Until we seize the means of perception, monsters of varying cuteness will continue to divide us along lines that serve them, not us. We don’t have years to learn to see because the battle over Trump 2028 will be won and lost long before it is fought.
Catch-Up Service: About a month ago, in "Survival Strategies: Prophecy, Anti-Prophecy and Realism", I wrote about human responses to what W.H. Auden described as “forces we pretend to understand”. Since then, I also offered a mythic example of one of the survival strategies — Realism — based on Ibn Arabi’s deliciously unorthodox interpretation of the story of Noah’s Ark. In addition, I introduced “Seize the Means of Perception” as my motto, provided unsolicited PR advice to recently displaced federal workers, proposed a response to normal madness, explored the sum of all knowledge with Google Gemini, and published “My ‘Realistic’ Message: In Search of Non-Kleptocratic Employment”.
In this Post: Below, I’m publishing an open letter to confounded beholders of one of the forces we pretend to understand: Trumpism.
Trump 2028: An Open Letter to Confounded Beholders
Most of the people I’ve ever called friends and family have been either avid or covert Trump supporters from the very start. Since Trump’s victory in 2024, most of them have been brimming with bravado and triumphalism. Some of them may have reservations about Trump 2028 due to Trump’s age, but they want Trumpism to continue as much as an addict wants to get his next fix.
I also know people who believed that Biden, and then Harris, represented appropriate responses to the rise of Trumpism. Since Trump’s victory, they have been reeling and hyperventilating. Against the backdrop of the new world order, their maps of meaning suddenly looked like instances of cartographic error, if not fraud or malpractice. To them, the idea of Trump’s third term elicits horror.
I’ve never felt at home in either of these camps. So, I’m neither brimming with bravado, nor reeling or hyperventilating. Instead, I increasingly gravitate to a dispassionate view of this special moment in our political life. From this vantage point, I don’t feel the need to speculate about Donald Trump’s life expectancy or cognitive functioning. I simply acknowledge that both Trump and Trumpism continue to benefit greatly from the absence of real opposition.
Indeed, Trumpism seems to be the only game in town. For this reason, it seems a defensible bet that 2028 will mark the beginning of a new round in this game, not the beginning of a new game. Based on what I heard in this interview with Chris Cuomo and Steve Bannon, we still seem to be at the stage where Trump’s third term is only mentioned coyly, suggestively, without roadmaps. But I wouldn’t be surprised if, a year from now, or even sooner, we start to hear legal arguments redefining term limits. If past is prologue, the pseudo-opposition’s responsees to these arguments will be effete and ineffectual.
As a currently tribeless participant in this game, I maintain equilibrium by using a self-generated remedy that I call Literature as Medicine. In this post, I’d like to offer my readers a small dose of LaM. The main ingredient in this dose is a short story that, I hope, will help readers shift their view of the political horizon from the prospect of Trump 2028 to the larger imperative of learning to observe what Marshall McLuhan described as “the pattern of the effects of this huge vortex of energy in which we are involved”.
Into the Vortex: A Story of Three Brothers
The short story I’m recommending is Edgar Allan Poe’s A Descent Into the Maelstrom. Here, Poe tells the story of three brothers in a powerful whirlpool called Moskoe-ström. Only one of the brothers lives to tell the tale of this confrontation with a force of nature that defied description. Descriptions are difficult here, he explains, due to the “bewildering sense of the novel which confounds the beholder”:
The ordinary accounts of this vortex had by no means prepared me for what I saw. That of Jonas Ramus, which is perhaps the most circumstantial of any, cannot impart the faintest conception either of the magnificence, or of the horror of the scene—or of the wild bewildering sense of the novel which confounds the beholder.
Most interpretations of this story focus on how the protagonist survived — he survived by observing his environment — but to use the story as an allegory for our political moment, it helps to examine how the other two brothers died. These deaths, especially the death of the oldest brother, highlight the gravity of the choices we face on our political horizon.
The magnificent horror of the scene consumes the youngest brother first. His death highlights the fragility of human defenses against forces of nature. The surviving brother tells us that…
Such a hurricane as then blew it is folly to attempt describing. The oldest seaman in Norway never experienced any thing like it. We had let our sails go by the run before it cleverly took us; but, at the first puff, both our masts went by the board as if they had been sawed off—the mainmast taking with it my youngest brother, who had lashed himself to it for safety.
The youngest brother dies because his survival strategy — lashing himself to the mast — could not withstand the force of the hurricane. However, he only dies once. By contrast, the oldest brother dies twice, first psychically then physically. He is consumed by madness before he is pulled into the vortex. When bewildering forces of nature throw people into desperate states, people grasp at straws. In this story of three sailors descending into Moskoe-ström, the ring-bolt on the boat replaces the ‘straw’, and the oldest brother betrays the survivor in order to cling to the ring-bolt.
All this time I had never let go of the ring-bolt. My brother was at the stern, holding on to a small empty water-cask which had been securely lashed under the coop of the counter, and was the only thing on deck that had not been swept overboard when the gale first took us. As we approached the brink of the pit he let go his hold upon this, and made for the ring, from which, in the agony of his terror, he endeavored to force my hands, as it was not large enough to afford us both a secure grasp. I never felt deeper grief than when I saw him attempt this act — although I knew he was a madman when he did it — a raving maniac through sheer fright. I did not care, however, to contest the point with him. I knew it could make no difference whether either of us held on at all; so I let him have the bolt, and went astern to the cask. This there was no great difficulty in doing; for the smack flew round steadily enough, and upon an even keel — only swaying to and fro, with the immense sweeps and swelters of the whirl. Scarcely had I secured myself in my new position, when we gave a wild lurch to starboard, and rushed headlong into the abyss. I muttered a hurried prayer to God, and thought all was over.
Betrayed by his panic-stricken brother, the protagonist feels grief but no resentment or contempt. He realizes that his brother is no longer there. In Marshall McLuhan’s words, the brother is “autoamputated”. Through sheer fright, his brother's been transformed into a raving maniac clinging to the ring-bolt as his only hope.
Interestingly, the protagonist’s path begins with the water cask, which is what the insane brother gave up to grab the ring-bolt. However, the survivor uses the water cast differently because he observes his environment differently. He says:
I resolved to lash myself securely to the water cask upon which I now held, to cut it loose from the counter, and to throw myself with it into the water. I attracted my brother’s attention by signs, pointed to the floating barrels that came near us, and did everything in my power to make him understand what I was about to do. I thought at length that he comprehended my design — but, whether this was the case or not, he shook his head despairingly, and refused to move from his station by the ring-bolt. It was impossible to reach him; the emergency admitted of no delay; and so, with a bitter struggle, I resigned him to his fate, fastened myself to the cask by means of the lashings which secured it to the counter, and precipitated myself with it into the sea, without another moment’s hesitation.
The protagonist treats the raving maniac with compassion, but in the end, resigns him to his fate. When a man is impossible to reach, why risk life trying to reach him? In my view, the reason people often continue to try for years has to do with the experience of what the psychologist Pauline Boss calls “ambiguous loss”. But that’s a subject for another post.
A Descent into the Maelstrom is a sobering tale that reinforces Marshall McLuhan’s message that predetermination is only the destiny of people who refuse to contemplate the situation. For the rest:
“Pattern recognition in the midst of a huge, overwhelming, destructive force, is the way out of the maelstrom. The huge vorticies of energy created by our media present us with possibilities of evasion of destruction. By studying the pattern of the effects of this huge vortex of energy in which we are involved, it may be possible to program a strategy of evasion and survival.”
— ‘Man as Media’ 1977
Our Moskoe-ström
As the three brothers in this story, we are confronting an ineffable force, and our two default responses to this confrontation result in death, either through incapacity or insanity. To think clearly about the third response, let’s ask basic questions:
What’s the force that we confront today?
Who are the ‘brothers’ who succumb to insanity or incapacity?
Who are the survivors?
What does any of this have to do with Trump and Trumpism?
What’s the force that we confront today?
When I first read Poe’s story, I thought of it as an allegory for our long-running descent into what I had been describing as Second-Order Ignorance (SOI), i.e ignorance of ignorance. When I discovered Dietrich Bonhoffer’s theory of stupidity, I thought it was an even better description of our vortex. As forces of nature, ignorance and stupidity are no less powerful than Moskoe-ström. They too defy description, and no description quells “the bewildering sense of the novel which confounds the beholder”.
The problem with description is that it’s a language-based art form. It uses words to name things, actions and qualities. However, as inhabitants of the modern-day Tower of Babel, we increasingly find ourselves exchanging descriptions with compatriots immune to language. In part because of the futility of this tendency, we turn names and naming into a fetish, a repetition compulsion.
Who is succumbing to insanity or incapacity?
Whatever name we assign to our Moskoe-ström, we will all succumb to insanity or incapacity until we at least learn to see the clearest effects and the fragmenting character of this ineffable force. Both in Poe’s story and in our lived reality: the vortex is a desperation-inducing and divisive force that turns brother against brother through betrayal and sacrifice.
Who are the survivors?
The survivors are the ones who dare to see.
What does any of this have to do with Trump and Trumpism?
In A Descent Into the Maelstrom, survival is the result of a kind of perspective, a frame of mind, that I would describe as objective but not neutral. And I’d like to look at Trumpism through this lens before I conclude with a cautionary note about ‘Cute Monsters’.
Objective But Not Neutral
I’ve argued elsewhere that we should not reduce our Moskoe-ström to Trumpism, but neither should we deny the political dimension of our vortex or our personal situatedness in socioeconomic environments. When we seek to escape from the vortex, we must distinguish objectivity from neutrality. This distinction is skillfully drawn by Sam Vaknin in this interview with Vaughan Smith. Starting at 59:17, Professor Vaknin explains that:
It’s absolutely possible to be non-neutral, opinionated. It’s absolutely possible to support certain values and value systems and yet be objective. It is possible. Absolutely possible.
The cost of this absolute possibility is that we have to follow it where it leads, even if we don’t like where it leads.
Had you been neutral in Nazi Germany, that would not have been an objective position. That would have been immoral. Similarly I consider it to be highly immoral to be neutral about Donald Trump. A highly immoral stance.
You have to choose the truth at all times, but when you choose the truth, it means you are wedded to it. Wherever the evidence leads, even if you don’t like where it leads, you are wedded to it.
Spelling out this cost of pattern recognition isn’t the only reason this interview is relevant for this post. It's also relevant because, during the first 20 minutes or so in the interview, Vaknin discusses the cognitive, emotional and behavioral patterns that characterize authoritarian leaders, as distinguished from “strong men”.
Vaknin begins the presentation with the observation that authoritarian leaders believe themselves to be chosen as saviors. Colloquially speaking, they suffer from the Messiah Complex. Vaknin sums up the list of character traits by describing authoritarian leaders as “inverted humans” whose normally private unconscious replaces their public self. Interestingly, the inverted character in Vaknin’s description is consistent with one of McLuhan’s observations about the effects of electric media. McLuhan writes:
“The unconscious is a store of everything at once. When you begin to move information electrically, you begin to create a subconscious outside. Until recently, the conscious was our environment; now the subconscious has become the environment.”
Cute Monsters: A Cautionary Note
Many labels have been affixed to Donald J. Trump: strong man, populist, messianic, authoritarian, autocrat, malignant narcissist, psychopath, fascist, clown, criminal, rapist, gangster, etc. To me, none of these labels is either true or false, but they can all be useful. Some of them try too hard to force-fit 20th-century words onto emerging 21st-century realities.
The most useful label I found for leaders like Trump is not a recent coinage. It comes from the ninth chapter of Being A Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience by Christopher Bollas. He described these leaders as “cute monsters”. As I argued in my detailed annotations of this chapter, an important pattern in our vortex is the irrepressible human tendency to elevate cute monsters as leaders. In my view, this argument expresses both a metaphorical truth and a lived reality skillfully depicted by Bollas.
I bring up the concept of cute monsters because it highlights an important reason for the irreconcilable split between the two camps I mentioned at the start of this post. The reason for the split is that Trump's supporters are blind to Trump’s monstrosity, while the pseudo-opposition is blind to his cuteness. To use Poe’s language, the two camps only see either the magnificence or the horror of the scene. Neither camp sees the cute monster.
Until we seize the means of perception, monsters of varying cuteness will continue to divide us along lines that serve them, not us. We don’t have years to learn to see because the battle over Trump 2028 will be won and lost long before it is fought.
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