For the Israelites wandering in the wilderness, their anxiety was triggered by the prospect of total surrender to an invisible God. For us today, it is the confrontation with the bleak emptiness of a world bereft of all meaning. As Tillich might put it, so long as we can’t find within ourselves the “courage to be” in the face of the anxiety inherent in being human, many of us will continue to avoid the responsibility of freedom and will rather seek to be temporarily soothed by charlatans. We will be like the Israelites who said to Samuel: “Give us a king who will fight for us”. History moves in huge cycles; everything seems to change, but something fundamental remains the same. Donald Trump and all the rest of the current crop of authoritarians are not an aberration; they are fitting icons for our time.
