https://dexterchapin.substack.com
Stepping stones form a pattern, or not. Stepping stones lead somewhere, or not. These stepping stones will be about cultural resilience, education, and thrivancy via General Systems Theory and Natural History. I am fascinated by questions of how we know and what we know. I always look for patterns. Long-term, these posts are explorations of patterns that maybe I see locally, nationally, culturally, socially, and environmentally.
Previous posts are at the Substack site.
The latest Post:
The Trump-Musk Extinction Burst
The destructive chaos raging across the U.S. since November 5th has been mind-numbing. The musk-trump team is shredding the rule of law in general and the constitution in specific. The richest man in the World is attacking and killing the poorest children in the World. Will we really become a rogue, pariah, invader of friends and neighbors? Several members of the Cabinet and above can rationally be considered traitors. To put it mildly, it isn’t a good look for a country that sees itself as the biggest, the best, city on the hill.
There is a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth going on. Cries of anguish, cheers of joy, echo through the halls of the Capitol as fascist salutes become a “thing”. Is this the end of the American experiment? Many think so.
I have another idea. Consider for a moment a small child in a toy store being told “no”. There are two possible results, acceptance or tantrum. If a tantrum has worked sufficiently in the past to become a habit, it will be a tantrum. If the parents stick to the “no”, the tantrum will escalate and get more and more extreme. As it does so, it becomes harder and harder to stick to “no” in any form. However, if the parents do stick to it, the tantrum fails, and the habit starts extinction. That escalation is called an “extinction burst”. It happens when a tantrum, or any behavior, no longer gets the desired results and becomes more frequent and extreme.
I suggest that both musk and trump are escalating their behavior in an extinction burst, not triggered by parents but by Nature, aka reality.
Think about it. Trump is a morbidly obese failson with a diet that carries all sorts of penalty points. He has many photo’d and rumored physical limitations. He has never been very bright and is now spiraling into some form of dementia. There is a legitimate thought that he will not last four years. He is a felon, a rapist, an object of billionaire mockery, and he cheats at golf. The habits and strategies he lived with for his whole life are failing to grant him the stature and credence he craves. In the long dark reaches of the night, some part of him knows all of that. His midnight posts prove the point; extinction burst.
Think about musk. This is a man subject to deportation because of perjury on paperwork for staying in the country. He is a failson who rode the work of others to enormous admiration and success, until it didn’t. His latest effort has just been ranked the most dangerous vehicle ever put on the American road. Tesla sales locally and internationally are tanking. He is a master at pump and dump when it comes to AI. His announcements of new and wonderous achievements are roundly laughed at. He is clearly an up-front fascist and has been credibly accused of aiding Putin’s war effort. His Mars plans are a fantasy that do not even reach the level of being a goal. He has admitted to on-going, perhaps habitual, perhaps addicted, use of Ketamine, a drug known to reduce cognition. His intellect has sunk to challenging other billionaires to cage fights and penis measurements. He wants to be an alpha so badly, he has to cheat at games. In short, here is a man who, again, just isn’t as bright as he thinks he is, and knows in his heart of hearts that his public persona is beginning to unravel.
Both individuals are devolving back to early childhood, escalating their tantrums individually because the rewards are no longer assured. For both men, in different ways, their turns and their lives are coming to an end.
The same can be said collectively about disparate segments of American culture; people who believe being a white male is a claim to privilege, people who claim being Christian is a sinecure of full pews and power, young male incels, and some parts of the obscenely wealthy. These groups have overlaps but together make up about 35-40% of the American populace. They are terrified. Their “habits” are no longer paying off the way they did in the past. They do not have the wherewithal that trump and musk have but they gave trump and musk permission to throw a MAGA tantrum.
We have three spoiled siblings throwing tantrums in unison and cooperation. This is not an extinction burst. This is an extinction explosion due to predictable and foreseeable failure.
The MAGA tantrums fails. Brown and black people are not going away. DEI will remain a force because the predominant beneficiaries are white women who will not take kindly to being metaphorically grabbed. Women are unlikely to become more compliant to incel demands, and the price of eggs will not go down for a long time, if ever. It is unlikely that Gen Z and the Millennials will start pouring into the churches that think Jesus is too woke.
The musk tantrum is potentially damaging. He will damage the governing infrastructure, and people will suffer and die. When that happens, the image plastered across the country will be his Sieg Heil salute. That image combined with his total lack of personality and empathy will mean he loses Tesla. X , formerly twitter, is bleeding out to Bluesky and will eventually end up the functional equivalent of 8kun, formerly 8chan, as an intellectual and social cesspool. It seems inevitable that he will cross trump at some point and lose favor. After all, it seems musk’s son told trump “shush and go away”. Without those pedestals, he ends up as a very, very rich voice shouting down a polluted well.
The trump tantrum has the greatest pyrotechnic values as he loses the bubble entirely. He gets wilder and wilder. He, and his toadies, claim the courts have no jurisdiction over him. He is going to claim Canada, invade Mexico and Greenland. He may get away with Panama but none of that is going to win him respect or adulation. The billionaire boys-club will still deny him membership. It will not take very long before he sinks into irrelevance, and he knows that. The body language during that musk news conference said it very clearly.
What does all this mean? As Yogi is reputed to have said, “Predictions are tough, especially about the future” but if the justices have any sense of self-preservation, and if there are elections, in two years, the Republicans are dead, Vance is as ineffective as a three-day-old fish, and we can begin to undo musk’s neo-apartheid. It will take decades to regain the World’s trust and respect, but it can be done. And maybe we will have a progressive federal tax system.
The trump, musk, MAGA extinction explosion is going to be very hard to live through. Like all tantrum-beset parents, we will be shocked, embarrassed, dismayed, chagrined, and terrified every day for the next two years. If we hold our ground and say “no” as often and loudly as we can, the tantrum will end, and we can get back to work on making the U.S. the best ever city on the hill where all people are created equal, where all possess unalienable rights, and where all have the opportunity to develop and enjoy those rights secured by a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.
N.B. Unlike my other posts, this one does not have footnotes. The “facts” stated are in the public domain. The perspective and predictions are mine. It is tiny and picayune but, absent any other rules, I try not to grant either man the respect of an upper-case letter in their name.