One of the strategies of the emotional plague in its onslaught on human life and its destruction of America is to eliminate American’s memory with its past. There is an active process of psychic repression on a mass scale in every area of social life including in people’s knowledge of America’s history, its social traditions and ways of life that is happening unrecognized by almost everyone. The effect of people losing their memory of their past history and traditional ways of living places them at the mercy of the emotional plague, political leaders that will have brought about this clueless state of social being. On a more superficial, everyday level, eliminate the friendly black images of Aunt Jemima, Little Black Sambo and Uncle Ben from America’s culture and what you have is encouraging the opposite emotion: divisiveness, mistrust and enmity between blacks and whites. On a deeper level, the convicted, drug addict, black criminal, George Floyd is made into a national hero with a cavalcade of police cars escorting his funeral procession while the passing of John Lewis, the first black Congressman ever to be elected to Congress, passes by almost completely unnoticed.
To prevent the spread of mass amnesia and the resultant state of cluelessness, one has to be constantly reminded that the accelerate rate of human destructiveness that is currently happening in America would have been unimaginable not only a decade ago but even last year.
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Neither Left Nor Right
The Emotional Plague
Charles Konia, M.D. 
Yes, reality is taking a beating, human destructiveness is rampant, and racial mistrust and enmity are new barriers to human contact.
Even simple conversation gets held back by the lurking danger of all the new, forbidden words, attitudes, and perceptions.
One can speak freely with fewer and fewer people.
And through a mask, yet!
We hide who we are and what we think and feel and know.
With reality slipping away in the media and the culture, we have all the more reason to focus on maintaining contact in our private lives.
My new slogan is, “Hide your dear eyes from the devil’s devices.”
I look forward to more of your thoughts on staying in touch with reality.
I mentioned to a friend back in April that the world reaction to Covid-19 might turn out to be the 21stC equivalent of the effect of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 on the 20thC.
You wrote this on page 222 in the your first book “The Emotional Plague”
“During the 1920s and 1930s in America, many social forces acted together with pseudo-liberalism to weaken the existing authoritarian system (Allen 1931). Freud’s misconstrued influence on America was an important factor. His popularized theories were misunderstood and distorted in the minds of armored people and they had a powerful but, unfortunately, destructive effect on the American people. One message, distorted by freethinking liberals that became imbedded in the popular mind, was that the most important requirement for mental health is an uninhibited sex life. Another erroneous and equally destructive concept was that, because there is an unconscious mind, people are not accountable for their destructive behavior. A third destructive effect was that of psychoanalytic technique itself, which relied heavily on the individual analytical faculties. Attempting to achieve self-understanding, intelligent people in all walks of American life became caught up in “analyzing” and questioning themselves. They became “stuck in their heads” asking themselves “why” they thought or behaved as they did. This practice most often only served to intensify the intellect and, from then on, understanding itself came to be widely used as a defense by deadening emotion.
Lastly, a related factor that served to aggravate the use of the intellect as a defense was that psychoanalysis had little to say about the importance of the function of emotions and their role in health.”
One can’t understand what is going on today without a decent understanding of how we arrived at this point in time.
The quote above helps lay out some of the underlying conditions that set the stage for the post WW2 anti-authoritarian transformation of America.
This transformation has been in the formative stage since that time and awaiting the appropriate conditions for full expression. The election of President Trump was a threat to the raison d’etre of the EP (i.e. the transformation to anti-authoritarianism).
In February of 2020 a golden opportunity presented itself. We are in the beginning phase of the battle to see if the full expression of the EP will come to fruition.
To look at the present chaotic conditions without an accurate historical functional perspective is to miss an important opportunity to understand more fully how an emotional plague outbreak in the greater social realm can occur.
Steven,you make great points and thank you! While an understanding of how the current EP epidemic has come about, is quite important ,the outbreak at this juncture appears to be so severe, that “understanding” its roots, must take a back seat to dealing with the immediate problem of stemming the bleeding. A police(military?)response is badly needed given the extent of this outbreak, before it’s too late. Order needs be restored. Social media needs to be severely curtailed as well as the news media which has become nothing more than a propoganda arm for the Trump hating LEFT. Long jail sentences for rioters/looters needs to happen. Military response may be needed in cities where emotionally sick mayors are encouraging the chaos, while handcuffing the police. Millions of suburban Americans are arming up right now as gun sales are soaring. Many folks intuitively understand the need for force to stop the madness. Our freedoms are rapidly slipping away. I so wish Trump comes to this conclusion & acts accordingly!
Elliott
I definitely am interested in actions being taken today and tomorrow to deal with and contain the current outbreak.
Unfortunately the best that any action (police or not) will do is plug one of many holes in the dam.
As Ed brought up a few comments back I think a two prong approach is necessary at this stage of degeneration. Education (talking directly to the American people everyday if necessary to help them understand what is going on) and police/military action. How Trump could accomplish this I am not sure. He probably does not have the knowledge and people around him to implement it.
Dr. Konia, I agree with every substantive point in this article, except what you say about John Lewis. He was far, very far, from being the first elected black congressman (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans_in_the_United_States_Congress), and his passing has been thoroughly covered in every news source I’ve looked at, both mainstream and alternative,— for example, https://abcnews.go.com/US/world-leaders-politicians-pay-homage-civil-rights-icon/story?id=71854525&cid=clicksource_4380645_6_film_strip_icymi_hed.
I stand corrected.
I agree, Steven, of the necessity of the 2 pronged approach. Let’s hope Trump has the fortitude to do both. I think he truly “gets” the danger presented by the Far Left, but how much he’s willing to go out on a limb to stop it is another question. If it was solely up to him, I think he’d be up to the task. But one wonders about the people around him & if they’d be willing to go along with a long overdue crackdown.
Thanks again for your thoughts sir….fingers crossed during these critical times!
Elliott, I always greatly appreciate our interchanges and look forward to many more!
While I agree that Trump, like many others, have an instinct and sense about the destructiveness of the pseudo-liberal far left, he is still stuck with and limited by conventional thinking which will never be an adequate method of thinking to take on an EP outbreak of this magnitude. It has now taken up a good portion of the space in the greater social realm while the health that still exists is quite compromised and, for the time being, isolated.
Hello, Dr Konia thank you for the accurate and clear depiction of reality in our days. I would like to ask a question about the emotional plague and covid-19, although i know it is somewhat irrelevant to this entry (sorry for my english, i’m not a native speaker).
So what is the common functioning principle of these two? Armoring? Anti-authoriatariansm? DOR?
Thank you
The emotional plague and the corona virus belong in different biological realms and so there is no CFP underlying them. However, like any other function the corona virus epidemic can be used by the emotional plague of armored humans to spread its destructiveness.