At the time of Trump’s victory in the presidential elections, in 2016, I published a post where I recounted my personal experience with my father’s dementia of a few years before. At that time, I was discussing whether Trump could suffer of dementia, concluding that, yes, in some respects, he reminded me of my father’s initial stages of sickness. A period in which he was always sure of himself, would hear no suggestions, and take rushed decisions on the whim of the moment.
I couldn’t have imagined that, eight years later, dementia would become the protagonist of the new presidential elections. Today, at 79, Donald Trump looks very much the same as he has always been, but Joe Biden, at 81, seems to be rapidly descending into irreversible dementia; he looks to me very much like my father was in his mid-80s. For the occasional observer, it was not evident that my father had a problem, but for the members of his immediate family, it was obvious.
Biden, for the time being, seems to be just confused, unable to do much damage, but clearly he is not going to improve. I can only imagine what kind of heavy medication he is given now; stuff that may help in the short run, but that may well worsen things in the medium term.
How about Trump, now 79? He may soon suffer from mental problems, too. Fortunately, the first Trump presidency didn’t see major wars starting, so if he is elected, we may not see major disasters. But, in a society that’s becoming older and older, we are having more and more problems with the mental health of those who occupy positions of power and who can make important decisions for all of us.
I am reposting here the post about my father, which I published in 2016 and where I concluded that
Maybe there really is no ghost in the machine we call civilization. It is a giant creature that stumbles around while arguing with itself in an endless squabble and getting nowhere.
I have other posts that examine the mental sanity of state rulers. I’ll see to repost some of them in the near future.
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From Cassandra’s Legacy, 2016 (slightly edited)
No ghost in the machine: is humankind suffering of a global Alzheimer disease?
The human brain is the most complex thing we know in the universe. It is also fragile and prone to malfunctioning. Civilization is also a complex system, fragile and prone to malfunctioning. Perhaps some ailments of the human brain, such as Alzheimer's disease, have their equivalent at the civilization level. (image source)
My parents had been married for 58 years when my mother died. That was a terrible loss for my father, then 86 years old, and I was much worried about his health. But I was relieved when I saw that, after a few months, he seemed to have recovered from the shock. He remained active, and he could manage his everyday life without special assistance. He could take the bus alone and walk alone in the neighborhood, even making new friends and spending time with them.
However, something was wrong. Terribly wrong.
I remember a conversation that my father had with my son about some plants growing on a steep slope of the garden. He wanted to cut them down and my son, a geologist, was trying to explain to him that it wasn't a good idea; the roots of these plants were keeping the ground of the slope stable. I watched that conversation, more and more distressed, while my father kept building up all sorts of arguments to counter my son's. It went on, perhaps, for one hour, and it ended with my father not having budged an inch from his position, leaving me and my son looking at each other, baffled.
That conversation was the first evidence of the onset of dementia in my father. At that time, I didn't really understand what was going on, mainly because I didn't want to. But the symptoms kept mounting until they were unmistakable, until my father died at 92, his mind gone. Nevertheless, for a few years, he managed to hide his mental decline. He had always been intelligent and brilliant, and he developed all sorts of strategies to avoid finding himself trapped in a situation that would show his problem. He would get out of trouble with a joke, a witty comment, a humorous quip, or simply by changing the subject.
But my father could get away with his problem only with acquaintances. For the members of his family, his condition was evident. Maybe you know the metaphor of the "ghost in the machine;" it says there is a little ghost in the brain or somewhere that controls the bigger machine, the human body. That ghost wasn't inside my father anymore. He was gradually becoming akin to an answering machine, a very sophisticated one, but a machine. He was like one of those computer programs that purport to simulate human intelligence, able to speak to people and even answer them in ways that seemed to be superficially correct. But, like an answering machine, he wasn't listening, the ghost was gone.
This story from some years ago came back to my mind as I was reading an article by David Dunning, titled "The Psychological Quirk That Explains Why You Love Donald Trump" You may know Dunning in relation to the "Dunning-Kruger" effect, a feature of the human mind that makes people convinced that they are competent in some subject, and that makes them the more convinced, the less they know about that subject. Of course, the Dunning-Kruger effect is not the same thing as Alzheimer's disease, but in his article, Dunning highlights the fact that there is a mental problem with many people engaged in political debates. I think it is true. There is such a problem.
When I read or hear Donald Trump's statements, I can't avoid thinking about that ill-fated conversation when my father argued with my son about cutting those plants in the garden. It was the same kind of exchange: people who just appear to be debating but aren't understanding each other. In the political statements by Donald Trump, I see something of the way my father would react during the initial stages of the disease. The same unsupported statements shot at random, the same absolute certainty shown by someone who has no idea what he is speaking about.
That doesn't mean that I can say that Donald Trump has Alzheimer's. He might; others seem to have noticed something wrong in his behavior (h/t Clark Urbans for the link). But there is no way to diagnose Alzheimer's with any certainty when it is in its early stages. But the problem is not specifically with Donald Trump.
No, this sensation of discussing with an Alzheimer patient often comes to me when following a political discussion in the media or in the comments of a blog or on social media. The debate doesn't seem to be among people who listen to each other. It is among people who throw statements at each other as if they were tennis balls. Think of tennis players: they are not interested in the ball color they play with, only to throw the ball back to their opponents as fast as possible. So, in these debates, people don't seem interested in the meaning of what's being told to them, just to throw something back at their opponents as fast as possible.
Do you know the debate tactic called the "Gish Gallop"? It involves drowning an opponent in a torrent of arguments, one after the other, ignoring the counterarguments. It can be used by perfectly sane people, but it is also the ideal strategy to conceal one's mental disease. It also describes very well the strategy that my father used for that purpose.
So, those people whom we call trolls, our politicians, our leaders, are they just nasty, or are they sick? How many people in high-level positions could be affected by Alzheimer's disease and yet be smart enough to hide the early symptoms? We already had a president, Ronald Reagan, who may have been in the early stages of Alzheimer's during the last period of his presidency. That may not have caused big problems, but don't you have the sensation that the world is ruled by people affected by some form of dementia?
Could it be that we suffer from an Alzheimer-like civilization disease? That would explain why civilization never arrives at doing something useful about the terrible threats it faces, firstly, climate change. Maybe there really is no ghost in the machine we call civilization. It is a giant creature that stumbles around while arguing with itself in an endless squabble and getting nowhere.
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My father, Giuliano Bardi (1922-2014), was an architect and a high school teacher. As an architect, he didn't have the chance to build many structures, but those he built showed the cleanliness of lines typical of the modernist architecture school. He designed and built the house where he lived until his death and where his family still lives. I remember him for his keen spirit of observation that allowed him to discover unsuspected details on anything. He was also a brilliant teacher, much loved by his students. So much so that at his funeral, many of them remembered him well enough that they came to say farewell to him for the last time.
Thanks for this. Re: "don't you have the sensation that the world is ruled by people affected by some form of dementia?" Oh yes. It's really quite awful and sad. I am coming to the conclusion that the three best things I can do for myself, at least intially, are: (1) recognize it; (2) accept it; and (3) find the humor in it. Not recognizing it is dangerous, and so is refusing to accept it (and relatedly, getting stuck in just nattering on about it). The humor isn't always easy to find, but when all else fails, there is Monty Python.
I said "at least intially" because, obviously, sometimes some tough decisions need to made— for example, with family elders with dementia, taking away the car keys. In the case of societal dementia, I don't want to get into details here, but I can say that in recent years I have resigned from a number of professional associations— in those specific cases, I decided that what was best was for me to just leave them to stew with each other in their own race-gender-jabs-obsessed hell.
Is it possible to not agree?
About the argument is scaring how far we can go with this, studying Dunning-Kruger effect is interesting to understand that people in the "overconfidence phase" are terribly effective in convincing other people of their beliefs, usually we TALK about arguments so we didn't get factual feedbacks, so all is about persuasiveness of orator (or writer). People perceive the doubt as treating, so usually agree to the most straightforward and seemingly clear explanations and solutions because offer a fast way out of uncertainty, usually this approach is not linked to reality and real experts in any field know that a margin of uncertainty is unavoidable and is more pronounced more complex is a system: Newtonian dynamic is quite straightforward but still have ample margin of uncertainty, is almost impossible to get a perfect solution for real movement of an object or structural limit of anything, but we can get very close to, and we accept that we can have no solution to thing as simple as the 3 Body Problem.
Scaring as is usually a demented leader is not so much of a problem, usually we have quite a big score of sociopaths as ruling class (https://www.huffpost.com/archive/in/entry/why-sociopaths-succeed_b_7965882) and usually we can get to full-fledged psychopath in the topper most positions (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/articles-of-heterodoxy/202212/do-you-know-a-successful-psychopath) doing their fair share of damage!
Usually, societies are adapted to survive a ruling class that is ineffective, egotic and narcissist and fall apart only when the burden or the habit of these elites exceed a threshold, we can mirror it in the image of crime in society: all societies have a percentage of criminals and are adapted to them enduring negative effects and culling down them functioning quite well but if the percentage go up we can get to the point that the society go non-functional and individuals in it find impossible to survive. Today we see demented leaders, last century had seen mad leaders (Hitler, Stalin and a lot of ones not always recognized as such) but I feel that we are going to the right path......