Behold, the Party of Rapture-welcoming fanatics, power-hungry cynics, and far-right nihilists.

[Mike 03]

2. There are individuals who want exactly this.

Nihilists, accelerationists, etc. I agree, it's very dangerous. Some mental health professionals have likened Trump supporters to cult-members, and we have examples throughout history of cultists choosing death over life. The Christchurch shooter wrote about accelerationism in his manifesto. Freudian analysts call this drive "Thanatos."

In his classic psychoanalytic studies, Freud described the human drive or instinct for life, Eros--for the Greek god of love--and its opposite force, a "death drive" toward self-destruction that writers later labeled Thanatos, after the Greek god of darkness and death.

That quote is from "The Age of Thanatos: Environmental Consequences of the Trump Presidency" by Lise Van Susteren and H. Steven Moffic in "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump," edited by Dr. Bandy X Lee. (p. 419)

We are at odds here with some people who are willing to die and who expect to die in a fight for something that is difficult to understand, and to objective observers looks pretty ridiculous. That's always a terrifying scenario.

I wish there were more discussions about this. It's a difficult concept for some, maybe most, people to come to grips with. I don't say it's an 'epidemic" but it's out there. As an aside, I also wonder about this nihilistic drive being the same force that kicks in where you see genocidal behavior, where people who not long before lived side by side in peace are suddenly murdering each other.