Mimetic Rage: Why Epstein Leads to Sacrificial Violence
January 6th was the model for how Trump’s followers react to decompensation
Mimesis is the process of mimicry, which is one of the most important ways that we learn. This is echoed in numerous clichés like “Monkey see, monkey do”, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” and so on.
This process was partially formalized by philosopher and historian René Girard in mimetic theory, an idea highly influential on Peter Thiel, who met Girard at Stanford as an undergraduate and became a member of what Thiel described as a “cult-like” following. Girard’s theory focused on mimetic desire, which Girard said led to mimetic rivalry which inevitably leads to violence against a scapegoat. This violence becomes a cleansing ritual that allows the society to return to peaceful coexistence.
While there is a lot to glean from Girard, especially considering his influence on key figures connected to the Trump regime, Girard’s work suffers from his dogged efforts to create an explanatory edifice around Christianity and the biblical narrative of Jesus Christ. Girard saw Jesus as the only scapegoat who, as a result of his resurrection, could break the vicious cycle by proving that mimetic violence was just an illusion and that scapegoats may be innocent. This is why, in Girard’s world, Christianity is the solution to violence.
Emotional Mimesis
To extend Girard’s concept of mimetic desire, other emotions are equally prone to mimesis, for example, mimetic rage. This is evident in the behavior of crowds, both in the real world and online. When we see someone we use as a model expressing rage about someone or some thing—an object in Girardian terms—we feel that rage and want to express it as well. The subject mirrors the model.
Here is a generalized model of emotional mimesis.
This human instinct to mimic our models has been deliberately hijacked to psychologically bind a large part of the American population to one man, Donald Trump. This process has been ongoing for a decade.
The weaponization of mimesis through the internet has been systematically targeting the U.S. population since Donald Trump came down the escalator. But why Trump? Why did he, of all people, become the model for so many?
First, narcissists are attractive to others because the narcissist has learned how to model the kind of behavior that many others desire. This is how Donald Trump has lived his entire life.
The narcissist flaunts his charitable nature as a bait. He impresses others with his selflessness and kindness and thus lures them into his lair, entraps them, and manipulates and brainwashes them into subservient compliance and obsequious collaboration. People are attracted to the narcissist's larger than life posture – only to discover his true personality traits when it is far too late. "Give a little to take a lot" – is the narcissist's creed.
―Sam Vaknin, Confessions Diary of a Narcissist
In Vaknin’s book, he describes how the narcissist brainwashes those around him into “subservient compliance”—which is how the U.S. federal government operates right now. But how did Trump extend this subservience to so much of the American population?
The Five-Step Process of Online Brainwashing
The systematic brainwashing of a large minority of the American population is both the most glaring and least understood problem affecting our society.
Trump’s followers are not simply being “radicalized.” They have been psychologically captured. They are prisoners in their own minds. Here is how it happens in five steps:
“Redpilling” and Trauma
Dissociation
Salvation
Refreezing
Mimetic Synchrony
Step 1: “Redpilling” and Trauma
People exposed to severe trauma often find their most deeply held beliefs and their own self-worth shattered.
“Traumatic events destroy the victim’s fundamental assumptions about the safety of the world, the positive value of the self, and the meaningful order of creation.”
— Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (1992)
Clinically, trauma is a cause of numerous psychological and psychiatric problems, including dissociative disorder. Here is the definition for Other Specified Dissociative Disorders, type 2 in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders:
Identity disturbance due to prolonged and intense coercive persuasion: Individuals who have been subjected to intense coercive persuasion (e.g., brainwashing, thought reform, indoctrination while captive, torture, long-term political imprisonment, recruitment by sects/cults or by terror organizations) may present with prolonged changes in, or conscious questions of, their identity.
Online content designed to traumatize people is everywhere and the pipelines to drive people to that content are well-developed and intentional. As an example, here is part of a long post on 8chan about the deliberate process of traumatizing and “redpilling” “normies” into QAnon—“Redpill Tactics.”
“Podesta art shock method” means deliberately sending someone to view traumatic content posted by others of Satanic Democrats featuring Hillary Clinton’s crimes including kidnapping, trafficking and torturing children to extract their “adrenochrome.” The use of children is an especially potent and harmful tactic. It reaches deep into the fear center of all people, but especially women, as the authors of “Redpill Tactics” note.
The purposeful exposure of people to traumatic content without their knowledge is violence. Doing this deliberately should be a crime in the same way any assault is. Nevertheless, it happens all day long and begins the process of brainwashing online.
Here is a fictionalized account of how it happens from the point of view of a victim. This is a composite of thousands of people I have personally interacted with and observed.
Step 2: Dissociation
When the mind is flooded with too much signal from acute stress, intense pain, or emotional overload, it may dissociate, effectively throwing up a wall inside the mind. This depersonalizes the subject from whatever is causing what may be an incipient mental breakdown, by creating a safe(r) zone inside the mind, essentially forming a different “depersonalized” existence which is still able to cognitively function. This has also been described by people in severe abuse or violent trauma as being “outside of my body.”
This can have a healthy impact on someone’s ability to survive a life-threatening scenario. If you have a potentially fatal injury, you need a way to continue to function despite the physical, emotional, and psychological stressors.
When “redpilled” with violent, pedophile-oriented, racist, antisemitic content of the kind found in Pizzagate, QAnon and other MAGA forums, the viewer is dissociated by the traumatic nature of the content and wants to protect themselves from the extreme emotional pain of what they’re seeing. This is a way for the mind to process the content without the burden of the emotional impact.
However, this is precisely the moment at which the mind is most vulnerable to outside influence. A terrorized, dissociated person is desperate to reintegrate, to resolve the trauma that they are experiencing. In the online brainwashing process this is the exactly when the savior arrives, whether it be “Q” or Donald Trump.
Step 3: Salvation
In classic models of ideological capture—from Kurt Lewin’s behavioral theory to Robert Jay Lifton’s totalist psychology, to Dr. Steven Hassan’s “Combatting Cult Mind Control”—the first step in changing a person’s identity is “unfreezing” by unmooring them from their existing framework, their sense of self, and their place in the world. You deliberately disintegrate them.
Online, the redpill is the unfreeze, the agent of contagion for directed trauma. The refreeze is two-fold.
First, the savior or the prophet, e.g. Trump or “Q” is always presented in these moments as the solution to the false problem. For example, there are countless Pizzagate and QAnon videos with something like the following sequence:
America is presented as a utopian white society which has been attacked and infected by a dark force composed of Democrats, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and so on.
A mythology of sexual sadism, torture, pedophilia and other violent visuals and lies are presented to deliberately shock, horrify, and traumatize the viewer in conjunction with the targets of the video. These segments are sometimes referred to as “trauma porn.”
The “heroes”—Q, Assange, Mike Flynn, et al.—are presented as prophets with special gnostic knowledge or exclusive access to the “savior”, Donald Trump.
Second, cult dynamics give the traumatized, dissociated victim a safe place to land, for example the chat rooms and DMs on Telegram, Facebook and Twitter. Or, in the past, the boards of 4chan and 8chan. These are insulated environments that reinforce both the validity of the lies and the infallibility of the leader. They also simulate positive emotions like acceptance, warmth and even love, when a person is most vulnerable to influence.
Step 4: Refreezing
After the violence of “unfreezing” through trauma, the refreezing of a person’s psyche after being dissociated online is a process, a constant reinforcing set of messages, images and videos that present a world perfectly aligned with the designated savior and prophets. It also requires other people actively enforce the doctrine of the group. Anything that contradicts the group’s collective reality—which is directed by the leader—is rejected, cast out, and ridiculed.
In MAGA and QAnon, there is a certain set of rules. If you comply with them you are rewarded. The more enthusiastically you promote the doctrine and the leader the more likes, retweets and warm invitations you get to various gatherings. You are put into follow-chains and grow your presence online. You are welcomed. In a way, you are family.
But it is all a well-crafted hoax, an alternate reality that you are presented as real. If you have doubts, you keep them to yourself. Why bother when you’re making so many new “friends”? As they keep telling you, the more “redpill” videos you watch, the more you will “understand the hidden world the mainstream media won’t tell you about”—and the more you will understand how Donald Trump is going to “Save the Children” from Satanic pedophile Democrats.
By the time you feel “normal” again, in this context, you are not the same person you were when you were “unfrozen.” You have been refrozen into a different identity, a person who feels somehow synchronized with the alternate reality around you and its leader.
Step 5: Mimetic Synchrony
Mimetic synchrony is emotional mimesis synchronized through an insulated information environment, using prophets and proxies of the savior to model the desired emotion. It is what makes MAGA and QAnon behave not so much like a political movement but more like a flock of birds or a school of fish.
Once the subject has been traumatized, unfrozen, “saved,” refrozen, and committed to mimetic synchrony, it becomes, in Lifton’s model, a totalist environment.
“The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought‑terminating cliché. The most far‑reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive‑sounding phrases… These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”
— Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism
MAGA and QAnon are totalist environments in mimetic, overlapping synchrony. They present an endless and evolving set of thought-terminating clichés starting with “Make America Great Again” which allows the person repeating it to fill in whatever version of a regressive America they choose. The very name of the movement instills the core message, “America has gone bad. Trump will take us back.”
Some other prominent thought-stopping phrases:
“Russia, Russia, Russia”
“Lock Her Up”
“Where We Go One We Go All”
“Trust the Plan”
“Do Your Own Research”
These kind of phrases serve as a defense mechanism against any narratives or content that give them cognitive dissonance, defined as mental anguish resulting from trying to hold contradictory thoughts at the same time. We’ve all experienced this when trying to reason with a Trump supporter. Give them a reasoned argument about our descent into authoritarianism, they will give you “the real fascists are on the left.”
Note that not all attempts to create a thought-stopping phrase are successful. For example, the phrase “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” which Trump explicitly told his followers to use, has been a flop. It only exacerbated their cognitive dissonance.
Here is Dr. Steven Hassan’s dissertation on the BITE Model of Control—Behavior, Informational, Thought and Emotional. It incorporates Lifton’s work and extends it to a comprehensive model that can be used to understand how authoritarian groups keep their members under mind control, and in my words, mimetic synchrony.
Why Epstein Leads to Violence
Mimetic synchrony, or the flock-like behavior of a brainwashed group online, is very powerful when in control and directed. However, when it is out of sync and chaotic, it can be explosive and violent. MAGA and its more radical wing QAnon, having been in power for four years with their beliefs reinforced in real-time from the White House, suddenly found themselves with a massive shot of cognitive dissonance when Trump lost the 2020 election.
Trump, for his part, as a malignant narcissist, began to spiral into narcissistic collapse. His myth of invincibility was punctured, and his ego gravely wounded. He immediately began projecting blame, going into magical thinking, and making up or going along with all manner of conspiracy theories. And then, in accordance with both Girardian and clinical psychology, he created a scapegoat—Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi and the Deep State in the Capitol.
His rage, and his decompensation, was mimetically transmuted to his government and to his followers, as was his determination to seek revenge on those he truly believed had “stolen” the election. When he had a screaming match with Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Patrick Byrne in the White House on December 18, 2020, he was a decompensating, out-of-control, malignant narcissist in Stage IV of collapse, and when he was presented with a plan by Flynn to use violence and a scapegoat to retain power, he entered Stage V—rupture.
When Donald Trump tweeted “Big protest… will be wild” after that meeting he was signaling that a scapegoat had been chosen and a sacrifice was coming. He was signaling that he was going to burn the system down rather than face his own failure.
It’s the same reason Donald Trump will pardon Ghislaine Maxwell. It’s why he has destroyed the DOJ and embarrassed himself and the world with his clownish cover up of the Epstein files. It’s because he must, lest he be exposed as a pedophile, a conman and a total fraud. It is much, much worse for him than losing an election. This time he will lose everything.
When a narcissist in power is under threat and collapses to the point where their reality ruptures completely, you get J6, or you get Jonestown. It is a near mathematical certainty that the narcissist will lash out with whatever tools are available, and just as importantly, that they will take their own organization, be it a cult or a government, with them.
Organizational Decompensation
Organizational decompensation occurs when the psyche of a single leader becomes the nervous system of an entire institution, or when the ideology of an institution becomes fused to its members. When the ego of the leader or the ideology collapses, so does the organization. In an authoritarian organization, the internal instability of the man becomes the behavior of the machine.
The federal government is mimetically decompensating along with Donald Trump and his followers. It’s not just the people breaking down, it’s the system.
That’s what makes Donald Trump’s personal fear of being exposed as a criminal, again, via Jeffrey Epstein more than a personal crisis, or even a national one. It’s an international emergency. If decompensation turns to a rupture of the kind he experienced on December 18th, 2020, there is no limit to what he might do to save himself. He has already turned his sights on America and signaled even more violence.
What Next?
Given the nature of a decompensating, rageful man and a regime that is reacting like his psychological mirror, in a strange way the only thing preventing a mass spasm of violence is MAGA itself, which has been stunned by the Epstein matter. It’s as if someone dropped a bomb in a school of fish, or shot a firework into a flock of birds. Will the flock recongeal, as it always has, to mimetically wrap its arms around a broken man, or is the chaos that’s been introduced enough to disturb its cohesion to the point that it breaks the flock apart?
Either way, this situation must be resolved. Trump will continue to project his own crimes onto innocent people, identify a scapegoat among them, and demand a ritual sacrifice of violence. It’s just a matter of whether his mimetic demands work one more time.
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Vitally important work, Jim. Thank you.
A great summing up of a situation that is so layered and complex. Thank you.