Transitional Trump
Transitional Trump
Trump has finally made the transition (he’s a “trans”): from falsehood to nonsense. He has long been unconstrained by truth and tells whopping lies all the time. We are accustomed to that. But now he has gone a stage further: he has descended into nonsense (very Lewis Carroll). He is no longer constrained by logic and simple coherence (Gaza, Canada, the FBI, the CIA, etc. etc.). His followers lap it up, but it is amusing to see fellow politicians trying to make sense of it all. He gets that self-satisfied blank look on his face and starts spouting total rubbish—strings of words with no logical connection, odd divagations, meaningless phrases, massive non sequiturs, strange locutions, mangled words, weird fantasies. He seems to dwell on the borders of sanity. I wonder what the next stage will be: will it be pure gibberish? What will his supporters and enablers do then? Will they start to talk gibberish themselves, or try to offer meaningful paraphrases of his verbal tangles? How far can he go on the road to incoherence before they call a halt?
Incoherence sounds like a town in the Wild West. Donald J Trump is the Sherriff there, slouched in the saloon, rambling daily whilst injecting crazy old Elon’s medicinal disinfectant tincture as the rest of the posse knock back the Kool-aid.
Or he is the leader of a gang of outlaws who have seen better days but can still scare old ladies.
Trump is the oracle of Mordor. Everything he says is a malicious lie with no sense and no reference, everything he says is toxic waste, a bubbling bath of BS.
I think he wakes up every day and wonders what big lie he can get away with that day.
Rome was sacked by the Huns, the Goths and who else? The US was sacked by who? By Trump, starting in 2016 and it’s an inside job. He is our Sea Peoples.
He is the worst kind of German.
He is both a paradigm and a paragon of Frankfurt’s bullshitter.
And, as we learned from Frankfurt’s critical distinction between the liar and the bullshitter, the latter is far more dangerous than the former because he cannot be defeated by our own commitment to the normative value of truth.
We now have not just bullshit but trumpshit: not indifference to the truth but incomprehension of it. You can detect it by its love of nonsense.
You may be right; it’s hard to interpret his behaviour as anything but symptomatic of total epistemic incompetence – the obtuse end of a sort of ‘epistemic entropy’, I suppose.
I’m concerned about it’s effect on democracy, given the apish enthrallment that comes so naturally to most of us, combined with the total dissolution of truth (I recall your idea that truth is the sui generis logical property which enables us to learn from one another).
Normally serious people can now be heard tortuously accommodating his ‘cognitive abyssalism’.
I don’t like to point out a mistake in your normally impeccable writing, but what is that “it’s” doing in your second paragraph (it should be “its”)?
That’s the second time in 21 years you’ve pulled me up for this.
It’s the bloody autocorrect on my phone, combined with my lazy eyes.
To press the point, if I may: the implications of the intersection of Frankfurt’s analysis of bullshit (as complete indifference to the normative value of truth) and your pragmatic point (about truth’s being the property which uniquely enables us us to learn from other peoples’ testimony) are dire, to say the least, for democracy.
It’s no coincidence that Orwell and Kafka focussed on truth in the ways they did.
Putin is the doyen of bullshit and he appears to have Trump by the short and curlies!
The problem is that people who really don’t know any better will read such mistakes as correct and keep making the same error.
You are quite right that the love of truth is crucial to a civilized society. We are surrounded by an epidemic of lying these days. Universities are not immune.
I had a tutor who deducted marks because I’d referred (in an essay about Shostakovich’s subtle and satirical use of klezmer) to “Stalin’s unconscionable persecution of Jews”; he remarked that “unconscionable is a subjective term; someone else may take a different view”.
Hmph. Tsch.
He was wrong–it’s not a “subjective term”, unless all of morality is subjective, which it isn’t.
Orwell was concerned with the political manipulation of truth. Kafka saw the bureaucratic absurdity that made truth inaccessible. Frankfurt worried about truth’s susceptibility to complete insouciance.
But, if you’re right about trumpshit, then we are now witnessing something none of them lived to see: the full eschaton of epistemic order; a final severance of truth from its social function.
Trump (and his allies and enablers) have made truth irrelevant to the body politic. Performance has eclipsed truthfulness. The social function of truth has been taken over by crowd manipulation. Not the pragmatic theory of truth but the political theory of truth: truth is what maximizes votes.
You’re right to keep this sober; performance has eclipsed truthfulness, and the social function of truth has been subordinated to political expediency. But this doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve passed the event horizon of epistemic collapse. Things may not be as biblical as I have implied. It could merely suggest another dark cycle from which truth may reassert itself.
History shows that societies have recovered from epistemic distortion before but never under conditions so globally entrenched and technologically amplified.
You’ve given me reason to hesitate, to rein in the notion of an eschaton of epistemic order. Truth in essence is not something that can vanish; its logical status remains intact, untouched by the shifting conditions of human discourse. More precisely, belief itself (as a disposition to assent to truth) cannot be eradicated, for to abandon truth as its standard is to disqualify belief altogether. The deeper question is whether the public *expression* of belief, now so often governed by utility rather than truth, can still be meaningfully anchored in rational discourse. If the mechanisms that once aligned belief’s expression with its normative function have been thoroughly corrupted, is that reversible? Or could the concept of truth become a vestigial ideal?
Truth will assert itself in the end, but the end may be the End.