Trump, Musk and America are heading for a very rude awakening. (See article below.)
Rude awakening, indeed!
It has been years since I’ve reflected on a fundamental distinction I make between two bedrock impulses in sociopolitical behavior - and the corresponding analogies to be drawn between the “power of fission” and the “power of fusion.”
In brief, fission is the energy-power of division — the power of breaking things apart.
At street level, the simplest way to represent this difference is to consider thugs and their passion for breaking windows.
Notably, breaking things can be done by anyone as a result of individual effort.
The vandalism of breaking things requires no subtlety, no knowledge, no coordinated, collaborative effort.
Just brutre force.
Notably, Trump is - above all else - a brute.
And so it is -- at ground level -- that thug-loners (and other radical individualists) are good at breaking things, most especially, breaking apart the ties of community. Breaking apart what has already been built up.
It is a cornerstone fact that breaking anything releases a rush of dissociative energy.
Take a moment to recall the release of giddy energy when Jimmy Stewart -- in "It's A Wonderful Life" -- breaks a window in the dilapidated house where he and Donna Reid eventually settle down -- after long, collaborative efforts to re-build that same house - years of undoing the destruction in order to build it up, to put it back together again.
Perhaps I should have mentioned it earlier, but "the background" of this entire discussion is the fact that we eat humans are energy-seeking creatures.
We need energy, and we thrive on it.
And there are only two ways to acquire energy; one is by fission which breaks things-and-people apart, and the other by fusion, which brings things-and-people together.
Having already looked at the psychosocial and political mechanisms of fission, it remains to be said that people who participate in collaborative, knowledge-intensive, cooperative, community-based efforts to build things up (and in the process increase “social capital”) are people who edify - which literally means to build up.
An aside...
Even rugged individualists need collaborative helpers. However, their kind of collaboration tends to be uniform, goose stepping and cultishly adulatory, as we saw at Hitler's Nuremberg rallies and throughout his wehrmacht macinery. Lots of people, melded in socio-polticial brutality, raising their hands in Nazi salute to the ONE-AND-ONLY FUHRER.)
But by coming together — by virtue of “building up” collaboratively — organizations that require very detailed cooperative effort by many intelligent, well-educated and well-instructed people, these meticulous community builders fuse their energies into one collaborative effort and thereby manifest fusion as their fundamental modus operandi.
The "fusion approach" to the generation of energy is diametrically opposed to the destruction/breakage and rupture-of-fission, an approach to energy generation that characterizes hoodlums, thugs and destroyers, all of them relatively isolated populists who are drawn to fascism/absolutism and One Man’s totalitarian authoritarianism.
Note Well:
Trump and his destruction crew will release a tremendous amount of giddy energy because they have embarked the process of destroying what has been built up over 250 years.
But when it is all leveled -- when all the windows have been broken -- the profligate generation of so much dissociative, fission-generated energy will leave nothing but humans.
And into that void, I predict that China will emerge as the new Global Hegemon -- if only by default -- since China is dedicated, down to its marrow -- to a disciplined nation committed to collaborative building-up by bringing together intelligence, scientific knowledge and unshakable determination to continue building on their utterly unprecedented "great leap forward."
No comments:
Post a Comment