McDonald: Subversive minorities

One of my Substack subscribers referred me to a recently-published article based on an essay written in 1957 by Carl Jung titled “The Plight of the Individual in Modern Society” that explains how subversive minorities can, if left unchecked by the relatively healthy majority, ravage a society and send it into a death spiral. I believe that is what is happening here now in the United States.

The West suffers from an inherent weakness due to its “humanitarianism and sense of justice.” It tolerates people with sick and destructive ideas. Rather than condemn their expressions of mental illness, the majority of the population remains silent. It defers containment of the perverse pronouncements of these sick individuals to the minority population of the “fairly intelligent, mentally stable.” This mechanism only works as long as that minority remains properly educated.

Witness Greta Thunberg. A Swedish teenager suffering from autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia, and impairing anxiety and depression, she makes regular pronouncements on the state of the environment not born of sincere scientific inquiry and research but from her mental illness. Although we can sympathize with her personal struggles, her ideas deserve round condemnation. She is a resentful, ungrateful child who merits a therapist, not an audience. That anyone outside of a psychologist’s clinic even listens to her, much less recommends government policy based on her fantastical rants, is evidence of the failure of the intelligent and mentally stable minority to convince the majority of the pathologic basic of her secular religiosity.

Closer to home, we can see an explosion in mental illness in the areas of identity and sexual expression throughout the US. Drag shows, until recently confined to adults-only venues, are now being held at family restaurants, public libraries, and schools in full view of young children, who are often invited to participate in sexually explicit and perverse displays that many adults find vulgar and objectionable. Teachers encourage these events, because they themselves suffer from serious mental illness, on display in their classrooms in the form of cross-sex-dress, cross-sex names, cross-sex pronouns, and observance of the LGBTQA+ flag rather than the flag of the United States. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the US school system has been infiltrated by the mentally ill, who predate our children and groom them for sexual perversion.

Importantly, in both the environmental and transgender activist groups, it is emotion and not reason that drives their causes. The emotion, although genuine, does not derive from sane life experience. It is the product of wish fulfillment, of fantasy, of denial of reality born of unacknowledged and untreated developmental injury. A woman who screams that we must stop having children or risk seeing our planet end is simply not well. A man who believes he is a woman and insists on flashing his penis in front of little girls in the women’s locker room is not only sick but an exhibitionist pervert, likely a pedophile. These people are damaged and should never be given a platform to preach their sickness, much less invited to hold positions of influence within our institutions, especially our schools. Although we may have sympathy for the illness, we must not condone the behavior or celebrate the illness that drives it. Yet we are, and we do.

By allowing the sick to teach our children, we are removing our primary defense against infection of our society by the deranged. Until recently, all American children were taught that 2+2=4 and that there are two sexes—male and female. Now they are taught that 2+2=5 (depending on the race of the individual) and that sex can be male, female, or whatever you imagine it to be on any given day. Life is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where fantasy becomes reality. This is a dead end. The reason it is a dead end is quite simple: It is based on a denial of reality, grounded in uncontained emotionality and grievance masquerading as righteous virtue.

The majority allows this because underneath the “cloak of reason and insight,” all individuals harbor to some degree these fantasies, born of “fanatical resentment.” In a well-functioning society, the mentally healthy resist acting on them, though, having learned in school that despite one’s feelings, there exists an objective reality that we are all subject to, a reality where 2+2 always equals 4, and all human beings (and animals) can be distinguished as either male or female. Of course, a healthy home inhabited by a healthy couple—a man and a woman—also serves to reinforce this reality. The two-parent household standard, however, was lost over a generation ago. Our schools were our last remaining bulwark against disseminated infection by the emotionally damaged. And we have now allowed the gates to be opened to them. They are delighted to prance, frolic, and proselytize freely before the most vulnerable of our population—our children. Their resentment of reality, and its substitution with a fantastical farce, is met with no resistance by the acquiescing majority, as the shrinking minority, driven only by truth and reality, continues to be assailed by cancel culture, social shunning, and legal fiat. The majority has chosen to worship at the altar of tolerance and sensitivity. It has become a mob in slow motion, in full approval of the elimination of the dwindling minority of the intelligent and the rational by any means necessary.

This is what truly depresses me. It’s not Greta Tunberg or the prancing drag queens that I worry about but rather society as a whole that has allowed these people to take over and direct our lives. Society has done this not with reluctance but rather celebration. And those who dissent are attacked, and their lives destroyed. Those in the dwindling minority of intelligent and rational people continue to expose the sickness and the collusion of the mob majority, yet I just don’t have confidence that it will be enough to save us from the infection. Our societal immune system is weak. The entire social body is sick. And without the support of the majority that has recently shown itself to be asleep at the switch, we will be unable to push back against the cancer that is metastasizing across our nation.

Mark McDonald, M.D.

Psychiatrist and author of United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis and Freedom From Fear: A 12 Step Guide to Personal and National Recovery