“Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.” — Arthur Somers Roche, author
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Rising Violence
In conversations with therapists we’ve noticed a recent drop-off in clients bookings. The curve of this decline seems to be the inverse of the global anxiety created by Donald Trump in world, national, and community affairs. I want to think this through.
There is no question that among other things, Mr. Trump is a psychopath. In his case, the main presenting symptoms are hostility, dishonesty, the desire to manipulate, and a need to subjugate.
This does not mean all that he says is false, though truth plays little role, but that his intentions are unclear and he tends toward violence. This is not all that extreme a statement since most high profile people have social personality disorders. If you didn’t have a disorder before gaining celebrity, it’s guaranteed that celebrity will create disorder in you.
Psychopathy is a common, latent, spectrum disorder. That is to say, it hides until it’s triggered. This behavior is also present in cases of inter-personal and family violence, child abuse, and assault.
We excuse people who are not chronic psychopaths, but we should not. We believe psychopathic behavior is a natural response to extreme and unexpected situations. If you believe that it’s okay for people to yell and then fight, or if you occasionally yell and then fight, then this is the limit of your own sanity.
“In 2016, more countries experienced violent conflict than at any point in almost 30 years… Countries in the Americas have the worst homicide rates by a wide margin… Extremist groups today have unprecedented access to the general public through the internet… Political instability engenders organised crime…”
— from A New Era of Conflict and Violence, United Nations 2020 and Beyond (United Nations 2020)
Anger, while it always precedes violence, is not the same as violence. There is a limit to how unhinged one can be and still consider oneself sane. Anger, when managed, falls on the sane side of behavior. Violence falls on the insane side, and violence can be verbal as well as physical.
DJT is interesting in two respects. First, a violent presentation is his standard personality. And second, this represents most people’s feelings. That is, most people are in a bellicose mood that endorses anti-social behavior.
While we like to think that we’re controlling our destiny, it’s just as likely that our destiny is controlling us. That is, DJT may not be causing current events as he is the product of them.
Outward and Inward Presentations
As you approach the limit of your sanity you split into two parts: the outward presentation and the inward feeling. In extreme anxiety, the outward presentation is the fighting response while the inward feeling is fear. Other responses are to flee or faint, but fighting is the empowered response. Fighting is the response you would expect from the population of the USA since they feel themselves to be the entitled owners of world assets.
Citizens of the USA have little fear or memory of defeat. It is unfortunate that one’s understanding of defeat usually comes from being defeated, and the USA has few defeats to remember.
I feel lucky to have been aware of the defeat of the US in Vietnam and personally experiencing defeat in my mountain climbing ventures. The typical rejection of defeat, as expressed through the media and entertainment industries, creates a poor understanding and unrealistic attitude about actual threats and realistic responses (Nguyen 2021; Philipps 2025).
This reflects our unrealistic attitude toward misunderstanding, which we see as personal failure. This reflects our misunderstanding of learning, which we misconstrue as success. Learning is not success; learning is failure to understand. That is axiomatic: you learn by failing to understand. There is no other way to learn.
Even our language misleads us as we cannot distinguish between failing to understand and personally failing. As a result, we cannot approach learning correctly but instead think of learning as reward. Just look at the education system that offers rewards not for learning but for repeating. Repeating is not learning. You learn nothing by repeating.
Consider a walk through the woods. If you follow the trail then you learn nothing about the woods. All you learn about is the trail. To learn about the woods you must go off the trail. Then you learn about the topography, vegetation, regeneration, and decay. All of these are irrelevant to following the trail unless they fall on it.
Fear and Learning
The lesson of Donald Trump and his administration is fear. Fear underlies their whole mindset. It may look like strength in action and single-mindedness but there is no strength to it. It’s entirely fear, as fear is the foundation of anger and violence. And the only thing that you learn from fear is ignorance. You learn how ignorant and powerless you are… unless you’re a psychopath. Psychopaths never learn.
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The fundamental problem is understanding that you learn through failure. You have an idea, you try it, it doesn’t work in some regard, you examine the failure, you revise your idea and try again. This process never ends, it only plateaus. You have the option of settling for what you’ve accomplished, but there is never an end to ideas.
New ideas don’t always go forward, but they go somewhere. It is a function of reason and memory, or rather illogic and forgetfulness, that there is always a way to rework ideas. This continues until you exhaust your life, and you have no more ideas. There are still more ideas, you just cannot reach them.
This is the lesson of how to deal with your anxiety: you look for new ideas and expect them not to work as solutions to existing problems. The newer they are, the less you can trust them, and that’s what you want. You don’t want things that you can trust because trust is built on past performance and that’s what you want to get away from.
Your Effective Response
The effective response to anxiety is action without presumption. You do something new without expecting anything. You don’t expect success or failure, those things are evaluations after the fact. You simply observe, explore, examine without prejudice, and arrange new ideas. It’s always too soon to judge some ideas, and you’d like to have some idea about when to expect results.
This is another feature of DJT’s administration: there is no idea of when to expect results. DJT says, “I know what I’m doing!” which is false in both respects. This is what one must expect: everything DJT says, and everything that motivates you to success, is false. On the one hand DJT knows nothing, and on the other hand his administration has no idea what they’re doing.
We’ve seen this before. When Punk Rock dominated pop music there was no attempt at making music. Punk Rock musicians prided themselves on not knowing even how to play their instruments.
Destruction is part of the learning process. It’s a component of chaos. It’s not a necessary component if your system is flexible, but when the system is static, inflexible, or unresponsive, then destruction has a place. However, like dynamite, you’d better use it carefully. It needs to be used in brief and accurate ways. If dynamite leads to war, it has failed to address the problem assigned to it.
This is the solution to DJT: having injected chaos, his energy now needs to be removed. This is also the solution to your anxiety: having recognized your chaos you now need to examine, explore, and adjust to it. Perhaps you were too static, inflexible, and unresponsive. Hopefully your anger or anxiety has shocked you out of complacency. Once that happens, you must discard it.
The solution to fear in a time of anxiety is not to withdraw and ignore, these are the responses of fainting and fleeing. But fighting is also a misunderstanding. What you’re trying to do is learn. In order to learn you speak, feel, and listen.
If you’re aware of the anxiety that everyone is experiencing and you want to move forward in helpful and constructive ways, then you must seek the help of a guide who can lead you through the woods. You are going off the trail… you are off the trail… your only choice is to do nothing or take action.
References
Nguyen, Viet Thanh (2021 Aug 19). “I Can’t Forget the Lessons of Vietnam. Neither Should You.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/opinion/afghanistan-vietnam-war-refugees.html
Philipps, Dave (2025 Apr 30). “Vietnam Veterans Worry That a War’s Hard Lessons Are Being Forgotten.” The Seattle Times. https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/vietnam-veterans-worry-that-a-wars-hard-lessons-are-being-forgotten/
United Nations (2020). “A New Era of Conflict and Violence: UN75 2020 and Beyond.” https://www.un.org/en/un75/new-era-conflict-and-violence
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