Hi again. I’ve decided to end my relative radio silence and begin again by broadcasting my thoughts in a public forum. I’ve come to get a sense of why Facebook simply won’t’ go away. I think that there is something about people that makes them feel like they need to express their opinions to the world. We can only keep it locked up for so long, at a certain point we hit a threshold and these expressions need to manifest in a tangible form.
There’s also a lot of problems with expressing yourself on social media. For one, the social engineers use your expression to target you with ads and articles that fit your biases based on an algorithm that you fit into. How comfortable are you with that? Well, that’s why we decided to name this “The WIretap”. Another problem with social media is that we are not designed to express ourselves very effectively through a screen. I try to express myself eloquently via text but I also find myself failing to get the point across to a person I am at odds with online. Is this my fault or theirs?
If you’re wondering how I’m doing, the answer is- “All things considered PRETTY GOOD.” I left my job due to Covid-19 concerns in the middle of March because I decided to do what was best for me and my family. Online teaching is now the only truly safe game in town (or globally for that matter) so I’ve been keeping pretty busy. The family is pretty safe and we are masking up when we go out and are taking all the reasonable precautions you can take in 2020 to balance being a hermit with some form of social existence.
I started the podcast up again for a few reasons. One, I’m almost in a mental state to handle it again. I’ve stopped getting overwhelmed by all the chaos and have found myself increasingly able to detach from it to a certain extent. So that’s nice. Like that meme of the dog drinking coffee while his room is on fire saying “this is fine”
I’ve also had some requests for new episodes from die-hard fans. Thank you thank you thank you. “Just when I thought I was out, they PULL ME BACK IN.” I’ve also started meditating again which is huge. Mindfulness really aligns my thinking and pulls me out of constant distraction. From March up until very recently I was drenching my nervous system in Cortisol and trying to figure out how to get my family to survive this. When you’re in fight or flight all the time you really aren’t able to put your best foot forward on your side projects.
So here we are. “What’s with the title?” You may ask. Well, my notebook is full and the thoughts have bubbled over into social media where I swore I wouldn’t go to for the last few years. I’ve written a few posts on Facebook which were like threads of ideas that I had and I think I may be onto something. I’m curious to see where this goes so I decided to begin here again with you. I don’t know where it’s going to end up and I hope that you get something out of this journey with me.
I don’t pretend to know what’s going on or how we got here. I do have some perspective to offer on what all this means and how it will define this age in the future. The more I explore these ideas, the more I find that they don’t budge. You see, when you have a thought it should withstand scrutiny. It’s like a manhole cover that you can’t easily pry from the ground. The problem with conspiracy theories is that they’re like cardboard manhole covers, they pry off easily with verified evidence. Now you can call the evidence into question and go on and on all day but there’s a Facebook group somewhere out there for you. Or you have a home on Reddit.
These ideas I have are pretty solid. I call this “The Triumph of Delusion” because I think it sums up where we’re at. In three parts I want to dive into the modern human mind and how to view the realities of life in 2020. This is not going to be just about Trump, or BLM, or the Coronavirus, although they are all important subjects in this series. My goal is to explain to the best of my abilities how we got here, where we’re at now and what to do moving forward. So let’s get into it.
I’m tired of talking about Trump, but I will a little later. For now, I’d rather talk about you. You are the amalgamation of competing sub-personalities all vying for control of the wheel. Go ahead and Google “The Big Five Personality Traits”. In modern psychology, the Big Five model is the gold standard. So here are the Big Five personality traits, Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Think of these 5 traits as attributes that make up your personality, like choosing a character at the starting menu of a video game. We all have these built traits built into us and can be greatly affected by our family life and our upbringing.
Say you had a very Conservative father who worked with his hands to provide for you. You learned through either his words or his actions that hard work is good for you and you need to be a productive member of society. This may greatly influence your trait Consciousness, which is correlated with your social obligations and self-discipline.
Now say you had a liberal mother who did tarot readings. There were always new experiences afoot and wild adventures in your childhood. This may greatly affect your trait Openness, basically your openness to new experiences and creativity.
It’s important to mention that these are not good or bad things, they are in all of us to varying degrees. It’s also important to mention that the biases inherent in these traits are not a sign of a lack of or an abundance of intellect. Highly conscientious people are not stupid, highly open people are not stupid. These are merely traits that have implications that affect our world view. They are the particular, individual lenses in which we perceive reality.
I want to focus on the first two traits I mentioned, Openness, and Consciousness. I’ve come to see the conflict we experience between the left and the right as a disconnect in understanding how these traits are distributed within individuals. Take someone who is high in trait Conscientiousness and low on trait Openness and you’ll tend to see your classic Conservative. Conscientious people tend to be well organized and industrious. If this same person is low on Openness then they tend to shy away from things that are novel and strange. So if a person in their neighborhood is walking down their street wearing a Burka then they might see this person as a representative of global jihad before they see a new person in town that they can approach and talk to. This is not a stupid way to view the world, it’s a completely understandable one.
Now let’s take someone who is high in trait Openness and low in trait Consciousness. You have your classic Liberal. Many books on the shelf and lots of clothes piled in the corner. They would see this neighbor in a Burka as possibly a threat, maybe, but they are far more likely to come up to them, greet them and ask when they moved into the neighborhood because they would see them as a person before they view a representative of a Caliphate. Once again, not stupid. Completely understandable.
So this divide between the left and the right has plagued society for ages. It’s nothing new. We need to stop calling the other side stupid. It is not productive. You need both. Here’s how I see it: The left makes progress so that marginalized people don’t get left out of participating and contributing to society. The right makes sure that traditional values that makeup society remain conserved, hence the name Conservatives. They oscillate, the left moves forward, and when problems arise, the right comes in and tries to fix the problems that arose from the progressives, then the progressives enact policies that walk back those policies until we find a balance. So who’s correct? Sometimes it’s the Liberals and sometimes it’s the Conservatives. Things change, new problems arise, and both sides orient policy until the proper measures are put in place to fix most of the problems. I say most because the problems are always changing. It’s flawed, it’s not exact but it’s the system we have. We rejected tyranny over 240 years ago and there is no Daddy in charge of everything so that’s what we’re going with.
And it got us here. Now what I’m describing is a very, very basic overview of how politics have worked in the west until about 1960. Up until the modern age we had “colleagues on the other side of the aisle” and our politicians meant it. Now if you want to see how Liberals and Conservatives used to debate you should see William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal go at it in the early days of political debate on television. Two intelligent, eloquent men speaking in complete sentences to each other, it’s jaw-dropping. When you see them debate, it’s almost as if they know they are not necessarily enemies but they stand on different platforms and view the world from different lenses if they knew this from a psychological perspective I am not sure, but it certainly seems this way. Watch “Best of Enemies” if this subject interests you.
I use 1960 as a cutoff point because after that the oligarchs took over. The history of political corruption in the United States goes beyond the scope of this podcast and I am woefully unprepared to take on the topic, but let’s summarize it by saying that at a certain point our democracy was for sale. Now the people who bought the politicians have been working feverishly to convince the voting population that either they don’t exist or that if they do exist then they have their best interest at heart. So here we are, Democrats and Republicans are not immune to special interests influencing policy and there is a divide between voters who are anti-corruption and the two major political parties.
The solution for the anti-corruption voter block, (by the way, this SHOULD BE YOU) was to vote in an outsider. We tried for years, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Ron Paul. All of them failed to get the nomination from the two-party system which has been bought. In 2016 both sides had a shot, they simply had to pick the outsider who more closely aligned with their basic platforms.
Now nominating Bernie Sanders would have meant breaking the veil of the elites holding this country hostage. That wasn’t going to happen and it still isn’t apparently. Then there was Donald Trump. Waving his hands descending an escalator with a crowd of paid actors. Let me tell you, Trump has been iconic for over 40 years. In the 80’s he was a symbol of wealth in the “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” era. If you watch American Psycho, you see the main character, Patrick Bateman pursuing Trump like a ghost. It’s a good character development tool because Bateman’s excesses and materialism mirror Trump’s gaudy public image and lifestyle.
In the 90’s Trump was a bit of a relic. At this point, his bankruptcies and business failures were already well known and his business acumen was already perceived by those who were paying attention as a sham. He should have been done for but he turned it around due to a particular skill set. He is a master conman. I mean it and I will give the devil his due. He can manipulate and con his way out of most situations that would ruin anyone with the burden of morals and a conscious.
Trump’s quite bizarre. You probably have a story. I mean, you have a history. A past a present and a potential future in which you wish to get to. Say that you started poor or in a lower caste of society. Then you worked hard and studied a subject. You maybe went to school or learned a trade. You had failures, you had successes. You did something with your life. Your life has a narrative structure. You hope to continue your successes and minimize your failures in the future. You use a tool like using your word to build trust in others. If you don’t have money, the best way to build relationships is with your social contracts and your trustworthiness. Let’s call this a tool like a shovel you keep handy. If you build a good reputation, people can rely on your tool to get the job done in your respective field. I hope I made this obvious.
Now, I hope you understand my position here. By all evidence in interviews, speeches, and by all accounts of people who know him and report on him and have spoken to him, Trump has no narrative story. If you hear him speak about himself, he has always been successful. There has never been a loss. He has hit 5 stars in every event and every venture he has pursued.
There’s one problem here. That’s bullshit. No one’s life works that way. It’s bad fiction. You wouldn’t read a book or watch a movie where that actually happens. This means that whatever his past actually is, he communicates it to the world as an untethered success although that is impossible. Try this yourself. Go tell someone you just met that you’ve never struggled and that you are the most successful person in your field who has ever lived. See if you could pull it off. If you can, you are a Sociopath.
Imagine that you go through life without a sense of where you’ve been or where you’re headed. Every interaction with another person is a zero-sum game of winner and loser. Every interchange is a competition where you must come out on top. That’s how he communicates. Any pushback is met with vitriol and attack. There is no seeing the other side, there is no acknowledgment that another person has a different perspective or that their perspective matters at all. The world is divided into people who support you and people who are against you. Anyone who is against you must be silenced or destroyed.
I propose this is how our president functions. I propose it because I have seen no evidence to conclude otherwise. People who supported Trump thought that he would grow into the office. That he would take on the role of leadership and become the president we needed. He never grew into the office. He’s incapable of growth. He’s a blunt force object with one use. When you’re a hammer, every problem is a nail. Trump is the kind of hammer that destroys your sidewall though. When the house needs decorating, all he can do is punch a hole in the wall.
If this is terrifying to you, good. It should be. We are so screwed in our current situation because we really need a leader right now. Trump is incapable of leading. We need to stop acting surprised when he does something banal, cruel and ridiculous. Stop treating him like a normal human being! Stop acting shocked! There is no bottom. Study Machiavelli. You don’t see this behavior in modern civilization because it is out of your modern frame. This is cruelty and banality out of time.
Well, how did he get there? To the presidency? I have pondered over this tirelessly for over three years. I have thoughts about it that I want to convey. Side note: The day after he was elected I wrote a blog called, “The Second American Civil Rights Movement.” I’m sure people thought I was overreacting but look at what’s happened the past few months. People are done with him. I don’t mean to claim clairvoyance, but here we are.
Here’s how he got there. It has to do with him and it has to do with you. Trump is uniquely talented in a very specific way. Yes, he’s a conman but there is a savant-like quality to his con. I wondered about it and I think I figured it out.
My dad is in the “boomer” generation. This is the generation that grew up in the ’50s and ’60s and made their way into a good middle-class life through hard work and industry. Many people of this generation are Conservative-minded. Work hard, pay your bills, support the police that keep you safe, don’t expect a free handout. All the classic Conservative tropes and you know what, good for them. There is something honest and tangible in that way of thinking. My father has always been a model for responsibility to me and I’m proud of who he is and what he’s done with his life and for his family.
Much of America thinks this way. It’s worked for decades. So take the classic Conservative traits of High Consciousness and often time low Openness and give it an agent. A reactive molecule if you will. Trump is that reactive model, or at least was in 2016. Consciousness divides itself into two main categories: Industriousness and Orderliness. Let’s focus on Orderliness.
My father loves fences. One night he went on a rant with me about how he was working on a fence between him and his neighbor’s yard. He wanted to make sure that our pets didn’t escape into their yard or that their pets didn’t get into ours. He even said “I don’t hate my neighbor, I just want to make sure what’s his is his and what’s mine is mine.
Orderliness is fine. My dad never liked it when I took his stuff without asking. I get it, I’m the same way with my kids. Let’s also add in a dose of low Openness. Who has time for books? I have bills to pay.
There’s a certain set of words that you can say in the right order with the right amount of bravado to set off a reaction. Possibly the reaction you desire.
“I’m going to build a wall.”
You just did a magic trick. The people you are trying to get behind you go, “I like walls.” No one else is willing to say it. Why? Because it’s ridiculous. They don’t know why they like it, but they do. They will say, “Well there is a real problem at the Southern border” and it may be true but anyone capable of nuanced thinking would see that you can’t just build a wall because Mexico is not Mongolia and we are not “Jina” and this is not the Ming dynasty.
Practicality was never a factor though. He wanted your subconscious reaction. When he says, “Mexico is sending rapists.” He wants your “yes! he tells it like it is!” reaction. Except he really doesn’t tell it like it is whatsoever, he tells it like you want to hear in your less than polite moments. He doesn’t hold any real beliefs, he just spouts platitudes that gets his base behind him. And don’t you dare bring up Pelosi and Clinton and tell me they are the same. Not even for one second. Your orange messiah is uniquely talented in this way, don’t sell him short.
Other politicians have an actual narrative that they live. A real story and a future that they want to get to. Trump only wants himself and his circle to thrive and succeed. He really couldn’t give a crap if 90% of his country burned as long as the 10% surrounding him remained intact.
So he locked down the Conservative populist vote. But up to the debates, mainstream Republicans in D.C. were still wary of him. Let’s give him his due here too, Trump crushed the debates. Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, they didn’t stand a chance. Trump was so unique and brought so much attention to himself the other candidates should have just stayed home. So, here was their nominee. Mainstream GOP took a gamble on Trump because who knows what the hell this is? We might as well give it a go!
The Democrats could have taken a similar route with Bernie Sanders but they put forth their establishment candidate instead. Now, I’m sure Hillary Clinton isn’t a saint, but I’m not willing to believe all the garbage that is thrown out there about her. The truth, as it usually is is somewhere in between.
Clinton didn’t connect with America’s working class. This is big. America is made up of forklift operators and linemen, not just East and West Coast jet setting liberals. Maybe your vote was a protest vote against Clinton because you hated her, that I can understand. Trump was supposed to lose anyways. The problem is that he didn’t. Here we are. Ted Cruz would have never won against Clinton, but I would rather have him as president. And you better believe Clinton would have made a far better president who we have now. I held my nose and voted for Clinton because I’m A GODDAMN ADULT.
I think that people need to identify with a group. It’s part of our nature. Maybe you’re a musician, maybe you are also work in a Warehouse. You have musician friends who all vote Democrat, you also have coworkers in the Warehouse that are hardcore conservatives. Which way did you vote? Probably with the group you identified with the most. Much is said about “Karens” who are often time Trump supporters. I’m convinced that these women actually vote the way their husbands vote because once again, we go with our group.
And why not? Politics is complex. Why not outsource the thinking to a group you identify with and let them make the choices for you? The social engineers and the media know this very well. They are steering you one way or another because they are aware that you have an inherent nature. This nature predisposes you to spend your money and your vote a certain way. They need you.
Don’t be surprised that Evangelicals back Trump full-heartedly despite all that has come out about him. You may think that the morals of Christ are their central focus, don’t believe it for a second. They call Trump a “flawed” character but refuse to take a stand against him? Why? Because to them, Liberals are eviler than Trump. Mainstream Christianity will never vote Blue because that’s the party of abortions and gay marriage. Those are their central issues. Also, they like Trump because Evangelicals are conditioned to believe in BULLSHIT.
3 batshit crazy years into this dumpster fire of a presidency here I am still talking about it. Defending my Trump “derangement syndrome”, when really the main issue is this. When you lead, you take responsibility. Everything that happens is on you. Barack Obama did this, even if you didn’t like him. Everything that happened in those eight years fell on him and he took responsibility. Trump takes responsibility for nothing. Obama never called himself a victim, victimhood is basically a Trump policy.
That cannot be denied and he’s handled COVID-19 exactly the way I thought he would. Like someone who is looking out for his own interests and his own interests only.
I have discovered that there is another element at play in all this. The part that makes us truly American. When the lockdown happened in California in the third week of March 2020, I had a very open and emotional Facebook post about it. It seemed like I was out of control, and in a way I was. I was really actually relieved that people were going to be kept safe to the best of Newsom’s ability. I also felt like I knew something about how things were going to go. It took me a long time to discover what it was. You see, Japan and South Korea beat this virus because they are those highly conscientious societies that I was talking about. Those nations did what they were supposed to do to keep each other safe. We don’t operate that way. The U.S immediately politicized the virus and made a left vs. right thing rather than an apolitical health crisis. Part of me knew this was going to happen.
We really aren’t a highly conscientious society. It would make sense that the red states would embrace wearing a mask, after all, conscientiousness is divided into industriousness and orderliness. Orderliness aligns with high disgust sensitivity. Conservatives should love masks just like they love walls.
No, it was never about that trait. Walls stop people. masks keep people safe. It was an entirely different personality trait.
America is a disagreeable nation. That’s what American exceptionalism is. That’s why so many people embraced Trump. We were never going to agree to keep each other safe. That was the horror I saw looming and that is what American excpetionalism has become. Our exceptionalism is why this virus won’t stop and it will take us forever to get through it. I saw it in the back of my mind and I knew we were going to be in trouble.
In the next installment, I will talk about Trumps base and what causes them to go along with him. In the next installment of the Triumph of Delusion. In the meantime, take care and VOTE. Thank you.