Recently, someone I happen to know spent some time being hospitalized for an incident that might politely be termed a mental health emergency, and missed work as a result of this problem. Upon returning to work, he found out that his manager had somehow become aware of the nature of his hospitalization, and when he spoke about it after returning from work, he did so with a horror that expressed absolute terror that his mental struggles were known by his employers, to the point where I wonder how long he would be able to work with that degree of paranoia about being known for having such struggles. While I have never felt any particular urge to make fun of other people or to ridicule them for struggling with mental health difficulties, it struck me as curious that in a day and age where some people brag about being neurodivergent (which has never made sense to me either) that some people are absolutely terrified at being known to struggle in such an area.

One of the characteristic problems of our age is the difficulty one has in getting a firm understanding of the past. While Americans are often (not entirely unjustly) viewed as being particularly prone to forgetfulness about historical matters, this native tendency is by no means helped by the way in which people and institutions are so vigilant about seeking to destroy historical information that would help someone know what they were up to in the past. Neither people nor companies particularly like being called by their deadnames, even if these deadnames–and the deeds attached to them–give the truest picture of their character and nature and provide us with a good sense at where these people are going. When I was a first grade student, I was of the belief that my mother would marry a particular person that she spent a lot of time with–though admittedly at the time she was still married to (albeit separated from) my father. This belief was expressed in a typically six-year old way by my signing my name on at least some classwork assignments with my last name combined with the last name of the gentleman in question. While nothing came of that relationship for some time, about eight or nine years afterwards, the man in question did end up marrying my mother, and remains my stepfather to this day, so perhaps it may be said that I was onto something after all. If someone’s past is something that they have taken to heart and dealt with in a constructive fashion, that history, no matter how bad, need not be something of which anyone should be ashamed, but can be honestly and publicly dealt with as a story of growth. When people try to hide the past or destroy the record of it, we can recognize that there is a terror of being known for what one is truly like and has not admitted or overcome.

One of the strangest aspects of this year’s presidential campaign in the United States is the absolute extreme aversion that the Democratic ticket has to engaging in the usual ways–interviews, debates, talking off the cuff to reporters and audiences, having policy sections on campaign websites, and the like–that campaigns use to inform the voters on what sort of promises they will break if they win office. To be sure, politicians are not known as a particularly honest group of people, but we want them to at least tell us at least something that they plan on doing when they get into office. Voting on a bill or voting on a candidate to see what it will be like when it is passed or wins office is not an acceptable means of running a republic. It is important to know, when casting a vote or expressing support for someone or something, what exactly is involved in doing so. It is deeply alarming that a major party candidate and her running mate are running so scared that they are unwilling to put any public policies that they support, in the terror of being known to be supporting anything at all that would be used against them. These people, both of whom have their own sordid personal and political histories full of lies, even beyond the normal level for politicians, are also actively denying that they still support the sorts of things that they pushed and voted for in the past few years, because such policies are viewed (for good reason) with horror by the majority of the population. It is staggering to me that someone would want to run for office and expect to win without giving any indication at all what sort of policies and laws that we could expect from them in office.

All of this suggests that there is a widespread fear and hatred of the truth that manifests itself practically in a desire to destroy the past, so that we do not know what happened before and cannot make accurate judgments of what is going on now. When people want power without honesty about their biography and historical use of the power of previous positions, we can deeply mistrust their goals and aims at present. When people are in terror at becoming known, we can be sure that there is some sense of shame at the past and some desire not to acknowledge or admit or come to terms with the past. This suggests that history is not only a field of study–and one I happen to enjoy–but rather an attitude that is increasingly at odds with the longings and desires of many people to simply obliterate the past and recreate themselves without any recognition of the sort of people that they were before, without any admission of fault or any openness about potential vulnerabilities and flaws. This essential lack of integrity makes such people intensely untrustworthy and makes them extremely hostile to those of us who have a deep commitment to historical truth and its value in painting a picture of how we–and the world around us–came to be what it is, and at least the sort of direction it appears to be going.