerousness is different than labelling a public figure with a diagnosis.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump

In 2017, Yale psychiatrist and expert in predicting violence, Bandy X. Lee convened a group of mental health professionals around the topic of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. The conference led to the publication of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President and then later expanded to a new edition with ten more experts, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President – Updated and Expanded with New Essays. Dr. Lee ended up losing her position at Yale, then she created the World Mental Health Coalition, and has dedicated her work to illuminating the dangerousness of the current president.

I watched the first Trump presidency with concern. I also recognized, as a psychiatrist and as a human being, how Trump’s words and actions were right out of the “fascist playbook.” In 2020 I was moved by the mosque shooting hate crime in Christchurch, New Zealand to start the Words Create Worlds column. (I will list each essay title with links at the end of this article). Looking back, I think the pandemic and Trump’s mishandling of it, and his use of it to divide the country rather than bring it together, helped tip my hand to write in a more open and critical way about the public health emergency of Donald J. Trump. While I was cautious back then and did not want to overstate the risk of “just words,” I now feel that my concerns are valid and vindicated by the second Trump presidency where his words are moving into action and creating our world. In fact, I called Trump the anti-Doctor as his words were not only hurtful of people’s feelings, but dangerous to people’s lives and to American democracy.

Fifth Avenue to Nicollet Avenue to Iran

Donald Trump did not shoot someone on 5^th Avenue in New York City, but armed, masked men carrying out the orders of the president, shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in her car after dropping off her 6 year-old at school, near East 34th Street and Portland Avenue in Minneapolis on January 7^th, 2026. This was, ominously, five years and a day after the January 6^th 2021 attack on the United States Capitol.

Instead of Fifth Avenue, it was 34^th Street and Portland Avenue. Instead of Fifth Avenue, it was Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, where Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an ICU nurse who worked at the VA (Veterans Affairs) was shot.

Trump and his team of ne’er do-wells immediately went into “blame-the-victim” mode. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem lied about Renee Nicole Good, accusing her of “domestic terrorism.”[7] As with lies about Stephen Miller, Trump’s chief of staff, said that Pretti was an “assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.”[8] Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed Pretti “attacked” officers while “brandishing” a gun.”[9] However multiple eye witness reports and video footage showed that these were lies. The administration had to walk back its portrayal of a mother dropping off her child and a VA ICU nurse. The president even said he “felt bad” about the killings, but even worse about Renee Nicole Good’s killing as her parents were Trump supporters.[10]

Since I first started this essay, the United States of America and Israel have started a war with Iran. The lies continue…

“On February 28, during the opening hours of the assault on Iran, a missile struck a girls’ school in southern Iran, killing more than 170 people – most of them schoolgirls.”[11]

Rather than waiting for the truth of an investigation, Donald Trump immediately blamed Iran for using a US made missile to kill its own children. However, the evidence is pointing to the children being killed by the United States:

“Preliminary investigations suggest the school may have been hit by a US missile because of a targeting error, though the exact circumstances remain under investigation.

Analysts say the strike may have been caused by outdated targeting information, as the school is on the same block as buildings used by the IRGC’s navy and the site of the school was originally part of the base.”[12]

The Cusp Where Words Become Worlds

I have to keep writing this column on Words Create Worlds.

The risk of remaining silent, at this point, is greater to my humanity than the risk of speaking is to my conservative professionalism or my safety.

We are on the cusp of words becoming worlds – actually we are beyond the cusp, beyond the event horizon pulling us into the black hole of fascism. Donald J. Trump has told us, all along, what he intends to do. Republican politicians have minimized his words, saying “they are just words,” “that’s just who he is, he doesn’t really mean he is going to [fill in the blank: take over Greenland, make Canada the 51^st state, invade Mexico to combat cartels, remove Palestinians from Gaza and build luxury hotels, jail his opponents, kill his opponents, run for a third term, invade Iran].

I have seen this coming. I did what I do as a writer, I wrote about it. I educated about fascism.

Yet, I feel I have not done enough. Is there anything one person can do to stop the steady slide from democracy into fascism? Actually, “steady slide” is a mischaracterization – the United States of America did not “fall” into fascism, it was pushed.

Politically, with the House, Senate, and White House controlled by Republicans, it seems to depend on Republican politicians who need to break with Trump before it is too late. But it is already too late. Trump began as much of a buffoon as Adolf Hitler was in the early 1930s – no one took him seriously. The power Trump has is the power of the tongue, the power of mass hypnosis, the power of lying to people, telling people what they want to hear and making them feel good about uncaring, and the power of intimidation. Republican politicians have colluded with him in deforming American Democracy into the power of American Empire.

Bruno Frank, the author of Lüge as Staatsprinzip (The Lie as State Principle), whom I introduced earlier, quotes Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf on how lying words can create worlds:

“All this was inspired by principle ─ which is quite true in itself ─ that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods…For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.”[13]

Uncaring Words Create Uncaring Worlds

What we are living in the United States right now is the uncaring world created by the uncaring words of Donald J. Trump. These are the words of fascism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, infantilism, and me-first-ism. I have often thought that if Republican politicians asked themselves “Am I being kind, am I being compassionate,” that they would make different decisions. But kindness and compassion seem to have lost their appeal to MAGA and the Republican party. Instead, they speak words of power, words of me-first, words of us vs. them, words of hate thine enemies, and words of vengeance and retribution. MAGA and the Republican party have become, in the words of Adolph Hitler, “expert liars…who conspire together in the art of lying.”

If we hold uncaring feelings in our hearts and we speak uncaring words into the world, we will create an uncaring world.

Caring Words Create Caring Worlds

In 2025 I published my sixth book, Caring for Self & Others: Transforming Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Soul Loss. I wrote it as a follow-up to my first book, Re-humanizing Medicine (2014). I wrote Caring for Self & Others because I felt there was a need for a practical handbook for health care professionals, educators, and leaders – but it is really for anyone who cares for others as part of their life or jobs, which is most of us.

“Transforming burnout, compassion fatigue, and soul loss,” I wrote, “requires individual practices as well as institutional reform” (4). While I was mostly thinking about hospital and clinic settings as the place of institutional reform, we are in a place with our democracy that it also requires institutional reform in order to be a healthy place to live, love, and work.

Health Care Workers can burnout and develop compassion fatigue, where they feel they no longer have anything to give. The human imperative to resist fascism, you can call it activism if you like, also carries the risk of burnout and compassion fatigue – how can we keep caring when the suffering seems endless? We need to learn how to care for ourselves as we are caring for others. We need to learn how to replenish our own hearts of caring. The book has a number of exercises and meditations to help individuals to refill the cup of their hearts.

The Compassion Revolution & the Counter-Curriculum of Caring

In Re-humanizing Medicine I called for a Compassion Revolution in health care and now we need a Compassion Revolution in politics. We need to not just think about ourselves, we need to think about others. We need to not just care about ourselves, we need to care about others. Actually, I would argue that “caring” only for self is not really caring, it is more selfishness. Caring breaks down the boundaries and walls between self and other. Caring naturally shifts us into a transpersonal space, what Thich Nhat Hanh called “interbeing” and Martin Luther King, Jr. called the “beloved community.”[14] Caring connects us – connects us to ourselves, our hearts, our souls; connects us to other human beings; and connects us to our environment and ecosystem.

In medical school, I felt I was losing an important part of myself, I felt like I was losing who I was, my kindness, my sensitivity, my caring – my soul. Over the years I have developed what I call a counter-curriculum of caring, or rehumanization, as an antidote to counter-act all the forces in our modern world that leave us feeling dehumanized.

“These counter-curriculum practices grew into the practices for the ten dimensions of caring in this book. This book is a counter-curriculum of caring, reminding us in the midst of our busy days as technicians, educators, and leaders to take the time to care. Our current curriculum and operating procedures are creating burnout, compassion fatigue, and soul loss. The proposed counter-curriculum transforms burnout, reigniting the heart of the healer, the soul of the educator, and the vision of the leader; it gives us an antidote for compassion fatigue by giving compassion to ourselves―refilling the medicine bags of our hearts; and it helps us recover and nourish our souls, revitalizing and reconnecting all the dimensions of our humanity.”[15]

Caring is the antidote to Uncaring

What are we going to do now?

It is one thing to define a problem, to understand it, but how do we address the problem of uncaring in the USA and the world? I wish I had an answer for you, but I think each person has to figure this out for themselves, consulting their own hearts in the darkness of sleepless nights. I do think the heart can guide us.

And our souls? What about our souls?

I use the concept of “soul loss” as a metaphor for burnout and compassion fatigue – for the costs of caring. How do we recover our souls when we feel we are losing them – as individuals and as a country? We have to search, we have to be still, we have to go into the darkness – our own and that of our times. As Michael Mead writes in Awakening the Soul:

“As the inner dynamic of transformation, initiation means the continuous breaking open of areas of the soul to reveal hidden capacities and inherent gifts. When life pulls at us from the outside and the soul pushes us from the inside, we reach the point where pain and longing requires that we change. … Whatever interrupts, breaks us open, or breaks us down―whether it is the trauma and shock of a loss in life or the drama and exhilaration of success―also initiates us into a greater knowledge of ourselves.”[16]

Meade’s book repeatedly reinforces the idea that the crisis can awaken the soul which then gives the support that is needed for the particular crisis. Caring for ourselves entails caring for our souls, which then give us the strength to further care for ourselves and then to care for others.

What can we do? When you find yourself in a dark place, when you feel you are at your limit, when you feel burnout and compassion fatigue, when you feel a sense of soul loss – that is the time to consult with your soul through inner practices that lead to outer actions and outer actions that lead to inner practices.

Q: What are we going to do now?
A: Whatever needs doing.

Q: How are we going to do it?
A: I’m not sure, but check with your heart, check with your soul. Let your heart and soul find the caring response as the antidote to the uncaring world we are living in. The answer is in caring. Caring for what? Caring for yourself & caring for others.

Inner Democracy

One way of caring for Self is cultivating Inner Democracy. I am starting another series of essays on this topic and will be posting them soon. In addition to the outer work of challenging words creating worlds of fascism, this inner work is an antidote to uncaring. Creating Inner Democracy is a practice of Caring for Self & Caring for Others.[17] This work owes a great deal to Steven Herrmann’s work on Spiritual Democracy and Jeremy David Engels On Mindful Democracy: A Declaration of Interdependence to Mend a Fractured World.[18]

I will leave you with an exercise from Caring for Self & Others, one that actually came to me when I was working with Joseph Rael on our book, Walking the Medicine Wheel: Healing Trauma & PTSD.

Compassioning Practice—Giving & Receiving Meditation^{^[19]}

Imagine and visualize what the heart does on a physiological level in the body.

The heart receives (through the right atrium) the blood that has traveled throughout the entire body. This blood has the lowest oxygen content; all the tissues of the body have already absorbed oxygen from this blood―it is blue, venous blood. From the perspective of tissues, it is “bad” blood, no longer oxygen-rich. As the heart receives and accepts this “bad blood,” it doesn’t complain or cling to it, but gives it away, lets it go, and it passes on to the lungs. There the blood is replenished with oxygen. The heart then receives again, only this time it is the “best blood,” the most oxygen-rich. Once again, however, the heart doesn’t cling or hoard the goodness for itself, but gives it away to the rest of the body.

Hopefully you are seeing the metaphor of how your heart works physiologically and how you can work with suffering in your life. How much do you cling to the good? How much to you reject “bad” life experiences, which could be blessings in disguise?

Sit back for a moment, closing your eyes. Focus on what your heart is doing an average of 60 to 80 times a minute. Receiving depleted blood, giving it away; receiving replenished blood, and giving it away. Become aware of this ongoing process within you.

If you would like, focus on this same movement in your life.

Think about a situation in which you experienced suffering. Remember to step back and use some of the grounding techniques discussed in chapter 2 if you feel overwhelmed.

Allow yourself to receive it. Once you have received it, give it away again, allow it to transform, and then allow yourself to receive it again, then give it away once again. Go through this cycle of giving and receiving for as long as feels right to you. Breathe in deeply―let it flow through you; breathe out―let it go. Practice this breathing in/letting go three more times. Feel the movement of the action of your heart throughout your being. Take a deep breath, and open your eyes.

This exercise of giving and receiving shows that compassion begins within our own hearts, that we must be willing to accept both the good and the bad in order to fully feel and fully live and fully love. Transformation occurs when we accept through receiving and let go through giving.

[1] Heschel, S. in “Introduction,” Heschel, Abraham Joshua. Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition, 1997.

[2] “In 1,267 days, President Trump has made 20,055 false or misleading claims,” Updated July 9, 2020. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker’s ongoing database of the false or misleading claims made by President Trump since assuming office. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?utm_term=.27babcd5e58c&itid=lk_inline_manual_2&itid=lk_inline_manual_2

[3] Daniel Dale, “Donald Trump’s top 25 lies of 2025, CNN (12/27/25) https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/27/politics/analysis-donald-trumps-top-25-lies-of-2025

[4] Cited in László Földeényi, “Imprisoned in Cold Myth,” in The Quest for Vision in a Confused World, Cultura Animi VIII, Nexus Institute, p. 59.

[5] Jonathan Chait, “The logical end point of Trump saying he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue,” The Atlantic (1/25/26) https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-logical-end-point-of-trump-saying-he-could-shoot-somebody-on-fifth-avenue/ar-AA1UWa0h

[6] Ibid.

[7] Maria Ramirez Uribe and Amy Sherman, (PolitiFact) “Experts question Noem calling Good a ‘domestic terrorist.’ Here’s what the term means” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/experts-question-noem-calling-good-a-domestic-terrorist-heres-what-the-term-means

[8] Daniel Dale, “What Trump officials claimed about Alex Pretti — and what the evidence actually shows,” CNN (1/25/26) https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/25/politics/trump-officials-shifting-rhetoric-alex-pretti

[9] Ibid.

[10] Amy McCarthy, “Trump Says He Feels ‘Terrible’ About Alex Pretti but ‘Even Worse’ About Renee Good Since Her Parents Were ‘Tremendous Trump Fans” People, (1/27/26) https://people.com/trump-says-he-feels-terrible-about-alex-pretti-but-even-worse-about-renee-good-since-her-parents-were-tremendous-trump-fans-11893999

[11] Elizabeth Melimopoulos, “Who bombed the Iranian girls’ school, killing more than 170? What we know,” Aljazeera, March 12, 2026, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/12/who-bombed-the-iranian-girls-school-killing-more-than-170-what-we-know

[12] Ibid.

[13] Cited in László Földeényi, “Imprisoned in Cold Myth,” in The Quest for Vision in a Confused World, Cultura Animi VIII, Nexus Institute, p. 59-60.

[14] Discussed in Caring for Self & Others, p. 198-201, 171-173.

[15] Caring for Self & Others, p. 21.

[16] Michael Meade, Awakening the Soul: A Deep Response to a Troubled World (Vashon, WA: Greenfire Press, 2018), 72-73

[17] For now, you can reference my writings on spiritual democracy and caring for all:

Caring for Self & Others: Transforming Burnout, Compassion Fatigue, and Soul Loss (ch. 10, Becoming Caring: Caring for All). Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality (ch. 14, Spiritual Democracy) – this is available as a free pdf download: https://www.davidkopacz.com/becoming-medicine

[18] See our Becoming a True Human podcast interview with Jeremy David Engels, https://beingfullyhuman.com/2026/03/04/on-mindful-democracy-with-jeremy-david-engels/

[19] Caring for Self & Others, p. 83-84, adapted from David Kopacz and Joseph Rael, Walking the Medicine Wheel: Healing Trauma and PTSD (Tulsa, OK: Pointer Oak, 2016), 164–65.

Words Create Worlds.9 – Death & Life are in the Power of the Tongue

Posted on January 7, 2021 by davidrkopacz

Well – that is what we’ve been warning you about.

Words create worlds.

Violent words create violent acts.

Fascist words create fascist acts.

Seditious, treasonous, insurrectionist words create seditious, treasonous, insurrectionist acts.

Even after the debacle spectacle at the Capitol yesterday, 147 Republican lawmakers voted against democracy, voted to overturn the election.

I have been writing this column called, “Words Create Worlds,” about how what we say begins to create reality. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton warns about malignant normality, when we gradually become desensitized to words and our reality gradually becomes malignant. Our country has become unhealthy in mind and body and spirit. We are suffering from a nearly unchecked spread of Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic – with no coordinated national public health policy and politicians actively promoting unhealth; we have also been suffering from a disease of the mind and social body: fascism. Now we have new words creating our worlds.

treason (n.)

c. 1200, “betraying; betrayal of trust; breach of faith,” from Anglo-French treson, from Old French traison “treason, treachery” (11c.; Modern French trahison), from Latin traditionem (nominative traditio) “delivery, surrender, a handing down, a giving up,” noun of action from past participle stem of tradere “deliver, hand over,” from trans- “over” (see trans-) + dare “to give” (from PIE root *do- “to give”). A doublet of tradition. The Old French form was influenced by the verb trair “betray.”

insurrection (n.)

“an uprising against civil authority,” early 15c., insurreccion, from Old French insurreccion or directly from Late Latin insurrectionem (nominative insurrectio) “a rising up,” noun of action from past participle stem of insurgere “to rise up.”

sedition (n.)

mid-14c., “rebellion, uprising, revolt, concerted attempt to overthrow civil authority; violent strife between factions, civil or religious disorder, riot; rebelliousness against authority,” from Old French sedicion (14c., Modern French sédition) and directly from Latin seditionem (nominative seditio) “civil disorder, dissension, strife; rebellion, mutiny,” literally “a going apart, separation,” from se- “apart” (see secret (n.)) + itio “a going,” from ire “to go” (from PIE root *ei- “to go”).

Meaning “conduct or language inciting to rebellion against a lawful government” is from 1838. An Old English word for it was folcslite. Less serious than treason, as wanting an overt act, “But it is not essential to the offense of sedition that it threaten the very existence of the state or its authority in its entire extent.”

Let’s return back to where this phrase originates with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

“Words create worlds,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.[1]

“Words create worlds.” These are the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, here is the full quote, remembered by his daughter, Susannah Heschel:

“Words, he often wrote, are themselves sacred, God’s tool for creating the universe, and our tools for bringing holiness — or evil — into the world. He used to remind us thatthe Holocaust did not begin with the building of crematoria, and Hitler did not come to power with tanks and guns; it all began with uttering evil words, with defamation, with language and propaganda. Words create worlds he used to tell me when I was a child. They must be used very carefully. Some words, once having been uttered, gain eternity and can never be withdrawn. The Book of Proverbs reminds us, he wrote, that death and life are in the power of the tongue.”^[2]

Death and life are in the power of the tongue. We have a great sickness in this country and are in need of words of healing – not words of violence, not nasty words, not fascist words, not seditious words, not treasonous words, not insurrecionist words. We are in need of words of healing, words of unity, words of spiritual democracy. Let us stop creating destructive worlds through destructive words. Also, please wear your damn mask, we are in a pandemic and that is the most basic public health policy – it is not politics, it is science.

Here are the links to my essays over the past couple years on this subject:

Words Create Worlds.1: A Memoriam for those Killed in the Christchurch Mosque Shootings

Words Create Worlds.2: Rebecca Solnit and Calling Things by their True Names

Words Create Worlds.3: Remembering the Past & Learning from History

Words Create Worlds.4: The Fight for Humanity – or should we say – Working for Humanity

Words Create Worlds.5 To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism & Humanism

Words Create Worlds.6 Doctors Against Fascism

Words Create Worlds.7 – The Cure: Spiritual Humanity

Words Create Worlds.8 – The Public Health Crisis of Fascism

Words Create Worlds.5 To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism & Humanism

Posted on October 9, 2020 by davidrkopacz

“Words create worlds,” said Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.[1]

To Fight Against this Age: On Fascism and Humanism[2] by Rob Riemen

The Words Create Worlds series of essays was inspired by Rabbi Heschel’s warning of the way certain words led to the Holocaust, Riemen’s To Fight Against this Age, and Rebecca Solnit’s Call Them by Their True Names. I felt compelled as a health professional to speak up about fascism, based on the warning flags of the current US presidency and other world movements. In my youth, I was fascinated with World War II, later as a professional I became interested in trauma and the role of the trauma therapist as a moral agent – not just a neutral technician, but a human being who takes a moral stand against human rights abuses, what Robert Jay Lifton calls a “witnessing professional.”[3] As I have watched this regime unfold over the past four years, my early uneasiness has gradually turned to alarm. As physicians, we need to remember our higher calling to function as witnessing professionals for the health of society.

I think it is time for the Doctor to make the diagnosis: fascism, the prognosis: serious.

Fascism is a sickness, an illness, a disorder. It spreads through false-fixed beliefs (delusions), scapegoating (projection), and its continuous stream of lies creates unreality (impaired reality testing). Fascism infects the individual, but it spreads through the community. As a doctor, I am trained to diagnosis and treat sickness. As a doctor, I am trained to attend to individual health as well as public health. Some would say that doctors need to shut up and “stay in their lanes.”^[4]^{,^[5]} However, as someone who has read Nietzsche,^[6] has read Robert Jay Lifton, Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder, Rebecca Solnit, Madeleine Albright, and Rob Riemen – I have learned from history and I have studied epidemiology – people staying in their lane and just following orders leads down a deadly road.

It is Time to Call it Fascism

Could it really be happening again? Right here in the USA? The erosion of democracy and the growth of fascism and totalitarianism. I think it is time we started calling it anti-democracy and fascism. Umair Haque thinks so, see his article “What Does it Take to Fight Authoritarianism? The One Thing Americans Still Won’t Do,” in which he writes:

“I don’t blame Americans for not getting why they have to say fascism. It’s a complex and subtle set of thoughts to understand, this responsibility.

And yet if I say ‘not calling racism or sexism racism or sexism is legitimising it,’ you get it instantly. Get exactly that logic for fascism and authoritarianism now. That moral, social, and personal responsibility.”[7]

The Leader spews a continuous stream of “false statements,” otherwise known as lies, propaganda – to confuse and disorient opposition and to mobilize a base of followers into a false-fixed state of loyalty and unreality. There are so many lies that the footnotes start to eclipse the text. During his presidency, the president of the United States had made more than 20,000 “false statements,”[8] which we should just start calling lies and propaganda because there is a method behind the madness – the method of the fascist playbook.

It sounds like a constant stream of gibberish, (just try to read this two hour speech), it makes no logical sense, but it appeals to biases and emotions. It is propaganda: “othering” and demonizing of groups of people: Mexicans, immigrants, Muslims, and women, “Antifa,” “radical leftists,” “anarchists.” Every event is amplified and weaponized to create divisiveness. He casts doubt on the institution of elections and hints that he will not honor the results or submit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses.

And This Also Has Been One of the Dark Places of the Earth, D. Kopacz

To Fight Against This Age

Let us turn to Rob Riemen’s To Fight Against the Age: On Fascism and Humanism (2018). Riemen is the Founder, President, and CEO of the Nexus Institute, “a leading international center for intellectual reflection to inspire the Western cultural and philosophical debate,” and is the editor of the journal Nexus.

I picked up Riemen’s book, by chance, when I was traveling for work and was in Charleston, West Virginia. I found it at a nice little bookstore, Taylor Books. I bought it on impulse and then was fascinated by it and finished it on the flight home. The book consists of two essays, “The Eternal Return of Fascism,” (originally published in 2010) and “The Return of Europa.” In keeping with the theme of Words Creating Worlds, Riemen writes that “to be able to understand something,” you have to “call it by its proper name,” specifically, “populism…will not provide any meaningful understanding,” (18). Even more specifically:

“The use of the term populist is only one more way to cultivate the denial that the ghost of fascism is haunting societies again and to deny the fact that liberal democracies have turned into their opposite: mass democracies deprived of the spirit of democracy,” (19).

Fascism Rests on Dehumanizing Others

I have personally been concerned with the objectification and dehumanization that happens in medical education and medical practice (see Kopacz, Re-humanizing Medicine – 2014). The antidote to dehumanization is quite simple in theory: re-humanization. The more difficult questions are: What is a human being? How is the soul of the human being lost? How is the soul of the human being regained? Riemen reaches a conclusion similar to mine about the limitations of numbers and the scientific method and the need for the humanities and a whole person philosophy.

“Science and technology will never be able to provide us with a complete understanding of the human being with his instincts and desires, virtues and values, mind and spirit…The humanities and the arts” provide “the only knowledge that could provide a true understanding of the human heart,” and that “the real requirements of a democratic civilization [are] the wisdom of poetry and literature, philosophy and theology, the arts and history,” (19-20).

How does fascism return to civilized democracies? Germany, itself was a democracy, Hitler was elected and then gradually did away with democratic institutions, consolidating power. Riemen puts it bluntly, “the main reason fascism can return so easily in mass democracies: ignorance,” (21). The ignorance of history. The ignorance of social psychology. The ignorance of power and fascism. If we don’t call it by its true name, as Riemen and Solnit both implore us, we will have no chance of confronting and stopping it.

Riemen takes his title of his book, To Fight Against this Age from Nietzsche, whom he paraphrases, “we should not accept the blind power of the actual and that instead of conforming to the whole noisy sham-culture of our age, we have to be fighters against this age…It is now upon us to fight against a zeitgeist that destroys the spirit of the democratic civilization,” (27).

You Let Your Magic Tortoise Go, D. Kopacz

The Plague of Fascism

Riemen writes about Camus’ allegory of fascism, The Plague,[9] commenting on the “fascist bacillus,” he tells us that if “we want to put up a good fight, we first have to admit that it has become active in our social body and call it by its name: fascism,” (34). We must diagnose the problem before we can treat it correctly.

Riemen’s book was published in 2018. Now we have the strange juxtaposition of an actual pandemic being used as a fascist tool for promoting divisiveness and effecting the first purge of this regime, 200,000+ dead in the United States as of late September – 25% of the global deaths for 4% of the global population, at least we are “great” at something. Even stranger, now we have a president who is actually infected with a virus he is hell-bent on spreading to others.

Riemen, following Nietzsche’s critique, sees a problem with European and Western culture – that we have lost spiritual values. “With the loss of spiritual values,” he writes, “not only did morals disappear but so did culture in the original meaning of the word: cultura animi, the ‘cultivation of the soul,’” (38). We have become the barbarians. Barbarian originally meant “unintelligible speech,”[10] again, just try reading through this transcript.

This “cultivation of the soul” and the recognition of our common humanity is what humanism is founded upon. Fascism is the opposite of humanism – it is about the degradation of the soul, it is about exaggerating the differences between human beings into a false and superficial sense of sameness rather than seeing “out of many, one,” e pluribus unum.

Writing in the mid-1930s, Menno ter Braak noted that fascist movements were focused on “stimulating aggression and anger.” Riemen summarizes that a fascist movement:

“was not actually interested in finding solutions, had no ideas of its own, and did not want to solve social problems, because injustice was necessary for maintaining an atmosphere of vilification and hatred,” (51).

Lousy at Democracy, Super-Good at Fascism

If we look at the current US presidency, we might be tempted to call it incompetent – and from a perspective of democracy it would be right to do so. However, if we view the current president through the lens of fascism – he is hypercompetent. He is lousy at democracy, but he is super-good at fascist.

Menno ter Braak focused on the use of “social resentment vented on a scapegoat who was blamed for everything: the Jew.” Riemen further summarizes ter Braak’s view:

“At the same time, this movement considered itself to be the eternal victim of the ‘left’ or the ‘elite’ and harbored a deep aversion to intellectuals, cosmopolitans, and anyone who was different…[with a] continuous use of slogans and empty rhetoric…it was reactionary,” (52).

Fascism is Semi-civilization and Promotes the Cult of Resentment

Fascism is “semi-civilization” and promotes “the cult of resentment.” These are the rules that the current US president is very good at, he consults the fascist playbook at every turn and fascism is winning and democracy is losing.

How did fascism gain hold in European democracies? By using those democracies against themselves. Both Hitler and Mussolini were voted into power. Riemen writes that both the liberals and the conservatives caved in to fascism because they thought they could gain something from it. It is the classic devil’s bargain of “the end justifies the means.” This is based, or maybe we should say de-based, on the idea that getting power or money (the ultimate materialist focus) is more important than human values, civility, decency, or humanity.

“The liberals no longer defended the freedom principle of European humanism but became interested only in the freedom of the markets: that is to say, As long as we can earn money,” (56).

We see this today – somehow the stock market in the US seems to give permission for fascism, as long as we can earn money.

“The conservatives were unprepared to unscrupulously exchange the protection of spiritual values for the preservation of their own power, under the veils of ‘tradition’ and ‘social order,’” (56).

We see this today, the conservatives going along with the president, even when it seems to violate their own principles, as long as they can preserve power and social order. This is the definition of fascism: power and order become more important than principles, ideals, more important than human beings.

After World War II, after Mussolini and Hitler were defeated, some still worried that we had not learned the lessons of history. Riemen reminds of that both Albert Camus and Thomas Mann, both Nobel Prize winners, warned of the return of fascism.

“Camus and Mann…as early as 1947…stated that fascism was a political phenomenon that had not disappeared at the end of the war and that we could now describe as the politicization of the mentality of the rancorous mass-man. It is a form of politics used by demagogues whose only motive is to enforce and extend their own power, to which end they will exploit resentment, designate scapegoats, incite hatred, hide intellectual vacuity beneath raucous slogans and insults, and elevate political opportunism into an art form with their populism,” (60).

A Realm Where Words are Separated from their Meanings

Riemen warns us, as early as 2010, that “this is a new outbreak of the plague,” (60). But just as you cannot treat a disease you cannot name and diagnose, you cannot appropriately respond to a movement if you cannot call it by its true name – fascism. We, in the US, were sick, even before the Covid-19 pandemic, we were in the throes of a revival of an old illness – the pandemic of fascism. We entered into a realm where “words were separated from their meanings and reduced to slogans,” (61).

Again and again, throughout this essay, Riemen reminds us that the cure to fascism is the medicine of our human unity and spiritual/moral values. This is not about religion – many of the most vocal followers of the president are “religious” people who are more interested in power than in human goodness.

“Our true identity is determined not by nationality, origin, language, belief, income, race, or any way in which people differ from one another, but precisely by what unites us and makes the unity of [hu]mankind possible: universal spiritual values that shape human dignity and that every… [one]…can adopt,” (67).

“Anyone who really wants to be a humanist rejects every form of fanaticism and learns the courtesy of the heart and the art of conversation, dialogue,” (68).

What is needed is not a political solution, but a human solution. We need to remember our original instructions and the principles and tenets of spiritual democracy. While fascism is a political movement based in materialism (money and power), its cure is a spiritual movement based in humanism (soul and spirit).

Continuous Lies as Politics

Riemen describes the Party for Freedom (PVV, Partij voor de Vrijeheid) in his native Netherlands in words that sound like the current US president’s playbook. Fascism is not creative, it is not novel, it is really just the same damn thing, over and over again – the basest aspects of our material nature. It is the propagation of dehumanization through dehumanization. The PPV offers

“the shameless opposite of the Judeo-Christian and humanist traditions: vulgar materialism, oppressive nationalism, xenophobia, ammunition for resentment, a deep aversion to the arts and the exercise of spiritual values, a suffocating spiritual bigotry, a fierce resistance to the European spirit, and continuous lies as politics,” (68-69).

Doctors Against Fascism

The way you learn how to diagnose something in medical school is by seeing case after case after case – until it becomes automatic, at the first signs or symptoms, you see the incipient signs of a more serious illness. This is why we need Doctors Against Fascism – witnessing professionals to diagnose and warn us that the fascist bacillus is starting to dehumanize our population and make it vulnerable to fulminant fascism. In the USA, there has been a growing concern about the signs and symptoms of fascism since 2016. Riemen has been seeing it in Europe since at least 2010 and we see it spreading all over the globe – a pandemic of fascism in Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, Philippines, England, Brazil, India, and the United States of America.

The Doctor is in and has bad news for you – the prognosis of our nation’s health is serious. We are infected with fascism – it has taken hold in the minds of many of our citizens and it is spreading through our institutions. Words Create Worlds and we are surrounded by continuous lies as politics.

This essay seems to have found a natural ending-point here. I will pick up with the rest of the review of Rob Riemen’s book, To Fight Against This Age: Fascism and Humanism, in the next installment of Words Create Worlds. Perhaps I will develop this theme of Doctors Against Fascism more.

…

This series, Words Create Worlds, grows out of my work with Joseph Rael on peace. In Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality, I felt compelled to write about the responsibility that grows out of mystical, visionary, and shamanic experience—that we must work toward “Spiritual Democracy.” At its deepest point, mystical experience leads to an awareness that we are all one and this comes with a responsibility to challenge words of separation which can ultimately lead to fascism. Mystical experience is a pathway that leads us to question who we are and gives us a responsibility to use our words wisely to create worlds where we are becoming the medicine that our world needs. As Rumi says, “We are pain and what cures the pain.”[11]

[1] Life Between the Trees blog.

[2] Rob Riemen, To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.

[3] Robert Jay Lifton, “Foreword to the First Edition: Our Witness to Malignant Normality,” in Bandy Lee (ed) The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2019.

[4] “Doctors Revolt After N.R.A. Tells Them to ‘Stay in Their Lane’ on Gun Policy,” Matthew Haag, The New York Times, Nov. 13, 2018. The original criticism was in a Tweet from the NRA, “Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane. Half of the articles in Annals of Internal Medicine are pushing for gun control. Most upsetting, however, the medical community seems to have consulted NO ONE but themselves.” https://twitter.com/NRA/status/1060256567914909702.

[5] “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me by My Pronouns: At ‘woke’ medical schools, curricula are increasingly focused on social justice rather than treating illness,” Stanley Goldfarb, Wall Street Journal, 9/12/19.

[6] Richard Huelsenbeck, German-American psychiatrist and Dada-ist who was investigated by the Nazis and forbidden to write, once said, “We are psychiatrists; we are Germans; we have read Nietzsche; we know that to gaze too long at monsters is to risk becoming one―that’s what we get paid for!” (Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, p. 211). Marcus’ book traces the spirit of protest from punk rock back to earlier art movements that were cultural and political critiques of the times.

[7] Umair Haque, “What Does it Take to Fight Authoritarianism? The One Thing Americans Still Won’t Do.” Eudamoinia & Co, Sept 25, 2020, https://eand.co/what-does-it-take-to-fight-authoritarianism-the-one-thing-americans-still-wont-do-676dfb86794b

[8] Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, Meg Kelly, “President Trump has made more than 20,000 false or misleading claims.” The Washington Post, July 13, 2020 at 12:00 a.m. PDT

[9] Albert Camus, The Plague, New York: Vintage International, 1991.

[10] https://www.etymonline.com/word/barbarian

[11] Rumi, “We are the mirror as well as the face in it,” The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks, 106.

Words Create Worlds.3

Posted on September 18, 2020 by davidrkopacz

This essay first appeared in The Badger, Year 6, Volume 6, Issue 1 (4/4/20). Thanks to The Badger for permission to reprint.

“Words create worlds.” These are the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, here is the full quote, remembered by his daughter, Susannah Heschel:

“Words, he often wrote, are themselves sacred, God’s tool for creating the universe, and our tools for bringing holiness — or evil — into the world. He used to remind us that the Holocaust did not begin with the building of crematoria, and Hitler did not come to power with tanks and guns; it all began with uttering evil words, with defamation, with language and propaganda. Words create worlds he used to tell me when I was a child. They must be used very carefully. Some words, once having been uttered, gain eternity and can never be withdrawn. The Book of Proverbs reminds us, he wrote, that death and life are in the power of the tongue.”[1]

Remembering the Past & Learning from History

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (George Santayana)[2]

Are we witnessing a rise of fascism and totalitarianism? Many say we are, and it is worth looking at what these words mean and if they apply to our current situation, which Rebecca Solnit calls a linguistic crisis.[3]

Are we justified in using such a strong word as “fascism” for the language and ideas that are being tossed about under the guise of a resurgent nationalism? The Director of the McMaster Centre for Research in the Public Interest, Henry Giroux, believes so.

“I have no apologies whatsoever for using the word fascist politics. And I think that people who are afraid to do that become complicit with the very politics they condemn. Because if you can’t learn from history, then it seems to me that you end up in the dark,” (Henry Giroux).[4]

In this next installment of the Words Create Worlds series, we will turn to the work of two authors who warn us against a global movement into fascism. Both authors have familial roots in the persecution of the Jewish people during the holocaust and the Soviet take over of Eastern Europe after World War II. We will first discuss former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright’s book, Fascism: A Warning. Then we will turn to Yale professor, Jason Stanley’s book, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. I do not intend this to be polemical, partisan politics, but rather to objectively document the current resurgence of fascistic rhetoric, in the United States and globally, in light of the history of fascism in the 20^th Century.

Fascism: A Warning

Former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright published her book by this name in 2018. She starts with describing her family’s experience with fascism, escaping to London in 1939 from the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. The family returned to Czechoslovakia after the war, only to have to flee in 1948 from the communists, this time to the USA. The family lost numerous members to the Holocaust.

Albright sees a worldwide movement of leaders “intentionally undermining the institutions and democratic principles that have held the world together,” (xvii). She has chapters focusing on the rise of Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain, Stalin in the Soviet Union, Putin in Russia, Erdoğan in Turkey, Milošević in the former Yugoslavia, Chávez in Venezuela, Orbán in Hungary, Kaczyński in Poland, the Supreme Leaders in North Korea, and Trump in the USA. She defines a fascist as “someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals that he or she might have,” (245-246).

Albright includes Trump in this group of leaders leaning into fascism as “we have not had a chief executive in the modern era whose statements and actions are so at odds with democratic ideals,” (5). She points out that he has “systematically degraded political discourse in the United States, shown an astonishing disregard for facts, libeled his predecessors, threatened to ‘lock up’ political rivals, referred to mainstream journalists as ‘the enemy of the American people,’ spread falsehoods about the integrity of the US electoral process, touted mindlessly nationalistic economic and trade policies, vilified immigrants and the countries from which they come, and nurtured a paranoid bigotry toward the followers of one of the world’s foremost religions,” (5).

Albright notes that, in 2016, “fascism” was the most searched for word in the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary, except for the word “surreal,” showing a popular interest in understanding the meanings of these words. She describes the history of the word fascism, going back to Mussolini’s revival of the Roman consul’s emblem, the fasces, a “bundle of elm rods coupled with an ax,” (19-20). Mussolini is also credited with coining the term, “drain the swamp” (drenare la palude) by firing 35,000 civil servants (20). Albright traces the history of the words, “America First,” back to Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee of 1940, which included “Nazi sympathizers” to resist entry into World War II (216). One of the things we are looking at in this column is how words create worlds and to echo and mimic the words of a fascist is to risk recreating a fascist state. She quotes George Orwell’s one-word description of a Fascist, a “bully,” (209). We can look to see if the current president of the United States qualifies as a bully – does he call people names, does he push people around and try to intimidate them and always get his way?

The question is whether what we are seeing in the United States, which seems to resonate on larger geopolitical trends, deserves to be called fascism. Albright states that “Trump is the first antidemocratic president in modern U.S. history,” and that on “too many days, beginning in the early hours, he flaunts his disdain for democratic institutions, the ideals of equality and social justice, civil discourse, civic virtues, and America itself. If transplanted to a country with fewer democratic safeguards, he would audition for dictator, because that is where his instincts lead,” (246). She writes that leaders around the world “observe, learn from, and mimic one another,” and that they see “where their peers are heading, what they can get away with, and how they can augment and perpetuate their power,” (246). She describes how this happened historically in the Twentieth Century and she fears that history is repeating itself and that “the herd is moving in a Fascist direction,” (246). Albright is issuing a warning, as her book’s subtitle states, she feels that in the US, we “are not there yet, but these feel like signposts on the road back to an era when Fascism found nourishment and individual tragedies were multiplied millions-fold,” (224).

Albright’s Antidotes to Fascism

Albright mentions a few antidotes to fascism, such as “caring about others” and “the proposition that we are all created equal” which neutralizes the “self-centered moral numbness that allows Fascism to thrive,” (66). She also says that we need to develop world views that see similarities, rather than us and them, that we need “a way of looking at the world that recognizes the humanity that we share with one another, and the interests that nations have in common,” (187). This is similar to the idea of “spiritual democracy” that Joseph Rael and I develop in our forthcoming book, Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality.

“Medicine Wheel of Dark Matter,” D. Kopacz

How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

Jason Stanley is a Yale professor and author of the book, How Propaganda Works and his recent How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Stanley was born in the US, but his parents fled Europe as Jewish refugees. His father lived through Kristallnacht in Germany and his mother, from Eastern Poland, was in a Siberian labor camp during the war.

Stanley also speaks of the history of the America First movement (“the public face of pro-fascist sentiment”) and its roots in anti-immigration policy. He defines fascism as “ultranationalism of some variety,” with the nation “represented in the person of an authoritarian leader who speaks on its behalf,” (xiv). As does Albright, he sees the United States in a dangerous moment. A hallmark of fascist politics “comes from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population,” which leads to limiting “the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination,” (xv). He points out that dehumanization can exist without overt fascism, but that “it should concern all Americans that as a candidate and as president, Donald Trump has publicly and explicitly insulted immigrant groups,” (xv).

Dehumanization

Dehumanization is the process of treating a person as a thing, as something less than human. I have written about this process in medical and health care settings in my book, Re-humanizing Medicine. Dehumanization can spread like an epidemic. Psychoanalyst, Robert Stoller, has written that the act of dehumanizing another “dehumanizes the dehumanizer,”[5] (Stoller, 32). The dehumanized individual has lost touch with what it means to be human and thus treats others as objects rather than as people. This recalls Martin Buber’s distinction between the I-Thou and the I-It relationships. The I-It relationship is a dehumanized relationship, it is profane and materialistic, treating human beings as raw material. The I-Thou relationship, on the other hand, sacralizes and spiritualizes the relationship between two human beings, it is a subject-subject relationship.[6] The reason that fascism is a spiritual as well as political issue is because fascism despiritualizes human beings and the world. Just as I called for Re-humanizing Medicine, we need a Re-humanizing Politics, and a Re-spiritualizing Politics after the resurgence of fascist rhetoric and action. Two of the antidotes that I describe in Re-humanizing Medicine are developing a personal counter-curriculum of re-humanization (an action plan to reinvest in one’s being fully human: body, emotions, mind, heart, creativity, intuition, and spirituality), and to join the compassion revolution – a global movement of bringing heart back into health care. We could use these processes in our current geopolitical climate.

Stanley’s 10 Common Features of Fascism:

Political invocation of a mythic past – e.g. “Make America Great Again”
Propaganda – to distort reality and create alternate narratives and “realities” of control
Anti-intellectualism – “the liberal New York Times,” casting free speech and scholarship as liberal agendas
Unreality – “fake news” and “alternative facts,” creating a state news organ
Hierarchy – us/them, the deserving and the undeserving
Victimhood – seeing oneself as a victim can lead to victimizing others before they victimize you
Law and order – warn about dangerous “others” and the need to control and contain “them”
Sexual anxiety – fears of racial purity and appeal to need for “strong men” for protection
Sodom and Gomorrah – decadent “coastal elites”
Arbeit Macht Frei – This German phrase, meaning “work will set you free” was inscribed over the entrance to the Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz[7]

Stanley’s book follows chapters on each of these different topics, but he reminds us that:

“The most telling symptom of fascist politics is division. It aims to separate a population into an ‘us’ and a ‘them,’” (xvi).

The antidote to fascism can also be found in the poison of it. Stanley writes that the “suffering of strangers can solidify the structure of fascism,” but that “it can also trigger empathy once another lens is clicked into place,” (xix).

This is the much-needed compassion revolution. I often find myself musing about what would happen if all these politicians who are spreading hatred and division simply asked themselves before they spoke, “Am I speaking from the heart and out of love?” Stanley sees the root power of fascism in the separation of people into us and them. Many spiritual practices cultivate the opposite of us and them, seeking states of peace, unity, and interconnection. For example, the Tibetan Buddhist practice of tonglen and Loving Kindness focus on breaking down the barriers between self and other. Hindu Kashmiri Shaivism seeks the understanding and experience that all is Śiva, that we are all God, and that there is no “us and them.” In our forthcoming book, Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality,[8] Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) and I discuss the concept of Spiritual Democracy, of cultivating different ways that we can move from self and other, to brother and sister, and even further to the non-dual point where we are all one. Through exploring different pathways of initiation we come to the conclusion that the spiritual path leads to a state of oneness and from this state of oneness, one feels a responsibility for all life. After seeking initiation, comes finding & receiving wisdom, and this wisdom comes with the responsibility to return to the world and to find ways of giving compassion and wisdom to others.

Sun Through Trees Near Sol Duc River, Washington state, D. Kopacz (2019)

In the next installment of Words Create Worlds we will be, “The Fight for Humanity – or should we say – Working for Humanity.” Throughout 2019 I was writing these Words Create Worlds essays that appeared in The Badger. In working with Joseph Rael, writing our next book, Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality, I felt compelled to write about the responsibility of mystical, visionary, and shamanic experience—that we must work toward “Spiritual Democracy.” At its deepest point, mystical experience leads to an awareness that we are all one and this comes with a responsibility to challenge words of separation which ultimately lead to fascism. Mystical experience is a pathway that leads us to question who we are and gives us a responsibility to use our words wisely to create worlds where we are becoming the medicine that our world needs. As Rumi says, “We are pain and what cures the pain.”[9]

[1] Life Between the Trees blog.

[2] “‘Those Who Do Not Learn History Are Doomed To Repeat It.’ Really?” Nicholas Clairmont, Big Think, 7/31/13, https://bigthink.com/the-proverbial-skeptic/those-who-do-not-learn-history-doomed-to-repeat-it-really

[3] Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018, pg 4.

[4] “Henry Giroux: Will Trump’s Deliberate Racist Rhetoric Lead Us to Fascism?” Interview with Marc Steiner, Big Think, 7/18/19. https://truthout.org/video/trumps-racist-rhetoric-is-deliberate-will-it-lead-us-to-fascism/

[5] Robert Stoller, Observing the Erotic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 32.

[6] Robert Audi ed., ‘Martin Buber,’ The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 104.

[7] These are the chapters from, Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House, 2018. I have provided my own brief elaborations after the topic headings of Stanley’s chapters. For a quick review of Stanley’s 10 elements of fascism, which also comments on the rise of Hindutva in India, see “The ten indicators of fascist politics,” Kanishk Tharoor, The Hindu Business Line, 5/17/19, https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/talk/the-ten-indicators-of-fascism/article27158525.ece

[8] David Kopacz and Joseph Rael. Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality. Seattle & Marvel: Condor & Eagle Press, 2020.

[9] Rumi, “We are the mirror as well as the face in it,” The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks, 106.

Words Create Worlds.1

Posted on August 28, 2020 by davidrkopacz

This is a series I have been publishing over the past couple years in the online journal The Badger. The Badger is not a political journal, but in my work with Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) I have been seeing the intersection between spirituality and politics – particularly when politics is against peace and is against human rights. The spiritual path leads to ever greater states of union and love – and yet we are witnessing a resurgence of fascism which is based on separation, division and hate.

Thank you to The Badger for giving permission to post these essays in my blog. You can find the hub for all the issues here, and I will provide a link to the specific issue for each of these essays.

Words Create Worlds.1

A Memoriam for those Killed in the Christchurch Mosque Shootings

Originally published in The Badger, 2019, Year 5, Volume 1

“Words create worlds.” These are the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, here is the full quote, remembered by his daughter, Susannah Heschel:

“Words, he often wrote, are themselves sacred, God’s tool for creating the universe, and our tools for bringing holiness — or evil — into the world. He used to remind us that the Holocaust did not begin with the building of crematoria, and Hitler did not come to power with tanks and guns; it all began with uttering evil words, with defamation, with language and propaganda. Words create worlds he used to tell me when I was a child. They must be used very carefully. Some words, once having been uttered, gain eternity and can never be withdrawn. The Book of Proverbs reminds us, he wrote, that death and life are in the power of the tongue.”[1]

I am writing this the day after 49 people were killed in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand (March 16, 2019). I have a personal connection to New Zealand, having lived there from 2010 – 2013. I visited Christchurch days before the second earthquake in 2011. I have a series of selfies my wife and I took walking across the courtyard in front of the Christchurch Cathedral, which was destroyed in the quake.

Since leaving New Zealand, I have been working with military veterans. The way I conceptualize my work is that I am helping to guide veterans from a war culture of the military world to the peace culture of the civilian world. It can be a tough journey after speaking words of war to speaking words of peace.

Red Begonias, Christchurch Botanical Garden, (D. Kopacz, 2011)

During this work, I was befriended by Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow), who has been working for world peace since the 1980s when he had visions of Sound Chambers, Peace Chambers: circular structures, half above ground, half below ground, with men and women chanting for peace. He has created over 50 chambers for peace across four continents.

Working with Joseph has reinforced and shaped my identity as a psychiatrist who is not just treating mental illness, but is supporting cultural transitions and transformations, and is creating peace. Joseph would agree that “words create worlds.” He often talks about the power of sound and speech. When we were working on our book, Walking the Medicine Wheel: Healing Trauma & PTSD, Joseph would tell me, “I am my brother’s keeper.” As I contemplated this saying, I realized he was not just stating a world-view of many indigenous people—that we are all interrelated and connected—but that he was also speaking an antidote to the first murder documented in the Bible. After Cain killed his brother, Abel, God asks Cain where Abel is and Cain says, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?”[2] With these words an identity of separation is created in the Biblical tradition. Joseph, in saying “I am my brother’s keeper,” is using words as an antidote for an illness of separation which is once again becoming an epidemic in our world.

“Words create worlds.” J.M. Berger, author of Extremism, would likely agree with this statement. Writing for the Atlantic, he writes of the dangerous impact of publishing and thus publicizing the words of mass murderers.

“It is far past time to reconsider the standard for publishing such manifestos. That does not mean we should abandon the search for meaning. But manifestos are rarely simple confessional documents. They are works of propaganda, just like ISIS beheading videos and al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine. Like those publications, journalists should report on manifestos, but they should mediate their propagandistic intent instead of blindly amplifying it. . .We have only begun to suffer the cost of these writings, crafted with an intent no less lethal than their authors’ violent crimes.”[3]

We find ourselves in a war of words. I try not to use the word “enemy.” To think of someone as an enemy is to make them “other” and this is the very root cause of violence, hatred, racism, and bigotry. To meet violence with violence or hate with hate does not create peace. Rather than enemy, I think opponent is a better term. The United States fought wars against England, Japan, and Germany. They were our opponents during the wars, but they are not our enemies. Consider the relationship between Gandhi and Jan Smuts. Smuts was the only person to sign the peace treaties ending both World War I & II. He advocated for the League of Nations following World War I. Yet, earlier in his life, he was a proponent of apartheid and he had a worthy opponent in South Africa on this, Gandhi. While Gandhi was imprisoned he made Smuts a pair of sandals. He returned the sandals for Gandhi’s 70^th birthday, writing, “I have worn these sandals for many a summer, even though I may feel that I am not worthy to stand in the shoes of so great a man.”[4]

These two men struggled against each other for their beliefs, and yet they were not life-long enemies. Smuts literally walked in Gandhi’s shoes. We can wonder if this influenced Smuts’ later 1926 book, Holism and Evolution, in which he coined the word, “holism,” the concept of not seeing things through separation and isolation, but as component parts of a larger whole.

Christchurch, New Zealand (D. Kopacz, Feb 2011)

In this war of words we are struggling with our own darker natures, as well as the darker nature of all humanity. It is human nature to view ourselves as separate tribes and clans and peoples based on the superficial colour of our skin or which football team we support, or which religion we belong to. Yet there is also a deeper truth that we are all one, we are all interconnected, sharing the same Earth. The findings of scientists about Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam tell us that we all are, literally—not just figuratively—brothers and sisters.[5]

This war of words is a struggle about what kind of world we are going to create: a world in which everyone is equal and everyone has a place and a voice, or a world which is only for some people, a world where some people have more rights than others. This is a struggle of words and world-views which is being waged in the hearts and minds of all human beings on planet Earth as we try to come to terms with our interrelatedness and oneness.

Gerald Arbuckle, a Catholic priest and cultural anthropologist (who is from New Zealand and lives in Australia) has been studying the effects of loneliness and isolation and the resurgent rise of fundamentalism in our world.

He calls this a “global epidemic of fundamentalism both religious and political,” and he defines fundamentalists as “boundary-setters . . . marking themselves off from others.” Arbuckle sees, “A typical fundamentalist leader is a populist, homophobic, charismatic, authoritarian man who likes to bully,” a personality type that is only all too common in positions of power across the world.[6]

To see ourselves as separate from others opens the doors to discrimination, racism, and violence. Separation leads to loneliness and authoritarian and fascist movements promise a way out of loneliness through belonging to a tight-knit in-group based on an exclusionary identity opposed to another group or culture. Fascisms power comes from having an “other” who is an enemy. We should be very suspicious of the use of this word “enemy,” for instance in hearing the press called the “enemy of the people,” which is an age-old fascist trope.

Christchurch Cathedral – February 2011, prior to being destroyed in earthquake (D. Kopacz)

New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern’s response to these recent killings was this: “Because we represent diversity, kindness, compassion. A home for those who share our values. Refuge for those who needs it. And those values will not and cannot be shaken by this attack.”[7]

New Zealand is geographically isolated, tucked away in the South Pacific, it has a strong anti-nuclear policy, refusing to allow nuclear U.S. warships into port. In New Zealand, the police do not openly carry guns. One former patient of mine, a teenage refugee from the Balkans, told me, “As soon as I saw the police here in New Zealand do not carry guns, I finally felt safe after years of war.” Now we have a major act of terrorism in New Zealand. In the United States we have debates over gun violence. Second Amendment Rights advocates always argue for more guns after gun violence, but research on gun ownership and gun violence shows that guns are more likely to be used in suicide or against someone in the home than they are against a violent “other.” In the United States, powerful lobbies and ideologies actually banned scientific research on gun violence for fear that it will lead to restrictions in gun ownership.[8] How do we respond to gun violence, terrorism and acts of hatred? Research for individual gun ownership does not support that we should all arm ourselves. The suspected killer in Christchurch, a 28 year-old, Australian born man targeted this gun debate and wanted to fuel the flames. Reporting in the New York Times states:

“Writing that he had purposely used guns to stir discord in the United States over the Second Amendment’s provision on the right to bear arms, he also declared himself a fascist. ‘For once, the person that will be called a fascist, is an actual fascist,’ he wrote.”[9]

We should take a closer look at this word, “fascist,” including its current manifestations and history, because it is like a disease that our global civilization has had a recurrence of in recent years.

Duke professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Omid Safi writes of these killings,

“This terrorist attack is not an aberration. This is not about mental illness, it is not about one person. This is where all the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant discourse over the last few years leads to.”[10]

Safi sees the roots of these killing in the ideas and words of white supremacy and he anticipates the gun rights arguments that “guns don’t kill people, people with mental illness kill people.” Yet when we have the confluence of easily accessible lethal means and a growing epidemic of violent words, there is an increase in violent actions. “Words create worlds.”

Nietzsche warned us that those who fight something risk becoming the very thing they fight, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look too long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”[11]

Pink Begonias, Christchurch Botanical Gardens (D. Kopacz, 2011)

Clarrissa Ward, from CNN, sees a similarity in the ideas and words of the far-right and terrorist organizations.

“To me, there’s almost a symbiotic relationship happening right now between extreme terrorists on the far-right and between some of these other terrorist organizations that we’re more familiar with.

The other thing that’s interesting, and disconcerting, frankly, is how much of the language and ideas he [the Christchurch killer] talks about have also seeped into mainstream political rhetoric.

He talks a lot about the idea of invasion, that Muslim migrants are invading white Western countries. He talks about the birth rate, the idea of replacement, that white culture is being replaced. We’ve heard such words coming from the President of the United States. We’ve heard them coming from far-right governments in Europe, whether it be Italy, whether it be Hungary. . . .

When you look at the zeitgeist and the rise of the far right in Europe and the US, ideas that were once considered as taboo to talk about are now being flaunted and public discourse invariably sets a tone.”[12]

Ward raises this disturbing spectre that Western Democracies are at risk of becoming our enemies—state-sponsored terrorism and extremism. The disturbing rise of far-right ideologies and words is being supported at the highest levels of governments across the globe.

Over the next year, I would like to write about some of these topics of how our “words create worlds.” In working with Joseph Rael, writing our next book, Becoming Medicine: Pathways of Initiation into a Living Spirituality, I felt compelled to write about the responsibility of mystical, visionary, and shamanic experience—that we must work toward “Spiritual Democracy.” At its deepest point, mystical experience leads to an awareness that we are all one and this comes with a responsibility to challenge words of separation which ultimately lead to fascism. Mystical experience is a pathway that leads us to question who we are and gives us a responsibility to use our words wisely to create worlds where we are becoming the medicine that our world needs. As Rumi says, “We are pain and what cures the pain.”[13]

Cape Reinga, North Island, New Zealand – meeting of the Pacific Ocean and the Tasman Sea (D. Kopacz, 2013)

[1] Life Between the Trees blog. I first came across a shorter instance of this quote in the Omid Safi reference below.

[2] The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition, Genesis 4.9.

[3] J.M. Berger, “The Dangerous Spread of Extremist Manifestos: By sharing the writings of terrorists, media outlets can amplify their impact,” The Atlantic online, 2/26/19, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/christopher-hasson-was-inspired-breivik-manifesto/583567/.

[4] Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas, ed. Louis Fischer, 98.

[5] This is discussed in National Genographic DNA results. Also see Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Gene: An Intimate History and “Y-Chromosomal Adam,” Wikipedia.

[6] Gerald Arbuckle, Fundamentalism At Home and Abroad, 28, 9, 15. Also see his recent book, Loneliness: Insights for Healing in a Fragmentary World.

[7] Lucy Bennett “Christchurch mosque massacre: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks to nation following shootings,” New Zealand World Herald, 3/15/19, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/crime/news/article.cfm?c_id=30&objectid=12213187.

[8] Arthur L. Kellermann, et al, “Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home,” New England Journal of Medicine, 10/7/93, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199310073291506. February 13, 2013

Arthur L. Kellermann and Frederick P. Rivara, “Silencing the Science on Gun Research,” Journal of the American Medical Association, https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1487470. J. John Mann, M.D., Christina A. Michel, “Prevention of Firearm Suicide in the United States: What Works and What Is Possible,” American Journal of Psychiatry, Published Online: 22 Jul 2016, https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2016.16010069 .

[9] “New Zealand Shooting Live Updates: 49 Are Dead After 2 Mosques Are Hit,” New York Times, 3/15/19, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/world/asia/new-zealand-shooting-updates-christchurch.html.

[10] Omid Safi, Facebook, 3/15/19, https://www.facebook.com/omidsafi/posts/10157227737858793.

[11] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146, trans. Walter Kauffman (1989).

[12] Clarissa Ward, “How language in the attacker’s purported manifesto mimics the words of ISIS and al Qaeda,” CNN, 3/15/19, https://www.cnn.com/asia/live-news/new-zealand-christchurch-shooting-intl/index.html.

[13] Rumi, “We are the mirror as well as the face in it,” The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks, 106.

Racism & Narcissism: The Work of Carl Bell, MD

Posted on July 21, 2020 by davidrkopacz

I reviewed Dr. Carl Bell’s collected papers, The Sanity of Survival: Reflections on Community Mental Health and Wellness in a previous blog (all quotes referenced by page number are from this book). This volume includes two papers that are worth dealing with at length as so many people are trying to understand how racism in the United States could be getting so much support from elected officials and even the president. Dr. Bell published “Racism, Narcissism, and Integrity” in the Journal of the National Medical Association 1978; (70):89-92 and “Racism: A Symptom of Narcissistic Personality Disorder” in the Journal of the National Medical Association, 1980; (72):661-665. Dr. Bell was not looking at politically motivated and politically encouraged racism, but racism in general. We will circle back around to the issue of politics, racism, and narcissism at the end of this paper.

One of Dr. Bell’s many interests, during his career, was whether racism should be considered a form of mental illness. In these papers he addresses racism as an expression of narcissism.

“Covert racism is a psychological attitude and as such, should fall under the scrutiny of psychiatry as a psychopathological symptom of personality disturbance,” (406).

“The racist individual suffers from a psychopathological defect of developmental processes involving narcissism, which precludes the subsequent development of such qualities as creativity, empathy, wisdom, and integrity,” (406).

Dr. Bell draws on the theoretical and clinical work of Kohut, Masterson, and Kernberg and sees the core lack of the development of empathy as common to “racists…murderers, child abusers, child molesters, and sadists” he has treated, (407). The behavior of these kind of crimes against humans has its roots in dehumanization and a lack of “respect for human life,” (407). Racism, says Dr. Bell, can thus lead to “violation of basic human rights” secondary to the racist individual’s “grandiosity, lack of self-boundaries, and dehumanization,” which are traits of narcissistic personality disorder, (407).

What’s Mine is Mine and What’s Your’s is Mine, Too

Dr. Bell noticed that, “Territoriality or boundaries are paramount for racists because of their lack of self-definition and tendency to extend their boundaries, which thus motivates them to make anything foreign a stimulus for protective action,” (407). This could explain the preoccupation with building walls and keeping out the “bad guys.” Even keeping medical supplies and protective equipment for the “government” rather than giving it the states and people could be seen in this light (consider “Trump’s use of medical stockpile veers from past administrations, leaving states in the lurch,” Shannon Pettypiece, NBC News April 6, 2020, and Daniel Dale, “Trump administration edits national stockpile website a day after it contradicted Jared Kushner,” CNN April 3, 2020, ).

Seeing the Other as Inferior and Less Than a Whole Person

Dr. Bell points to the “narcissist’s internal fragmentation” as leading to the inability to see others as whole people – in essence projecting off fragments on to others that one is unaware of in one’s self, (408). This is the essence of what Carl Jung called “the shadow,” which, if not owned and made conscious, gets projected off on to the “other.” What should be an internal psychological issue becomes an interpersonal, and even political, issue. Dr. Bell quotes the psychiatrist and activist, Frantz Fanon, “It is the racist who creates his inferior,” (408).

The Stress-Induced Racist, the Socially Misinformed Racist, and the Narcissistic Racist

Dr. Bell develops three categories or explanations for racist behavior: 1) the stress-induced racist (where racism arises only during stress); 2) the socially misinformed racist (due to ignorance and cultural indoctrination); and 3) the narcissistic racist, (418-420). The difference between socially-misinformed racism and that due to narcissism is in “the degree of hostility directed toward the perceived inferiors,” which stems from what is called narcissistic rage, (408).

These types of racism would require different kinds of responses. For the stress-induced racist, learning self-soothing skills from at a personal level and alleviating sources of economic stress at a collective level. For the socially misinformed racist, education and corrective experiences might suffice, if provided within a peer context. Sometimes this happens with military veterans who are acculturated into hating the “enemy” and seeing them as less than human. After returning home, the larger culture no longer supports such a degree of dehumanization of others and no longer condones using violence for problem-solving. For the narcissistic racist, none of these interventions or appeals will have any weight, because the narcissist is only motivated by self-interest.

The Narcissistic Racist

Dr. Bell mentions the work of Adorno and Allport looking at how so many people went along with fascism in World War II, for instance the work on “the authoritarian personality.” Milgram’s studies showing that study subjects were willing to punish others when told to do so by a man in a white coat (Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, 1974). Dr. Bell describes the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder (as given by the DSM-III which was the edition at use at that time):

Grandiose sense of self importance or uniqueness
Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
Exhibitionistic: requires constant attention and admiration
Responds to criticism, indifference to others, or defeat with either cool indifference or with marked feelings of rage, inferiority, shame, humiliation, or emptiness
Two of the Following:
1. Lack of empathy: inability to recognize how others feel
2. Entitlement: expectations of special favors with reactions of surprise and anger when others don’t comply
3. Interpersonal exploitiveness
4. Relationships characteristically vacillate between the extremes of overidealization and devaluation

It may be impossible for many to read this list and not think of one person who is always in the news for the past four years or so. The risk of a narcissistic leader is that they will use the country to play out their own personal pathology. The fact that this pathology requires an “other” is similar between narcissism and fascism – as both seek to blame someone else for social problems and to strengthen us and them divisiveness. If one can magnify and increase social and personal stresses for others, stress-induce racism will increase. If one can exploit cultural narratives of racism, introducing continuous references to inferiority and superiority, one can amplify socially-misinformed racism. Dr. Bell wrote in 1980, “If the man behind the institution is a narcissist of the grandiose type, as was Hitler, then a racist institution is bound to be established,” (420). He quotes Kohut on the narcissist:

“They seem to combine an absolute certainty concerning the validity of their ideas with an equally absolute lack of empathic understanding for large segments of feelings, needs, and rights of other human beings and for the values cherished by them. They understand the environment in which they live only as an extension of their own narcissistic universe,” (Kohut, 420).

In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess the President, Bandy Lee, MD MDiv (ed.), two of the 37 papers have narcissism in their title and the word appears 62 times throughout the volume. The papers are, “Pathological Narcissism and Politics: A Lethal Mix,” by Craig Malkin, PhD, and “Who Goes Trump? Tyranny as a Triumph of Narcissism,” by Elizabeth Mika MA, LCPC. Two papers focus on race and immigration, “Persistent Enslavement Systemic Trauma: The Deleterious Impact of Trump’s Rhetoric on Black and Brown People,” by Kevin Washington, PhD, and “Traumatic Consequences for Immigrant Populations in the United States,” by Rosa Maria Bramble, LCSW. Many of the authors and clinicians prefer to focus on dangerous behavior patterns and the question of whether professionals “duty to warn” regarding the dangerousness of a person extends to the president.

If Dr. Bell were writing these articles now, rather than in 1978 – 1980, I imagine he would have something to say about our current political situation. Perhaps he would have said it in The Dangerous Case. The DSM-III description of Narcissistic Personality Disorder is almost a biographical sketch of the current president. The Dangerous Case appeared first in 2017 and it was cautionary. It was updated in 2019 and the warnings it raised seemed to be coming true, now, in 2020, we are witnessing greater levels of the behaviors Dr. Bell described and greater levels of fascism and totalitarianism. The example this week is the use of federal law enforcement in unmarked cars being used against protesters in Portland, Oregon, with threats to use them in other cities run by Democrats, whom the president calls the “radical left,” (“Trump Sends Federal Troops to Cities Run by Democrats,” Heather Cox Richardson, Moyers on Democracy, 7/21/20).

Dr. Bell cautions us about narcissistic racism with its “features of grandiosity―lack of empathic linkage…poor self-boundaries, with a tendency to intrude upon or molest others; and an underlying mood of fragmentation with anxiety, agitation, and rage,” (413). He could be cautioning us about the United States, right now.

Carl Bell, MD, https://www.psych.uic.edu/profile/carl-c-bell

Words Create Worlds, Part III, published in The Badger

Posted on April 10, 2020 by davidrkopacz

Words Create Worlds. Part 3

“Words create worlds.” These are the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, here is the full quote, remembered by his daughter, Susannah Heschel:

“Words, he often wrote, are themselves sacred, God’s tool for creating the universe, and our tools for bringing holiness — or evil — into the world. He used to remind us that the Holocaust did not begin with the building of crematoria, and Hitler did not come to power with tanks and guns; it all began with uttering evil words, with defamation, with language and propaganda. Words create worlds he used to tell me when I was a child. They must be used very carefully. Some words, once having been uttered, gain eternity and can never be withdrawn. The Book of Proverbs reminds us, he wrote, that death and life are in the power of the tongue.”[i]

Crow Flying through the Cosmos, D. Kopacz (2020)

Remembering the Past & Learning from History

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (George Santayana)[ii]

In this next installment of the Words Create Worlds series, we will turn to the work of two American authors who warn us against a global movement into fascism. Both authors have familial roots in the persecution of the Jewish people during the holocaust and the Soviet take over of Eastern Europe after World War II. We will first discuss former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright’s book, Fascism: A Warning. Then we will turn to Yale professor, Stanley Jordan’s book, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. I do not intend this to be polemical, partisan politics, but rather to objectively document the current resurgence of fascistic rhetoric, in the United States and globally, in light of the history of fascism in the 20^th Century.

Follow the link for the full article, pages 58-69.

Medicine Wheel of Dark Matter, D. Kopacz (2020)

[i] Life Between the Trees blog.

[ii] “‘Those Who Do Not Learn History Are Doomed To Repeat It.’ Really?” Nicholas Clairmont, Big Think, 7/31/13, https://bigthink.com/the-proverbial-skeptic/those-who-do-not-learn-history-doomed-to-repeat-it-really

[iii] Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018, pg 4.

[iv] “Henry Giroux: Will Trump’s Deliberate Racist Rhetoric Lead Us to Fascism?” Interview with Marc Steiner, Big Think, 7/18/19. https://truthout.org/video/trumps-racist-rhetoric-is-deliberate-will-it-lead-us-to-fascism/