And the Truth Shall Make You Huge: Trumpian Nihilism in an Age of Apathetic Narcissism

I generally don’t discuss politics. Not because they aren’t important, and not because I don’t have opinions on them, and not because I’m cynical and don’t care. No, it’s more because I want to start discussions at the roots of things – and politicians nowadays are too far gone for that; however much they may pretend to talk about religion, they’re functional materialists and the general system keeps them from being otherwise.

The systems are pinned in place by an oligarchy retaining the honorific title of democracy much as the British monarch is still called “queen.” And this oligarchy is invested in making people consumers rather than questioners. Consumers are more politically convenient because you can bribe them – but questioners can be stickier. Since the time of Socrates, the common practice has been to kill them – but we are humane now and do it quietly and less publicly rather than giving them hemlock.

I am reluctant to talk about politics, and moreso to talk about American politics as a Canadian – we after all have our own “sunny ways” to deal with, the pearl path leading to a legalized euthanasia with no provision for those mentally ill most vulnerable to murder. In spite of my reluctance, however, I was struck into speech by the recent video of Ted Cruz’s engagement with a Donald Trump supporter, and that because of the supporter’s rhetorical stance. The terrifying thing is that facts don’t seem to matter. Of course, like that supporter, I did have questions about whether what Cruz was saying was true – because our world is now such that we all try to get away with lies because nobody checks the sources anymore – lies from Trump and lies from Cruz are probably not that different, and who knows anyway?

But the thing that gives me pause is that, rather than adopting a cautious skepticism about the whole enterprise, the protester has clearly decided that everything is shit anyway, and one person’s shit is not much better or worse than that of another – so he’ll just go with the shiniest shit. It feels right to be a Trump supporter – to believe whatever I simply want to believe – and so he does it. It would be a shame to let facts get in the way – or, for that matter, the very difficulty itself of knowing real facts. Indeed, neglect of this last is the real problem, and it is a problem not simply with the masses and the yokels and the rednecks. No, it is a problem I lay firmly at our feet – the wages of academics, and journalists, and intelligentsia – because ours is the failure in curation of wisdom and knowledge.

Let’s put it another way. Knowledge and wisdom are always hard to obtain, always uncertain, always difficult. We’ve known this since the time of Socrates. But aided in our illusions by modern technology, we’ve assumed that we’re a step ahead, that we somehow know more and are wiser. Indeed, I’m not sure how we would or could know this, and I read an interesting article the other day on the “half life” of facts – how what we ostensibly know gets garbled and breaks down so that even ostensible mythbusting stories are themselves subject to mythology – we always know less than we know. The day will come when some of the things we believe currently will look as silly as geocentrism does to us now – though even our catty denigration of past scientific errors such as geocentrism is itself merely a way of compensating for a certain kind of smallness we feel in ourselves.

But the real deadly thing is that we don’t in fact have either more knowledge or more wisdom to know what to do with it than our forbears, but we are deeply committed to the illusion that we do. It’s the premise of modern capitalism – if you have a problem, our knowledge can fix it, for a price – and a myth we must sustain for the system to keep going.

When suddenly the desert dwellers realize that sand has been all about them all the time – that it is precisely no more nor less difficult to get than in the past – the business of sand salespersons is going to get bad. And so it’s their business to ramp things into hysterics – to frighten and excite the desert dwellers into buying sand lest they start to doubt and get it themselves in the only way people have ever gotten sand – collection, sifting, and endurance.

But such doubt is strong – doubt of the fake in favour of the real – and so it takes huge – one might even say “yuge” – resistance. The systems are therefore bent against it rhetorically into manifold illusions backed by power, and it is no wonder that people despair in such a culture. And it is despair we’re encountering more than anything else in this little clip; to offer my own paraphrase, the attitude here is roughly as follows:

It’s all lies anyway. So – it was on TV? Everything is on TV. It was said publicly? I wasn’t there – can’t trust anyone who was anyway – and so can’t consider it a factor. Was I covering the election point by point and thoroughly? No, I was busy being exhausted trying to make a living and didn’t have any energy left to cultivate the Sherlock Holmes skills it seems to take to cut through the crap – if it can be cut through, and if there’s anything other than crap, which I doubt. I can’t see beyond my own eyes – so why not go with what I feel? Scandal? That’s a relic of days when we used to believe things. Might makes right? It’s only a problem if there is a rightness and wrongness somehow other than might – and that I doubt. I can’t see beyond my own eyes.

And why would they try? We promised them the moon with our wisdom and knowledge and expertise, and haven’t delivered. And further, putting all our eggs in one basket, we abandoned that historical steam valve for doubt and failure and questions, the Socratic method that elegantly keeps such questioning from descending into hopeless nihilism that tears the world apart. We jettisoned the lifeboats to make room for the party on our brave-new-world titanic of a yacht – and now the ship is sinking. The band has stopped playing, and it is they who once taught us how to doubt – and to die – well. It is they who taught us the ars moriendi – but who needs silly Latin words after all? Facts, knowledge, and wisdom? We’re going to do one better and make our lives great again. You’ll see. It’s going to be huge.