The Zeitgeist of Mad Logic

“The marvellous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same, and because at the secret heart of madness, at the core of so many errors, so many absurdities, so many words and gestures without consequence. . .”

― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

Conspiracy theories dwell in complexity, a complexity of thought and passion. The thinking has what Foucault calls “the marvellous logic of the mad,” and the “madness of passion,” as each brother in The Brothers Karamazov reveals, preempts observing anything clearly. Transparency is occluded. We see through clouded minds, not the spiritual and divine that is beclouded but everyday words and events. We see within what Keats called “the moods of one’s mind,” and today we are captured within the moods of one mind, Donald J. Trump’s.

The first six months of Donald J. Trump’s second presidency sharpens the focus on this dark state of affairs, though the descent into irrationalism, the collapse of rational and empirical methodologies into a war of opinions, wasn’t initiated by Trump, although he cleverly exploits this collapse. You can just say something isn’t true or say the opposite is true, play to the audience, confound and blitz and leave clear refutation to your opponents. The sad truth is that nothing said or produced is now clear, by which I mean, accepted as clear by all. Whatever contesting evidence put forward can be rejected as fake, falsely concocted by those dark conspiracies of power: The New World Order (NWO), The Committee of 300,  also known as the Olympians or the hidden hand, The Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, and now, the Deep State.

Transparent clarity is mystified by paranoia and conspiracy, brilliantly revealed in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49., written in 1966, two years after the country wondered whether the Gulf of Tonkin North Vietnamese attack was real or fabricated so as to escalate U.S. involvement in ‘Nam. Was this President Lyndon Johnson’s doing? Was indeed Johnson the president because he made the call on JFK’s assassination?

Some 60 years later, President Donald J. Trump has fabricated one story after another, capitalizing on this strain of paranoia and conspiracy that bedevils the American Mass Psyche. An essential part of Marxist critique is the inevitable concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few, an imbalance fueling resentment and suspicion, which in turn triggers paranoid theories of dark controlling forces. Resentment over the oppression of the masses was Marx’s take. He held an ideological narrative. Not the case now where a large segment of the country ingests the derangement of just one man.

Paranoia and conspiracy is the present American zeitgeist: nothing can be clearly identified to everyone’s acknowledgement and acceptance. As it is the nature of the madness of passions “to know” on a level of knowing (call it the logic of the mad) and to act on that, the dark, hidden deep State therefore can be defeated by assertion, proclamation, executive order. We are way beyond rational dialectic and due process. Knowing is now a passion of irrationality, a logic of madness.  And all of this tragically attached to and fed by a sick mind.

Originally in Mike Lofgren’s 2016 book, The Deep State, that Dark Hole was described as connections of power set on increasing and preserving that power in undemocratic ways and beyond the electoral power of the people to identify or oppose. In short, it referred to a complexity of interconnection not egalitarian but cabalistic, a secret order of malignant power.

The Trump world has deflated that complexity to the level of a personal narrative in which a perceived network of Democratic and Left Wing leaning bureaucrats and officials are out to destroy President Trump. They have weaponized the agencies, instruments and personnel of the Federal government to destroy Trump’s presidency, to stop him from making American great again. A hit has been put out on him, Donald J. Trump.

Within the logic of the mad this is indisputable. Of course, in this world, we no longer have dispute but loud declarations strung together with the thread of outrage, or sharp crushing demolitions of invisible antagonists. Whether or not this madhouse would have developed as it has without Trump’s stroking and fueling it simply for his own megalomaniac ends is not at first look a transparent matter. But neither is it complex. The conspiratorial mind discovers complexity where it is not; the paranoid mind finds transparency in what is not real.

Judging by who historically has occupied the presidency, Trump as a gnostic Archon is without precedent. The complexity of pathology in power within a disordered order of things, one that has lost any path to transparency of word and action, is something like a highly unlikely cosmic event. The zeitgeist of mad logic of the present has only the longevity and resilience that a politics of passion provides. I mean very little. And yet, what a mad logic grounded in the performances of a mountebank president faces is a tradition of scientific method and rational dialectic that has been seriously interrogated for some fifty years, put under what Derrida called “Sous Rature,” under erasure. We have been living within this interrogation of reason, truth and reality. Associatively, the present unforeseen reign of mad logic has clearly exposed the fragility and vulnerability of American Constitutional democracy and what has been held to be sacrosanct, such as Due Process and Habeus Corpus.

Within our complexity of thought and passion where any path to transparency is false and conspiracy is the road taken, what we demand to know of Jeffrey Epstein becomes more important than what ICE is doing, or the defiance of judicial authority, or ignoring due process of the law, or undermining the electoral process and the transition of power, or destroying Federal bureaucracy, or whether there’s starvation and genocide in Gaza. When an issue touches a foundational part of Trump’s appeal, namely uncovering the vile Democrats behind the curtains of the Deep State, and it seems like the Trump regime is gaslighting that disclosure, then a glove is being laid on the thus far invincible, Trump.

This is now being done not by Left Wingers, Progressive and Democrats, university profs, the legacy press, unhinged judges, subversive bureaucrats, frightened immigrants but by his loyal followers. His fan base.

He may implode from within. That’s why the story has legs. The “Woke” Democrats who have a far lower approval rating (33%) than Trump (37%) need Trump’s help to take him down. And he’s giving it to them. Right now, he’s helping them by strangling himself with the Epstein cesspool, just as the Dems helped him by replacing kitchen table issues with bathroom ones. The Dems’ Congressional wins in 2026, very likely, would not be achieved by a winning platform but by voters in retreat from Trump, whose inner demons have both a winning and a destructive mania. He’s crowned himself Napoleon in a mad house of his own construction and remains imprisoned by a logic he can’t escape. He’s been on the attack against whatever challenges his mad logic, from the Federal Government and the Constitution to the Epstein files.

The scenario we can now follow. He’s promised to open all the locked files of the Deep State, including the Epstein files, assuming his minions would know that he didn’t really want them opened because he had a fifteen-year close relationship with the degenerate Epstein. He assumed wrong. They pitched hard to show the files. Until he called them stupid. Not his followers. The con man always thinks the conned are stupid. No, the stupid ones were his own minions. They just are not Roy Cohns.  And the deeply enthralled MAGAs, convinced the files will damage Hillary or Obama or Biden and that crew, another pizza gate Democrat pedophile ring, are pushing that the files be shown.

That the powerful degenerate, corrupt elite behind the Deep State was their savior, Trump himself is an awareness to come. It’s transparent. Or not. It’s complex within the zeitgeist of mad logic. To see what is transparently there and true, requires the same kind of therapy the logic of the madman requires. What epiphany a whole society seated at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party needs will probably be provided by that order of Nature we are damaging. Or not.

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