The politics of psychotic delirium

Weaponized neolanguage aims to create fearful, dispirited subjects

French philosopher cum political provocateur Bernard-Henri Lévy characterizes Western politics since Covid as a form of devolution into mass “psychotic delirium”.

In the 2024 U.S. election spectacle, the delirium is in full bloom, driven by the same debilitating language and imagery of apocalyptic crisis from top government authorities and their allied media syndicates that triggered widespread “autocratic violations of democratic norms” during the Covid pandemic.

In addition to the possibility of direct U.S. war with Russia over Ukraine, Iran over Israel and China over Taiwan, today’s stream of crises includes the continued announcement of an average 1.4 new Covid variants monthly (72 since 2020); a global Monkeypox “health emergency”; a global “climate crisis” causing “extreme weather”; dozens of varieties of bird flu effecting over 100 million poultry; the attempted assassination of ex-president Donald Trump; a palace coup at the White House to replace president Joe Biden; 10 major cyber attacks in 2024; the “largest outage in the history of information technology” (CrowdStrike, July 2024), which also exposed vulnerabilities in local election systems across the country; human displacement by Artificial Intelligence; and a record $35 trillion national debt as of July, 2024.

Public health experts have identified a new psychological condition called “crisis fatigue” caused by what they describe as an ongoing “polycrisis”, which is, in turn, producing “compassion fatigue”.