Recently, President Donald Trump declared, “You know, if you want to go out and buy groceries, you need identification.” This isn’t at all true, not even a tiny little bit. There is no requirement at all to show identification in order to buy groceries in the United States. People need to show proof of age to buy alcohol. If they look young, they might be asked to show identification in order to buy cigarettes, but groceries can be bought in complete anonymity.
Still, Trump has insisted that the opposite is the case, and has said so many times, in public, over the course of several months, even though his aides have conspicuously corrected him. It’s not just a case of a momentary lapse of mental focus. Trump’s belief in the requirement of identification for the purchase of groceries is so strange, and yet so focused in his mind, that it leaves us feeling bewildered.
To be bewildered is to feel as if one has been led into the wild. There, the straight and predictable paths of civilization are lost. There are no registered addresses that a GPS could use to guide us safely and quickly to our destination. So, when we are bewildered, we lose our mastery of the environment around us, and become merely one of its inhabitants.
In her book Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert writes of the emotional disorientation that results from to the realization of a deep bewilderment: “When you’re lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you’ve just wandered off the path, that you’ll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it’s time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don’t even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.”
The wild woods of bewilderment are a metaphor, of course. We aren’t typically bewildered in a literal wilderness, and can become bewildered while sitting in our favorite spot in our own home. A bewildered feeling takes place as the result of a psychological disturbance, rather than a physical one. When we are bewildered, we lose the intricate architecture of our civilized identities and are knocked out of our familiar, comfortable presumptions about who we are and how we relate to those around us.
Ironically, it’s our firm sense of knowing what is true and right that makes us especially vulnerable to bewilderment. On the other hand, to be bewildered is to be emotionally honest, acknowledging our lack of comprehension, rather than pretending that we understand what’s going on. As Khalil Gibran wrote, “That which seems most feeble and bewildered in you is the strongest and most determined.” If we didn’t care about being on the right track, we wouldn’t be capable of feeling bewildered.
In a world where disruption has become a conventional business model, as well as a tactic for political domination, bewilderment has become a culturally defining emotion… at least for those who still care to know where they are being led.
