Sam Harris Makes Sense
I have just listened to Sam Harris’ podcast, “Making Sense,” in which he relates becoming suddenly conscious of the appeal of Trump. The missing link is the function Trump serves to take the shadow off people who are feeling shame, because he has no shame, does whatever he wants, has not a single virtue, he’s worse than they are and he is an image of one of them with a billion dollars acquired without the advantage of a single virtue.
To even think about this is like an acid trip, now, the realization along with Harris that it is precisely because Trump has no virtue at all that his followers love him. And that it is because he is so awful nobody can really be worse. He will take on your sins and relieve your burden of shame and guilt because he doesn’t give a shit about virtue unless it slips on and off easily, and he would destroy the world just to live the dream.
Now it has become interesting, like an anthropological study, to see these people who carry so much guilt and shame from living inside a slave religion, that they think Trump is Jesus. He serves the same function for them. Damn. A little knowledge really is dangerous. haha. Of course he is the second coming. Like Jesus, he’s there if you need him, which brings me to the people who don’t need him, the atheists.
When a crowd is gathered to find the guilty party, you don’t want to be the only atheist in town, but in New York, San Francisco or Paris, you’re the majority. Trump is from Queens. Who cares if you’re an atheist in Queens? But true to the repudiation of any virtue at all, Trump pretends to believe. And it is hilarious. Every time he tries to say something about the Bible, or even hold one, his unconscious makes it into a joke. Sometimes I try to imagine how much Trump must hate himself, having no virtue, then remember he is the king of those who have no virtue, a considerable crowd. If he suddenly became virtuous, even slightly, he would not precisely polarize the Nazarene.
What Harris points out so well (so I won’t go into detail) is that if you look at the two Americas in stereo, so that you see them in contrast, you see on the left the elevation of virtue signaling. Virtue and virtue signaling are not the same thing. One is private and the other public, behavior.
As you rise in leftist society you know the right answers about a world of issues, such as GMO, herbicides, race relations, gender equality, gender pronouns, and if you say the wrong thing you bring down all this censure from people who have the most dangerous weapon you can wield on the internet, a little knowledge. These are narrow people, regardless of how good their intentions and how worthy the goal. I am thinking of Jordan Peele’s, “Get Out,” where the liberals are monsters who have learned the environment of the liberal container. Anybody can learn to be a liberal or a conservative. It depends on who your friends are. You can’t make friends if you start out making them feel like the first step is sending them to be scrubbed and dressed for dinner.
The solution for the society is the same as for the individual, you stay on the cross, which symbolizes the tension of the opposites, until you realize these opposites are polarities in a unified field, and you make the third, creative, choice by not identifying with polarities. Identify with the field. At least you’re going in the direction of evolution and something might come of that.
What intrigues me about Harris’ observation is that it also shows how at the extreme things turn into their opposites, as in a magnetic field. The evangelicals judged everybody else, even blaming them for weather events, playing to the superstitious nature of those who not only don’t know nothing, they don’t suspect nothing. And they kept going east looking for Jesus until they circled back around and found Trump. And at either end of the spectrum it’s the same thing, you feel a lot better when you aren’t ashamed of yourself, no matter the device you have to employ. So do other people. We can all feel a lot better taking care of each other, instead of being obedient to the guards and at the mercy of a warden.
