Folie a Deux

In 1895, an Irish woman named Bridget Cleary disappeared. Her husband Michael held a vigil for her, and he seemed sincerely distraught. Police began asking questions, and they found that Michael had been telling people that his wife had been abducted by fairies. They interviewed several others in the small town and soon discovered what had actually happened to Bridget, and what they learned went like this.

Bridget had fallen ill, and appeared so near to death that a priest had been called to give her last rites. The priest found her alive but agitated, since Michael had not been giving her the medicine prescribed by a doctor. The priest gave her communion and left, after which Michael and Bridget got into an argument. Michael claimed with conviction that his wife was no longer his wife, that she had been replaced by wicked fairies with a changeling. The two began to fight, and Michael threw her to the ground beside the kitchen furnace. He threw kerosine on her and lit her on fire. Nine others came to the scene as Bridget’s body was still burning. Michael convinced them that his wife had been replaced by a changeling for at least a week, and he vowed to get the real Bridget back from the fairies. They helped him bury her in shallow grave and went home.

Michael Cleary's delusion was rooted in fertile ground. Many in Ireland at that time still believed in fairies and changelings, and Bridget Cleary is sometimes referred to as the “last witch burned in Ireland.” So what he claimed to the others either struck them as true, or they were so afraid to challenge the superstition that they could not refute it. At least some of them appeared to authorities to have taken on Michael’s delusion entirely, and they repeated it over and over as truth even when facing prosecution. They were frustrated by investigation, since it prevented Michael from finding the wicked fairies and getting his wife back.

The Cleary case is cited as an example of a phenomenon called folie a deux, or “madness shared by two.” It’s when delusions or hallucinations are transmitted from one person to another, such that a shared psychosis can take root within a group. It was considered a rare phenomenon, almost always found among people who lived in close proximity, like a small Irish country town with a common foundation of superstition and agreeability. 1895 Ireland didn’t have smart phones, after all.

That story came to mind recently, and I often use this space to tell such tales and see if they help me understand things a little better. But I’m struggling with this one. My thoughts are scattered. Things are moving faster now.

I watched last week as the entire American power structure — from the federal government to the news media to the cooperate hive mind — rushed to hide and deflect and obfuscate the nature of an attack on children at a Christian school in Tennessee. I watched the “arbiters of truth” at the New York Times and the Washington Post bend over backwards to avoid any violation of the demon’s desired pronouns - even the area police chief fumbled and fidgeted and ultimately paid heed to the ruling diktat that this is something we must care for. I watched the White House issue forth from its podium a message of deep concern not for the community of the victims — Christians, more specifically white red state Christians — but for that of their killer. I watched just about every major corporation in America make sure that every consumer was aware of the “Trans Day of Visibility” taking place as the bodies of the nine-year-old victims of this demented movement were being prepped for burial. I watched as a crowd of “trans activists” — an aesthetically and spiritually disgusting horde to anyone still holding onto a well of clear vision — stormed the Tennessee legislature and demanded the repeal of democratically delivered laws. I watched as they stood in the state capital and held up seven fingers, six for the children and staff that had their blood sprayed on the walls of the Covenant School, and one for the monster that had slaughtered them. “There were seven victims,” shouted one of the activist leaders as he rallied the display. “Let’s not forget, there were seven victims.”

We must understand the pain and fear these people feel, said the ordained spokespeople for whatever it is we live under now. This was in reference to a recently passed bill that will make it harder to mutilate children in the surgery offices of Tennessee.

Good enough for a one news cycle, anyway. Three days after the massacre, they indicted Donald Trump in New York.

The demand made of everyday people trying to get a handle on all this is not an entreaty to be polite to a tiny population suffering from a dysphoria, nor is it about trying to have a “conversation” about the nuances of gender that most only heard about three years ago. The demand from these people and the system that has set them loose on the world is much simpler than that, and it is this:

Anything and everything we state to you as reality must be granted as true.

The idea is that you have the right to force people to perceive you in a certain way, but only if you are of a regime-favored group. And whatever lovely things can be said about the children that had the misfortune of running into Audrey Hale at the Covenant School that day, they were not members of a favored group. It’s quite a status flex as well. If you can demand that people behold you in a way so obviously contra to reality, knowing you have such immense social forces behind you — that’s power. This portends a unique kind of nightmare. More of this is coming, and it will crack the minds of many who try to face it down because they have no clue what they are facing. There are groups in America targeted for destruction, and they are not those who get the White House plaudits and the “days of visibility.”

One thing they are certainly facing is an unterclass of addled lost souls whose minds are already cracked, surrounded on all sides by oppressive reality as the sweet voice of this modern system whispers in their ears that everything they see with their own eyes is a lie. That they have the power to dominate nature by force of scalpel and chemistry, or drape it in delusion as one drops a sheet onto a lamp. And that anyone who takes reality as it is, who respects it and tries to move within in as best they can, those people are trying to destroy them. And they have the right to light everything on fire if others do not bend.

Some new monster has crawled out into the world. It’s fundamental and elemental, lashing at the bedrock of civilization in way most ignore and for which I struggle to find words. I just know that it threatens everyone I care about, and it breaks my heart when they don’t see it.

I’ll write more about this as I find the words. As with so many things, it’s getting easier to see and yet more difficult to describe. So it goes.