Gringo View: Watching History Happen in Real Time

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) “The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.”

Eckhart Tolle, the popular spiritual guru, argues that there is really nothing we can do about the past: it’s gone. And, trying to predict the future is nothing more than idle, often soul-destroying speculation. Unless we are living in the ‘Now’, we are disconnected from the real world.

While this gringo had honestly pledged not to indulge my news addiction, I must admit that I have seriously relapsed. Since the beginning of the year, just one week ago, I reconnected, tuning into the goings-on in the world with a front row seat – watching history being made. It is not the past or the future: it is very definitely the real-time ‘Now’.

In the more than two decades I have happily lived in Brazil, while there has been a lot of noise on the Av. Paulista, I have never seen a spectacle to compare with this Wednesday’s insurrectional storming of the US Capitol Building, said to be the first time this has happened since 1814 when British forces set it on fire.

Yes, there have been major demonstrations by Brazilians since the end of the military regime and the restoration of democratic government, the largest directly ignited by a rise in public transportation fares in 2013. Unlike the US protests, these were not ‘partisan’. In fact, they have been variously described as ‘antipartisan‘, “sem partido” (“without political parties”) as demonstrators proclaimed. There was a practical, not a political or cultural issue at the heart of the public grievance.

By contrast, in the US, the protests are totally partisan and political. Quite simply, far-right pro-Trump extremists, actively encouraged by the soon-to-be ex-president and his sycophantic minions, invaded the U.S. Capitol Building in the hope of preventing Congress from ratifying the electoral college victory of President-elect Joe Biden, thus leaving Trump in power. That is nothing less than an attempted coup, fortunately unsuccessful. It was as stunning as it was unique.

The mob was following the calls at a morning rally from Rudy Giuliani, the president’s crackpot lawyer, and from Trump’s sons for “trial by combat”. They were fueled by the totally disproved conspiracy theory that the recent presidential election has been stolen through massive and widespread fraud; Trump proclaimed, over and over and over, not only that he had won, but that he had won in a landslide.

As I watched the drama unfold on television, I simply could not believe what I was watching. It was, as one commentator described it, a “bonfire of the insanities”. It was real life imitating (or rather replaying) all the intrigue-heavy historical dramas we had been watching for months on Netflix, involving the Tudors, Marco Polo, the Vikings.

Yesterday, I was watching history being made in real time, in the ‘now’. And it is scary.

Normally, history isn’t like a solar eclipse that you can watch as it happens. Like excellent wine, history needs time to mature before it can be fully appreciated. Our current situation breaks that rule. It’s ‘now’ and its meaning is clear. What we witnessed on Wednesday was, as Charlie Warzel wrote in the ‘NYTimes’, “the crash of a universe of toxic conspiracies against the rocks of human reality”.

Like many of us, I’ve become angrier and angrier. A good deal of the reason is, as I have written before, that it becomes harder and harder to distinguish between what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fake’. Maybe I should start a new career as a moderator of ‘truth’ – someone who exorcizes ‘untruths’ – if only I can figure out what they are. It is not easy.

We should remember the words of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy who wrote, “the remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth.”

Alternative realities constructed on toxic conspiracies distort the shared commitment to the truth on which I was reared and on which a free society depends. Cults, like cancers, can grow undetected until they threaten life itself and there is no reason to believe that ‘Trumpism’ is anything less than a malignant cult.

In the early 80s, I was invited by Werner Erhard, the charismatic albeit controversial creator of est (Erhard Seminar Training) a personal transformational training program, to conduct a weekend seminar with his top management group.

The purpose was for me to do a strategic assessment of the program’s future. Est, which had attracted thousands of participants all over the world, was being attacked as a cult, awakening recent memories of the Jim Jones’ infamous ‘People’s Temple’ in the jungle of Guyana where, in 1978, more than 900 members committed mass suicide drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.

Having completed the assessment and discovered how easy it was to convince the group to taste my form of ‘Kool-Aid’, I went back and urged Werner that the est training be shuttered to assure that nothing serious could happen. He listened and with great integrity, a month later it was gone even though it was a very profitable business.

The future of Trump’s cult looks ominous. Still head of the Brazilian Trump fan club, Jair Bolsonaro has been reported here as saying: “You know I’m connected to Trump, right? There were a lot of reports of fraud,” he added without any evidence.

To the Trump faithful, and there appear to be many millions who have signed on to the cult and its conspiracy theories, the siege of the US Capitol must seem a noble and proper expression of fidelity, something to be proud of and a certain font of bragging rights. Adherents claim to be ‘tired of democracy’. No matter the arguments, it may be too late to change minds that are anchored to this alternative reality.

At this writing, there is now an active effort to remove Trump from office immediately, even with only a few days left in his term, using the 25th Constitutional Amendment, which allows the Vice President and Cabinet to declare the President unfit to continue in office.

It is unlikely that, after January 20 when Trump leaves the White House, reason and truth will cause his acolytes to give up their fantasies. That is the ‘now’ and that is where the ultimate danger lies.