The Post-Trump World

Roger Cohen's piece "The Trump Possibility" in The New York Times articulated a list of why it is possible for the world's most powerful nation to elect

a fascist. These included fear, anxiety-multipliers, the crash of 2008 which rigged the global system and granted impunity to an elite, growing inequality, abandonment of the working class, and the perennial folly of blaming those who have the least power.

But is it because we are so impressed with media we cannot see how we are being manipulated into believing that we have elected this man rather than the system presenting the "winner" before the elections?

"We are on the wrong track if we imagine that ideas put forth by political leaders contain, or are intended to contain, some form of “truth”; that ideas correspond to some aspect of “external reality.” The coin of the realm in politics is fantasy: the leader’s ability to express his own fantasies, and to induce or seduce others to share those fantasies. The leader presents ideas that resonate with his audience. His utterances allow followers to externalize inner states of being." writes Richard Koenigsberg in his post Ideology as Shared Fantasy.

I do not know enough about how this works but those in communications and advertising may be familiar with it.  I have mostly felt we are being manipulated by institutions and business who have learned how to work on the most cynical levels of human nature. 

George Orwell's 1984 is an allegory that takes place in the future but based on the horror of fascist societies in Europe, while its victims believed they were willingly driving the fight for freedom.  

Then the fifties and sixties flourished with consumer fashions and we thought we could express who we were with clothes, make-up and cars - the fantasy was about endless stuff.

Now that the economy is rigged to benefit only a few, most of us don't have that opportunity to spend our lives away. 

My current fantasy is that we shall find a way to preserve our water, the environment, and justice - so we won't need to carry placards on the streets forever. How to convince others? Many are already doing it.

The idea that our fantasy is wanting to find its way out is both intriguing and terrifying.

If I Can't Rule the World I Shall Destroy It

This is the cry of the authoritarian narcissist, and those who support him or her. It's a cry of despair from the minds of those who believed that reason and justice ruled the world and now realizing it's the opposite, feel betrayed but cannot see their part in it. In denial and without humility they sink into the dark hole of revenge. 

The trouble is we confuse ideology or the power of ideology with right and wrong. "Ideologies may be viewed as societally defined ideational structures that exist in order to permit latent dimensions of the psyche to become manifest in the external world." says, Richard Koenigsberg in his essay "Why do Ideologies exist".

When someone says "the real world" what they mean is the "ideational structures" that we have taken for granted as "truth". What we often call human nature is the "psychic functions" that permit certain desires and fantasies to be projected onto "reality".

The ideational structure I am most affected by is the notion of control. Raised in a nation who preached progress and who embarked on racist, colonial brutality, we argued about how to rule the world but not how to care for it. 

The male head of the household made decisions for members of his family whom he viewed as weak and childlike, who needed his strength and protection.  When things didn't go as planned the ones who failed were those who could not live "up to" the patriarch's laws.  

In authoritarian cultures, the sons learned to shut down their emotions and daughters learned how to keep silent.  Love became duty. Empathy and compassion died. 

We are born into a set of beliefs that our parents and teachers assume are right, and since we need approval from our society to survive, we learn how to adjust ourselves to an external view. It works to oppress and make obedient the people who live under its power.

I grew up believing I was good and those who behaved and thought like me were also good, and if we all thought the same there would be peace. Prejudiced and privileged, I must now swallow how wrong I was. Thanks to the Republican party in the US, I see how corrupted the white colonialist is capable of becoming. I see the harm I have caused by believing I must be in control, by holding on to control and blinding myself to the effect it has on those who have less.

The more I age, the more I lack confidence in talking about big issues. How to create or be part of an inclusive and just society is beyond my control. Things are changing. There is so much I cannot know - even on my own street. I am a stakeholder in this thing called humanity but not its ruler.

When despotic opportunists threaten what little bit of civil society remains, I feel absolutely lost. Outraged that we vote for hate rather than deal with our own discomfort because we are not in control.  You and I can't rule the world. Yet we commit endless acts of violence to support the delusion that we can. Nations are not great. And we are destroying the world because we can't rule it.

Fascist and communist movements in Europe in the 1930's, according to Hannah Arendt, recruited support from the masses dismissed as being too stupid for the other parties.

Chris Hedges, in his article The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism. writes there is only "one way left to blunt the yearning for fascism coalescing around (Donald) Trump. It is to build, as fast as possible, movements or parties that declare war on corporate power, engage in sustained acts of civil disobedience and seek to reintegrate the disenfranchised—the “losers”—back into the economy and political life of the country." 

In short,  we must declare war on our addiction to power-over and use our power to care for and heal our world in any way we can.  

Consolidating Power through Ritual Contempt For Life

"Well over 250 million people died in the 20th Century as a result of political violence. This includes an estimated 200 million deaths that were the result of people killed intentionally by governments, and perhaps fifty million deaths as the result of warfare. Among governments that were the most prolific in murdering people were the communist USSR, China and the Mao Guerillas, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and of course Nazi Germany." Hitler, War - and the Holocaust. Richard Koenigsberg.

The complete essay needs to be read as Koenigsberg reveals how violence breeds violence.  It appears to arrive from the idea that young men are born to experience the glory of running out on the battlefield to be gunned down.

Dying on the battlefield has mostly been portrayed as sudden death but that's not how it happens all the time or most of the time.  Sometimes they lie on the field in excruciating pain - intestines falling from a gaping wound, arms and legs blown off, eyes ripped out, faces blown away, cold icy rain on frozen mud.  Or prisoners transported in cattle cars without food or water, the stench of urine, pus, for days, weeks or more, knowing that wherever they arrive it will not be good.

Megaphones spouting the glory of giving your life to war, worshiping the men who designed the battles - Kemal, Ludendorff, Hindenburg, Hitler, who told the people in various words - we do not ask you to fight but to die for your nation.

Now I am thinking of ideologies preached by a few candidates of the Republican Party that are clearly destructive to those who have had the privilege of living in a peaceful, almost democratic nation.  Their policies are not about running a nation but about preparing people for war through hatred and division. Fascist parties in Europe and America are not interested in governing a nation  - they are looking to centralize power.

Why do they focus on hate? Is it because they/we are seeking revenge? Is it because we cannot imagine a world that is just and so we think it useless to work towards a better world? Has the system created the means to destroy us as soon as we enter school through ritual humiliation and competition, so we grow up valuing things more than ourselves? 

Would it be that education, compassion, social justice, cooperation, wisdom and social responsibility would take back the power from those who preach that our worth, our only worth, is when we become the means of aggrandizing the emperor?

Would you like to die on a bloody field or coffee shop with your limbs blown out of reach, or in a cattle car with the stench of pus and urine, or a slow and painful death as a refugee carrying your infant to nowhere? 

Who benefits from this global contempt for life?