We are witnessing this now with Trump’s instructive actions against Venezuela and his own allies: the nation’s ‘father’ figure imparts the lesson on his people that taking others’ possessions is a purely righteous act simply by virtue of its ‘economic benefits’. The people of the nation thereby become spiritually sickened by this inhuman approach to national selfhood, inured to a sense of exceptionalism and racism: that they are the only “chosen and worthy” ones, while all other people of the earth are merely resources to be extracted after ‘righteous’ pillaging.
This begets the slow descent and decay of the entire concept of nationhood into terminal moral decline to the point where the very fabric of society itself begins to reflect this debasement of values until there is nothing of worth left. A nation which celebrates greed and rapaciousness as pillars of virtue will eventually die from this very spiritual poison: the people thereof become deracinated, spiritless vessels of corporate values, and nothing more, and they reflect these values onto each other as well, which becomes evident in the breakdown of civility and neighborliness. In short, we are witnessing the civic and cultural debasement of the entire populace by the ‘shared values’ instilled of the corrupted political class.
Trump is bringing a business-industry cut-throat thuggishness to world and domestic politics, which he views as some kind of revolutionary ‘patriotism’ he calls ‘America First’. Trump’s treatment at the hands of his Democrat opponents may have also warped his sense of risk-reward. Having survived the various slings and arrows, which include assassination attempts, he may now feel ‘entitled’ to take whatever he wants from the world, achieving glory at any cost simply because he’s now “owed” his greatness by the travails he had fought and suffered through; it is a kind of warped messianic victim-persecution complex at a universal scale that is both dangerous yet, perhaps ultimately, useful to the world.
Such an escalation spiral has no real exit strategy, because the further Trump doubles down, the more enemies and bad-will he engenders which increasingly condemns his future to an unenviable fate: his opponents will likely hunt him for life for all the perceived legal iniquities he committed, both domestic and international. The only way to escape such a spiral is by burning the whole system down behind himself, a kind of anarchic Sunk Cost pedal-to-the-mettle policy of turbo-escalation. Push the system to the breaking point until there is nothing left to “chase him” after he’s done, whether he succeeds in his aims or not; logically speaking, it’s at least a sound strategy.
And through this natural arc, in the spirit of the supernova, the American Age seems to be going supercritical by the combustion of its own runaway excesses. It’s a process that can only stampede forward and may end up engulfing the entire world before it settles because there is far too much blood in its trail for the drivers of the process to ever be able to stop and turn back.
Again, despite how it may sound, this is not a generic slam against Trump because he’s the product of a system, and a long-running culmination of things set into motion long before him. He merely serves as the apostle of a terminal age of American decline, and in some ways cannot be personally blamed since he’s a kind of logical byproduct of everything that the American system has been building toward for decades. Now all we can do is strap in, enjoy the ride, and hope that—in the spirit of true anarchy—he at least takes down the bad along with the good, for all our sakes.
~ Reprinted in part
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