I just heard that Donald Trump unilaterally decided to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities based on a “feeling.” He is about the last person whose “feelings” I would trust, yet, he apparently bases his impertinent, impulsive decisions on “feelings” – plus whatever the last sycophant to talk to him said.

When I was a teenager, I learned about humanistic psychology, which imputes great importance to “feelings,” and it left such a lasting impression on me, that it could be said to have been a profound influence on my life ever since. I learned that people have a right to their feelings. I also learned that we need to have our feelings validated. I learned that we are supposed to “trust our feelings” – that is, our intuitions, and evolve as people toward “self-actualization.” I learned that we can use our “feelings” to help us develop our talents, including our intellectual talents.

All of this is beautiful stuff, psychologically, and people such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow are to be commended for explicating it. However, as I have unfortunately learned over the years since then, “feelings” can go both ways. Rogers and Maslow, along with other humanistic psychologists, were and are liberals politically, and liberal-minded and tolerant in general. The use of “feelings” against people, either never occurred to them, or more likely, they thought (as I admittedly tend to) that the good in us will always overcome the use of fear and hatred.

Tragically, it turns out that fear and hatred are very potent political tools for those who are willing to use them. For Trump’s MAGA cult, it’s all about their fear and hatred, which Trump and his cronies validate. These are their relevant “feelings.” Where does it come from? A good place to start is conservative media, of which Fox News has been the largest purveyor of fear and hatred over the past few decades. Owned by an ultra-conservative Australian, Rupert Murdoch, this propaganda outlet has been poisoning the airwaves for decades with its campaign of terror, and it has been joined by many others over the years. These people have discovered that fear and hatred sells (at least to a relatively uninformed audience), and so those at the top have become enormously wealthy by doing so. And I say that theirs is a relatively uninformed audience with good cause; studies show that people who watch Fox News, or similar “news” outlets, become less well informed, the more that they watch it.

At the same time, they become more fearful and hateful. What are they being trained to fear and hate? Anyone who isn’t like them, or anything that does not conform to their world view. All of this serves to promote what has become conservative politics in the United States – a politics which has been largely shaped by right-wing news to become something barely recognizable to generations of Republicans past.

The bottom line is that people vote for Donald Trump, and other Republicans, based on irrational messages of fear and hatred that are not based in reality, no matter what they might say. They find Trump in particular to be charismatic, motivating and inspiring – which, as I have previously stated, is completely in the eyes of the beholder – so much so that he has achieved cult leader status. The good news in this, is that there is no replacement for Trump. However, the fear and hatred will not go away until Fox News and the rest of the hate-talk machine goes away.

As many have pointed out, the propagation and exploitation of fear and hatred based messaging by politicians is not unique to Donald Trump. It has happened many times around the world, and continues to happen elsewhere as well as the United States. Hitler scapegoated, and eventually slaughtered millions, of Jewish people, and right-wing political parties have recently arisen in Europe which demonize immigrants in much the way that Trump does. Racism usually plays a huge role in this process, as do religious biases, ethnic biases, and gender biases. Basically, any kind of prejudice can be exploited for political gain. This is the manipulation of weak-minded person’s “feelings” for political gain.

None of this actually contradicts the tenets of humanistic psychology, which refers to our own, internally generated emotions that are an expression of who we really are. Such emotions will not steer a person toward prejudice, nor toward idolizing a despotic autocrat or would-be autocrat. They will not predispose a person toward joining a cult of any kind, in fact. The problem is people not trusting their feelings, and instead trusting others to tell them how to feel. The real problem is the manipulation of feelings by people in positions of authority. This can also apply to parents, as Rogers wrote about extensively; parents who are emotionally manipulative, make poor parents. However, when it occurs on such a mass scale as we see with political manipulation, the problems thus created are correspondingly magnified, and we are suffering the consequences of that now.

All of this makes me think that we need more humanistic psychology in our society, in fact. We need children to not only learn to be socially responsible, but to have an internal moral compass that they can trust. They need to be taught about empathy and compassion, and encouraged to develop these qualities. They need to be allowed to be themselves, not what Donald J. Trump or Fox News wants them to be.