How do you deal with a madman? For a long time the answer was to beat him and chain him up in the dungeon. But in the more enlightened 18th century, pioneers of psychiatry sought kinder solutions. One of them was what was called “pious fraud”.
Pious frauds were, as Victoria Shepherd puts in her fascinating A History of Delusions, “little white lies, to trick a person out of a delusion”. In revolutionary Paris, Philippe Pinel, head of the Bicêtre asylum, developed this method. “He would enter part way in the delusion in the hope of bringing his patient back with him to reality,” she wrote.
For example, to help a patient who was suffering from a terror that he was about to be executed, Pinel staged a mock “trial” at which the man was found innocent and told he was free to go.
Later, this method had to be adapted to the delusions of grandeur in which patients imagined themselves to be Napoleon. A Dr Leblond claimed to have cured a captain of the dragoons: “‘It is surely an indignity to treat Emperor Napoleon in this way‚’ he declared to the doctor. ‘Those frightful valets bound me – I intend to have them shot’. To which Leblond calmly replied, ‘Yes, you are indeed emperor Napoleon, but Napoleon on St Helena [island].’ On hearing these words the madman fell silent, then began repeating ‘St Helena, St Helena’. He then asked to be unbound and kept his promise to remain calm until he was freed.”
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The United States is ruled by a man who believes himself to be the emperor of all he surveys. And the method of dealing with Donald Trump adapted by most democratic leaders is the pious fraud.
They have followed the approach outlined by Shepherd: “Simply throwing logic or even conclusive evidence at a person experiencing a delusion does not loosen the grip of their belief. A willingness to engage with the alternative logic of the delusion, to meet it at least some of the way, can be effective.”
Or maybe not. The danger of entering part way into the hallucination in the hope of bringing the madman back to reality is that it may work the other way round: the madman might just suck you into “the alternative logic of the delusion”. He doesn’t get cured and you end up colluding with the insanity.
Trump is not mentally ill, but he is in the broader sense mad. If you surround a narcissist with sycophants who keep telling him that he is indeed omnipotent then he is going to believe them. Trump, with that weird honesty of his, told the New York Times in January how he regarded himself as unfettered from all constraints except those of “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me”.
When the only thing that can stop you is your own warped mind in which you appear as the greatest person who has lived, you are mad. Sanity consists in the constant calibration of our inner impulses to the limitations imposed by external reality. When there are no constraints, there is no longer any reality.
Thus, we know that about a week before the US and Israel initiated the war on Iran on February 28th, a report by the National Intelligence Council, which brings together the collective knowledge of Washington’s 18 different intelligence agencies, said that even a large-scale military assault on Iran would be unlikely to topple its theocratic government.
[ How Spain’s Pedro Sánchez became Trump’s fiercest critic in Europe ]
That’s called reality: there is no known case of a bombing campaign on its own bringing down a deeply entrenched regime. Trump has at his command terrifying and overwhelming air power. He can kill vast numbers of people, pulverise entire cities and plunge the Middle East into catastrophe. What he can’t do is rule Iran from 30,000ft above its ground. He can destroy at will, but he cannot will a “pacified” Iran into existence.
But madness unchecked expands to infinity and beyond. What began as an intention to decapitate the Islamic Republic, and replace its leadership with a more compliant ayatollah, expanded within days into a demand for “unconditional surrender”. What began with some idea of specific targeting swelled into Trump’s announcement on Saturday: “Under serious consideration for complete destruction and certain death, because of Iran’s bad behaviour are areas and groups of people that were not considered for targeting up until this moment in time.”
And this is only going to get worse as Trump throws off the last shreds of inhibition. Megalomania feeds on itself. Trump is a Napoleon with a Napoleon complex – the holder of immense real-world power who is also under the illusion that this power is unlimited.
The more he destroys, the more he believes in his capacity to remake the ruins into whatever image of it comes into his head. We know (because he has repeatedly told us) that the image in his head is of a world in which everything is demolished and rebuilt with the Trump brand emblazoned on its topless towers.
The pious fraud has been the treatment of choice for most European leaders, including our own: don’t confront the madness, go along with it and try to bend it back towards sanity. Try to convince Trump that, yes, he is Napoleon but Napoleon on St Helena – an emperor bound within the confines of international law, rationality and (God help us) morality.
Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez is the one European leader who understands the folly of persisting with the pious fraud. “It is”, he said last week, “naive to believe that democracies or respect between nations can spring from ruins. Or to think that practising blind and servile obedience is a form of leadership.”
The only form of leadership that has a chance of preventing large parts of the world being turned into Gaza writ large is unequivocal support for Sánchez’s truth-telling. Going along with the logic of murderous delusion has already proved a disastrous failure. That way more madness lies.
