May 23rd, 2024
Despite common belief and evidence to the contrary, I don’t like to write political pieces.
In fact, very little of what I’ve written would I consider actually political; most of our arguments and lines of division today come from cultural and moral differences, that get repackaged as shiny political keys by those in power to distract us from the fact that most of the powerful people suck and we are easily manipulated.
That being said, there is something about Donald Trump that I want to talk about, a sentence that encapsulates how I’ve felt for over eight years now:
I don’t like what he does to us.
And I don’t just mean the people who support him.
I mean all of us.
People are wondering where all the conversations have gone; that’s a complicated thing to untangle, but what isn’t hard to see is how quickly we confront one another, not with open minds and benefits of the doubt, but from a place of certainty and eager combat.
The result is near-universal conflict; there is no conversation if even one of the participants refuses to equally exchange ideas for the sake of being aggressively and undeniably right.
This one-sided problem doesn’t belong to one side.
I don’t know if I know anybody, myself included, who hasn’t been there, for a multitude of reasons. I’ve screamed, I’ve been screamed at, I’ve beared witness to screaming, all from a hill that someone refused to die on.
But I don’t know if I’ve ever seen this disorder as severe as I have when it comes to the subject of Donald Trump.
I don’t want to list what he is and isn’t, the things that he’s done and hasn’t; I’m actually not interested in him at all. I’m just trying to diagnose us here.
Radio host Charlamagne tha God said recently that we have become a society that makes every micro thing macro; we blow up the tiniest, stupidest shit, and as a result, we don’t know how to deal with (or talk about) big, real problems.
That’s the real casualty of Donald Trump and these anti-culture wars.
How bad is our inability to accept new information? I’ve done my own testing which, while anecdotal, is telling.
Recently, when I’ve see false information shared on social media, I’ve been commenting. Not with my own feelings or arguments, but with a link to a website that contains facts. I try to make sure that my link is trustworthy; by that, I mean that the articles I use share their own sources, so there is no question to where their information comes from.
Can you guess what happens?
Sometimes, the poster doesn’t react to or comment on my link. Fair. They’re under no obligation to interact with comments on their own post. But do you know what happens more often than not?
They will delete my comment. Or, in some more extreme cases, they will delete their original post, with my comment attached, and repost the exact same thing, my additional context removed.
People cry that the mainstream media is crooked and untrustworthy. But it’s not a faceless organization that lies. It’s people. It’s you.
We have to read more than headlines. We have to see more than masks.
Have you ever heard the theory that the thing people hate or fear the most is the thing that reminds them of themselves?
Cancel culture does not exist, unless you live under a dictatorship and question the leader; you will find yourself buried by the cult of the fascist, and you can see it happening now if you’re paying attention.
I’ve been reading René Girard lately (which could be its own essay) and his big themes of mimetic behavior and desire and the role of the scapegoat could not be more relevent; it’s why I’ve decided to write all this today.
We copy one another to learn how to be human, and when our desires mix with the broken system of capitalism, chaos and violence ensues.
Using Girard’s observations as a warning, a scary but relevant question remains: what has to die to make society whole again?
The Den 