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 Apprentice, without short-stops
Watching trump’s behavior is like watching a badly written horror movie. You know the car is going to stop on a clear night and everybody is going to pile out to take shelter in the abandoned basement. There is just so much rank stupidity on their part and suspension of disbelief on our part required to move the story along. It is the same with trump.
He speaks at the approximate level of an 8- or 10-year-old.1 Does that mean he is immature or is he brilliantly speaking to millions of adults, all of whom are 8- to 10-year-olds?
Is he a brilliant psychopath playing a role and following an internal script, or a moronic, drug-addled, demented, failing narcissist?
Does he have any principles, ugly or not, that guide him or is he a cheap, easily manipulated, choir-boy for the oligarch-priests?
There have been many articles written trying to answer these and similar questions from a distance, including two by me.2,3 Taking them together, they talk about sheer stupidity, immaturity, narcissism, Adderall, dementia, and various psychopathologies. They are all probably correct to some degree without being totally satisfying. All the explanations are about what happens inside his skull. Whatever that might be is largely invisible and largely unknown.
It may be that trump is a simple, if extreme, outcome of a very common, almost daily, social phenomenon called schismogenesis4,5, or the creation of difference.
All schismogenesis is essentially a vicious cycle where the behavior of a person or group X effects the behavior of a person or group Y which in turn effects the behavior of a person or group X. There are two types of schismogenesis, complimentary and symmetric.
In the symmetric version, which is basically about rivalry, both parties increase their responses. A good example is the cold war arms race. If we develop a new offensive capacity, they must match, exceed, or defend against the new capacity, at which point we must come up with an even greater capacity. At a small scale, the process perfectly describes a football game. At an individual level, consider the oligarch competition for the annual Forbes rankings.
Symmetric, rivalry, schismogenesis occurs between more or less equals. The U.S has always had complimentary schismogenesis based on inequality of race, gender, rank, wealth, and power. Obvious sociocultural examples include chattel slavery, lynching, Chinese exclusion acts, Indian removals, and Japanese Internment camps. The list could go on and on. On a more individual level, domestic abuse can be a perfect example of an increasingly violent process of dominance-submission, increased dominance, increased or ongoing submission, etc. Unconstrained, it always ends badly.
Schismogenesis is endemic. It is always there. If a social context is to be viable over time, schismogenesis must be constrained by what might be called short-stops. These may be cultural, social, legal, physical, economic, or just rational. Examples include;
-Social networks; connections, and resources reduce escalating home violence. Internationally the UN actually has some effect, NATO had even more. Formal and informal referees play a major role.
-Mercy rules. The cold war arms race collapsed economically when both sides had enough weaponry to sterilize the globe. We weren’t getting any safer. OSHA limits maximum dominance in the physical work space. The Constitution, progressive income tax, and the estate tax were a short-stops to increasing inequity in economic power and resources.
-Legal and physical threats. The U.S. is a litigious society. We sue at the drop of a hat and theoretically we all get a fair shake in civil cases. Not so much in criminal cases.
The point is that as a society, we have, or had, established formal and informal, explicit and implicit limits to the development of damaging divisiveness. Under the present Chief Justice, several important short-stops have been obliterated; gutting the voting rights act, Citizens United, presidential immunity, overturning Roe, 2nd Amendment extensions, reductions in due-process, allowing Texas-style vigilantism, and most recently rejection of limits on DOGE.
In terms of trump, metaphorically, he is a domestic violence abuser where the short-stops have been removed. He didn’t get this way overnight. As a child, he knew he wasn’t very bright. People just didn’t like him. Have you heard a single story about a childhood friend? Not very bright, no friends, very insecure, desperate to make it to the big-boy’s table, he played a role.
He developed a persona, loud, brash, aggressive, unprincipled, and abusive, in short, a bully. He victimized individuals based on a perception of lower socio-economic rank, for example women, people of color, contractors, and you, me, us, and them.
He seemed to be rich. He surrounded himself with like-minded individuals, Epstein, Diddy, Roy Cohn, and other mob figures.6 Between his money and his “friends” he was not called to account for his actions. There were no penalties.
Peak trumpism was The Apprentice, a fantasy game show. He was dominant. They were submissive. He could be arbitrary, rude, dismissive, and arrogant. They begged, groveled and accepted. With a weekly dose of scripted schismogenesis, trump’s worldview was cemented into his psyche.
What we are witnessing now is The Apprentice on Steroids. He is a domestic abuser with no short-stops. The Supremes have given him, and continue to give him, that assurance. He will never win the Forbes-listing-contest, and he will never get a seat at the big-boy’s table. He is too needy and not rich enough. But he knows, and they know, he can shout, “You’re fired” at any moment, so they grovel and submit. We are past authoritarianism and well on our way to a flat-out, fascist, dictatorship.
There is one short-stop left. You, me, us, and them. We must walk the streets. We must carry the signs. We must shout. We must be there, and we must be counted. We cannot shuffle it off to black women, gays, trans, natives, or any other marginalized groups. We cannot count on the churches. If it weren’t for “Christians”, he wouldn’t be there.7 We, the privileged, better start carrying our weight.
3) https://dexterchapin.substack.com/p/they-are-all-as-dumb-as-rocks
4) https://tinyurl.com/4yzmrjjh
5) https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~rfrey/PDF/220/220%20Schismogenesis.pdf
6) https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910/
7) Private communication from somebody smarter than me.