There is, within the range of our developmental assets and capacities, an array of primitive, inchoate elements whose functions within consciousness remain largely custodial. That is to say, they are not deeply involved in the core of our personhood or thought. But they ache for power within what we may imagine as a sort of internal hierarchy of functions. In fact, they would like to rule.

Trauma may provide them this opportunity.

If the basic structure of the personality is not yet flexible enough to allow various failures, losses, harms, and criticisms to pass without enshrinement, these relatively crude aspects of consciousness will use the venerated ‘harms’ for leverage in a full-scale assault on the entire personality. This often proceeds throughout an entire lifetime, and to whatever degree it succeeds, we lose a human being to what is a kind of inward fascism of consciousness.

These elements use trauma to advance claims about reality, other people, what is good or just or due us — an endless array of fictions for which ‘evidence’ is supplied from memory. But the basic nature of the narrative is false, and its goal is not justice but the prosecution of a coup against the personhood of the victim. If it succeeds, they will become subservient to tiny functions of consciousness, inflated in the wake of trauma, and empowered by ridiculous stories, models, and evaluations to completely replace one’s humanity with something we might reasonably understand as the skeletal remnants of a judgment.

And a nation is the same. So if it is, for example, filled with hubris and rampantly uroboric, all that is necessary to destroy it from within is the right ‘moment of trauma’ which it will then venerate and react to, catastrophically expending its most precious resources in pursuit of ghosts of its own invention.

We are like this. Our nations are like this. But our nations can use this to remake us in their currently sick likeness.

Any antidote must begin with a clear sense of awareness of the dangers at play and how they are defused, and a sense of mutual care and common concern at every order of our human cultures from the universal to the personal.