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.
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.