10/29/2024
TRUMPIAN AMERICANS ARE TRYING TO ESCAPE FROM THE BURDEN OF FREEDOM
(This piece is for those interested in political psychology and political sociology; we are witnessing the mass movement of insane people, Trumpian, a phenomenon that takes hold of Europeans every once in a while; the people are speeding to war; and contrary to what you might believe, warriors all over the world are cheering it because they believe that the world is overdue for a mass war to eliminate what Thomas Malthus called the unproductive and surplus population of mankind. War has a cleansing effect on society!)
Ozodi Osuji
Existentially depressed Americans seek escape from incessant preoccupation with politics and follow cultish political leaders promising to make America great.
These people are nihilistic, they are the type of people who followed Adolf Hitler(Hitler had promised to make Germany great); if they succeed in following their heaven-on-earth promising leader, Donald Trump, they may stimulate a world war that may destroy their civilization (just as Hitler’s war destroyed Germany).
Their more intelligent siblings escape into science and technology but ignore politics; the university crowd leaves their half-witted siblings to rule America.
America is good at producing food and technological gizmos for the people but discourages philosophical reasoning, preventing the people from developing reasonable purposes for living.
In the old European world, people had not yet been given birth to individuality and lived in the womb of society. However, certain developments in the Western world, such as The Renaissance, Reformation, The French Enlightenment, Industrialization, and Urbanization (and now the Information Revolution) have liberated people from the womb of unreasoning society and asked them to live as free human beings, to think for themselves.
But to think for themselves entails not knowing what the truth is, which can arouse tremendous existential anxiety in them.
The people sought ways to escape from their emergent freedom and its attendant anxiety by squelching their freedom and joining mindless political parties where the Fuhrer in Germany and the Il Duce in Italy told them what to do; they found security in being led, as they were led in the past by the Church and their kings.
Erich Fromm delineated these nihilistic trends in European society in his seminal book, Escape from Freedom; he talked about how Germans found no reason to live (the Church and kings used to give them reasons for living) and wanted to return to the old ways where religion and or authoritarian kings gave them reasons for living.
The past kings and the leaders of Christianity took Europeans to narcissistic wars to make them seem powerful and had their people kill other people and get killed. Europe, ruled by the kings and the Church, was characterized by incessant wars to make the kings and popes seem immensely powerful egos.
The point is that what constituted reality was defined for Europeans by the Church and their political leaders, so they did not have to think and try to figure out what reality was.
With the overthrow of kings, the aristocracy, and the marginalization of religion by science (Nietzsche said that God is dead), Europeans had no one to tell them what the truth was.
The N**i Party and the Fascist Party and their leaders proposed to define reality for them, and they followed them (as they are now following the five-year-old Donald Trump, who defines reality for them…imagine a five-year-old child telling supposed adult Americans what reality is; life, as existentialist thinkers say, is truly an absurd phenomenon!).
White America is seeking escape from freedom by joining the political cult of Donald Trump and his Maga Political Party. The self-anointed master of the universe, like Jim Jones of Jonestown, Guyana, is leading Americans to take the cool aid, to self-destruction. See Adorno et al (1950), The Authoritarian Personality.
What gives people meaning, such as loving your neighbor as you love yourself and working for the public good, the devilish leaders of America will not encourage their people to do it. Instead, they allow their society to become a jungle where the most amoral and predatory animals make tons of money, and the rest of the people live as homeless folks.
In this amoral situation, even the rich live meaningless lives and seek escape from alcohol, drugs, and unnatural s*x; they gravitate to whatever stimulates their bodies and enables them to forget their existential angst (mask the inherent absurdity of being a human being with the mind of the gods and the body of animals; human cognitive dissonance cannot be solved as long as human beings are a mix of gods and animals…unless you choose one, be a mindless religionist or be an equally mind dead Darwinian who believes in evolution theory).
What will save Americans is a return to true Christianity, and its emphasis on love for the whole self, aka God and love for all people, and organizing society to provide minimum survival for all people. A Christian society, as Jesus Christ taught in the parable of the Good Samaritan, must publicly pay for health care for all people and publicly fund education for all children through university and technical colleges, and then allow capitalism to distribute other goods and services in the economy.
These people Mist start doing what gives human beings a sense of meaning: loving and caring for each other, as Erich Fromm noted in his books, including The Art of Loving (1956).
FURTHER READING
Adorno, Theodor, et al (1950/2019). The Authoritarian Personality. Berkeley, California: University of California Press.
Fromm, Erich (1947/1994). Escape from Freedom. New York: Holt Paperbacks.
Fromm, Erich (1956). The Art of Loving. New York: Harper and Brothers.
Nietzsche, Fredrick (1883/1896). Thus Spoke Zarathustra. London: Alexander Tille.
You can also read Dr Fromm’s other books, such as To Have or to Be; The Sane Society; The Art of Being; The Sane Society; Man for Himself; The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. My general philosophical orientation is existentialism (See Sartre, Camus, Jasper, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Kafka, etc.).
Ozodi Osuji
October 29, 2024
[email protected]
(541) 686-6682