You cannot defend against it any more than you can joust with ghosts.
Trump is a symptom, not a cause - the embodiment of the inexorable collective decay of the idea of “America”, set against the slow collapse of a global order built on forgotten consensuses.
Empires and structures inevitably decay and ultimately fail in the same way - reification of that which was once novel, the pollution of minds with layers of abstraction so divorced from any objective reality that they find irreconcilable differences in the symbol maps they use to describe their world.
Abstract, abstract, abstract,
my hat is red,
your hat is blue
that is why -
I hate you.
Like with Newton, any force you exert against an object will be met with an exact opposing force. The net result is just the production of waste energy. The fight becomes the system.
I earnestly think the best thing we can be doing with our time against this backdrop is preserving knowledge and building stable islands of coherency amidst the growing chaos. The dark ages are often blamed on Christianity, but the reality is more that they were a result of the might of Rome - people forgot how to do things, how to exist in a society, as rather than understanding these things themselves, they relied upon the map that was handed to them and took it as reality.
That’s the risk we face now. Not Trump. Not whatever comes next - but the slow, uncomprehending loss of the ability to make sense of the world at all.
Trump is a symptom, not a cause - the embodiment of the inexorable collective decay of the idea of “America”, set against the slow collapse of a global order built on forgotten consensuses.
Empires and structures inevitably decay and ultimately fail in the same way - reification of that which was once novel, the pollution of minds with layers of abstraction so divorced from any objective reality that they find irreconcilable differences in the symbol maps they use to describe their world.
Like with Newton, any force you exert against an object will be met with an exact opposing force. The net result is just the production of waste energy. The fight becomes the system.I earnestly think the best thing we can be doing with our time against this backdrop is preserving knowledge and building stable islands of coherency amidst the growing chaos. The dark ages are often blamed on Christianity, but the reality is more that they were a result of the might of Rome - people forgot how to do things, how to exist in a society, as rather than understanding these things themselves, they relied upon the map that was handed to them and took it as reality.
That’s the risk we face now. Not Trump. Not whatever comes next - but the slow, uncomprehending loss of the ability to make sense of the world at all.