Evil Chauncy Gardner Syndrome
There are things in this piece I disagree with, but her basic point about the pathological motivations and overall ignorance of people like Trump getting interpreted as a kind of genius is right I think.
I’m starting to think of it as the Evil Chauncey Gardener Syndrome.
Chauncey Gardner is a simple minded gardener, played by Peter Sellers in the movie of Being There; whose speech is simple minded to the point of being practically random. As the movie unfolds, having never encountered anyone like this before, people mistake him for a sage, of their position, whatever it may be.
A certain conflux of personality attributes that are so pathologically outside the norm, that people’s normal analysis protocols cant cope with them. They end up filling in their gaps of understanding by seeing what they want to see in the person. So to the extent they see themselves mirrored, they support him, and to the extent they don’t, they rationalize away the weirdness, as their brains attempt to cope with someone just so outside of their experience.
They try to make the weird, normal any way they can. The problem is if it goes on long enough, the weirdness gets accommodated to, and for a while there is a possibility of the whole society getting sucked in as co-dependents in the person’s bubble of destructive, mad, delusion.
I think its this projection/mirroring effect that is the reason we are suckers for destructive outliers like this over and over again throughout history.