Tag Archives: president-elect

Impulsive

Of all the qualities the president-elect has shown to us I think the most disturbing is his impulsiveness. I gather that this word means the tendency to act quickly without forethought — as we do in stores when we see something we don’t really need but it looks enticing. So we buy it.  This man shows every sign of being impulsive to a very high degree.

How does this fit in with the analysis I posted the other day, standing as I did on the shoulders of Arthur Schopenhauer? I have thought about this and it fits perfectly. The man of dominant will, the man who exhibits a diminished intellectual capacity, is likely to act on impulse. His intellect is completely at the service of his will: it simply shows him the way to achieve the ends he wants, it provides motivation. Period. His intellect lacks imagination and the ability to abstract from immediate experience; he has scattered ideas but lacks ideation. Impulse is the embodiment of this sort of behavior: immersed in the present, we simply grab what we want without giving it a thought.

Let us imagine that such a person is a TV personality who wants to improve his ratings and also to make sure he will get a great deal more money from the network bosses. Let us suppose further that this man decides that running for president will do the trick. He doesn’t think it through, indeed he CAN’T think it through. He doesn’t really know what the presidency involves and he has no idea what the Constitution of his country allows the president to do and what restraints it puts on that office. But he knows he wants to make the run. And in doing so he perceives around him an alarming degree of discontent and even anger and hatred on the part of a great many people toward those, like himself, who are wealthy and who have much bigger slices of the pie.

This man is clever and he realizes that his bid for success in the presidential race necessitates posing as one of those angry folks and encouraging their basest wishes — which are in many respects like his own. He is a super salesman: he has been selling himself for years and he knows how to play that game. (I never said this man was stupid. I simply said that his intelligence is totally in the service of his will). His will is very strong indeed, and has always shown him the way to achieve what he has gone after; and as his success increases his will becomes even stronger, much like a spoiled child.

Along with his impulsiveness, which leads him to say and do things he has not thought through, we discover in this man a tendency to react strongly to criticism and observations from others who oppose this will. Impulsively, he strikes out at those people, calling them names and threatening to sue, jail, and even to harm them. He is a bully and he sees those who oppose him as people to be eradicated, one way or the other.

This, as I understand it, is the sort of person Schopenhauer has described and the man we have selected for our next president. His will dominates his personality and he exhibits a mind that is enslaved to that will, a strong tendency to act impulsively. Recall how Schopenhauer describes such a person:

“. . . we find in many men a strong, i.e., decided, resolute, persistent, unbending, wayward, and vehement will, combined with a very weak and incapable understanding, so that every one who has to do with them is thrown into despair, for their will remains inaccessible to all reason and ideas, and is not to be got at, so that it is hidden, as it were, in a sack, out of which it wills blindly.”

There has been much talk lately about how this man is precisely the sort that Alexander Hamilton warned against in the Federalist Papers, the sort for man the electoral college is supposed to keep out of the highest office in the land. I would argue that he is the prototype of such a man, and his impulsiveness is the key to a personality that will act first and react later — showing a tendency to reduce what little thought he is capable of to finding fault with others and blaming them for his own shortcomings — and if impeded he will plot other avenues to the shallow goals he has set for himself. This is a personality that is lost within itself and acts only in those ways that will advance his own agenda and seeks blindly to find ways to eliminate those who oppose his will.

It is my sincere hope, and my expectation, that if the electoral college does not perform its proper function this man will enrage those he must please in order to realize his goals (to wit, the Congress) to the point that soon after his swearing-in he will be impeached by that Congress — a Congress made up of a majority of men and women from his own political party who will find this man impossible to deal with. They cannot understand him and he refuses to try to understand them — as though he even could.

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A Confession

I find myself these days between the proverbial rock and a hard place. I begin to feel the pressures the average German must have felt in the teens of the last century as Hitler began his rise to power. I see clearly that the man who recently won the U.S. presidential lottery is poised to take a path not unlike the dreaded German. He shows all the earmarks of an intolerant, insecure, paranoid, disillusionist — much like Hitler. And the types who adore him and salute his every move confirm this picture, with truly disturbing effect.

I desire, on the one hand, to adopt a wait-and-see attitude, since with this man we really don’t know which way he will jump next. Further, I fully expect him to alienate the powers that be in Congress, including those who number themselves among the now crippled Republican Party. I simply don’t see this man getting along with anyone who disagrees with him. Thus I would adopt a quietistic attitude and try to ignore the absurd things this man is doing as he prepares to take the highest office in the land.

On the other hand, because these things appear so clearly to me, I feel the need to speak out and protest his every move, his every decision to appoint like-minded imbeciles to his cabinet and to important posts around the world. Like the character in Conrad’s novel, Under Western Eyes, I tell myself that “if life is not to be vile it must be a revolt, a pitiless protest — all the time.”  Albert Camus, who fought in the French underground during WW II, agreed: to have any real meaning human life must protest against evil wherever he finds it.  As thinking human beings who still have a deep sense of right and wrong, we must protest the wrong that surrounds us today.

The difficulty I have is that the problem is so immense and I feel helpless to effect meaningful change. How does one “take on” a powerful man surrounded by armed followers who are beginning to show themselves to be as bullying and as unconscionable  as their leader? How does one deal with this huge problem in light of the sure and certain knowledge that it will adversely affect his own health and well-being? The pressure to do something is great, but the stress that follows from the need to know what is going on in order to oppose it, and the sense of futility that attaches itself to every plan of action, is somehow is immense.

I try to close my eyes to what is going on around me with my futile attempts at quietude. Wait and see. But the sound and images are deafening and it would require that I move away from my computer and make no attempt whatever to keep up with the latest absurdity. I could do that but it seems cowardly and self-serving. I know that evil must be resisted in any way possible. But I know my limitations and have a real concern for my health, both physical and mental. I take these things too seriously. A cartoon making the rounds shows a young woman walking and talking with a friend. She says, ” My desire to be well informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.” That puts it in a nutshell.

In an attempt to find a middle ground, to follow the lead of such thinkers as Aristotle and the Stoics, I seek to do those things that I am able to do, to speak out and resist where I can — knowing that it is almost certainly too little to be truly effective. But in order to do even this I must keep myself somewhat informed, read at least the headlines and follow those whose blogs are insightful and well-written — and deal with the stress that inevitably follows, try to find humor wherever it hides. My task is to undertake to do what I can and try not to worry about those things that I clearly cannot oppose effectively. Try not to dwell on the negatives; to soothe my frazzled nerves, reflect on the many benefits I enjoy and the beauty that surrounds me and those I hold dear. My protest may be too little to be of any real effect, but the need to resist evil is essential to one’s humanity, and that must remain of paramount concern.