Forgive yourself
When the scales fall from your eyes
About a decade ago, I got romantically involved with a woman who had a very complicated life. I won’t go into details, but it was almost non-stop drama. It was too much for me, so I broke it off. But we remained on speaking terms. I still cared for her, and I wanted to help her overcome the obstacles in her life.
Those obstacles included health problems. Shortly after we broke up, she let me know that she needed expensive surgery, and that her health insurance would not provide sufficient coverage. I agreed to help her financially.
It turned out that the initial surgery was just the tip of the iceberg. There were complications and additional surgeries. There were expensive prescriptions. There were travel expenses. She couldn’t work while she was recuperating and needed help with other expenses. And so on.
I’m embarrassed to say how long this went on and how much I spent. Finally, there came a day when I caught her in a lie, and the whole thing unraveled. She had indeed had a life-threatening condition initially, I think, but mostly she was exploiting me. I came to realize that she was an expert manipulator and con artist. I was not her first victim, and probably not her last.
I’m sharing this painful personal episode to show that I know how it feels to be conned. I think of myself as a reasonably intelligent person. I have two graduate degrees. I’m generally very careful with money, and I had built up substantial savings. I thought I had more common sense than most people I know, but it turned out I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. I finally had to face the facts.
Why am I revealing this in a Substack newsletter that is mainly about “practical philosophy for a post-industrial republic”?
Because our republic is at risk, and I want to preserve it. Our republic is at risk because a solid third of the electorate has fallen under the sway of an even more shameless liar than the one I ran afoul of. (It is also at risk because of the structural factors I’ve talked about in other posts.)
Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” Maybe we should add, everyone gets fooled eventually by someone — including me and you. When you get fooled, the sooner you admit it to yourself, the less damage you will suffer. If you keep doubling down, making excuses for the one who is deceiving you rather the facing the shame of admitting that you’ve been fooled, you’ll continue to let yourself be taken advantage of.
Politically, the situation today is even more dire than Lincoln’s adage suggests. Instead of fooling some or all of the people all or some of the time, Trump’s GOP has figured out how to fool just enough of the people just long enough to retake power, and now that Trump and the pack of sell-outs and suck-ups who do his bidding are in, they are working to dismantle any constitutional, institutional, legal, or customary structures through which they might be challenged and removed. Trump is even talking about running for a third term.
I could list all the unconstitutional, illegal, immoral, incompetent, or imbecilic actions that Trump and Musk and their stooges have taken, but such evidence is not what I want to focus on in this post. The evidence is easily available. This post is about internal barriers to accepting the evidence.
I’m not a fan of Freud or psychoanalytic theory, but I do find the idea of “ego defense mechanisms” to be useful. Freud studied and classified the tricks that we play on ourselves to avoid confronting whatever threatens our sense of self. Evidence that we have been fooled is threatening, especially for those of us who make the mistake of basing our self-worth on our intellectual abilities. So we resist admitting we have been deceived. But again, if we are caught in the web of a grifter, as I was, the longer we refuse to admit this to ourselves, the more we will lose. We must break free of the web before we get sucked dry, and to do that we must come to terms with what is happening.
I imagine this will be easier for independents who thought that Trump would do something to bring down inflation than it will be for those who are deeply immersed in the MAGA cult. The latter may need to undergo something like a conversion experience.
One day, the scales will fall from your eyes, if you let them.
(Recommended reading: William James devotes two chapters of his classic Varieties of Religious Experience to the phenomenon of conversion.)
It may be helpful to think in terms of forgiveness. I still have not completely forgiven myself for being duped by my ex, but if you were duped by Trump, you should forgive yourself. Trump may be the most adept scammer of his generation, and he had the backing of a rogues’ gallery of disloyal billionaires, complicit media organizations, accelerationists, and foreign authoritarians who all amplified his lies. So when you do recognize that you have been conned, don’t beat yourself up too much.
(And those of us who didn’t vote for Trump are not off the hook. Others have already written plenty of opinion pieces about where Trump’s opponents went wrong and why they lost in 2024, so I won’t bother to add another, but I will say that I could have done more, and I’ll probably write about that at some point.)
But don’t stop at forgiving yourself — take action. Our republic is in danger, and however we voted, we must all come together to preserve it. Most importantly, Trump’s control of Congress must end in 2026. We need to support candidates who will uphold the Constitution, and we need to make sure the election proceeds without interference.
If you’re fed up with Trump but aren’t ready to actively support a Democratic candidate, there are nonpartisan organizations promoting resistance to Trump, including the 50501 movement and Indivisible.
Please share this with anyone you know who may be having second thoughts about voting for Trump.
But you trust Biden? If so, you are more gullible than you know.