Thread by @UnRapporteur1

Awake, arise or be forever fallen.
 
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
  John Milton, Paradise Lost
 
We all agree that Trump’s GOP and MAGA faithful are swooning in some ‘mass hysteria’.

It is growing in velocity, to our collective peril. We’ve seen it before: Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda. We know it travels quickly. We know it feeds on lies and laughs at suffering.
We know it leads to genocide, if unchecked. I know it intimately, but I know it as Mobbing Syndrome.

I was a Bystander and Target in a Workplace Mobbing. I was rapidly injured by it, just by being near it; by being unable to stop it.

In only 8 weeks, I had hypertensive crises and rollicking PTSD. It nearly killed me. Mobbing Syndrome is an incubator for suicide. Worse.

With its fearsome unanimity, lack of advocacy (no help coming), and faint hope for accountability it is a nursery for workplace violence and workplace homicide/suicide.

It changes the psyche of the Target. Most can only walk away from the job and begin to try and heal somehow.

Others surrender to it and try to endure it. Me? It turned me into Batman. 

I tried to end the Mobbings at my work. I failed. Somehow, they cast me as a ‘villain’ and antithetic to ‘their values’. This was how they disqualified me.

They effectively pushed me out of my job, the community, and into counseling. They were good at it.

I wondered: how many times had they done this? How did they know their roles so well? And how did they not see that their actions were unethical; contrary to company policies and

our union’s agreement; and against the law under the Occupational Health and Safety Act?

Why was their reasoning completely upside down? How did they not see how obvious they all were, and why did they have this ‘undisguised glee’ about it all? Why? Why? Why?

I warned them it was Mobbing Syndrome and they replied glibly, “Interesting opinion” and “Is that your perception?”

It was as though they didn’t see how the gaslighting, denial of due process, naked fraud, or willful negligence were wrong at all.

They know it leads to psychological scarring – they even call it ‘Crazy Making’.

I used to often say, “They do know we can see them, right?” Still, they did nothing.

They did not seem to care. They continued their behaviors in this strangely naïve, robotic way

– leaving a train of casualties (and a trail of evidence).

In my now-burning fixation to make sense of their behaviors, I imbued them with every deceitful trait and wickedness; however, I came to realize that I was looking into a dark mirror inversion of myself.

And that they were exhibiting symptoms of some cognitive disruption too.

It was Newton’s Third Law, comfortably hanging out in our Human Resources department:
I wanted to stop this deadly illness – they wanted to stop me (still, presumably);
I wanted transparency –

they wanted ‘confidentiality,’
I wanted the management to bring in a qualified third party – they maniacally pushed everyone to consider it ‘handled’ and to just ‘move on.’

Sound familiar?

Rising Trumpism, like some catastrophic National-scale Downward Administrative Mobbing, provided a wide sample of kindred ‘inexplicable’ behaviors to observe.

The GOP has been about ‘moving on’ from scandal to scandal for decades; resistant to oversight, allergic to integrity.

Mobbing Syndrome is highly contagious, and no one is immune. Yes. Read that again.

If you swam in MAGA threads or watched Fox non-stop you’d risk getting ill. You may have heard the expression: make your idols your rivals? Rivals are not adversaries but those drawing water

from the same stream (L. rivalis).

MAGA are only drawing nourishment from rivers generously flooded with 180° falsities and projections. This is fueling their logic-defying Race to the Bottom. We see them striving to exceed the ill deeds of their Trumpy ‘idols’;

it reminded me of Kapos, whose vile sadism was said to even outdo their Nazi Killing Center captors.

The pinnacles of personal excellence are limitless. Climb as high as you want, there is always room to improve. Inversely, you cannot plumb the depths of this

culture of depravity; it is bottomless.

Abuse-ridden migrant concentration camps?
Forced hysterectomies? Pardoning war criminals? Attacking Whistleblowers? Supporting the grisly vivisection of Jamal Khashoggi, Washington Post contributor and an American resident?

Torpedoing the Violence Against Women Act?

Ignoring any acknowledgement for the brave men and women of the Capitol Police, after a violent uprising fomented and executed with the cheerful assistance of sitting Congressional Republicans?

The maniacal energies now exerted

in vain to ‘cover it up’?

There is no Republican platform based on ‘expressions of forgotten voter resentment’ found here – that is a lie.

These are not ‘differences of opinion’. These are just deliberate and egregious abuses.

It’s not ‘Owning the Libs’. It was Russian-aided, Oligarch-funded, and Republican state-sponsored polarization. Conspicuously, it is also a 180° inversion of our values.

Who in their right mind, would swap every laudable value for its antithetic and reprehensible depravity?

They replaced; a skilled National administration with an inept criminal enterprise; our dedicated professionals with their mediocre cronies; our allies with our adversaries; irrefutable truths with demonstrable lies, construction with obstruction, preservation with exploitation,

self-reflection with projection, science with superstition, education with ignorance, altruism with greed, concern with apathy, empathy with cruelty, democracy with autocracy, patriotism with treason. Up is down, white is black, cowards are heroes, bullies are victims.

In this wasteland of these contradictions, I found an answer to this riddle. The condition affecting the GOP/MAGA echoes symptoms found among actors in instances of Mobbing Syndrome. These appear to be symptoms of Anosognosia or Loss of Insight, which stems from forms of trauma

to the brain’s frontal lobe. This is where information coming into the mind is decoded and organized.

A properly functioning frontal lobe is crucial to assess what our current realities are: the 6 inches in front of our face. Disturbance in such a complex neurocognitive process

would result in incorrect information being sent to our Amygdala, where emotions take on meaning and are stored as our emotional memories. 

Anosognosia can appear with psychosis or mania, and it seems likely it would accompany a mass bewildering of this magnitude.

Psychologically, there must be some moral trauma from these relentless barrages of lies and smears.

There would be a tangible accompanying injury, from being incessantly told; you’re the real victim, your country is being invaded, your jobs are being stolen, you’re

being replaced, laughed at, ignored, etc. etc.

Imagine having these lies reinforced by your ‘news’ media, across all your social media, and in your every virtual and actual echo chamber.

All your perceived grievances, all your irrational fears, all the time.

Our brain’s two hemispheres work together in a delicate concert. Their continuous contact is vital to process the information we ‘see’.

Such an assault on the psyche could cause trauma capable of interfering with this neurological process.

This could explain how 20% of Americans still don’t see this as a rising threat. Read that again because it is correct. They simply do not ‘see’ it.

In 2004, Dr. Ken Westhues surmised that to reduce Mobbing Syndrome and heal the effects from it that ‘critical reflection

on the human project, insight into the complexity of life, knowledge of right and wrong, self-knowledge above all’ were essential. With Anosognosia, insight, self-reflection, abstract thinking, empathy, and moral judgment are essentially lost.

I do not believe the similarity

between these catalogues of deficiencies is coincidental.

Anosognosia comes from Greek, ‘to not know a disease’. This is not being in denial; we must be consciously aware of our impairment to form that denial.

Sufferers of this disease cannot accurately perceive their current

condition. That is both the key and a huge problem. Loss of Self-assessment means that they are not updating their perceptions of themselves. For people with Anosognosia, their outdated insight seems just as real as our steadily renewed sense of our continuously changing selves.

Their misperceived Self-assessment can lead to conflict with those around them that are unaffected, and, in turn, spark a near-immediate explosion of anxiety.

Now, think about the sudden and furious ‘Rise of the Karens’ and ‘The Attack of the Chads’…

Any reinforcement of their old Self-image is soothing, anesthetizing: it’s their natural anti-anxiety medication.

It’s grilled cheese and soup that Grandma made. It’s a giant Plymouth parked in front of the house to carry Dad to the factory, while Mom does housework and manages

the home economics.
This romanticized, contrived Rockwellian version of America didn’t exist except in advertising.

America in the 1950s wasn’t Leave it to Beaver. It was Peyton Place, and Far from Heaven, and most certainly In the Heat of the Night.

Remind them of this and you’ll get, ‘Why do you hate our country?!’

Information inconsistent with their last retained image seems like an assault. It’s the unsettling of this fixed and familiar Groundhog Day that makes people with mental illness resist taking their meds –

‘I’ve never felt better! YOU’RE SICK!’ Now, multiply that by some 50-million MAGA-infected ‘Libertarians’ who DON’T want to take THEIR meds.

Did I mention that they’re armed?  

To be continued…

#MobbingSyndrome #Contagion

This too, will sound familiar: Eliminators in Mobbings will often resort to some of the worst smears and predictably accuse Targets (or Supporters, Bystanders) of pedophilia. It is a kind of Social Murder because no one is willing to come to the defense of a pedophile.

It is the Mobbers caught up in this Eliminative Lust that drives them to strive for a dreadful unanimity in the workplace; that everyone must see the Target as wholly abhorrent, someone without any redeeming value whatsoever.

(That they added Satanist Cannibals was predictable).

I rest my case…

@threadreaderapp unroll please

Listen to Seth’s take on this. And compare it to my observations.

Here’s a precursor to the above thread.

The last part is coming.
The scary part. The hopeful part too.