Missing the Point, Destructive Reductionism, and the Danger and Distraction of Taking Sides on the Importance of Trump’s Narcissism
I think any assumptions we make here are dangerous. Yes, Trump seems to be a narcissist, but to what degree? And how much of it is a staged persona? Recent republicans have a long history of having many faces, none of which are real except for the one that’s greedy and lusts for power. The polarizing nature of his public expressions plays directly into the republican power play to divide the population and create straw-man scapegoats and distractions (childish protesters, anti-free speech ultra PC leftists). If anything, Trump to me seems to be a man without morals who will do anything for money and power. He made himself untouchable by constantly parodying himself so that the worst people could say about him was that he had bad hair, small hands, and was disrespectful to women. And that’s how he won. The attacks on Hillary were concrete, they demanded real answers that never came.
This is short and insightful:
http://www.gq.com/.../donald-trump-is-just-a-puppet-steve...
He won the election by artfully devouring the news cycle and constantly creating trivial outrage to overshadow actual things that were happening. To think that we can simply attack his personality and have things fall apart is naive I think. It’s not Trump, It’s Bannon, it’s the old Republicans that know how to manipulate 25% of the American population without fail. Those are the people that need targeting, and to come back to our original topic, by having voices like Elon Musk in Trump’s face every week, that in some small way takes power away from Bannon and the neo-cons, even in some small way.
The protests must continue, and they must get louder and more violent, and we can’t let up, Bernie can’t and won’t shut up. And if we keep up these conversations and encourage people to the do same, we might be surprised what happens in the midterms.
I am not hopeful, but I do see any argument that tends towards polarization and promoting a hard Us VS. Them line to be incredibly detrimental to the cause of creating positive worlds in this chaos. We need to be somewhat artful to sway the millions on the fence who don’t have the same access to information that we do. It’s too easy to reject the outliers and push them to “the other side” when really we just need deeper information so people can see a bigger picture than “The left are a bunch of Pussies” and “The Right are a bunch of Nazis”
I’m gonna say some dumb shit: The political field isn’t a linear scale, it is at least a circle or a horse shoe, but it is most likely a quantum space where contradictory truths exist simultaneously until happenstance reveals the mortality of the cat. But I believe this about all argument, especially on the internet. I always have since being in philosophy class where a bunch of the class would latch on to one side of the argument, and the the other other other… but then a third way would sit back and do meta-analysis and identify strengths and weaknesses and discover the impossibility of concluding the debate. That is the conclusion, that there is none, which is why I come back to it, we have to do with what we have, and that doesn’t mean accepting it. It means interacting with it in reality instead of a reductionist version and experimenting with how we can create meaningful shifts that will blossom into positive change and transfer and dissolution of power.
I stayed up all night recently watching live streams of the Berkely protest/riots… of brave iPhone reporters getting phones smacked out of their hands while antifa smashed up banks and the cops didn’t do a god damned thing, because they know that the will of the people is too strong, and that 5% of people doing the violence could easily turn into the other 100% with instigation. This is a good sign. The will of the people is being heard loud and clear and we cannot tire or resign to hoplessness or convincing ourselves that this is a war between two sides.
Traverse the n-dimensional cluster fuck of human interaction with me without fear or prejudice and lets see what we can do. I think it’s a lot.
