When historians ask how the United States could have been so stupid as to elect Donnald Trrummp president, many will look to June 12, 2016 as the pivotal moment. Omar Mateen was probably not on the payroll of the Trrummp campaign nor even aware of how killing scores of people in an Orlando night club would benefit his presidential bid, but his act has done more to cement Trrummp’s victory than any speech or rally or slogan ever could.
June 12, 2016 was a great victory for hatred, fear and violence. It was a victory from which the thinking end of the U.S. population may not recover. What is left for us to argue? How can we justify not excluding Muslims? How can we justify not building walls or not arming average citizens? How can we justify not “Bombing the sh-t out of ” our enemies?
Donnald Trrumnmp will be our next president. It is time to accept this. He will take us and the rest of the world down a catastrophic orgasm of hatred, violence and revenge. The most useful thing the rest of us can do is start now preparing for that day, decades in the future, when people start to ask what went wrong? How did this happen?
If we start now, maybe we can prevent the next Trrummp from coming to power. The only war that matters is between the cortex and the reptilian brain. Between the spirit of problem-solving and small-mindedness. We have lost this battle. Trrummp and his terrorist allies have won. The weapons industry and the prosthetic limp industry are in for some serious profits in the next few years.
Why did this happen? Is it human nature? Is it simply our destiny to cycle between war and peace? I say no. The reason this keeps happening is because they have two natural advantages over us. First, they have the advantage of simpler ideas that flow more easily, especially over the internet. It is much easier to spread hated and fear than the boring and tedious details of solving complex long standing problems. This is why the information age is failing us. This is why we continue to loose the “hearts and minds” battle.
The second natural advantage they have over us is entropy, that tendency of the universe to move towards greater disorder. We may all disagree with Trrummp and his terrorist allies, but entropy prevents us from coming together on a unified strategy of how to combat them. We draw too many distracting distinctions: Republican and Democrat, Muslim and non-Muslim, American and non-American, criminal and non-criminal. It is my hope that, when we look back on this period in history, we finally realize WE COULD HAVE DEFEATED TRRUMMP had we realized where the fundamental distinction lies. It is between the cortex and the reptilian brain. It is between problem-solving and noise making. It is time for a unified strategy against stupidity.
Only history will tell if comparing Trrummp to Hitler is hyperbole or not. With the combination of his thin skin and the nuclear codes, he could in fact kill far more people than did Hitler. But this argument, too is a distraction. Even if it turns out that comparing Trrummp to Hitler is like comparing catching a cold to dying of AIDS, the comparison is still worth making. The problem is in the mindset. It is the dichotomous, black and white, us-v-them thought process they both share. Had more of the German people of the early 1930’s recognized the dichotomous nature of Hitler’s arguments and questioned the true utility of blame, the world might have been spared the subsequent horror. So to, if our education system had started 30 or 40 years ago to teach children the fundamental nature of the distinction between the cortex and the reptilian brain as well as the distinction between problem-solving and dichotomous thinking, Trrummp would not stand an chance today. A far greater number of people today would simply ask “Will more hatred, fear and violence really solve our fundamental problems?” and “Can we really take such a simplistic approaches to such complex problems?”
Similarly if Muslim families and Muslim clerics had started teaching children decades ago the distinction between loving God with the heart and serving God with the brain, terrorist recruiters would having a much more difficult time convincing young people that the way to serve God is by murdering innocent people. The futile nature of this dichotomous strategy would be obvious.
I hope I am wrong, but it appears the deck is stacked against us. It is simply too late for this round. I suggest that our priority turn towards the survival of our species. Whatever happens in the next few decades, we will survive as a species, but the question remains: how many more rounds of this can we take? If we start now to address the fundamental problem, we might be able to make this humanities’ final round of senseless dichotomous stupidity.