At a certain point in my early thirties, a group of my beer-drinking co-workers and I piled into a van to go see some live professional wrestling at a local arena.

It had been years since I’d watched even a little bit of it on TV, and now I found myself noticing things that were different from what had struck me as a kid.  Many had to do with the audience—which, for the first time, I was able to get a sustained look at.

For one thing, I was struck by the disproportionately large number of people who were on crutches or in wheelchairs, casts, or slings.  Had they injured themselves trying to imitate professional wrestlers’ moves?

Or were they maybe enjoying the feeling of vicariously slamming people around—perhaps ones who had dissed them because of their disabilities?

When the action began, my main interest remained on the people in the audience, and how they interacted with what was going on in the ring.  

I figured just about everyone knew it wasn’t real fighting, but that didn’t deter them in the least from getting passionately, even viscerally, wrapped up in the spectacle.

Later that evening, it occurred to me that all the matches had been elements or variations of a single overarching theme:

An endlessly put-upon hero whose abilities and efforts make him clearly deserving of higher recognition slogs on through intolerable unfairness and outright abuse, never losing faith that he can prevail over the rotten people and systems bent on keeping him down—and a significant portion of the time, he actually comes out on top.

Today, it’s hard for me to imagine a tale that could be latched onto more quickly, deeply, and consistently by people who feel put down and rendered intolerably small by our oppressive gigantism of scale, and yet can’t identify the real source of their pain—or openly admit (or just recognize) how acute their suffering is.

When I learned that Donald Trump had been professionally involved for years in the successful monetizing of this tale, I gained a clue as to where he had picked up his understanding of how to resonate with the multitudes.

Although he initially strikes many people as one of the bad-guy "heels" of  entertainment wrestling, in his political endeavors, Trump has in essence cast himself to his base in the role of the wrestler John Cena, who for many years was the main good guy struggling to get his due against a corrupt and powerful “system.” 

In place of Cena’s muscles, Trump flexes his money, which puts him even higher into the realm of the superhuman—perhaps even at the level of a Marvel superhero.

By so doing, he’s invited people to likewise adopt him as their proxy and champion, forming an intense and incredibly durable bond based on a sense of shared cruelly-unfair hardships overcome, as well as spectacularly magnificent triumphs achieved.

Best of all for his hero-worshippers, Trump gives them a sense that they’re playing a major role in all his successes. 

If you’re one of those people who want to live vicariously through someone, he’s offering you about as good an arrangement as it gets.

A key point for would-be successors:

Neither Trump nor Bannon seems ever lose sight of how desperately and addictively many people crave a world (an alternate one, if necessary) where they can feel they’re playing a non-trivial role in a stirring mission.  Can anyone hoping to supplant them afford to pay less attention to this yearning?

In the meantime, strong emotional reasons to latch onto particular narratives that aren’t based on actual reality lure people into increasingly toxic forms of neo-tribalism.

 When paired with tribalism, the dangers inherent in a world of alternative realities increase exponentially.

The potential for the debilitating chaos of everyone feeling entitled to create and believe in their own reality, with none of these to be considered any more valid or worthy of belief than any other, might be mitigated if the alternate views of reality were scattered randomly in all directions—with one person believing, say, that he needs to wear a tinfoil hat to prevent Martians from interfering with his brain waves, while another one is convinced the Mayan deity Quetzalcoatl has re-emerged in the form of a costumed Mexican lucha libre wrestler on pay-per-view cable.

But today, we’re not so fortunate.

Instead, widespread humiliation and boiling rage at feeling insignificant drive large numbers of people to latch onto stories that provide an explanation of their plight that they find acceptable (a vast shadowy cabal running everything from behind the scenes), along with a remedy they find even more satisfying (Tear it all down!  Bring low the very same entities that have already laid them low.)

The net effect of this destructive frenzy is like getting the previously-mentioned drivers wearing virtual-reality headsets to all see a demolition derby on their screens, where the most appropriate action is to crash into as much as possible.

The cringeworthy absurdity of this situation masks something more sinister.

A lot of what people are seeing on these virtual-reality devices has been carefully programmed by totalitarian adversaries, with the specific goal of rendering democratic forms of government no longer viable.

Although our intelligence agencies are certain this is going on, and have been warning about its dangers for quite some time, at this point hardly anybody seems to know what to do about it.

One thing is clear, though:  we need to respond to the threat with all the resources at our disposal.