When heaven turns to hell

You couldn’t watch TVNZ’s Centrepoint documentary, Heaven and Hell, without feeling sick, astonished, appalled, at where people who like to follow leaders can willingly end up. I’m still processing it.

There’s a Breughel painting, The Blind Leading the Blind, that encapsulates the situation, but the painter’s row of blind men is only going to fall into a ditch. That’s not shameful. It’s misfortune. The adults at the end of the Centrepoint experiment, though, revealed something shameful about human nature, how far intelligent people can go in accepting the unacceptable because a guru – or corrupt religious leader, or charismatic politician – leads them to a ditch and shoves them into it.

Here I’m meaning giving children recreational drugs and having sex with them. If adults want to walk around naked, have sex publicly, give birth as theatre, have an open toilet setup, do drugs, who cares? But they dragged children into their antics at Centrepoint, and that was unforgivable.

There’ve been famous experiments along these lines, breaking down civilised hesitations, like one where people freely gave what they believed to be fatal electric shocks to volunteers, and others where groups of people were encouraged to treat others as inferior, discovering their own latent capacity for cruelty. Some of these adventures in psychology have been discredited, but anyone who thinks at all can believe the truth of the result.

Bert Potter, Centrepoint’s unlikely guru, died unrepentant, probably mightily amused by his own mischief. I doubt that jail bothered him.

He had something about him of the Nazis, as in their anarchic propaganda man Josef Goebbels, who lied so inventively to the German people. If Centrepoint had lasted longer, who’s to say it wouldn’t have sunk to killing its nonconformists, anyone who doubted that Potter was – in his own words – God? Who would have stopped them?

Currently, Donald Trump signals that he’s preparing to become president again. Scarily, he has millions of followers who believe whatever he says, however preposterous. He wasn’t exaggerating when he said he could shoot someone dead in plain sight and they wouldn’t object.

Some of his devotees demonstrated their loyalty on January 6 when they attacked the American Capitol, killing and maiming people who had to protect lawmakers while trying to fight off a mob. A tame report about the incident this week detailed astonishing incompetence among agencies that should have foreseen what would happen, and who delayed providing backup when it was needed.

Populist dictators have such effects on their followers. Hitler had a gang, the party’s stormtroopers, ready to rough up opponents, kill, and persecute Jews and others. In fits of dystopia, I can see Trump copying the idea and giving his lot uniforms too. They already have guns.

He knows how to whip a crowd into craziness in stadium events packed with people who worship him for reasons I can’t fathom, any more than I can imagine women flinging themselves at Potter, but they did. As such people do.

Just now the Republican Party seems to be reborn as the Trump Party. I don’t know what it stands for. His rhetoric seems to be about mocking other people, and however shabbily he behaves, his mob applauds him. Bullies love company. Fans don’t ask for content.

I don’t think the founding fathers could have imagined this scenario. They didn’t have the Internet or automatic assault rifles. They were excited by the French Revolution and believed the American oath of allegiance. But all that was a long time ago, and times have changed. They had their uses, but Trump is bigly big.