By Richard John Stapleton
About half the voters of the US voted for Donald Trump again November 5, 2024, enough for him to win the election, despite irrefutable facts and evidence made public about his atrocious and insidious lies and crimes, his damnable moral and ethical behavior, and his avowed intention to turn the US into a fascist dictatorship if he got elected USian president again. These lies, crimes, and abominable behaviors had been clearly and vividly described almost daily in broadcasts throughout the US by newscasters in mass media, in which many of them play a psychological Game that might be called GEE, YOU’RE WONDERFUL, MS./MRS./MR. NEWSCASTER.
The facts and evidence the mostly beautiful and handsome newscasters said and showed using politically correct Adult ego states and good English, sometimes lecturing using Parent ego states, sometimes joking with Free Child ego states in entertaining ways, inserted into the eyes and
ears of their passive Adapted Child/Critical Parent listeners and viewers, was like water running off a duck’s back, or, in this case, like water running off the backs of Trump’s supporters, who did not “learn” a thing listening to and watching what the wonderful beautiful, handsome, and intelligent newscasters and commentators said and showed.
Trump’s Adapted Child/Critical Parent cult members did not care what he said or did. They loved the guy, they said, despite most of them considering themselves to be Christians, even wanting to turn the US into a Christian nation, despite Trump violating just about every Christian principle you can think of over and over for over eight years as president or former president, with not a sign of repentance. On the other hand, there is a Christian principle that says “Judge not lest ye be judged,” which might be construed to mean it’s OK for Christians to vote for a Not-OK -3 Monster and not get sent to hell for doing so.
Those voters “believed” and had “faith” that Trump would somehow make them great again, and that was all that counted; but instead of “America” being made great again the US is being made a third-world nation again, to be ruled by an irrational extremist fascist president who appoints his own kind of dogmatic irrational right-wing extremists into leadership positions of USian government departments and right-wing ideological sycophantic judges into USian courts, including the Supreme Court, making the US once again a ravaged and pillaged land controlled by the elite rich who pay politicians with maga million dollar donations to reduce their taxes and rig the laws in their favor, leaving honest hard-working truth-seeking folks at the mercy of desperadoes and lawless renegades, as in The Wild West.
H L Mencken, a long-time columnist for The Baltimore Sun newspaper, hit the nail right on the head, writing in that paper July 26, 1920: “As democracy is perfected, the office (of president of the US) represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move towards a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
H L Mencken was also known for his coverage of the Scopes Trial, in Dayton, Tennessee in 1925, labeling it in his newspaper column the “Monkey Trial”, in which a local high school science teacher John Scopes set himself up to get sued for violating the state’s 1925 Butler Act that outlawed the teaching of evolution in public schools in Tennessee, since the act outlawed teaching anything that contradicted the “truth” of the story about how Earthian human life began as written in the book of Genesis in the Christian bible. The trial was a put-up show trial designed by members of the local Chamber of Commerce to drum up business that worked. The trial was the first trial in the US to be broadcast on public radio. Williams Jennings Bryan was the prosecutor for the state and the ACLU, Clarence Darrow, and others, were attorneys for the defendant. In the end the defendant was convicted and fined $100 for violating the law, but the case was dismissed the next day on a technicality concocted by Clarence Darrow, and the whole legal charade wound up more or less good fun for the country.
Trump’s election was not good fun for the country. About 51 percent of voters in the election decided Trump should not stand trial for fomenting an insurrection against the constitution and government of the US on January 6, 2021, since getting elected president caused him not to go to trial, an insurrection that millions of Earthians saw and heard him lead with their own eyes and ears on TV. The US is now more polarized than ever and millions of citizens are wondering if the USian legal system only works if criminals are not wealthy or powerful enough to pay millions of dollars to smart lawyers to defend them or stack the USian Supreme Court with judges who will kowtow to them with rulings in their favor.
Trump cult supporters, and diehard Dem supporters as well, for that matter, are closed systems buried in their own peculiar wormholes of existence shut off from participating in serious dialectical dialogical case method arguments about what is really going on in human states of affairs, being primarily exposed to ideas, beliefs, doctrines, schemata, scripts, etc. of people who were scripted much as they were by infinite cause-effect chains.
Thus, Red states stay red and Blue states stay blue, decade after decade, as the US inexorably splits up and sinks into polarized isolated abysses of hatred, ignorance, fear, cynicism, despair, and violence, devoid of bottom-up-derived democratic peaceful consensual truths about serious things that count.
Most USians have “learned” nothing about how to manage economic and political states of affairs in political parties in recent decades, maybe, even, in centuries, having been scripted by their parents and others in early childhood with injunctions and counter-injunctions causing them to prefer certain kinds of political and economic processes, systems, parties, etc., including such things as authoritarianism and democracy.
It appears about half of USian voters prefer to be told what to do from the top down based on the impulses of a Nazi-type loser fascist Fuhrer like the spoiled-brat rich-kid and narcissistic nihilistic nitwit Donald Trump, being willing to subjugate their lives to his lawless ego states and his capricious violent political behavior, a nitwit being a person who does not try to see the whole picture.
Among all the dumb and stupid ideas Trump has come up with and expressed, such as deporting twelve million illegal immigrants from the US, charging foreign countries three trillion dollars in the form of tariffs (which is tantamount to imposing a cruel regressive sales tax of about that amount on the poorest USians), gutting or abolishing the Education Department, getting rid of the Civil Service System, gutting or abolishing the National Institute of Health, cutting the taxes of large corporations and the elite rich again by another three trillion dollars, and enacting a national ban on abortions, perhaps the dumbest and stupidest idea of all is exemplified in his supercilious chanting of “Drill Baby Drill,” which includes such things as gutting or destroying the Environmental Protection Agency, selling off public lands to oil companies, maximizing energy usage in the economy at large, and possibly destroying the Earthian environment, trying to maximize dog eat dog competition among people, corporations, and countries, hastening the race to the bottom by the human species, the bottom being the extinction of human life on Earth, caused by Earthian humans denuding and destroying their resources as they produce more and more goods and more and more humans, heating the Earthian atmosphere more and more, burning more and more fossil fuel, causing more and worse wildfires and hurricanes, Earthian humans fouling their nest with over-fecundity and rampant dog eat dog competition, producing more people and products than Mother Earth can sustain.
What the world needs now is cooperation, not competition, and de-growth, not growth, of products and populations, if any sort of peaceful and satisfying human life is to be enjoyed by all humans alive aboard Spaceship Earth indefinitely.
It’s incredible and almost unbelievable that diabolical processes such as these could be happening in the US; but they are, and they have happened over and over again all around Spaceship Earth since time immemorial.
Every so often in Earthian human history here and there around Spaceship Earth scripted losers in various societies get fed up with being considered inferior to scripted winners in a society, so they subjugate themselves to a Not-OK human monster who promises to steal what the losers need from winners in the society using violent means and share the plunder with them, who are also promised superior status in a restored or new great and wonderful, and beautiful, as Trump says, political world, after he takes over, but who are suckers playing psychological Games, going nowhere, Games such as DO ME SOMETHING and I’M ONLY TRYING TO HELP YOU.
If you don’t believe this has happened over and over around Spaceship Earth take a look at what happened to ordinary Russians after the communist revolution in Russia and Stalin took over imposing a fascist dictatorship, or what happened to ordinary Germans after Hitler and his fascist Nazi party took over, or what happened to ordinary Spaniards after Franco took over in Spain, or what happened to ordinary Italians after Mussolini took over Italy, or what happened to ordinary Chileans after Pinochet took over in Chile.
Or what happened to ordinary Frenchmen after their authoritarian leaders tried to wipe out the French aristocracy, or what happened to ordinary Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese after their authoritarian leaders took over those countries, or what happened to ordinary Cambodians after Pol Pot took over Cambodia, or what happened to ordinary Hutus after their authoritarian leaders told them to massacre overnight their Tutsis neighbors in Rwanda using machetes, or, for that matter, what happened to ordinary USians after their authoritarian leaders tried to wipe out the Indians of North America, or what will happen now to ordinary Jews, Palestinians, Russians, and Ukrainians after their authoritarian leaders get through trying to take over in their wars, all playing a psychological Game called NIGYSOB, NOW I’VE GOT YOU, YOU SOB, trying to triumph and reign supreme, to be superior.
All of these authoritarian leaders and followers were also playing a psychological Game called I’F IT WEREN’T FOR YOU that caused their wars.
Scripted ordinary people everywhere have gone nowhere economically and politically despite all the revolutions and all the violence, theft, killing, loss of property and infrastructure, and human misery in wars of all kinds all around Spaceship Earth, started by ordinary lawless fascist street gang leaders promising losers he will make them great if they help him take over the country.
Seems to me the only way ordinary Earthian humans can get ahead is to learn better scripts and schemata. I disagree with Karl Marx about how to cure this over-and-over-again process of losers and dictators taking over societies. Marx thought such processes were caused by have/have-not class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, in what came to be called the Marxian Dialectic. The bourgeoisie was a better educated, freer, more accomplished, relatively well off, luckier, and somewhat more satisfied element of society and the proletariat was a less educated, less free, less accomplished, less well off, unluckier, and dissatisfied element of society.
Karl Marx thought this class struggle would inevitably be stopped and permanently cured by the establishment of a communist society wherein the means of production was owned by the common people and goods and benefits were distributed to everyone based on their needs, regardless of what they contributed to the society, in a dictatorship of the proletariat. Well, this has been promised and tried in several countries and to date it has not worked. Authoritarian top-down leaders have taken over and corrupted such societies, idealistic to begin with, becoming brutal fascist dictatorships in the end, becoming a simple dictatorship of a dictator, by no means a dictatorship of the proletariat. Seems to me the optimum solution is for societies to be managed from the bottom up by Earthian humans using non-violent I’m OK—You’re OK Adult-Adult Game-Free Democratic peaceful learning and decision processes, requiring dialectical dialogical discussions by participants randomly selected from all elements of societies to establish consensual decisions and policies.
See my article The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc. for some ideas on how this sort of world might one day come to pass at https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc-3/.
Whether Trump will do in office this time around what he has said he will do remains to be seen, since most of what he says about anything is a lie or fictitious; but if he does do what he has said he will do we Earthian humans are in serious trouble. Who knows what this sociopathic impulsive amoral unethical human might do in the heat of battle, in control of the most powerful country on Earth, to personally survive?
It takes time for a new fascist dictator in a country to go through the stages of the whole fascistic process after taking over a country, to undemocratize it, escalating from minor bureaucratic changes to full blown violence playing third-degree IF IT WERE’NT FOR YOU psychological Games with internal political adversaries, migrants, dissidents, scapegoats, and with external enemy countries, trying to the bitter end to win with a I’m OK We’re OK—You’re Not OK Critical Parent-Adapted Child life position and script, almost devoid of Adult and Free Child ego state energy.
Causing a large disadvantaged group of Victim people in a society to get better off quick economically and politically entails more goods and services being produced for everyone in the society, or goods and resources being stolen from Persecutor groups and doled out to the privileged special Victim group. Trump has talked about having the “largest deportation program in history” to make his special Victim group better off. How this would work remains to be seen but at least theoretically the goods and resources in a country that would have been required to keep twelve million deported Persecutor/Victim in-migrants alive might be reallocated somehow to the special Victim group legally entitled to be in the country, which leaves the problem of who would do the work the twelve million one-down deported immigrants would have done at low wages.
But it can get worse. If more goods and resources cannot be produced in a country, which is most likely the case, the dictator will have to steal goods and resources from perceived Persecutor groups inside the country or from Earthian humans in other countries in wars to make his special Victim group better off, if deporting twelve million immigrants does not do the trick.
If fascist dictators try to steal from external enemy countries now, what with the advent and proliferation of nuclear weapons, Earthian humans could be rendered extinct in a nuclear winter.
The fascism process is a fool’s errand, with little or no chance of permanently making Victim groups better off. Hopefully the democratic republic processes of the US, despite the fascist Electoral College enshrined in the US constitution, designed to protect Victims in small states, but making them Persecutors instead, will be able to survive another four years of Trump and keep the US inching forward in its wormhole of existence caused by accidental/inevitable cause-effect chains, long enough for another Rescuer non-fascist USian president to “win” the next quasi or pseudo-democratic presidential election.
I am now working on a new book tentatively titled LEARNING, UNLEARNING, RELEARNING: How I’m OK—You’re OK Adult—Adult De-Gamed Democratic Case Method Learning Processes Can Increase Earthian OKness.
In the meantime, you might want to check out my 2021 novel As The Rooster Crows Earthian OKness Increases showing how some of these ideas were used in a fictional management seminar coordinated by the protagonist Rout Logger.
And go to the EFFECTIVE LEARNING REPORT at https://blog.effectivelearning.net/
And RJS Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/richard.stapleton.397.
Best wishes, Richard John Stapleton, Cedar Hill, Bulloch County, Georgia, USA, December 5, 2024
“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
William Shakespeare, Act 5, Scene 5, Macbeth
November 7, 2024