Let’s go back to 1984. The book. Reagan. Then let’s go further back to WW2. Then WW1. These are all keys toward understanding the clear and present danger. And of course hate, dissent, and the obfuscation of all these elements, creating a picture, maybe a film, whose image changes, according to fed back information , real or imaginary.
What does this picture look like?
Is it overly magnified, way out of proportion, larger then life, bizarrely grotesque? Or, is it diminutive, shrunken by psychiatric jargon assailed from all sides as immaterial and insignificant, propped up by those who seem to need a link between the needs/wants of society qua the individual Joe Shmoe & those who are ok with confusion and chaos.
Can a narrative be written , incorporating all elements of the social fabric into a cohesive whole, where causes and effects naturally flow , or are they the jerkish spasms of a dying world as we know it?
I don’t mean to narrate an extremely long and tedious indulgent social hypothesis, but only touch upon some highlights to support, yes , support the politician Trump, rather than the man.
Prior to WW1, the air was pregnant with doubt, as to the direction that the world would take in the brand new twentieth century, taking a breather from the horrors of social revolutions, the latest of which still cast the long shadow of the 1848 revolutions. From here to 1900 is a mere hop and a jump,50 years, beset by doubt as to the universal implications of the rabid onslaught of unbridled Capitalism, especially in the very young United States.
Europe, still stung by the newness of the successes of anti monarchal systems, where classic forms of authority and privilege sustained society for a thousand years, needed time to adjust. This adjustment called on the simulation of the new regimes springing up, and based on the simulation of the new money aristocracy.
This is really not new: With backward glance it could be asserted that the buying of titles were seeded around the time of the dependence of autocratic control on the new pockets of accumulated wealth.
Marx saw this trend, very early on, and his vision was fifty percent intuitive, and fifty percent based on the new tools of capital excercised on workers. communism grew out of this visionary probable scenario, and immediately grew to very large proportions. The mirror of credibility inflated its grasp to be able to offer competitive edge to the very substantial system of capital. They started to interact, and the image went through various changes, revising earlier appearent outcomes, based on the interaction. At first, the image was innocent and barely touched by antimony, but very soon, the age of revolution of the 19 th century, took up again the threads of unfinished business, and empires shook and sank as a result of years of conflict between major powers.
WW1 had resulted in tremendous losses, and the whole world shuddered and shook. What was it all about? The Hapsburg Empire lit up like a dry keg, lit by a Serb, a Baltic country in the belly of the beast. The underbelly, a particular interest of Mr. Hitler, who
Priotorized it as the area of extreme strategic and political importance. As WW2 grew out of the same unresolved issues as the ones WW1, one needs to ask the question what were the most basic underlying ones.
The birth of communism, as a Reaction against unbridled capitalism, the social political atmosphere sought a catharsis, from the possible implosion into a centerless void of immense power. It was a cyclone of immeasurable power, whose techno simulation became a reality with the invention of the ultimate power machine, the nuclear bomb.
What was missing to create such unearthly force , challenging life itself?
The void in the center, the Kantian synthesis, at the very bottom, a silent diabolical seed waiting not merely to grow exponentially, but transforming the various elements into a unified picture of a devouring monster, a creature so full of uncertainty, fear, desire, loathing, envy, and lust to power, -all concentrated into a simplification ad absurdism, that it did not take much to create the tinder box.
The synthesis was that totalizied seed , of the flower of evil, it started on a naive and innocent aesthetics, an aesthetics that conjoined with Kierkegaard’s substitution for god, conjoined with the darkness of decay. The decay set in early, unnoticibly at first, and ultimately, the survivors were those, who could by the use of their will, attain the power to control and substitute that control for those who lost it. A new method of pedigree and entitlement immediately took root, and these new growths grew tremendously strong in a very short time, compared to the thousand year old roots of the ancient regime.
Time was of the essence, and manipulation became the tool by which such deep roots could be unearthed.
But now, competing social programs caused conflicts of universal significance, and the world was at war for most of the twentieth century. The center was bever really defined, but the synthesis was bracketed and held at bay , like a sacred lamp, holding on to its past blaming curative effect, more a spiritual idea, than an actual device.
This synthetic vision, took on various forms, and the latest was fascism, a so called pure idea, insulated from the stupidity, arrogance and lack in identity of the mob, while at the same time, retaining the original forms of its antithesis, not the unnatural substantive one, but the one which contained within its own form the form of its antecedent content.
This return was forecasted, and it became seen as the necessary tool to sustain a world without gods.
Now reel foreward, and we are in the middle of the Vietnam War, and Nixon tricks the machine, to sustain a worthless Indo-China War, for fear of loosing an essentially chaotic center to the maelstrom of huge Capitalistic-Communist conflict, with again, no resolution in sight, between them, and sensing the recurrence of the huge gap between combatants, perhaps sensing an immediate need of resolution. But he knew and feared again the new fascism, and he warned it publicly, among those his friend, Mr.Trump.
Now the Reagan years seem to put balm on the age old wound, and things quieted down for a while. But again, crisis appeared on the horizon, the most severe was the one they called the greatest threat to democracy since the Great Depression, :, the Great Recession.
The long held weaknesses of the system again manifested their Marxian sources, and the time became alarming.
Obama was put into office, to amaliate consensus on the possible causes of dissatisfaction being the racial divide.
They did not intend to elevate Trump , he being the most clever opportunist since McCarthy. He was perfect, a cure to demolish the last bastion of doubt, in the most basic sense of our man Descartes, that yes the system will work, because the center consisted of the uktimate symbol which literally belongs within the framework of his own reference.
There is no doubt about the meaning of the middle, because he is he new king, the autocrat, who has access to the tools of the technocrat of 1984, a predicted symbol, a recurrence to the time of magical powers, with which to manipulate the will of others.
Meanwhile, life has been given the last chance, live in the most absurdly reduced synthesis of all times, and really there is no escape, no exit from it, since there is no real going back to the sources of power, it has been bracketed at a point, where further descent would have meant madness, annihilation, or both.
Trump is the necessary evil genius of doubt, the Orvellian Faust , indispensable as he is unappreciated.
He may even come to see himself the victim drawn in, to actually save man from himself.
As strange as he is, he is the perfect, pitiful, but indispensable post humanist solution.
This realization can actually turn all opinion of him on a dime to the very opposite of appraisal, the original thesis reappears as if emerging from some hidden depth, and Trump will no longer be an individual seeking for himself a place in history, but one who has been elevated there by the sheers course of states of affair caused by opportunity, accessibility and a strange turn of events. Call it luck.
Mine and most everybody’s problem is reconciliation, in spite of not recognizing the very quickly emerging center.
If not for that , perhaps, then would come the deluge.