On Abusing Words to Make them Mean Things

We want to believe that we use our language to promote our morals or to describe our situation—we want to believe that the origin of language is a desire to know or a desire to do what is or what is right in reference to what is. But it turns out that our language, in its whole compass, exists in other ways from other causes that at best are in tension with these which we want to believe or at worst simply overwhelms them and uses them for cover, like the wolf who kills the sheep and wears its skin to kill other sheep. Nietzsche was obsessed with this other thing as power. The will to power. Instinct, the unconscious—there are various ways to formulate this (but again, we’re using the belief what we are using language to find out what is when we say this and not admitting that we too are caught in this other dynamic of language, more profound, more frightening). Our concepts are arranged to make it possible for us to do certain things, act certain ways, gather to ourselves what we are really after, be it power or security or freedom from fear or the illusion of immortality or love or meaning.

On Beauty. What is it?

If you ask, “What is beauty” you are assuming that something exists which the concept “beauty” applies to. How do you know this? Why do you assume it? Can you ask whether your assumption is true without first having an understanding of what beauty is? Are you therefore not really asking, “When I use the word beauty, what do I mean?” And if that is the question you are asking, aren’t you avoiding the question of whether “beauty” exists? Is there any way out of this closed circle? Is it actually possible to ask, on its own terms, the question, “What is beauty?”

The Fear of the Trump Voter

A somewhat tentative analysis.

The sins, the shortcomings, the failures of Donald Trump are so obvious, so blatant, so in-your-face, and have been for so long and have been repeated so often that those who wish to deny, excuse, or defend him have decided long since that have no use for evidence and no interest in rational judgment regarding this man. Think about it. He ridiculed a disabled man on national television. He repeatedly called for violence to deal with interruptions during his campaign rallies, he bragged about sexual assault, he defended white supremacists, he made disgusting and racist statements about countries whose populations are not primarily white, he declared that a judge of Mexican heritage could not do his job because of his owns disparaging remarks against Mexicans, he cheated innumerable investors (and not just in his phony “university”), and on and on. One could so easily add to the list of the obvious, indisputable examples of insensitivity, stupidity, incompetence and racism. One could spend all day on examples of his irrational hatred of Muslims or his moronic rejection of climate change or his baseless promotion of birtherism. His own political party is composed mainly of people who either openly oppose him or (despite hardly disguised loathing) praise and defend him in the hope of using the power his position represents. And there is also a third group, small by comparison but not insignificant of those who actually support him, who think he’s doing a good job, who defend Trump sincerely. This group has two camps: people who are as morally and intellectually just like him—a sizable group of deplorable people—and those who for some other reason remain blind to the obvious.

This latter group is the only group I find interesting. It’s small. It’s benighted. But the people in it, in their hearts, want to do the right thing. They actually think Trump is a good idea. It's hard to figure them out. Their reaction makes no sense given the obvious. And yet there must be some explanation. They think he’s keeping them safe. They have a kind of religious devotion to the man. Many of them in fact are religiously driven, though their religious faith is just another manifestation of the same impulse that drives them to support Trump. They watch FOX news and allow themselves to be convinced by whatever shallow, slippery, partisan defense the rhetorists and sophists can dream up. Trump baits Kim Jung Un and threatens to provoke nuclear war, but these people still think he’s keeping them safe. What could their motivation be if not fear? I have tried to come up with some other possible motivation for these people, but I cannot, at least not without getting into the sordid territory raked over by the likes of Freud and Lacan. The simple explanation always comes back to fear. Fear does not lead to clear thinking.

The question is whether this small group of otherwise good people who refuse to see what is right in front of them and who grope around for any broken stick of a reason that might allow them to pretend to themselves that his obvious racism, sexism, moronism, inveterate dishonesty—that all of his myriad sins and stupidities are just superficial appearances that hide the real, deep, honest patriot underneath, whether these people can by any means be made to see what is right in front of them? Probably not. The tactic of picking the decayed thing up up and sticking it under their noses isn’t working. But what would it take? If it could be done, the obvious first step would be to remove the fear. If they weren’t afraid of the things they think Trump can protect them from, they could see that he not only can’t protect them, everything he does makes the fearful situation worse. It would work, but it won’t happen. You can’t take away the fear because the fear itself is not irrational. These otherwise sincere Trump supporters have badly misdiagnosed the causes and therefore the solutions. (So many of them are afraid of Muslims but not the private ownership of guns.) But even that is something they are incapable of seeing. It would take a slightly more subtle analysis than exposure of Trump’s incompetence—and that takes no analysis at all, just ears or eyeballs. If you can’t see that the dancing monkey is a dancing monkey, if you pick up the pile of dog shit and smell it and taste is and still don’t recognize it as feces, how could you possibly become willing to see that you have misdiagnosed your fear?

So we can’t expect real progress in changing hearts and opening eyes, not even otherwise good hearts and working eyes. The job then, perhaps, lies in controlling our own counterproductive anger and frustration. Those things will persist. But directing them toward the individuals who cannot see is counterproductive. We can’t change their minds. We can’t relieve them of their fears or even reduce or redirect them. We have to direct our frustration and anger toward political action and not toward people whose only power is their vote. We won’t change their vote.