Watching History Happen in Real Time
“The more you are focused on time — past and future — the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.”
Eckhart Tolle, the popular spiritual guru, argues that there is really nothing we can do about the past; it’s gone. And trying to predict the future is nothing more than idle and often soul-destroying speculation. Unless we are living in the ‘Now’, we are disconnected from the real world.
While I had honestly pledged to abstain from my news addiction, I must admit that I have seriously relapsed. Since the beginning of the year, just more than one week ago, I reconnected, tuning into the goings-on in the world with a front-row seat watching history being made. It’s not the past or the future: it is very definitely the real-time ‘Now’.
I have never seen a spectacle to compare with last Wednesday’s insurrectional storming of the US capital building, said to be the first time this has happened since 1812 when the British forces set it on fire.
Quite simply, far-right pro-Trump extremists, actively encouraged by the soon to be ex-president and his sycophantic minions, invaded the U.S. Capitol Building in the hope of preventing Congress from ratifying the electoral college victory of President-elect Joe Biden. They were following the calls at a morning rally from Rudi Giuliani, the president’s crackpot lawyer, and from Trump’s sons for “trial by combat”. They were fueled by the totally disproved conspiracy theory that the recent presidential election has been stolen through massive and widespread fraud.
As I watched the drama unfold on television, I frankly could not believe what I was watching. It was, as one commentator described it, a bonfire of the insanities. It was real life, imitating or better, replaying all the intrigue-heavy historical dramas we had been watching for months on Netflix; the Tudors, Marco Polo, the Vikings. I was watching history being made in real-time, in the ‘now’. And it is scary stuff.
Normally, history isn’t like a solar eclipse which you can watch as it happens. Like excellent wine, it needs time to mature before it can be fully appreciated. Our current situation breaks that rule. Its ‘now’ and its meaning is clear. What we witnessed on Wednesday was, as Charlie Warzel wrote in the ‘NYTimes’, “the crash of a universe of toxic conspiracies against the rocks of human reality”.
Like many of us, I’ve become angrier and angrier. A good deal of the reason is, as I have written before, that it becomes harder and harder to distinguish between what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fake’. Maybe my new career should be as a moderator of the truth — someone who exorcizes ‘untruths’ if I can figure out what they are.
I am reminded of the words of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy who wrote: “The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.
Alternative realities constructed on toxic conspiracies distort the shared commitment to the truth on which I was reared and on which civil society depends. Cults, like cancers, can grow undetected until they threaten life itself and there is no reason to believe that ‘Trumpism’ is anything less than a cult.
In the early 80s, I was invited by Werner Erhard, the charismatic, albeit controversial creator of est (Erhard Seminar Training) a personal transformational training program, to conduct a weekend seminar with his top management group. The purpose was to do a strategic assessment of the program’s future. Est, which had attracted thousands of participants all over the world was being attacked as a cult, awakening recent memories of the Jim Jones’ infamous ‘People’s Temple’ in the jungle of Guyana where, in 1978, more than 900 members committed mass suicide drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
Having completed the assessment and discovered how easy it was to convince the group to taste my form of ‘Kool-Aid’, I went back and urged Werner that est be shuttered. He listened and with great integrity, a month later it was gone even though it was a very profitable business. The future of Trump’s cult looks just as ominous.
To the faithful, and there appear to be many millions who have signed on to the cult and its conspiracy theories, the siege of the US Capital must seem a noble and proper expression of fidelity, something to be proud of and a certain font of bragging rights. They claim to be ‘tired of democracy’. No matter the arguments, it may be too late to change minds that are anchored to this alternative reality.
That’s where the ultimate danger lies. It the ‘now’ and it is unlikely likely to go away.
