Trump is Taking us Back to the Jungle!

 Tarzan the Ape Man was a popular story when I was growing up.  Nowadays it’s not so popular, because its premise, that a white male brought up by apes could rule over blacks, is too obviously racist.

I bring this up because it reminds me of what Donald Trump is doing: Stripping down our rule-based international order in order to nakedly dominate the rest of the world.  It’s back to the jungle on steroids.

Jane Goodall, who spent decades observing chimpanzees in the African jungle even compared Trump to one dominant male she named “Mike”, because his method of achieving dominance was not to demonstrate superior strength, but to scare the bejesus out of his fellow apes by grabbing empty 55 gallon oil drums and smashing them against each other in a terrific hullabaloo. This ingenious technique reminded her of the way Trump delivers a constant barrage of lies and insults in order to gain publicity.

America is the greatest country in history because it developed a democratic rule-based system of government, welcomed immigrants from all over the world, built a public educational system that honoured and encouraged critical intelligence and scientific and technical achievement, and then helped build international economic, legal, and cooperative institutions that facilitated the spread of knowledge, public health, and enabled billions of human beings to be raised out of poverty. And all this time the United States was itself a beneficiary of these changes.

Sadly, as I write this, The Trump  administration, in the name of MAGA, is savagely deconstructing the entire edifice that made both an international rule-based order and America’s greatness possible.  He is replacing it with big power politics, the rule of the strongest countries over the smaller, weaker countries.  This is the rule of the jungle, winner-takes-all ethos if you can call it an ethos.

Our closest biological relatives are the great apes.  Where we differ from them is we are more intelligent, more cooperative, and we’ve replaced ape dominance with moral rules.  In the jungle, it is winner-takes-all, and minimal sharing.  Each troop of apes rules their patch and viciously repels all male intruders.  In contrast, humans are able to cooperate widely by collectively adhering to moral rules.  Trump is amoral.  He doesn’t care that an innocent man was sent to a Salvadoran concentration camp without due process - it’s not a mistake, it’s intentional.  He doesn’t care that Russia invaded a sovereign neighbour, Ukraine, and murdered Ukrainian citizens and kidnapped their children.  What’s important to Trump is the law of the jungle - the weak must defer to the strong.  By enacting tariffs on every other country for no rhyme or reason, and by destroying the institutions that uphold the international rule-based order, he is asserting his dominance over the world.

What took millenia to build, he is destroying in a matter of weeks.  Soon the economic fallout will come.  The American economy will falter and slow to a crawl, international investors will pull their money out of the U.S. and  global economic growth will reverse its course. Even if the American people rise up and overthrow his regime, it will not restore what was lost.

Say goodbye to civilization and moral decency and hello to Planet of the Apes.

Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining

 We are heading for rough waters - in Canada, in the U.S., and all over the globe. The fact is that the U.S. economy has been the basis for the global economy, for global stability, and the U.S. dollar has been the universal store of value, because no other economy has been  bigger or more productive in human history.  But that’s all going to change; in fact, it’s already started to change, and nothing we can do will halt this change.

 There is already an ongoing crisis of confidence caused by the actions of the current President of the United States.  By his utterly reckless actions, In less than one hundred days, Donald Trump has single handedly increased economic uncertainty exponentially.  Now, the lesson has become evident to all: he cannot be trusted, nothing he says can be relied on.  This means that the uncertainty has no reverse gear, it will just keep ratcheting up;  because of what he has already done, nothing that Trump does from here on can change the nature of this problem. 

 Because international investors will realize that the  American economy and the American dollar are not to be trusted,  a tipping point will be reached, probably  sometime this year, when people around the world will decide to take their capital out of America; and this will become irreversible; it will turn into an unstoppable flood, a contagion that spreads exponentially.

  But where will the money go?  There is no real substitute for the United States, so it will have to go into multiple currencies and economies, none of which are equivalent in scale or quality, which means that the value of all this capital will decline precipitously.  We are looking at a severe contraction of the world’s money supply, something that has occurred before during the Great Depression, but never on the vastly larger scale of today’s global economy.

It will take all of the knowledge and ingenuity of the world’s central bankers to keep their economies afloat; so here in Canada, Mark Carney’s experience steering Canada’s and the UK’s central banks during major crises, will be a valuable asset if he wins the election.  That’s the silver lining for Canadians:  Trump's belligerence and bullying have unified Canadians like no other force in our history;  it has even convinced Quebecers of the importance of being Canadian, which is a miracle in itself!  And, while a significant minority of Albertans are making noises about succession, that  will go nowhere, because  Alberta’s economy, which is tightly bound to the fate of the oil industry, will take a dive as the demand for oil plummets, leading to an exodus of workers from that province.

There’s even a silver lining for Americans, and this is even more important in the scheme of things, because, in spite of America’s inevitable weakening, they will still be our neighbour to the south with a much bigger population and economy.  But a market crash and a depression will seal Trump’s fate, making him so universally unpopular that his project 2025 scheme to create an American autocracy will be stopped in its tracks by the collective will of the American people.  Thank God for small mercies.

Tariff Wars and Rumours of War

 What do you get when you have an incompetent immoral con artist running the world’s most powerful country? If you guessed chaos, you guessed right.  And when there is chaos, although most people lose, some people gain. Keeping people fearful is a way to control them, and the more chaotic things become the more desperate people become, and the more they are susceptible to being manipulated.  This is the way ruthless dictators can control people’s psychology - keeping them in thrall, distracting them to look away from the rampant state of corruption of their own regime, by stoking peoples anger and resentment in order to direct it at some convenient low status group like immigrants or refugees.   And, although the “fearless leader”  can control certain elements in his country's own population, it is a different situation in other countries where he lacks that psychological control. 

So our "fearless leader" starts to aim wider, perhaps he decides that his country needs to grow bigger in order to gain much needed land or resources, and he produces propaganda that denigrates the people in other countries, in the same way that he denigrates immigrants.  Pretty soon he has got his countrymen worked up to a frenzy about the foreign “devils”, the real enemy, who are taking advantage of us by ripping us off or by disrespecting our country.  Whatever!  It’s all in the service of mass mobilization:  motivating and moving the masses into the psychology of war. 

At a certain point in a tyrant’s career, war with other countries will begin to make sense as a means of controlling the population; making society more  submissive and  hierarchical, eliminating internal opposition, and giving the tyrant the means to commandeer the entire society’s resources in the service of defeating and conquering the enemy.  Putin’s shadow war with Ukraine: the initial “civil war”, the surprise annexation of Crimea, the eventual invasion of Ukraine in order to root out the “Nazi Ukrainian government”, the concurrent destruction of independent media voices and non-govermental organizations in Russia, the mass imprisonment of government critics, the assassinations of prominent opponents - all as a means to concentrate absolute power in one man alone.

There are some pretty hair-raising examples of this over the last century and a half Hitler’s insatiable appetite for conquest that led to the second world war and tens of millions of deaths.  The Japanese attempt to conquer the Pacific nations that also led to the second world war.  The Iran/Iraq war.  Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.  They all begin with a flood of lies that are used to stoke anger against a manufactured “enemy” and motivate a change in the people’s psychology to ready them to agree to the necessity of violent conflict  and then, inevitably, to convert production to a war-time economy.  

We’re starting to hear the same kind of noises from Trump, a consistent admirer of Vladimir Putin;  talks of “the enemy within”, talks of annexation of Canada, Greenland, and the Panama canal;   talks of trade war and then making it a reality; then escalating the trade war with China.

  What initiating and fomenting a global trade war does is it causes economic uncertainty and chaos which leads to a sharp break in economic activity, because investors, producers, and consumers, are not sure what to do.  So they pause their investing, consumption, and production, people begin to lose their jobs, investors lose money, and more firms go bankrupt.  People grow more anxious and fearful about the economic outcome, and they become easy prey for mass manipulation, which is most effective in times of war, as a war, even a trade war, galvanizes people, and leads them to be much more likely to agree to work together against a common enemy, even if that enemy is a figment of their imagination. This, in my opinion, is the greatest danger.

Ethics For Three Year Olds

 

“When those with power over children stifle children’s capacities to act on their own moral perceptions, they cause the moral sense to atrophy and be replaced by other action guiding motives.” - Patrick R. Frierson, The Moral Philosophy of Maria Montessori

Even three year olds are old enough to know that everyone should be fair, honest, kind, and that everyone ought to keep their promises and help others when they need help.  Let’s call this  “ethics for three year olds”.  Well, what happens when  many people suffer under a leader who makes a point of violating every one of these ideals everyday?  Unfortunately America has elected a President who lies all the time, who routinely breaks his word, and basically can’t be trusted. This is a big problem, not only for the citizens of America, but also for America’s neighbours as well as the rest of the world.

There’s  not much Canadians can do to stop Trump’s unethical behaviour, other than exercise solidarity and urge our leaders to stand up to Trump’s bullying when he aims his diatribes at Canada, which seems to be happening daily now. 

 I won’t venture to give Americans any sophisticated political advice, other than the kind of advice I would give to myself when I was a parent of a three year old. Parents should set a good example for their children. Try to be honest the vast majority of the time.  Never make a habit of lying.  If you don’t understand how something works, don’t pretend you know just to save face or impress someone.  If your child’s playmate refuses to play by the rules or cheats - tell her to find someone else to play with, someone who is willing to play by the rules. 

Let’s think about what kind of world we want to leave our kids.  Maybe one where the natural world is still healthy and has enough space to thrive.  Maybe one where children can grow up without getting asthma or cancer from industrial pollutants.  Maybe a world where everyone has a fair chance of thriving and being a productive citizen.  

I would tell my younger self:  avoid cynical people who see everyone as out for themselves; who think that playing by the rules is only for suckers.  It’s far better to live in a world where we can trust people and give them the benefit of the doubt.  If they cheat or steal, that’s another thing. We shouldn’t let people get away with that.  We shouldn’t let people get away with abusing others, and there are many kinds of abuse.  What they all have in common is people exercising arbitrary power over others they consider their inferiors - disrespect, manipulation, exploitation, causing physical harm, etc.  Children, women, foreigners, the poor, the homeless, and the mentally ill shouldn’t be mistreated. 

When people have prejudices, it means that they believe bad things about people of a different sex, colour, religion, or ethnic group, without any real consistent evidence.   There’s something called “confirmation bias” - and we all have it to some extent.  But it’s much worse for prejudiced people because  no evidence about the people they are afraid of will change their mind.  No matter how many examples you show a prejudiced person of “those people” being competent and honest, they keep believing the worst about them as a group.  They will look for and remember evidence that confirms their bias, and avoid  and forget any evidence that is positive. But it gets much worse, because the deeper the prejudice, the more likely that a person will believe lies about “those people”, especially if the lies correspond to what that person would like to believe anyways.  They are alright with hearing or spreading malicious gossip even if it is not true, because “those people” are the enemy. They think: “Kindness, and consideration towards our enemy is wrong.  Meanness and cruelty towards our enemies is good.”  This is the way confirmation bias can feedback into  lynching, ethnic cleansing and genocide.  When these things are allowed to happen society is in moral collapse. We want to avoid this at any cost.

Oops - Apocalypse!

 

In the last book of the New Testament, called “Revelation”, there is a chilling metaphor for the end times:  “the four horsemen of the apocalypse”  These are, in no particular order:  famine, disease, war, and death.  Death is the hooded skeleton carrying a big scythe, by the way,  a common image in Medieval times due to the recurrence of deadly plagues that swept over Europe for a thousand years.

For most of my life it seemed like we’d done a good job in keeping these horsemen at bay.  There were no pandemics since 1919, no big wars since 1945, and when there were famines they were localized to failed states in Africa, and we, in the rest of the world, collectively organized rescue missions.  Not only that, but the twentieth century saw life expectancy increase from sixty years to eighty years in all industrialized countries.  Whoa Horsemen!  

But then came the twenty-first century, and almost the first thing that happened was 9/11, Al Queda’s attack on the twin towers in New York.  Then the 2008 financial meltdown in America, then the 2020 Covid Pandemic, and two years later Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which has turned into the largest and most destructive war since 1945, and threatens to become the first phase in world war three if Russia is not stopped. 

 And barely noticed in all of this is the fact that life expectancy in the United States has, for the first time in history, started to decrease.  So it looks like those horsemen are back on the horizon.  And I might add that Donald Trump bears an uncanny resemblance to another character in the book of revelations whose name starts with “anti” and ends with “Christ”.

It doesn’t help that Trump’s co-president, Elon Musk has just shut down U.S.A.I.D., the U.S. charity organization that is the world’s largest funder of food and medicine aid.  This means that more deaths from famine, and more out of control disease outbreaks are a virtual certainty.   Also occurring were deep cuts to medical research, including vaccine research and pandemic preparedness.  Perhaps to top it off, were savage cuts to the program that was monitoring H5N1 infections in U.S. cattle.  I guess the philosophy here is “what you don’t know won’t hurt you.” 

It doesn’t help either that the head of the U.S. department of Health is JFK junior, a vaccine skeptic.  It’s almost like Donald Trump wants a repeat of his first administration’s disastrous handling of the Covid pandemic, only this time the human death rate from the bird flu virus could be as high as fifty percent, rather than two percent as it was for covid.  And this time Public Health authorities will be banished from the scene - replaced by the  free-dumb to not wear a mask, to  take vitamin A and horse de-wormer instead of getting a vaccine, and to  achieve herd immunity by mingling in crowds with other like-minded individuals. By the time this is over people everywhere will be glad they decided ahead of time to avoid travelling to the United States.  By electing Donald Trump, Americans have inadvertently opted to join his game of Russian Roulette with their health and safety.  It is not a pretty picture.  But it is one that we’ve seen before and it comes with four hooded horsemen, one of whom bears a scythe. Welcome to the Apocalypse, and say hi to the four horsemen

The Moral Breakdown of America

 “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”  - Hanna Arendt

“The fundamental weakness of Western society is empathy.” - Elon Musk

“The strongman’s goal is always to make his collaborators descend to his level….This trajectory of moral collapse explains how GOP elites such as…Marco Rubio and …J.D. Vance, both of whom called out Trump’s strongman ways in 2016, now collude with his destruction of democracy and alliances with autocrats.”  - Ruth Ben-Ghiat

How lucky we are to live in a society like Canada, where the country’s motto is “peace, order, and good government”.  Our coast-to-coast nation was built out of diversity, with the coexistence of  three peoples:  the French, the English, and the First Nations.  We have not always lived up to the ideal of  mutual respect but we have come a long way from our rough  beginnings. 

 President Donald Trump’s hostile attempt to weaken our sovereignty by raising tariffs against Canadian products is a clear and present danger for all of us. But this moment of existential threat has catalyzed a new understanding of who we are, as a nation, in comparison to our cousins to the south. It has brought us together, not pulled us apart.  We stand proud and united in the face of this threat against an obviously bigger  and more powerful foe.

Contrast our unity with that of the “United” States.  Even their name belies reality.  The United States is not united.  And that is because it is led both by a President and a political  party that has suspended moral and legal norms in the pursuit of authoritarian power. It began long ago with the widespread acceptance of lies, the denigration of scientific knowledge and the denigration of the legitimacy of government institutions.  Once the consensus on knowledge and legitimate authority was destroyed, the way was open for a demagogue like Donald Trump to spread lies and sow fear and prejudice amongst the population.  Chillingly, like Adolf Hitler, this demagoguery was focused on despised minorities and refugees, people already considered aliens by many within the country.

Trump, a convicted felon and sexual predator himself, has continually stated falsehoods about refugees, claiming they are murderers, rapists, and the mentally ill.  He has so poisoned American society with his lies that a majority of the population supports his draconian plans to deport millions of immigrants. But this deportation scheme is a pretext for bringing about the moral collapse of American society, paving the way for an authoritarian government.

In a moral panic, such as witch hunts,  “satanic daycares”, and  “transexual grooming” political opportunists spread fear and induce public hysteria in order to seize political power.  These same fear mongers are noticeably silent about real dangers such as increased access to guns and automatic weapons, climate change, and the preventable spread of infectious disease.  By amplifying ignorance and lies they condition a receptive portion of the population to increase their receptivity to lies even further, so that they end up in an information bubble, consuming only  media that confirms what they already believe and rejecting objective information from more mainstream sources.

It then becomes easier to manipulate people  to further dehumanize those they’ve already been conditioned to fear, such as refugees, visible minorities, and LGBTQ people.  This is the same political technique that was used in Nazi Germany.  First dehumanize a low-status group such as trans people, then isolate them, taking their literature out of libraries, excluding them from school sports, and medical care.  The basic idea is treat them as less than human and deserving of bullying and mistreatment.  Next expand this process to other low status groups, so that more and more of the population becomes involved in isolating, dehumanizing, and persecuting a growing minority of people.  In this way more and more people become involved in the moral breakdown of society.

And make no mistake, that is what Trump and his followers are attempting to do in America, to level the moral landscape, destroying empathy, and encouraging bullying, hatred, and violence against “the other”.   Needless to say, in no way does this strengthen and unite a society.  It does the opposite, because getting rid of empathy and common morality destroys the cooperative underpinnings of a society, leading to the destruction of trust, accumulated knowledge, and goodwill, and to a regime of unaccountable corruption.

How to Make "That" Make Sense

Yesterday Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said this, on the occasion of Trump’s tariffs against Canadian goods:  “So today,the United States launched a trade war against Canada, their closest partner and ally, their closest friend. At the same time, they’re talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator. Make that make sense.”

OK, let’s do that:  perhaps it does make sense if you consider that Donald Trump is a Russian asset, a Manchurian Candidate who returned from a business trip to Russia in the late 1980’s to proclaim in full page ads in major U.S. newspapers that the U.S. defence of Europe and Japan was subsidizing these countries and a waste of taxpayer’s money(which shows that he hasn’t changed his tune on that subject since then);  who ran a Russian money laundromat selling overpriced New York real estate to the Russian mafia;  who twenty years later began a winning Presidential campaign by borrowing the Russian propaganda technique of fire hosing multiple lies, obtaining additional help from the Russian “Internet Research Agency”, and publicly asking for Putin’s help to dump private emails from the democratic party onto the internet, which Putin, in fact, did the next day.

So you may be asking, if Trump is the Manchurian candidate, why didn’t he do more to benefit Russia in his first administration?  Well, the answer may be that, not having any previous political experience, he didn’t know how to, and his administration, which was largely made up of responsible people, constrained him from doing so.

But this time, both his words and actions actually do respect Russian priorities.  Putin has invaded Ukraine and wants to take it over and do away with  democratically elected leader Vladimir Zelensky;  and in the last week Trump has tried to make a unilateral deal with Russia, shutting out Zelensky, and giving Putin everything, without asking for any concessions in return.  He’s insulted Zelensky and the European Union, and betrayed his North American trading partners, while basically telegraphing that he won’t bother defending Europe  if Putin decides to invade another European country - a clear violation of the Nato agreement. And then he suspended intelligence surveillance of Russia, started the process of cancelling sanctions against Russian Oligarchs, and suspended military aid for Ukraine.  So last Friday, a Kremlin spokesman said  that Trump’s “rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations…largely aligns with our vision.”

As the Kremlin has pointed out, Trump has acted quickly to fulfill their wishes.  It took only one week for President Trump to deliver the breakup of Nato, the emasculation of American intelligence, the crippling of Ukraine’s defence and the welcoming of Russian Oligarchs to America’s shores - almost everything that Russia has wanted - handed to them on a silver platter. There - does that make enough sense now?