Your healing can begin with Political Junkies Anonymous

By David McElroy · June 23, 2011

I’ve already done the hardest part. I’ve confessed that I was once a serious addict — a political junkie addicted to the highs of winning elections and helping my ideological bedfellows take over part of the world.

But as a recovering political prostitute, it’s time for me to try to help others make a break from their addictions, too. So I’m happy to announce the founding of Political Junkies Anonymous.

If you’re a political junkie, you already know it in your heart — and you know you need help. You’ve found yourself caring more about elections than real life. You’ve made the mistake of thinking that it really mattered whether your favorite candidate won. Worst of all, you’ve taken buffoons such as Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann seriously. Yes, my friends, you need help.

Here at Political Junkies Anonymous, you can meet with other political junkies who have come to understand that majoritarian political systems are just traps that let you compete with other groups to impose your will on everybody else. We can jointly admit that we love the drive for that power — and we can help each other as we seek to learn to leave other people alone to live their lives as they choose. The program has two levels — one for the casual abuser and another for the hardcore cases who’ve turned to political prostitution.

Like any good 12-step program, we have a system for you to work through. Take a look at our steps and see if you’re ready to admit you’re a junkie and begin breaking free:

Step 1: We admitted we were powerless to control our craving for electoral politics — that our lives had become unmanageable from political overload.

Step 2: We came to believe it was only through the power of individual choice that we could be restored to sanity rather than live with the insanity of majoritarian dictatorship.

Step 3: We made a decision to turn power over to individuals to allow them to make personal choices for their lives rather than trying to raise up rulers over them.

Step 4: We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of the harm that our previous political activities have had on others.

Step 5: We admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our coercive political sins.

Step 6: We were entirely ready for God to remove the defects of character that made us believe we had any right to choose rulers over other people.

Step 7: We humbly asked God to remove the shortcomings and delusions that led to getting involved in politics and polluting our minds with garbage from pandering cable TV news shows.

Step 8: We made a list of all persons we could think of who had been harmed by the politicians we worked for and supported.

Step 9: We apologized to those who had been hurt by the politicians we worked for and supported, except in the cases of those who hadn’t yet figured out they were still being hurt by willingly following politics.

Step 10: We continued to take personal inventory and we confessed to each other whenever we felt ourself start to desire power over others or desire to watch idiots argue on TV.

Step 11: We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood God, praying only for better understanding of the morality of not forcing our will upon other people.

Step 12: Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other political junkies and began trying to build a world where everyone could make choices for his or her own life.

If you’re ready to take your life back and quit trying to control other people, it’s time to join us. We can turn off cable news. We can quit working in campaigns. We can quit pretending that we’re doing good things when we send money to politicians. We can start building alternatives that don’t require us to tell other people how to run their lives.

Yes, it’s tough, but we can do it. Altogether now: Yes, we can. Yes, we can.

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It’s something I wrote four and a half years ago — in the desperation of loneliness — and it’s become my most popular article. It’s not my best writing. It’s raw and unpolished. But it seems as though a lot of people can identify with it. It’s called Missing someone creates intense physical sensations in my heart. Just to give you an idea how many people still read it, I had 11,586 people visit the page last month — from 2,907 cities and towns around the world. London sent the most readers for it, followed by New York, Westminster, Los Angeles, Chicago, Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne, Sydney, Toronto and almost 3,000 more. I’ve noticed something interesting. It always gets the most hits from an area of the world in the late hours, right after midnight, and that breaks my heart — because I understand why. All these people are so lonely and are missing someone so much that they turn to a search engine looking for answers, so they stumble upon this piece. I wrote this late at night on the day after Christmas because my heart was breaking. I needed to express how much I missed someone, and a lot of people seem to identify with it. If you’re one of those people, I have no way of knowing who you are, but I empathize with you. I know why you hurt. I wish I could do more to help. I hurt with you, because after all this time, I still feel the same way.

I just found out that a long-time Facebook friend died a few days ago. I never met Tom Ender, but reading his posts and interacting with him over the years made me feel as though I knew him. He was a kind and gentle man who was also a fierce and principled individualist. When his long-time wife, Julie, died several years ago, it broke his heart. About a year ago, he posted an old photo from their wedding long ago and wrote, “18 months ago, Julie passed from this world. I believe we will meet again, though I don’t know details of how.” As I mourn the death of this gentle and brilliant man, my fondest hope is that he and Julie are together again by now. Goodbye, Tom.

When Francesca Montanaro’s school shut down in March due to fears about the new new coronavirus, she had nowhere to go. Francesca’s mother is a nurse working long hours in New York City. The grandparents who would otherwise have provided child-care were old enough to be vulnerable to the bug, so they were out. That meant Francesca has spent the last few months with her dad at his pizza shop in the Bronx. In this six-minute piece from Radio Diaries and NPR, we take a look at what it’s been like to be a bright and typical 11-year-old thrust into a completely different world. She puts pizza boxes together and answers phones. She’s even learned to make perfect pizzas. I found the story touching. It reminds me of the degree to which children used to learn more about the real world than they do today. Even though she won’t follow in the pizza-making footsteps of her father, I’ll bet this will be one of the defining experiences of her childhood, one that she will treasure for years to come.

I noticed three instances over the weekend of people talking about Donald Trump’s “campaign of hate.” I wanted to correct them — because they misunderstand this narcissist — but I knew they wouldn’t get my point. It’s not that I’m defending him, because what he does is worse than hate. You simply have to understand the way narcissists think to understand him. Trump doesn’t hate. It’s worse than hate. He’s indifferent and angry with anyone who doesn’t obey him and worship him, those who don’t give him what’s called “narcissistic supply.” People believe that Trump hates blacks or Hispanics or foreigners or whatever group which he’s seen as hating. It’s true that he experiences rage at people who will not give him what he wants, but he’s not in touch enough with his real self to feel real hatred, much less to feel real love. He’s like a vampire who sucks all the available praise and adoration from any group of people — any way he can get it. He doesn’t love rural, blue-collar white folks, but their adoration gives him what he craves. He’s not emotionally mature enough even to hate. For a narcissist, people are simply objects to manipulate, depending on what he can get from them. Trump’s indifference is far worse than hatred. This isn’t ideological or political. It’s pathological. He’s not mature enough to hate.

The decline of modern culture can be seen clearly by looking at what passes for public discourse. There was a time when people who wanted their ideas accepted made rational arguments. It was assumed that most people were bright enough and rational enough to evaluate those arguments — and a surprising number of them really were. Today, the arguments are made in the form of irrational and simplistic graphics called “memes.” Because these graphics can’t convey complex or nuanced information, they present dumbed-down presentations of positions which are stunningly juvenile and seem designed to offend rather than to convince. We have regressed from books and dense pamphlets to a level more like that of angry kindergartners making crayon-scrawled hate notes to send to other children. Reason no longer plays a role in public discourse, and this signals the coming fall of this society.

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