Ah, yes, Q. That irascible character described on his official web page as “impudent, self-superior and sometimes malevolent,” having appeared among us “to tease, torment, and try.”
“It should always be stressed,” the description reads, “that Q’s apparent juvenile humor should never be mistaken for the amoral, unconscionable acts of which he is capable.” Q likes to look back… the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Watergate… far more interesting to him. He has emotional outbursts of jealousy and petty tantrums. He often appears with disturbing news. He was inspired to take up the banner of individualism, which sparked an all-out internal struggle he depicted as a scenario from the Civil War.
If this sounds familiar, you’re either a Trekkie or a news junkie. Distorting reality. That’s Q’s jam, straight from Plato’s cave allegory in Republic.
In Plato’s cave, prisoners are chained facing a wall, unable to turn their heads. A fire burns behind them while puppeteers walk along a parapet casting only the shadows the puppeteers want prisoners to see. These shadows become their reality. The allegory compares the effect of education and the lack of it on our nature and argues that perception is not true knowledge.
It’s amusing to imagine someone spelunking in Plato’s cave found fodder for the long con and used the concept of curated perception to create QAnon in 2017. What’s not so amusing is what QAnon is about. The usual suspects; the Vatican, Illuminati, Freemasons and the Devil are jumbled with a host of dangerous conspiracy theories.
An internet search can explain more, but our point is that we do have an “impudent, self-superior and sometimes malevolent” entity in the White House. Because anyone who praises him gets a pass, Trump has set QAnon to assure its devotees: “You know that only Donald Trump stands between you and a damned and ravaged world.”
Language Trump has himself now appropriated. The “I alone” who can fix everything is, like any budding dictator, smart enough to know (along with Madison Avenue), that repeating a thing over and over makes sales.
Consider others who claimed they alone had the answers: Jim Jones and David Koresh among them. Jones threw down a Bible and said, “Don’t listen to that, listen to me!” and convinced an entire community that evil outsiders were coming to destroy them. He commanded hundreds of people to murder their children and commit suicide; and they did.
While we wasted energy discussing the president’s latest outlandish move ad nauseum, and reporters cried “Why doesn’t anyone stand up to him?” – Trump was quietly replacing anyone in power and installing his cronies in every important branch of government who could have.
Meanwhile, by choice or chance, GOP language is increasingly filled with fear-invoking words like darkness, shadows, evil, ravage, destruction – words straight from QAnon’s playbook. Who is influencing whom? In his convention speech Monday night, Trump repeated, “No one will be spared,” as he claimed he alone could save us from the evil Democrats “coming for you” to destroy the country and take away our lives and rights.
Fearmongering, lies, disrespect, cheating… yes, a wall is being built… to keep out the truth.
We can’t dwell on Plato’s cave, yet we seem to be trapped there by the sins of politics. When we don’t look away, shadows become real. They aren’t. Some among us find the time and courage to let go of perceptions and do the sacrificial work of admitting what is real, of finding and embracing the truth.
With hair on fire from the revelation, they walk bent almost double with sorrow under the burden of a crumbling democracy. They take the time to feel 3,000 souls a day slip from the nation’s collective consciousness while we stupidly argue about wearing a mask because we no longer have a sense of common good.
And sometimes it’s too much to bear. Occasionally one has to say, “I can’t think, I can’t pray, I can’t care about America today,” and just step outside to look at the stars or appreciate a canopy of sun-illuminated leaves and thank God for being able to breathe without a ventilator.