Trump Derangement Syndrome: An Exegesis

     Gateway Pundit has an article this morning about Elon Musk’s discovery that “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS) is real:

     Billionaire Elon Musk said he didn’t realize “Trump Derangement Syndrome” was a real thing until he was at a friend’s dinner party a month or two before the Nov. 5, 2024 presidential election.
     “I happened to mention the president’s name and it was like they got shot with a dart in the jugular that contained like methamphetamine and rabies,” Musk said in a joint interview with President Donald Trump that airs Tuesday, Feb. 18 at 9 p.m. EST on “Hannity.”
     Musk imitated people at the party going crazy and questioned why they couldn’t have a normal conversation.
     “It’s like they’ve become completely irrational,” he told Fox News host Sean Hannity.

     It’s not irrationality, though; it’s fury. Raw, unbridled rage of a magnitude the Establishment class cannot hold inside. They’re watching something they find impossible to square with their belief that power and pelf are their right.

     That’s the way people react when they feel their rights have been violated. Ask them to have a normal conversation when they’re choking on their rage? They’re likely to attack you with a scream and a salad fork. Assuming you were foresighted enough to keep the bread knife in the kitchen, of course.

     Another writer, whose name escapes me just now, once wrote a parable of a sort about this kind of reaction. Think about electric power, he wrote. When it was first made available to American homes, people welcomed it as akin to a miracle, or a gift from God. Yes, they had to pay for it, but the benefits were so much greater than the cost! And so the appreciation and gratitude were great, at the very beginning.

     But time passed. Electrical service became ever more available to ever more homes. Over the decades people came to rely on it, to expect it to be continuously available. When something interrupted the flow of juice, they were irked. Some became upset. Others became incensed. Don’t we have a right to electric service?

     Today, were the electric power grid of the United States to shut down and stay shut down, the country would grind to a halt. Many would die. But even before that became a fact of our socio-industrial condition, the “deprivation” of electrical power would have been viewed by millions as a “denial of the right to electric power.” They would have been as unhinged about it as the Establishment class is over the Trump Restoration.

     That mental transition, whereby a thing once viewed accurately as a gift or a product for sale morphs over time into a “right,” has applied equally to many other innovations, products, and services. The mechanism is that of habituation. It applies quite as much to benefits as to exactions.

     A man like Elon Musk, for whom cool, uninterrupted rationality is the name of the game, will always find a reaction like that difficult to comprehend. But the psychology of it is well understood… including by the many “mental health professionals” who writhe in its grip as you read this.