Gossip, rumor, and the Big Lie depend on telling people what they want to hear. I was part of a large school community. I said that 90% of my problems as the Spiritual Leader would go away if we could just do away with rumor and gossip. Rumor and gossip have the same dynamic of the Big Lie. We have been focusing on who shares the rumor, gossip, or those who spread the Big Lie that the election is stolen. We have not been focused on those who listen.
I noticed that certain people in our school community loved to hear a juicy piece of rumor or gossip. Others would discourage people from spreading gossip or rumor to them. People knew who these people were.
One of the phrases that I used in talking to or listening to others was simply, “I only want to know what can be helpful to another." Nothing else. I expressed this by indicating to as many who would listen that we should be having conversations “on a need to know basis”. I said it so much that people referred to “on a need to know basis” as my middle name. I have found that this is a difficult guideline for people in any community to adhere to. I frequently said that gossip was the snake that hisses because of those two s(s) in the name.
People forget that someone who shares gossip with you has declared part of their identity meaning they would someday share gossip about you. There is a saying, author unknown, that “Don’t tell me what they said about me. Tell me what you did to make them think it was OK to say it in your presence.”
Women students transferring to my school which is coeducational from a single sex school, seemed to have a common complaint. Girls are tough on girls in terms of listening to the lie found in rumor. This was not as evident in the Trump Insurrection because of the undercurrent of “Make America Great Again For White Men”. However, we do have a significant female presence supporting him.
Trump and other authoritarian leaders are not necessarily smart so why do people listen to them in their telling of lies? Trump and others of his ilk are “dumb like a fox” meaning they have Ph.D(s) in changing a lie to truth. Most are narcissistic in nature, but people listen to Trump because it helps them to be part of something bigger than themselves. Recall that passion trumps (yes, I meant to use that word) reason. The stronger the passion, the more unreal or surreal life becomes for the listener and those outside of the manipulative orbit. I was struck by a comment of one of the women insurrectionists who proclaimed: “This is the best day of my life along with the birth of my three children.” Her children were an afterthought.
Listening to rumor or the Big Lie helps people sense that they belong and builds their self-esteem. These are two vital parts of our psyche and soul. We see this graphically with young people’s strong connection to their cell phones. It is called FOMO or fear of missing out. It is like going to the grocery store and coming upon that item that is two for the price of one. You get self-esteem and a sense of belonging from one action of listening to rumor.
But there is another issue that Trump tapped in a brilliant toxic way. At our basic instinctual nature, we are people of the narrative. There is an old story that “God loved people so much that he created stories.”
After the insurrection the seditionists told stories of their best day and their heroics. They fist bumped and had cocktail parties which uplifted them all. They flooded their social media with statements, pictures, and videos that reflected the joy of their actions. Notice that initially they didn’t think that they did anything wrong. It was like a day at the beach. When it became clear to them that what they did was horribly wrong and there would be consequences, they removed their posts and went into hiding. The Trump narrative of “Stop the Steal” was powerful. It is heady stuff to be a revolutionary.
I saw this first hand in the 60(s) when I was a student at the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale where many of my classmates who were from affluent backgrounds took to the streets in protest being assured of backup money from their parents. I couldn’t identify with their narrative. I was a working-class kid who knew work, study, eat, sleep, and being on my own.
One of the best examples of connecting to an underlying narrative is found in the novels of Stephen King. He writes scary words! When asked by an interviewer why his books were so incredibly popular, he had an interesting response. “People who buy my books are the same people who slow down when passing an accident on a highway. Everybody likes to get a glimpse of blood and the scary”. It strikes me that Trump and the seditionists had the same impulse.
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