By Richard John Stapleton
With Donald Trump as president as the Covid-19 plague and civil unrest cripple the economic and cultural functioning of the US internally, as Trump and his Secretary of State Pompeo sanction, bully, and agitate countries externally, fomenting profits for the USian deep state, anxiety levels among USian civilians have got to be near all-time highs.
Trump has now put his own troops on the ground in Portland, Oregon, and according to stories in news media he is plotting to do the same in other places, such as Chicago and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
According to the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the mayor of Portland, this action is illegal; but does Trump care? Why is he doing it in the first place? Very likely he’s doing it to decrease his chances of being humiliated in the November presidential election. He probably thinks he can get away with violating the US Constitution for a few months, having had a lifetime of experience violating laws and getting away with it thanks to having inherited enough money to buy the silence of people and hire slick lawyers.
Is Trump evil? Well for sure he is not yet as evil as Adolph Hitler, apparently one of his heroes, according to stories about Trump reading Hitler’s books and keeping one of them handy in his bedroom for nighttime reading.
Hitler is generally considered the most evil human that ever lived, having conducted the most aggressive, egregious, callous, and diabolical cold-blooded genocide against millions of humans than any other mass murderer in history, primarily motivated by bigotry.
Back in the 1970s and 80s I had a transactional analysis colleague who had close relatives who died in the Holocaust who got so obsessed with it that he did some serious research about it. He made several trips to Germany to Auschwitz specifically to see firsthand the physical remains of the crime scene. An expert photographer, he photographed various aspects of the process, where the Jews got off the boxcars, where they got inspected and tattooed, where they slept, where they worked, and where they got gassed. He wound up writing and publishing a long article in the Transactional Analysis Journal titled “Aspects of Survival: Triumph over death and onliness,” by Alan Jacobs, (1991, Volume 21, No. 1).
Jacobs concluded that mass-murdering sociopaths and psychopaths like Hitler harbored a sub-conscious desire to wind up the only person still alive, to be the only one to survive, and while Hitler was among the most pathological he was not the only human harboring desires of this nature. Jacobs researched not only the Holocaust and Hitler but genocide and democide in general, democide being the mass murdering of various demographic groups by governments, who greatly advanced the efficiency of their murder methods and processes during the 20th Century, probably the most murderous century of Earthian human history, counting people killed with gas, guns, and bombs dropped from airplanes in wars and by callous governments deliberately letting humans starve to death, over two hundred million Earthian humans in the 20th Century, according to various researchers.
Jacobs concluded that such inclinations were not confined to obvious sociopaths and psychopaths: he concluded many people harbored sub-conscious desires and inclinations of this nature, albeit in relatively unthreatening doses, deeply submerged in their sub-conscious minds.
There is no doubt that the US has become more fascist under Trump due to his life script and personality. Did he cause himself to be what he is? No, he was scripted to be what he is by his accidental life experiences like everybody else, especially including the peculiar parents he accidentally inherited, relatively dysfunctional inhumane parents, however rich they might have been, who emotionally and intellectually abused him, contaminating his mind at an early age with insane script messages, as Trump’s niece recently divulged in her book, and as numerous writers have alluded to in articles since he became president of the US.
Trump was elected into office by ordinary voters who have fascist sub-conscious desires and fantasies, whom few people would consider evil, however much they are part and parcel of an evil process, not of their intentional making, mostly a function of their accidental life script messages laid on them by their parents, accidentally generated from one generation to another through time in the process of surviving, which was never easy for Earthian humans.
This is not the first time a relatively democratic country has become relatively fascist. It’s common in Earthian history, with relatively democratic large and previously relatively successful countries degenerating into fascist dictatorships in the 20th Century, Germany being a prime example. It’s common for countries to evolve from relative democracies to dictatorships and back to democracies, depending on what percentage of their human inhabitants hold various desires and fantasies about what leaders and countries are supposed to be like and do. Sadly a sizeable percentage of the human race has apparently always considered the entire Earthian human population to be so evil that they too had to do evil things, whether they liked it or not, evil things such as murdering people in cold-blood in wars, genocides, and democides, to survive.
The major governmental evolutionary change in the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries was from monarchies to relative democracies spurred by the American and French revolutions, with socialistic and communistic experiments being conducted in various countries at various times up to now. There aren’t that many hereditary monarchs ruling by divine right left. Kings and queens weren’t perfect by any means, or divine, but they were less murderous than fascist dictators like Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot.
Yes, fascist leaders can take over countries that consider themselves relatively socialistic or communistic, just like fascist leaders can take over countries that consider themselves relatively democratic; and it’s possible that socialistic or communistic countries can be more democratic than some so-called democracies, depending on what most of the inhabitants of the countries feel, think, and do.
Some humans think corrupt dysfunctional economic systems are the main cause of Earthian evil in general. This is not likely, in my opinion. Economic systems such as capitalism and communism are not like computer programs you put into a computer with consciously thought-out procedures for what to do given historical frequencies and random events; capitalism, socialism, and communism are sets of beliefs and attitudes regarding how selfish people should be and whether humans should be entitled to steal from one another in competitive economic behavior and to what degree. They are rationalizations of human behaviors en masse that naturally evolve through synergistic learning (learning in whole systems not apparent by observing sub-systems). They are not technological systems imposed by intentional intelligent humans.
I have no idea what’s gonna happen now. There is some chance the US will evolve into a fascist dictatorship sooner or later through general inertia, Trump or no Trump, depending upon what ordinary voters feel, think, and decide in presidential elections from here on. On the other hand let’s hope our dear leader sociopath Trump does not declare himself dictator for life before the November presidential election, as his hero did in Germany, assuming there would be any chance the real USian military would back him up, as his Homeland Security and Border Patrol troops are doing now in Portland, Oregon. USian civilians en masse would have no chance of winning a war with Trump’s self-imposed fascist dictatorship if the real USian military establishment followed his orders to suppress, capture, disappear, torture, execute, or imprison rebels, counter-insurgents, or whatever they might be called, using standard fascist dictatorship operating procedures.
Some USian civilians would probably fight for a while to remove the Trump dictatorship with an insurrection with no chance of winning. How long it would take the US society and government to evolve back into a relative democracy would remain to be seen. How many USians would have died in the upheaval is anybody’s guess. Hopefully it would be nothing like the carnage of similar upheavals in the 20th Century.
For more information regarding my use of Transactional Analysis https://www.itaaworld.org/ to create better discussion groups and democratic processes see my book Born to Learn: A Transactional Analysis of Human Learning. https://www.amazon.com/Born-Learn-Transactional-Analysis-Learning/dp/0692584331
For more information on how to co-construct better organizations and economic systems using TA see my book Business Voyages: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds https://www.amazon.com/Business-Voyages-Schemata-Discovering-Co-Constructing/dp/1413480810
See my article “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc,” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/ for some management science ideas on how human Earthians might eventually co-construct an economic system that is viable and satisfying for everyone aboard Spaceship Earth, making it possible for all Earthian humans to develop an I’m OK–You’re OK life position.
This entails Earthians peacefully reducing through natural attrition the human population aboard Spaceship Earth, never doing work that machines can do better, and delegating the day-to-day management of systems for scheduling, producing, and distributing the necessities of life to artificial intelligence programs and supercomputers.
This can be done using linear programming based on the general algorithmic matrix algebra form
Max CjXj, s.t. AijXj ≤, =, or ≥ Bi
as explained in “The Evolution of Spaceship Earth, Inc.” https://blog.effectivelearning.net/the-evolution-of-spaceship-earth-inc/
Flying aboard an airliner about to land at night moving at four hundred miles an hour at thirty thousand feet with cloudy and rainy weather below, which would you rather have landing the plane, the plane’s computer system or the pilot and co-pilot, seeing nothing out their windows but clouds and lightning?
For details regarding my transactional analysis and management science qualifications see my RJS Academic Vita at https://blog.effectivelearning.net/rjs-athletic-business-and-academic-vita/
Richard John Stapleton, PhD, CTA, is a certified transactional analyst, octogenarian emeritus professor of management, educator, writer, editor and publisher