donald trump
"THE CROWD" AND A NATION'S BITTER DESPAIR
by
LOUIS RENÉ BERES
___________________________
Louis
René Beres is Emeritus Professor of Political Science
and International Law (Purdue University). He is author of many
books and articles dealing with international politics. His
columns have appeared in the New York Times, Washington
Post, The Jerusalem Post and OUPblog
(Oxford University Press). This essay first appeared in www.moderndiplomacy.eu
The crowd is untruth.
Soren Kierkegaaard
The
“crowd,” cautioned Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard,
is “untruth.” Nowhere is the concise wisdom of this
19th century warning more plainly apparent than in Donald Trump’s
despairing United States. Even today, even after so much rancorous
presidential dissemblance and chicanery, this fragmenting and
unhappy nation too often accepts incoherent political dogma
as proper authority and conspicuously vile political gibberish
as truth.
Even now, even
when a derelict president elevates his own contrived and illiterate
judgments concerning epidemiology above the authoritative opinion
of America’s distinguished scientists and physicians,
millions of his supporters still offer a visceral “amen.”
In essence, these “obedient” citizens stand in stubbornly
open support of untruth or anti-Reason. Why?
How can this
unchanging self-destructiveness be suitably explained?
It gets even
worse. In certain refractory instances, this irrational hierarchy
of US citizen preference has led hundreds (perhaps thousands)
of Americans to consume potentially lethal medications against
Covid-19. What are these “obedient” people “thinking”?
This is a president, let us not forget, who thinks human bodies
can somehow undergo beneficial anti-viral “cleanings”
with commercially-available disinfectants. If it can “kill”
virus on tabletops, reasons Trump openly, why not take the remediating
substance internally?
Credo quia
absurdum, affirmed the ancient philosophers. “I believe
because it is absurd.” Still, this is a president of the
United States in the year 2020. How can such preposterous “reasoning”
be accepted by literally millions of Americans?
There is more.
How shall such normally incomprehensible behaviours be explained
more gainfully? At one level, at least, the answer is obvious.
America is no longer a society that sincerely values knowledge,
education or learning. Led by a retrograde man of commerce who
never reads books – indeed, who proudly reads nothing
at all – this has become a “know nothing”
country, a nation that wittingly and shamelessly spurns both
intellect and truth. For whatever deeply underlying reasons,
docile Trump minions seek to keep themselves “anesthetized.”
In this active
form of complicity with self-destruction, these Americans are
not passive victims. Rather, they insistently hold themselves
captive by a lengthening string of embarrassingly false presidential
reassurances and by clinging to endlessly mindless Trump simplifications
of complex problems.
In her magisterial
two-volume work, The Life of the Mind (1971), political
philosopher Hannah Arendt makes much of the “manifest
shallowness” of historical evil-doers, hypothesizing that
the critically underlying causes of harm are not specifically
evil motives or common stupidity per se. Rather, she concludes
controversially but convincingly, the root problem is thoughtlessness,
a more-or-less verifiable human condition that makes a susceptible
individual readily subject to the presumed “wisdom”
of clichés, stock phrases and narrowly visceral codes
of expression.
There are always
a great many who will be “susceptible.” This does
not mean only those who lack a decent formal education.
Significantly,
in Donald Trump’s fragmenting America, just as earlier
in the Third Reich, well-educated and affluent persons have
joined forces with gun worshippers and street fighters to meet
certain presumptively overlapping objectives. In the end, we
may learn from both history and logic, each faction will suffer
grievously alongside the general citizenry.
Both sides will
“lose.”
For philosopher
Hannah Arendt, the core problem is this: a literal absence of
thinking. In her learned and lucid assessment, evil is not calculable
according to any specific purpose or ideology. Rather, it is
deceptively commonplace and altogether predictable. Evil, we
may learn from the philosopher, is “banal.”
There is more.
Fundamentally, the “mass man” or “mass woman”
(a Jungian term that closely resembles Arendt’s evildoer)
who cheers wildly in rancorous presidential crowds, and whatever
the articulated gibberish of the moment, favours a constant
flow of empty witticisms over any meaningful insights of reasoning
or science. Living in a commerce-driven society that has been
drifting ever further from any still-residual “life of
the mind,” this susceptible American is a perfect “recruit”
for Trumpian conversion.
This “obedient”
citizen, after all, has absolutely no use for study, evidence
or critical thinking of any kind. Why should he? Der Fuhrer
will do his “thinking” for him.
Could anything
be more “convenient?”
With Arendt
and Jung, the anti-Reason “culprit” is unmasked.
It is the once-individual human being who has wittingly ceased
to be an individual, who has effectively become the unapologetic
enemy of intellect and a reliable ally of thoughtlessness. Using
the succinct but incomparably expressive words of Spanish philosopher
Jose Oretga y Gassett, he or she thinks only “in his own
flesh.” Following any such antecedent triumphs of anti-Reason
in the United States, it becomes more easy to understand the
hideous rise and political survival of dissembling American
President Donald J. Trump.
America’s
most insidious enemy in this suffocating Trump Era should now
be easier to recognize. It is an unphilosophical national spirit
that knows nothing and wants to know nothing of truth. Now facing
unprecedented and overlapping crises of health, economics and
law, sizable elements of “We the People” feel at
their best when they can chant anesthetizing gibberish in mesmerizing
chorus. “We’re number one; we’re number one,
“these Americans still shout reflexively, even as their
country’s capacity to project global power withers minute
by minute, and even as the already ominous separations of rich
and poor have come to mimic (and sometimes exceed) what is discoverable
in the most downtrodden nations on earth.
Most alarmingly,
among these manifold catastrophic American declensions, the
badly-wounded American nation is still being led by an utterly
ignorant pied piper, by a would-be emperor who was stunningly
“naked” from the start and who has now managed to
bring the United States to once unimaginable levels of suffering.
In this connection, the Corona Virus pandemic was not of his
own personal making, of course, but this relentless plague has
become infinitely more injurious under Trump’s unsteady
dictatorial hand.
Nonetheless,
the champions of anti-Reason in America will still generally
rise to defend their Fuhrer. He did not create this growing
plague, we are reminded. He is, therefore, just another victim
of a plausibly unavoidable national circumstance. Why keep picking
on this innocent and brilliant man? Instead, let us stand loyally
by his inconspicuously sagacious counsel.
Sound familiar?
Recalling philosopher
Hannah Arendt, such determinedly twisted loyalties stem originally
from massive citizen thoughtlessness. Though Donald Trump is
not in any way responsible for the actual biological menace
of our current plague, he has still willingly weakened the American
nation’s most indispensable medical and scientific defenses.
It is well worth mentioning too, on this particular count, that
meaningful national defense always entails more than just large-scale
weapons systems and infrastructures. Looking ahead, moreover,
this country has far more to gain from a coherent and science-based
antivirus policy than from a patently preposterous Trumpian
“Space Force.”
Thomas Jefferson,
Chief architect of the Declaration of Independence, earlier
observed the imperative congruence of viable national democracy
with wisdom and learning. Today, however, many still accept
a president whose proud refrain during the 2016 election process
was “I love the poorly educated.” Among other humiliating
derelictions, this refrain represented a palpable echo of Third
Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels Nuremberg rally comment:
“Intellect rots the brain.”
Americans are
polarized not only by race, ethnicity and class, but also by
inclination or disinclination to serious thought. For most of
this dreary and unhappy country, any inclination toward a “life
of the mind” is anathema. In irrefutable evidence, trivial
or debasing entertainments remain the only expected compensation
for a shallow national life of tedious obligation, financial
exhaustion and premature death. This sizable portion of the
populace, now kept distant from authentic personal growth by
every imaginable social and economic obstacle, desperately seeks
residual compensations, whether in silly slogans, status-bearing
affiliations or the manifestly deranging promises of Trump Era
politics.
Even at this
eleventh hour, Americans must learn understand that no nation
can be “first” that does not hold the individual
“soul” sacred. At one time in our collective history,
after American Transcendental philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson
and Henry David Thoreau, a spirit of personal accomplishment
did actually earn high marks. Then, young people especially,
strove to rise interestingly, not as the embarrassingly obedient
servants of destructive power and raw commerce, but as plausibly
proud owners of a unique and personal Self.
Alas, today
this Self “lives” together with increasingly unbearable
material and biologically uncertain ties. Whether Americans
would prefer to become more secular or more reverent, to grant
government more authority over their lives, or less, a willing
submission to multitudes has become the nation’s most
unifying national “religion.” Regarding the pied
piper in the White House, many Americans accept even the most
patently preposterous Trump claims of enhanced national security.
Credo quia
absurdum.
Upon returning
to Washington DC after the Singapore Summit, President Trump
made the following statement: “Everybody can now feel
much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a
nuclear threat from North Korea.”
It’s
not just America. Crowd-like sentiments like these have a long
and diversified planetary history. We are, to be fair, hardly
the first people to surrender to crowds. The contemporary crowd-man
or woman is, in fact, a primitive and universal being, one who
has uniformly “slipped back,” in the words of Spanish
philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, “through the wings,
on to the age-old stage of civilization.”
This grotesque
stage is not bare. It is littered with the corpses of dead civilizations.
Indiscriminately, the crowd defiles all that is most gracious
and still-promising in society. Charles Dickens, during his
first visit to America, already observed back in 1842: “I
do fear that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty will be
dealt by this country in the failure of its example to the earth.”
To this point,
at least, Americans have successfully maintained their political
freedom from traditional political tyranny and oppression, but
– plainly – this could now change at almost any
moment. Already, we have come to accept in once unimaginable
terms the kind of presidential manipulation and bullying that
can shred and pull apart well-established constitutions. As
corollary, Americans have also cravenly surrendered their liberty
to become authentic persons. Openly deploring a life of meaning
and sincerity, a nation stubbornly confuses wealth with success,
blurting out rhythmic chants of patriotic celebration even as
their cheerless democracy vanishes into meaninglessness, pandemic
disease and a plausibly irremediable despair.
Whatever its
origin, there is an identifiable “reason” lying
behind this synchronized delirium. In part, at least, such orchestrated
babble seeks to protect Americans from a potentially terrifying
and unbearable loneliness. In the end, however, it is a contrived
and inevitably lethal remedy . In the end, it offers just another
Final Solution.
Still, there
remain individual American citizens of integrity and courage.
The fearlessly resolute individual who actively seeks an escape
from the steadily-poisoning “crowd,” the One who
opts heroically for disciplined individual thought over effortless
conformance, must feel quite deeply alone. “The most radical
division,” asserted José Ortega y Gasset in 1930,
“is that which splits humanity . . . those who make great
demands on themselves…and those who demand nothing special
of themselves . . . ” In 1965, the Jewish philosopher,
Abraham Joshua Heschel, offered an almost identical argument.
Lamenting, “The emancipated man is yet to emerge,”
Heschel then asked each One to inquire: “What is expected
of me? What is demanded of me?”
Why are these
same questions so casually pushed aside by current American
supporters of a rancorous president who opposes “emancipation”
in any conceivable form?
There is more.
It is time for camouflage and concealment in our pitiful American
crowd to yield to what Abraham Joshua Heschel called “being-challenged-in-the-world.”
Individuals who would dare to read books for more than transient
entertainment, and who are willing to risk social and material
disapproval in exchange for exiting the crowd (“emancipation”),
offer America its only real and lasting hope. To be sure, these
rare souls can seldom be found in politics, in universities,
in corporate boardrooms or almost anywhere (there are some exceptions
still) on radio, television or in the movies. Always, their
critical inner strength lies not in pompous oratory, catchy
crowd phrases, or observably ostentatious accumulations of personal
wealth (“Trump. Trump, Trump“), but in the considerably
more ample powers of genuineness, thought and Reason.
There is much
yet to learn. Currently, not even the flimsiest ghost of intellectual
originality haunts America’s public discussions of politics
and economics, even those organized by intelligent and well-meaning
Trump opponents. Now that America’s largely self-deceiving
citizenry has lost all residual sense of awe in the world, this
national public not only avoids authenticity, it positively
loathes it. Indeed, in a nation that has lost all recognizable
regard for the Western literary canon, our American crowds generally
seek aid, comfort and fraternity in a conveniently shared public
illiteracy.
Inter alia,
the classical division of American society into Few and Mass
represents a useful separation of those who are imitators from
those who could initiate real understanding. “The mass,”
said Jose Ortega y Gasset, “crushes beneath it everything
that is different, everything that is excellent, individual,
qualified and select.” Today, in foolish and prospectively
fatal deference to this Mass, the intellectually un-ambitious
American not only wallows lazily in nonsensical political and
cultural phrases of a naked emperor, he or she also applauds
a manifestly shallow national ethos of personal surrender.
“America
First,” yes, but only in Covid-19 mortality.
By definition,
the Mass, or Crowd, can never become Few. Yet, some individual
members of the Mass can make the very difficult transformation.
Those who are already part of the Few must announce and maintain
their determined stance. “One must become accustomed to
living on mountains,” says Nietzsche, “to seeing
the wretched ephemeral chatter of politics and national egotism
beneath one.” It was Nietzsche, too, in Zarathustra, who
warned presciently: “Never seek the Higher Man at the
marketplace.”
Aware that they
may still comprise a core barrier to America’s spiritual,
cultural, intellectual and political disintegration, the Few,
resolute opponents of the Crowd, knowingly refuse to chant in
chorus. Ultimately, they should remind us of something very
important: It is that both individually and collectively, doggedly
staying the course of self-actualization and self-renewal –
a lonely course of lucid consciousness rather than self-inflicted
delusion – is the only honest and purposeful option for
an imperiled nation.
Today, unhindered
in their endlessly misguided work, Trump Era cheerleaders in
all walks of life draw feverishly upon the sovereignty of an
unqualified Crowd. This Mass depends for its very breath of
life on the relentless withering of personal dignity, and also
on the continued servitude of all independent citizen consciousness.
Oddly, “We the people,” frightfully unaware of this
dangerous parasitism, are being passively converted into the
fuel for the omnivorous machine of Trumpian “democracy.”
This is a pathologic system of governance in which the American
citizenry is still permitted to speak and interact freely, but
which is also an anti-intellectual plutocracy.
In the early 1950s, Karl Jaspers, well familiar with the seminal
earlier writings of Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, sought
to explain what a dissembling “Crowd” had brought
to his native Germany and Germany’s captive nations. Publishing
Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time in 1952, the distinguished
German philosopher explained the formidable difficulties of
sustaining Reason among many who would prefer “the fog
of the irrational.” Now, Jaspers’ earlier observations
about Nazi Germany may apply equally well to Donald Trump’s
dissembling America:
