iTrump: an existential crisis of global proportions

During our normal bedtime routine tonight, I watched as my son delighted in splashing his feet in the bath water, looking over his shoulder to grin at me and confirm I was paying attention. He derives some of the most basic pleasures from discovering and rediscovering how his body can interact with its material surroundings — like the fluidity and weightlessness of water and the sound it makes when slapped at the surface by a two year old foot.

After bath we read a book about Albert Einstein and his observation that there are invisible structures to everything — even our vast and unknowable universe. We are all matter. Then we held each other and whispered “I love you” in each other’s ears as I put him to sleep, the day’s end marked by the sun just set. As our friends and neighbors rushed to airports to show support for the detained refugees, my heart was aching — but for my son all was right and good in the world.

If there is a single lesson I’ve learned from becoming a parent it’s that we habitually underestimate our essential nature as human beings. Animals. We have an absolute need to touch each other, look one another in the eyes, verify our experiences through our connections to other people and exist in the natural world. Yet, we constantly ascribe to the notion that our mind controls our bodies, that we can will ourselves into feeling, thinking, being.

As we embark on a global charge toward nationalistic and fascist ideology and policy, I speculate that the true underlying conditions that have made us vulnerable to Trump and his likeness, is existential. We are experiencing a cultural psychic break. Our confidence in our own humanity has been shaken to its core.

As relatively slow to evolve animals, we have not been able to keep pace with the changes that technology has introduced over the past two decades. We are just now starting to understand the extent to which the information revolution has and will continue to alter our economy. The boundaries of its influence on behavior, relationships and sense of identity are murky at best. Yet we think that because technology is manmade that it is within our control, when in fact it is surpassing us at exponential speeds.

During the eight years that Obama was in office, it was too easy to relegate this to the backburner. We rejoiced in Silicon Valley culture, the iPhone and its infinite apps, the growing narcissism perpetuated by social media that simultaneously makes our world smaller while our perception of our own importance within it blows up. All the while, there was a growing unease in our guts. A nagging voice inside was saying “Mommy, Daddy, I don’t feel good. I’m sick.” We ignored it, shoveling ever more Netflix episodes, Amazon Prime purchases and Tinder dates on top of it until it finally got fed up. The child in all of us that requires human connection, the opportunity to have meaningful conversations, to learn and to reflect, threw a motherfucking tantrum. So we have the petulant child, Donald J. Trump, our elected pussy grabbing President of Celebrity Apprentice fame as its horrific embodiment.

Trump’s mastery — and what Hilary’s campaign failed miserably to grasp — was that as human beings our deepest needs and desires are not about what can be measured in numbers but what can be sensed. We don’t live inside demographic buckets nor political parties but rather are governed by our emotional connections to ourselves and that which we call community. It’s what makes us human and it’s also what makes us flawed and extremely susceptible to manipulation.

A web developer friend of mine said yesterday, Trump and his people were willing to go to the dirty parts of the internet to understand what the extreme were saying, knowing that in the extreme there lies brutal, raw honesty. But even without that, our shift from the lived world to that of Facebook likes was clue enough that people are no longer getting our fundamental needs met.

Couple that with the troubling state of traditional infrastructures and systems who have similarly failed to keep up with the changes introduced by the new digital world — from the public school system to the disastrous state of our prisons to an almost Wall-E like mode of work that saddles many of us up with machines for the better part of our day in place of people. Throw in a dash of weather catastrophy thanks to climate change caused by our relentless, egotistical taking from the natural environment.

Now more than ever, we are lost, scared, and very, very uncertain about our future. Trump knew it, will continue to exploit it, offering fear tactics and easy scapegoats in the form of the most vulnerable among us. And so, we open up to chapter one of the worst dystopian novel never written.

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