Mass Delusions

Many people are puzzled that millions of people can hold such bizarre beliefs as the Qanon variants and the preposterous lies of The Former Guy. But I've been reading a lot of history lately, and I have come to realize that mass delusion is a very common occurrence. I have mentioned The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Racist ideology is of course always delusional the Nazi regime was more than just racist. It completely controlled the informational regime and the vast majority of the German people came to believe in an alternative reality. The same was true of the Soviet Union and Mao's China.

That is not so difficult to understand as those totalitarian regimes closed off any dissenting sources of information and continually indoctrinated the population. It is a bit harder to explain why people outside of totalitarian informational regimes adopt absurd world views. Many people in the United States and Europe believed Soviet propaganda and saw Stalin's Soviet Union as an inspiration for people everywhere struggling for justice and equality; later, others were inspired by Maoism. Nazism per se probably had a smaller following outside of the regime, but certainly there were, and still are, sympathizers.

Now, I would say that the threat posed to the U.S. by the presence of communists among the population was vastly exaggerated. In fact it was pretty much non-existent. There were of course a few Soviet agents in the Communist Party of the U.S. but most members and unofficial believers were idealists who were simply misled about the true nature of the Soviet regime and society. They certainly did not want to impose a regime in the U.S. that was what actually existed in the U.S.S.R. In any case they had no realistic prospect of nationalizing corporations or any other radical goals. They were just a marginal group with admirable ideals and some wrong factual beliefs.

 

I think a big element of why they believed is because they wanted to. They wanted to find an alternative to the capitalist regime which produced so much injustice and inequality, and Leninism or Maoism had it on offer. Once they learned the truth about those regimes, most of them accepted it. I know because I knew some of them -- actual former members of the CPUSA or other organizations that looked to the U.S.S.R. for inspiration. The scales fell from their eyes pretty readily.

So I can understand how that happened. But I can't understand Qanon or Trumpism in the same way.. What are the ideals that could motivate belief in such ugly, vicious nonsense? You might take a guess.