Every now and again, I try to reason with readers who’re supporters of Donald Trump.
I know better. Or at least I should. But on some days I have a difficult time believing that people intelligent enough to peruse these pages (i.e., to read and understand what I write) are also people who’re gullible enough to RSVP for a Kool-Aid party hosted by a suicide cult.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, a lot of you are religious, and that’s self-evidently insane too. There’s nothing less rational about voting for Trump than believing the historical Jesus was born to a virgin 1,978 years before the advent of IVF. And still more of you are prone to other sorts of gullibility, wishful thinking and fanciful narratives, even if you wouldn’t vote for Trump to save your life.
Trump and I are different in too many ways to count, but we’re the same in some respects. The Trump supporters among you are encouraged to consider the following as you ponder your vote and as you think about life in general.
If you could ensnare Trump in Wonder Woman’s truth lasso, you’d discover a man who isn’t any sort of religious, who knows he has no business being president of anything, let alone the United States, and who’s wittingly engaged in a highly successful effort to exploit human gullibility, naivety and stupidity purely for personal gain because he knows, like I know and like every cynical, cold-hearted bastard ever born knows, that personal gain is all there is.
You get glimpses of Trump’s truth occasionally. Like the time he allegedly called dead American servicemembers “suckers.” I wouldn’t use the word “suckers,” but I understand where Trump was going with that remark: He knows, like I know, that the only worthy “cause” is self-preservation or its ambitious cousin, self-interest. Anything which doesn’t contribute to self-preservation or self-interest is at best a waste of time. Most people refuse to concede that. Most people need to pretend there’s more to life, because the psychological burden of the truth — that life’s meaningless — is too much to bear. So people take up and fight for causes, most of them nebulous, all of them contrived in one way or another. God. Country. Democracy. Freedom. And so on.
That’s great if you’re someone like Trump. Or like me. We get all the benefits that accrue from belonging to a collective organized around causes and principles, some of which are conducive to societal well-being through common goals and cooperation, but thanks to near universal naivety, we don’t actually have to participate or contribute.
Successful societies represent a triumph over the collective action dilemma. The vast majority of people eschew the temptation to pursue their own narrow, myopic self-interest because they realize that cooperation is better for everyone in the long run. Free riders are inevitable. The difference between a free rider and a freeloader is that the former’s strategic, the latter’s typically just lazy. Trump and I are free riders. We know there are more than enough suckers to pay taxes, fight wars, work jobs and so on, such that American life’s likely to go on whether we do our part or not. So why do our part? Why not just do whatever the hell we want? Self-interest being the only worthy cause.
The difference between Trump and I is that I’m content to just be on the “right” side of the societal free-rider problem. You’re all suckers, I’m not, and I’m satisfied with the benefits that accrue to me passively from that juxtaposition. Trump’s not so easily sated. He wants his passive, societal free-rider benefits, but he also wants to actively exploit the gullibility on the other side of the sucker continuum, both for monetary and political gain. That I can’t so much abide, and frankly I’m not sure why.
I don’t go in for normative statements. There’s no such thing as “right” and “wrong,” so I don’t think Trump’s “wrong” to actively exploit the gullible. To monetize, figuratively and literally, the “suckers.” Maybe it’s that I envy the purity of Trump’s unflinching egotism. I’m genuinely impressed sometimes by the unadulterated nature of his rapacity and the absoluteness of his amorality. I’ve sold poison as a palliative, but never as a cure. I’ve sold opinion as authoritativeness, but never lies as truth. I’ve engaged in cynical manipulation, but never predatory deceit. Perhaps I do have some moral compass that I just don’t recognize. Trump doesn’t.
The larger the society, the less impactful individual free riders generally are. In a collective comprised of just five people collaborating towards a common goal, one self-interested person can tank the whole project. In a society of 330 million people, it takes millions — tens of millions, even — to jeopardize the goals and achievements of the polity.
That’s one of the many marvels of Trump: One free rider’s efforts to actively exploit society’s suckers in pursuit of money and power threatens to undermine the greatest collective achievement — the establishment and maintenance of the world’s most successful experiment in representative government — of a nation comprised of so many millions. The prospect of Americans voting away their democracy in November is an ironic testament to the boundless grandeur of Trump’s heedlessness.
Of course, the classical example of societal death-by-free-rider is low voter turnout. “Every vote counts,” except that it really doesn’t. Your individual vote isn’t going to make the difference next month, so if you have something better to do on November 5, you should do it. As The New York Times put it two years before Trump was elected in 2016, “many people who value democracy count on others to carry the load for them.” That’s a free-rider problem. Indeed, that’s the free-rider problem in democracies.
Who knows, maybe I’ll vote this year for the first time in my life.
Very interesting perspective. The type of articles I enjoy the most other than your Mideast and “conventional” politics coverage.
I wonder, if everyone suddenly subscribes/wakes up to this thinking frame and decides it is infinitely better to be on the free rider side, what happens to the collective social edifice?
(A similar question has been raised in these pages i recall: what if everyone now aspires to be millionaire traders or tech entrepreneurs, who will deliver the pizzas?)
One can argue that it is unlikely to happen because it is statistical reality that the majority are suckers.
One can also argue that it is likely to happen because the majority are self-interested creatures with no genuine care for fellow human beings, so will jump over to the other side once realizing it exists.
Anyway, what if we expand the definition of “self-interest” to include the intangibles (like the pleasure from knowing one is of value/service to her tribe)? Does it then lead to the reasoning that the tendency to be suckers has been baked into our genes as a species, as expounded by Maslow’s hierarchy?
Another thought, seems like the divide is not suckers vs free riders/freeloaders, but a spectrum of sorts. On one end lie the unapologetic amoral grifters, on the other the self-sacrificing souls fighting for honor/whatever cause, while the majority lies somewhere in between: people who break some rules and exploit various loopholes here and there but by and large conform to social norms and laws.
Funny story: This one came about because I got stranded at the construction site of a Smoky Mountain retreat I’m having built. There was some confusion about the placement of my car port and I ended up having to sit out there for several hours. All I had was my stripped down Mac Air and a faint WiFi signal, so chart-based articles were out of the question. I had to put something else out for the afternoon, so I just started typing and ended up with this.
These types of articles are some of your best. You will have to promise us that when you are at your retreat, you will occasionally turn off Starlink.
As a mother, I can’t help but think how proud of you, your parents are/would be. Sounds like you had some very rough times in your life- but it really isn’t about the mistakes and failures; it is where you go from there.
I definitely think of you as “a teacher”, and I also sense that this isn’t your last chapter. Thanks for your prolific writing- I look forward to reading everything you write.
You’re always kind. Thankfully, the Smoky Mountain build isn’t so far out that I need Starlink, although yesterday’s experience certainly prompted me to consider getting some kind of backup WiFi for when I’m out there. It’s a super-cool build. Small — 1,900 sq ft — but that was actually ~500 sq ft more than I wanted out of this project. I’ll prob work some pictures of it into an article once it’s done. Supposed to be finished in mid- to late-December (which invariably means mid-January, if I’m lucky). I’m not so sure about the dining choices and so on in the nearest town, but I will say it’s quite a bit — which is to say dramatically — less abrasive from a kind of in-your-face Dolly Parton perspective than it was the last time I was there ~20 years ago.
If you accept the premise that everything is meaningless – the more accurate thing to say, though, would be that we have no convincing evidence to conclude that anything is meaningful, but it’s unclear if it follows that everything is meaningless since it’s not a natural science question where there is a clear default in the absence of evidence – then you might as well pursue psychological goods, such as happiness/life satisfaction, rather than material goods, since it’s undefined which is better. It’s also unclear how strong the correlation between excessive material goods and happiness is, and if you had to choose it might be rational to choose happiness over material self-interest. It might even be preferable to be able to be happy in the absence of material goods. At least it’s difficult to argue that being a sucker is objectively bad, if the sucker in question believes it’s good to be a sucker.
Assuming that anything “good” or constructive will come out of the pursuit of psychological goods depends on how much you share the definition of “good” with the person making the choice, and it might not align with a “species survival” perspective. If happiness is good, it is then rational from an individual’s psychological goods economy perspective to deny climate change if climate change makes the individual unhappy and the individual in question does not have preconceptions, such as a realistic understanding of the likely outcome of climate change which the individual is convinced of and associates a personal negative psychological goods value with that outcome occurring, which the individual is unable to overcome and which prevents that individual from receiving the psychological goods otherwise received from climate change denial. Framed so, an ideological conversion would mean overcoming previous psychological obstacles to receiving the psychological goods from the ideology and would be rational in itself for the individual in question, even though the ideology might not be harmonious with a rationalistic understanding of the external world. Additional assumptions such as inborn group empathy, rationality and ability to perceive the external world accurately are needed for it to be assured that an individual’s pursuit of psychological goods will usually lead to humane and rational choices for society. Unfortunately, human rationality and empathy have known limitations which are becoming more relevant in the modern era.
I think everything that lives does so at the expense of something else that lives.
No one gets out alive. So while you’re here do as little harm as you can and try to amuse, and assist your fellow passengers when the opportunities present.
And always vote so as to support the suckers whether they are so by choice or misfortune.
Someone has to collect the garbage. Teach the kids. Grow the food. Change the bedpans.
Mr. Heisenberg your writings fully pull your weight in my opinion.
Thanks for lessening the feelings of isolation these times can produce.
Question.
You wrote, “I don’t go in for normative statements. There’s no such thing as “right” and “wrong,…”
Isn’t that itself a normative statement?
I don’t remember just how long I have been reading your work but long enough to know you have helped a lot of people by educating us about more than just finance . I remember how broad the response was to the health struggles you faced some time ago and how heartfelt it was. If you are finding yourself in a dark place I hope you will keep walking til you get past it. You don’t have to post this generally but I wanted you to know what I thought.
No, I dare say I’ve never been in a happier place than I am today (and just over the past seven or so years in general). Of course, as every regular reader knows, “happy” is a highly relative term when it comes to my general disposition, but that aside, I’d rank the HR years among my personal happiest times.
It’s really quite simple. Human history is a story of narcissists and sociopaths will do anything to accrue power, riches and sexual gratification with little or no consequences. Society rewards antisocial behavior at the top of the human food chain. We admire scum bags, grifters and finance bros and before them, generals, Lords, shamans and kings.
The Rococo period was the first time in human history where “the pursuit of happiness” ever became a thing. In the greater scheme of things “happiness” is modern and not guaranteed. The grifters, scumbags and filthy rich only care about themselves. Ayn Rand is the current role-model of this new Machiavellianism.
“Every now and again, I try to reason with readers who’re supporters of Donald Trump.”
Sorry, this can’t be done.
Come on, Walt, do the right thing and vote.
I really enjoyed this piece. We share many of the same thoughts and beliefs. I will say that having a child somewhat changed my perspective on the meaning of life but overall, it is meaningless. You come and you go. That’s it.
H you are far from a free rider.
And occasionally, mankind is blessed with someone like this:
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/monk-billionaire-5hourenergy-irs-573c764b?st=xoXLxq&reflink=article_copyURL_share
My subscription was originally a self-centered act of education but you have given a bit of meaning to it. I can now delude myself by counting the 1900 square foot retreat as a worthy expenditure that in a very small way I contributed actively to.
I really appreciate the strategic decision framing. I have been trying recently to sort through what my future life looks like. I think a bit of categorization into strategic vs. self centered framing might give me more satisfaction in the long term. However this is but one lense of a virtually infinite variety from which we can evaluate ourselves.
In all though understanding what ails us as a society and specifically the orange cancer is helpful. Even if to see more of what supporters might hang on to. Do they sense the value of the strategy you illustrate to convince themselves that Donnie is a person who has got it? Or are they so far gone into repulsion of helping others that the mere whiff of such a person smells like a perfume?
Thank you again for your thoughtfulness and skill at sharing.
Wonderful effort, H, per usual…A couple crucial differences between you and Trump…I consider him to be a defective human being who is incapable of ever being happy or satisfied…you admit to such (not the defective part), and he cannot, as has no reflective potential (it seems at this point)…crucial…potential deadly…voter turnout please…
hope your new retreat works out and looking forward to the house warming party…
Can we surprised that a vigorous call for vengeance (however misguided) is answered? and answered vigorously?
“The residual imbalance highlights the fundamental absurdity of capitalism in its late stage: When you start paying people fair wages, the system gets a seizure — the economy can’t take it because inflation spirals out of control. It is addicted to easy access to cheap labor and chronically underpaid workers and will resist any correction in that respect. This exposes the dark core of the entire ideology: In a system which is based on a systematic devastation of everything that refuses to submit to the profit of the strongest, poverty automatically becomes an essential part of politics and policy and not an unfortunate outcome of meritocracy and competition. The absurdity of commitment to this policy is that if the engine of growth (and progress) is based on picking the pockets of the poor, this plan cannot be sustainable in the long run. And neither can be the political response to it — by denying reality to the facts, reality will not change, no matter how far boundaries of absurdity are stretched.
There is an unmistakable feeling that the final stage of market capitalism as we know it has already arrived, and that this idea is rapidly penetrating consensus. What we are experiencing in real time is a triumph of capitalism’s self-cannibalization taking place in an accelerated mode.
This is the final phase of a long process, which originated at what Elias Cannetti calls the vanishing point when mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn’t notice [6]. We managed to leave reality by achieving the escape velocity through persistent acceleration fueled by technology and media-driven modernity as well as the speed of economic and political exchanges that have set loose a tempo of liberation, whereby we have become removed from the sphere of reference to [reality] [7]. We have left the horizon where the real was possible because the gravitational pull of self-reflection was no longer strong enough for things to remain in its orbit.”
https://heisenbergreport.com/2023/06/21/has-the-final-stage-of-market-capitalism-arrived/