AMERICAN ABSOLUTISM

Book excerpt: Disrupting the Generational Cycle of Distrust in America's 600 Year Cultural War You are about to scan a high-resolution MRI of the psychological forces generating discord and disrupting the American democratic experiment. Absolute-mindedness is not a personality type, clinical disorder or social psychopathology, but an archaic "trust" adaptation giving rise to much of today's populist frustration and anger. When trust is disrupted early in life -- complexity, ambiguity, and disappointment fixate on a trust-mistrust duality -- good-bad, right-wrong, us versus them. Republicans and Democrats are undergoing cultural mitosis. An evolutionary social and political speciation driving us toward an autocratic America. Constitutional "originalists" were raised in parental originalism emphasizing principle and discipline over empathy and reasoning. Solo mass shootings are a predictable abandonment pattern over the course of America's history of gun rights and vigilante ethos. Conspiracy theories are repetitive information diffusion in dense social networks during times of social unrest, triggering individuals pre-wired for resignation, grievance, and revenge. The modern dictator: a "dark triad" of malignant narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. American Absolutism explores what happens when human adaptation loses viability as it comes face-to-face with an exponentially evolving complexity that is the modern human condition.