P
4/4 Lastly: have also been musing about how we, ordinary citizens, normally don’t talk about #Geopolitics.
We have this brief phase of doing “Origins of the first world war” at school, where we briefly learn to think in that way, but after that most of us just become extras in someone else’s film and don’t even bother to understand the plot; occasionally rallied when crowd emotions are needed but no actual grasp of anything.
It’s crazy really that we all accept this.
3/4 And now remembered this excellent recent LRB (my sanity sanctuary these days) article by Amia Srinivasan, “The Impossible Patient. The Return of the Unconscious”, about psychoanalysis and politics. Really recommend it - really worth exploring all this!
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n23/amia-srinivasan/the-impossible-patient
2/4 Also (more uninformed musings linking psychology and geopolitics with no expertise in either):
Trump is basically abusive, he is abusing/gaslighting all of us. Our times are so distorted that we have all become super quick to detect individual abuse (“he is gaslighting you ”; “you need to leave him”), but absolutely noone in MSM is calling out Trump in this way. They are all co-creating Trump world, gaslighting for him, reporting on him as if he is a normal person.
Dream team here, this “Board of Peace”
Have been detecting a new emotion recently triggered by news like this - same when Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump.
Barely an emotion; more like cold resignation to the surreal evil of our times; when you recognise there might have been outrage before but now it’s barely a flicker, like the last little flame when you switch off a gas cooker.
Need a name for it!
1/4 (mini #Geopolitics #Psychology 🧵)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/16/trump-gaza-board-rubio-blair?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other