I believe the United States is suffering right now from nothing so much as lies and distortions of truth coupled with a polarization caused by neither side listening to the other. I want to make it clear that I do not identify my political convictions exclusively with the Left or the Right. A plague on the houses of the extremists in both camps.

Some of the points in both camps are valid and deserve to be listened to. I believe we need to repair the structure of civil society by being civil to each other. If you think the other side is composed only of biased morons, then think again. If you think the other side are all devils, then you will feel justified in wiping them all out, and we will have civil war. Yet it is still possible to make valid objective judgments based on Truth.

I saw a statement in the last few days by a former Secretary of Defense. He said that without Truth there is no Trust, and without Trust there is no society. That’s our situation today in the United States. The President of the United States has so poisoned his supporters’ minds with lies about the election, despite all the evidence to the contrary, and the media and social media is so full of fake news, that people are either extremely polarized or don’t know what to believe. We can’t hold society together on this basis, and so it is falling apart. People have no basis for trusting each other in this situation.

The only way we are going to turn this around, short of an extreme situation like civil war, is by talking to each other respectfully. That means suspending judgment about the falsity of the positions of those in other camps. It means trying to understand why they believe what they believe. I’m not one of these relativists who believes there is no such thing as objective truth. I’m just saying we need to examine the evidence and follow it where it leads in a spirit of unbiased inquiry.

A big part of the mental disease we are facing in the United States, is fear of acknowledging reality. I’ve looked at this pattern of denial in the United States for decades. What we are seeing playing out now on a grand stage did not start recently. It has been brewing in the Unconscious for decades – most of my lifetime.

It starts with a pattern that has been with us as a species for no one knows how long. I mean the desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain. It appears to go far back into our animal ancestors. It is a necessary mechanism and instinct that facilitates survival.

Human beings, however, have a frontal cortex that is, at least, potentially capable of overriding these instincts, but it is not easy. We need those instincts to be there and to be strong. We cannot get rid of them. We have to struggle with them, and that struggle defines what it means to be fully human.

Most of us tend to deny and seek to blunt awareness of events and circumstances that threaten us and make us uncomfortable. We would rather redefine reality than deal with it head on. We would rather not come into contact with the hard edges that prick our tenuous grasp of reality.

Yet, it is only by overriding our tendency toward comfort that we develop character. An existence without challenges and hard edges would breed a population of weaklings and liars – spoiled children whose development was arrested and having no moral substance.

So, I’m afraid Americans have had life too easy. Most of them have taken the easy way out and have failed to grapple with the real problems of human existence.

So, I’m saying today: “Look at what our country has come to. Don’t blame the other camps and justify yourself. We are all in this together. We are all collectively responsible for what we have created. For my part, I have been quiet and intimidated far far too long. I haven’t wanted to deal with the inevitable opposition that speaking my truth would entail. I’m determined to change that now.

I look at the politicians who have been unwilling to call out the abuses and lies of our President for far too long. Yet, I can’t villify them because I see the same cowardice in myself that motivated them to keep quiet even when some of them knew there was no substance to the President’s claims.

If you disagree, then show me the evidence of voter fraud. I haven’t seen any yet. The courts and judges appointed by Trump or other Republicans, have thrown out almost all of his lawsuits summarily because they contained no evidence of widespread voter fraud or had no legal merit. Even Trump’s own Communications Director (recently resigned) said that they all knew that the claims of voting fraud were all stunts and had not truth to them. Yet Republican politicians were, until the egregious events of last week, unwilling to call it out for what it was because they didn’t want to alienate Trump’s base.

That’s what I mean about placing comfort, convenience, and supposed advantage over Truth. Not telling the Truth has consequences just as telling it has consequences. Some of the consequences are going to be painful either way and no matter what. I think the sooner we realize that we don’t get to avoid paying a price for our existence and what we do or don’t do, the sooner we will get in touch with reality and choose to live a moral and responsible life. If a substantial number of us decided on that course, it would transform society in a very good direction in my opinion.

If you are one of the many people who have as one of their top three values that you need everybody, or at least the vast majority of other people, to like you, then you will lose yourself. That is the price you will pay! You will end up having no idea what you stand for. You will easily be blown around by every collective and psychic wind that blows. You will have no center! You will be completely at the mercy of other peoples’ opinions. You will be a chameleon that always “adjusts” yourself to whomever you are with. You will be full of unconscious resentment because you went along with things that you didn’t really like. Other people will manipulate you and take advantage of you to further their own ends. You will have no moral compass. For you the Good will be the same as the Expedient.

Don’t underestimate your susceptibility to being drawn into a mob. I believe that many of the people who were in that crowd that stormed the US Capitol were people in this condition who were just wholly taken over by mob psychology and did things so they would feel somehow completed by being part of a crowd. BEWARE!

If you think it’s too dangerous to stand out and go against the crowd, then consider all the negative consequences that flow from going along to get along!

Contemporary so-called society, is mass psychology. It is no accident that so many people “adjust” themselves to their surroundings to an extreme degree. Public education, since the Industrial Revolution, has systematically inculcated a spirit of conformity and the lose of the ability to think critically.

Consider that, in order centrally to organize large companies, government bureaucracies, indeed any human system under centralized control that grows beyond a certain size, conformity and sameness is needed in order to make the system predictable and controllable. You can’t have individuals making decisions and acting independently and without coordination. The system just would not function.

So, it appears that the powers-that-be in society created the very mass psychology that came back and bit them during the storming of the US Capitol. They created this monster themselves. I am not without sympathy for conservatives who feel that change is spiraling out of control. I just don’t believe that tearing down the system precipitously is going to do anything except create more chaos and bloodshed. Instead, we need to understand how we got here and set about addressing the root causes of the phenomena. It needs very careful analysis and dialog not violence leading to chaos. Just as you don’t quit your job until you have a way to replace your income, you don’t tear down a dysfunctional system until you understand it thoroughly, where the levers are that allow it to change for the better, or you first create an alternative. When building a new bridge, you don’t tear down the old bridge until the new one is functional.

So, I’m inviting serious dialogue about how we can go about either reforming our present systems of government or replacing them in a way that does not send us into chaos.