America: Land of the Free, Home of the Deluded

A severe mental and emotional breakdown on a mass scale is taking place. Or, as my closest friend recently put it, “America is going insane.” The issues we face are not only those about which reasonable people might disagree, but delusional concerns lacking a basis in reality.

The world-renowned Cleveland Clinic defines delusional disorder as “a type of psychotic disorder.” People with this disorder:

…often continue to socialize and function well, apart from the subject of their delusion…. This is unlike people with other psychotic disorders who might also have delusions…[nevertheless] people with delusional disorder might become so preoccupied with their delusions that their lives are disrupted.

This article will look at three symptoms of delusional disorder in light of certain social and political distresses that currently afflict the USA.

Feelings of being exploited. The feeling of being exploited has reached pandemic proportions in the USA. Vast numbers of people believe they are exploited by the police, by white people, by Christians, by “the system,” by men, by Wall Street, by the U.S.A., by corporations, etc. etc. There has been a significant cultural shift away from seeing America as the distinctive land of opportunity in a corrupt, poverty-stricken, and cruelly corrupt world to seeing the U.S.A. as itself the leader of this world corruption and as the instigator of the world’s major problems.

Clearly ignored by these deluded persons is that tens upon tens of millions of people or all races and nationalities have made the difficult transition to life in the USA after immigrating and been blessed by the hardships they endured culturally in making that transition. They have enjoyed prosperity, freedom, rights, acceptance, and yes, even love, as a result of that transition. Their educational and interpersonal horizons have become wider as they lived in a country of liberty and law, moreover a land founded upon Judeo-Christian morality despite law breakers, immoral people, and immoral decisions made in our midst.

History indicates the USA has been more welcoming to all peoples in the world than any other country ever has been.

Persistently holding grudges: The inability to let go of longstanding resentments is another symptom of the delusional disorder. The great narrative of Jacob’s son, Joseph, found in the Bible in the book of Genesis should be the model for all longstanding familial and socio-political disputes. In that narrative, Jacob’s eleven sons were jealous of their brother Joseph, who, it seemed to them, was favored by their father. The brothers sold Joseph into slavery instead of killing him, and those who took Joseph in turn sold him as a house slave to a man named Potiphar who had Joseph as a house slave in Egypt. Joseph was subsequently accused of making advances towards his master’s wife, and even though he had not hit on her, Joseph was put in prison.

Because of his gift for interpreting dreams, he came to Pharoah’s attention, and rose to a top administrative post. Later, there was starvation in the land of Canaan where his brothers and father lived, and they came to Egypt to get food. Joseph recognized them before they recognized him, but when his identity came out, they were afraid of him – that he would take vengeance upon him for their wicked treatment of him. But Joseph said, “What you did you meant for evil, but God meant it for good.” They had sold him into slavery to express their hostility, but Almighty God used it to eventually bless Joseph in the Egyptian context, and he in turn was able to bless his brothers and his father in a time of need.

This attitude of forgiveness and personal magnanimity is something the deluded cultural Marxists and ever-angry and benighted BLM and DEI complainants cannot grasp… and do not want to grasp. They are mired in their resentments. The majority of the African American people had ancestors who were treated harshly. Yet, despite their blood, sweat, and tears – or even because of these – their descendants are living in a prosperous land of opportunity that they never could have known were they still living in Africa. Further, even on this soil, unlike any other event in history, 300,000 white soldiers fighting for the Union armies gave their lives to emancipate the black slaves in the Confederate States (and a small number of those slaves were held as slaves by blacks as well as whites). Slavery was not right, but the deaths and pain of the wounded whites attest to the uniqueness of the American ideals and the commitment to equality of opportunity, not equity where outcomes are pre-established by fallen humanity.

A readiness to respond and react to perceived slights. Overreaction to perceived threats comes from a deluded perception of the threat, slight, offense, and/or oneself in relation to other persons. This pathologies of boiling hatred based on irrational blaming and pathological demands for vengeance are now rampant themes in the USA and have been since the Columbine mass shooting in the 1990’s. Perceived slights feed the deluded consciousness, which magnifies those slights and runs them through a program of “blaming” and “fantasies” of revenge, which become rehearsals for real, murderous reprisals.

Looting, attacking police, burning buildings, screaming and cursing in a wanton manner, bottle throwing and Molotov cocktails are all manifestations of delusions of persecution.  Small inconveniences or slights may thus become the basis for violent reactions when magnified into delusions of persecutions or false ideas about the source of the fear or difficulties one experiences.

This writer was seated in a subway car in New York City and coughed twice. The man sitting next to me became quite outraged. I tried to reassure him by telling him that I did not have Covid or even a cold, but that I had just eaten three potato chips before I sat down, and the salt was the reason I coughed. Nevertheless, his rage intensified. He took off his hat and took a black cloth from his bag and pulled an Antifa-style hood over his head that covered every part of his face except his angry eyes. His wrath based on his fear of catching a disease from me combined with his blaming of me for not wearing a mask was making him angrier by the second. He could have solved his problem by simply moving away from me to another spot in the car, but instead he chose to manifest his rage.

If a man can put on an Antifa hood and fire arrows of hatred towards me from his eyes, how much worse will his reaction be if he fails a course in school or is not hired to work at a job for which he has applied? Will he lick his wounds and move on to bigger and better things? Will he seek to remediate his shortcomings? Or will he or she become discouraged, rage-filled, and increasingly hostile to society?

Delusion disorder is now epidemic and becoming increasingly dangerous.

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The above article (America: Land of the Free, Home of the Deluded) is republished on TLB under “Fair Use” (see the TLB disclaimer below) with attribution to the author E. Jeffrey Ludwig and americanthinker.com.

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Read more great articles by E. Jeffrey Ludwig

Image Credit: Photo (cropped) in Featured Image (top) by – Pixabay License.

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