I cannot help myself:
Donald Trump is so much on my mind right now that I find traces of him
everywhere, in a vain attempt to get my head around the whole Trump phenomenon
and generally to figure out what the hell is going on in the world right now.
Currently I am reading a lot of Dostoyevski, and I just stumbled across the
following passage in his (quite fabulous, I must say) Notes from Underground, which strikes me as providing an
explanation that is as good as any other that I’ve heard so far:
Man
really is stupid, phenomenally stupid. That is, he’s by no means stupid, but
rather he’s so ungrateful that it would be hard to find the likes of him. I,
for example, would not be the least bit surprised if suddenly, out of the blue,
amid the universal future reasonableness, some gentleman of ignoble, or,
better, of retrograde and jeering physiognomy, should emerge, set his arms
akimbo, and say to us all: “Well, gentlemen, why don’t we reduce all this
reasonableness to dust with one good kick, for the whole purpose of sending all
these logarithms to the devil and living once more according to our own stupid
will!” That would still be nothing, but
what is offensive is that he’d be sure to find followers: that’s how man is arranged.
In other words, there
is no rational explanation. People simply got fed up with being reasonable and
with being expected to behave reasonably. They saw an opportunity and seized
it. Man’s ‘wanting’, as the underground man would say, has shaken off its
fetters once again.
Source: Notes from Underground, translated by
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Everyman’s Library, p. 24-5.
I am also thinking about Trump and like you think he is a disaster that in time will fail.
ReplyDeleteOverall though, he is doing us a favour, showing human kind its real governing ways and advancement of Civilization.
Ironically and perversely, Trump is helping human governance move ahead.