Mobilizing Art & Soul in a Time of Crisis
I began creating this photomontage in the week following Donald Trump’s reelection. I was struggling to contain my despair, while also wondering whether—through time and sustained effort—something good might yet emerge from the impending blizzard of destruction, cruelty, corruption, and oppression.
Over the ensuing months, I kept tinkering with the montage, which now combines more than 300 smaller images. The result is a dreamscape that reflects inner and outer worlds, personal and collective trauma, history and transcendence, catastrophe and hope—what is, and what might be.
The montage references possible future calamities (e.g., nuclear war, climate change) and traumas from the past two centuries (e.g., the U.S. Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, and the war against Indigenous civilizations). Some historic events appear in the background, including iconic photos from the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, Kent State, and 9/11. Juxtaposing MAGA’s January 6th assault on the Capitol, Elon Musk’s fascist salute, and a cheerful Trump on the golf course with images from the Holocaust and early 20th-century lynchings exposes some of the historical roots of our descent toward an authoritarian white-supremacist kleptocratic police state.
The montage includes my own photos, others lifted from the internet, and several dozen images generated by artificial intelligence—all adjusted and synthesized manually in Photoshop. (There’s a great deal of minute detail; click here to view the montage in high resolution, ideally on a laptop or, better yet, a large monitor.)
Although I’m trained in critical interdisciplinary thinking, creating a complex montage of this sort requires asking my analytic mind to step aside so that intuition, soul, and the unconscious can do their work. Only afterward did I invite my reasoning mind back in to help interrogate the meaning-dense image it had little part in crafting. Several observations emerged:
• The montage may appear apocalyptic, but to me it’s also hopeful. In the foreground a throng of great souls—truth-tellers, visionaries, nonviolent resisters, and leaders of high character—stride forward toward beckoning green sprigs, symbolizing creative renewal. I don’t literally expect such figures to swoop in and save us—though if they do, I’ll take it—but I do believe that today’s resistance movements must embody the love, hope, imagination, moral determination, and courage that together these individuals personify.
Moral leaders like Mahatma Gandhi (“Mahatma” is an honorific meaning “great soul”), Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela—depicted in the front row—are especially crucial. They exemplify the possibility of pursuing justice with conviction and strategic savvy, while being large-souled enough to show compassion even toward opponents. As Abraham Lincoln urged near the end of the Civil War, “let us strive . . . to bind up the nation’s wounds … with malice toward none, with charity for all” (a mission tragically cut short by his murder just 5 weeks later).
This is essential. For example, even if Democrats manage to prevail in future fair elections, but without softening political polarization or the MAGA cult of personality, their attempt to restore democratic norms and basic decency will likely be short-lived. We have to do better than that.
Bonus points: How many of the marchers can you identify? Click here for the answers.
• Many of today’s ideas for resisting Trump’s assault on truth, democracy, and the common good—and for envisioning what might follow—are constructive. But they remain incomplete. Beneath the daily churn of political news, punditry and popular mobilization, deeper psychosocial dynamics are in play. If we fail to recognize and address these, we risk unintentionally reproducing the very conditions that brought us to this time of crisis. Neglected, these subterranean forces will eventually resurface to generate the next round of social pathologies and existential threats. For instance, Carl Jung (pictured just to the left of Michelle Obama) warned that unconscious collective forces, when overlooked, tend to erupt dangerously—as exemplified in his day by World War I and today by the MAGA movement’s angry white-supremacist strand.
It’s widely acknowledged that the inequality and social disruption engendered by global capitalism—and callously celebrated in the tech-bro ethos of “move fast and break things”—have fueled the nihilistic despair underlying MAGA. But subtler psychosocial currents are also at work. Physician and philosopher Gabor Maté traces modern trauma, including that which animates MAGA, to capitalism’s dehumanizing logic. In my book Escaping Maya’s Palace, I argue that global capitalism secretly distorts psychological development in ways that give rise to many social pathologies and macro-challenges, including authoritarian movements. I also propose action steps for evolving less disruptive forms of capitalism, including more locally self-reliant economies.
Archetypal figures along the montage’s perimeter—such as blue-skinned Lord Shiva on the far lower left and the buffalo-headed shaman on the right—suggest the possibility, with discernment, of harnessing these deep forces in service to healing and transformation.
• The bubbles floating away on the left side of the montage symbolize the processing and release of personal and collective trauma. The two lower bubbles on the far left depict my own childhood trauma and its lifelong reverberations; the three bubbles to their right encapsulate several grievous societal traumas. This juxtaposition reflects how, for me at least, the personal and collective are so deeply entwined that healing one seems impossible without healing the other.
Because the montage is composed of so many constituent images, the original Photoshop file is enormous (1.6 gigabytes—over 3,000 times the size of typical web images). Its resolution is high enough that it could be printed 6 or even 12 feet wide. Perhaps when I find a big enough empty wall, I’ll go that route—so I can step back to see the big picture and then move close to explore the details.
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