In my previous Facebook post, I pointed to the danger of diagnosing Trump. Placing him in a diagnostic category results in only the category being perceived, along with “fitting” Trump’s actions into that posited category. But, if we stay phenomenological we can be in a position of perceiving the emergence of the “Trump” phenomenon into visibility, speaking in its own terms. I suggested that this appearance will be more frightening than any diagnosis. Diagnostic categories are based on past experience. What we are facing is emerging from the unknown future. I felt this fear again after I read an interview with Trump by TIME magazine (see below)—an interview on truth and falsehood. I have distilled out some pertinent passages that shouted out at me. Here they are:
T: I predicted a lot of things, Michael. Some things that came to you (all) a little bit later.
M: But there’s other things you said that haven’t panned out.
T: Yeah well if you’d look at, in fact I’ll give you … We will see what happens. Look. I predicted a lot of things that took a little of bit of time.
M: But there’s no evidence that 3 million people voted with…
T: We’ll see after the committee. I have people say it was more than that.
M: Is there anything different about making these kinds of predictions without having the factual evidence as President?
T: I’m a very instinctual person, but my instinct (always) turns out to be right.
These few lines sent a tremor through my being and I want to try to give these tremors a voice here. There are two aspects of Trump’s inner life that come into play re: the future. First, he makes decisions regarding the future only on the basis of INSTINCT! Can you grasp the enormity of what is being said here? He gets an instinctual impulse and acts on that basis alone. The second, equally compelling feature of Trump’s inner life is his claim that when he acts on his instinct he is always right. This feature understandably gave the interviewer enormous trouble as he tried to point out to Trump that he had been patently wrong on occasion. Trump’s response is that no, he is always right about his instincts and time will reveal that “rightness” to all.
OK, let’s unpack all this. The person in the most powerful position in the world acts in relation to the future only on the basis of whatever impulse arises, never subjecting that impulse to any moral or psychological interrogation whatsoever. Once the impulse is satisfied in action, he faces the consequences of his decision with the well-developed practice of life-long conmanship or bullshit artistry, which, so far, is derailing the institutions of the US, not to mention the TIME interviewer who tried to challenge him on the “facts”. Like everyone else he failed.
This interview however reveals something critical to navigating the future, for all of us, I think. Trump is telling us, in the naïve way of all those who do not interrogate their motives or look inside at all, for that matter, that he acts on the basis of instinct and that he is always in command of those instinctual impulses. He is the master of his instincts and thus knows where his instincts are taking him, and us, at all times. The master bull shitter is at work here. If we can penetrate the bullshit for the moment, we find a terrifying thought. Since the early Greeks, we have developed cultural practices that have increasingly divorced us from the wisdom of the instincts, requiring, in its place, an external system of values (ethics etc.) so that our conduct can be guided from “without”, as it were, ie by imposed guidelines that we try to live up to. Under these historical circumstances, can any modern man or woman claim that he/she is the master of his or her instincts, repressed as they have been for millennia? Anyone in depth psychology, for example, who enters the depths of psyche will know that powerful instinctual energies do indeed get released, but also will come to understand that such an “interior” journey is fraught with incredible dangers, as instincts collide with moral tenets, or with one another. The released instincts in fact master the ego! However, we have a master conman now in the most powerful position in the world who unthinkingly believes he is the master of his instincts and he reinforces this mad belief by simply arranging or manipulating the consequences so that he “always wins”.
Instinctual life is exuberant Life indeed, as Nietzsche taught with his extraordinary work on “Dionysus”, but it is also madness, suffering, dismemberment and tragedy, and no human being is in control of it, once it is released (Nietzsche went under for example). We cannot control the god! The idea that a modern human being can be in control of the instincts as their now released impulses seek to live through us, is truly a mad idea. And the President of the US holds such a conviction about his own instinctual life!
Are you, too, beginning to tremble yet?
To prepare ourselves for this very uncertain future, we need to consider the following matter, I think: Nihilism has indeed announced the end of traditional values (i.e. externally imposed systems of ethics etc.) We all know this now, although Nietzsche was the modern mouthpiece announcing it to us. Along with this collapse of such systems of external values, the instincts have been released into the world, with all the chaos that such a release brings. This we cannot control. Trump cannot control this. The once repressed instincts and their impulses are taking Trump and us into the future and we cannot control the outcome. At the moment, this released instinctual life has formed an unholy marriage with the mind of a master conman. This is a terrifying combination and we need to be aware of it. It is quite like a man who thinks only bestially—and we have seen many hints of this possibility in Trump’s past actions.
I will end here with two questions for now.
1. What can such a phenomenon of intelligent bestiality “want”, once it finds a human conduit onto the world stage?
and
2. What could the future hold if, instead of the instinctual impulses “marrying” the mind of a master conman, they found a union with a very different kind of mind, say a mind of Love?
Towards developing this second question you might like my essay below:
