The Peripatetic Philosopher ponders a conundrum:

The Difficulty in Understanding the Donald J. Trump Phenomenon!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. 

© December 10, 2015

By an interesting coincidence, Adolf Hitler’s rise to power came when it was my time to come into the world. Now, when it is my time to exit the world, a phenomenon not unlike that of Adolf Hitler, who created a new model for the rise to power, finds Donald J. Trump frustrating those committed to a behaving corporate society being at a loss on what to do.

The Trump Phenomenon involves a bit of history, a bit of denial of the significance of sweeping change, and the dislocation of our individual and collective souls when it comes to “science and religion.” Whenever there is mass confusion rising to hysteria, society experiences a watershed moment. Are we on the cusp of such a moment?

This current phenomenon of Donald J. Trump cannot be explained away with conventional wisdom any more than people could fathom the rise of Hitler in 1933.

Fifty years ago, I read William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), which was a comprehensive historical interpretation of the Nazi era, positing that German history logically proceeded from the Protestantism of Martin Luther to Adolf Hitler along with the brutal rise of capitalism to replace feudalism.  In other words, it was the dawn of corporate society.

  

Hitler’s ascension to power was an expression of Germany’s national character, not totalitarianism as an ideology that was internationally fashionable in the 1930s.  He captured the mind of the time as Trump is capturing the mind of his time, which is mainly a mind out to lunch with reality.   

  

Much is made of Germany’s humiliation at Versailles at the end of WWI, but little note is made of the fact that most nations of the West then pledged blind obedience to temporal rulers be they in democratic or autocratic systems. 

  

This was especially true of Great Britain, despite its constitutional monarchy democracy, with the imperial majesty of empire extending to every corner of the globe, where the peoples of those regions were exposed to despotic control and exploitation with no viable avenue of opposition.

  

Germany in particular put a high premium on servility and allegiance to authority as the most prominent of Germanic virtues.  What is not so commonly acknowledged is that American academia, scholarship, industry and nationalism subscribed to a similar boilerplate but under the guise of constitutional representative democracy.  It was the infallibility of authority across the board.  

Adolf Hitler stepped into the confusion of his time to invent a new method of acquiring power.  He aggressively campaigned across Germany flying to every principality of the German nation, holding rallies and using the radio, newspapers and magazines as they had never been used before to promulgate his charismatic message of Germany being victimized by the West with him as Germany’s savior.   

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY REMAIN

 THE SAME!

We are quick to note Hitler’s excesses but not our own as there was little doubt in the United States who was in charge and who was not.  The “captains of industry” controlled the economy, and therefore essentially the nation.

Futurist Alvin Toffler shattered that convenient boilerplate with “Future Shock” (1970).   He explained why the emerging industrial giant, America, did what it did out of self-interest rather than humanitarian reasons.  This included the need to embark on compulsory education as the 19^th century gave way to the 20^th century. 

American industry needed workers who could read and write and do simple mathematical calculation.  It also needed these workers to behave as disposable parts to that gigantic machine. 

This new boilerplate had students matriculating from five-years-of-age through their teenage years.  In addition to learning these skills, they were conditioned to behave as obedient, polite, submissive, passive, reactive, complacent and compliant students to corporate authority.  This authority and compliance included parents, teachers, preachers, the police and politician.   

They were meant to be cogs in the wheel of progress and programmed to do, not to think.  This worked surprisingly well through WWII, but not after, as the 1960s and 1970s soon revealed.

Toffler explains:

  

"Society needs people who take care of the elderly and who know how to be compassionate and honest. Society needs people who work in hospitals. Society needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they’re emotional, they’re affectional. You can’t run the society on data and computers alone."

 Psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy gets inside this need to exposing the obvious:

  

"Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to unlearn …

  

"The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction — how to teach himself."

  

Yet, despite this advice, here in 2015, as I have attempted to continuously show in a constant stream of books and articles in the genre of the professional worker, students and workers alike continue to be managed, motivated, mobilized and compensated as if we are still the blue collar worker era of pre-WWII. 

That obliging blue collar worker was programmed to do, not to think, to behave, not to challenge, to comply, not to initiate. 

  

Toffler and Gerjuoy are suggesting a radical change from doing to thinking, from being obedient to authority to taking charge. 

  

Yet, seventy years after WWII, the working world is still not designed to fulfill that need, or that boilerplate, and therefore society is not yet ready for this new human being.

 In Toffler’s “The Third Wave” (1980), he becomes more specific describing three types of societies, based on the concept of "waves" with wave pushing the older wave and society and culture aside. 

 The “First Wave” was the society of the agrarian revolution after the first hunter gathering culture.

 The “Second Wave” was the industrial revolution that transpired between the late 17^th century and mid-20^th century.

  

The main component of the “Second Wave” was the nuclear family and the compulsory and compliant educational system, and the birth of corporate society.  

Toffler writes:

 “The Second Wave Society was of an industrial base on mass production, mass distribution and mass recreation, mass entertainment, and ultimately the mass of weapons of mass destruction. 

“You combine those things with standardization, centralization, and concentration of resources with synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy.”

 In my writing, I call it “corpocracy” (see Six Silent Killers, 2015 or The Worker, Alone! 2016).  

  

The “Third Wave” is the post-industrial postmodernity society.  According to Toffler, since the late 1950s, most nations have been moving away from a “Second Wave Society” into what he calls a “Third Wave Society,” one based on actionable knowledge as a primary resource.

 Tofller’s description of this super-industrial society (notice he still is stuck on industrialization) dovetails with current concepts of an “Information Age, “Space Age,” and “Technetronic Age,” or a scientific-technological revolution.

 Toffler and his futuristic cohorts predict a demassification, diversity, knowledge-based society in which production, and the acceleration of change is non-linear and can go backwards, forwards and sideways.  In other words, this finds unpredictability and contradiction endemic to the future. 

Modern man is uncomfortable with this as well as with complexity.   He wants predictable redress of problems with simplistic and understandable strategies.   

  

Donald Trump comes to the fore as did Hitler some eighty-two years ago with lifestyles supplanting living styles and subcultures exploding into all kinds of insanities. 

  

The contemporary mind has given way to pedestrian boredom. 

People have become so numbed and dumb witted by the constant cacophony of dissembling authoritative dribble emanating from parents, teachers, preachers, the police and politicians that little of that dulling noise registers. 

 People attempt to escape this prison with outrageous dress, music, and antics to shock when the collective conscience is beyond shocking.     

We have become a Teflon society led by Teflon figures in mass customization to the norm of “fast food” McDonalds to “on the cheap” Walmart.  Metadata has replaced the personal, as death and taxes no longer is the constant fear but not belonging.  The Donald appears in this climate.

Is Donald Trump an aberration?  Or is he the next nightmare that collective society will endure?  No one knows.  No one took the little German corporal seriously until he changed the world.  What will be the legacy of the Donald?

The reality is that people are tired of being tired, tired of being told what to think, believe and value, tired of being told what words and ideas mean, tired of being designated Democrats or Republicans, conservatives or liberals, Catholics or Protestants, Moslems or Jews, tired of living in this Wizard of Oz time.

While the Donald plays on our fears, and our hunger for the simplistic, he stays quiet on religion.  Religion brought the Puritans to America, and religion has always been fundamental to the American conscience.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Albert Einstein thoughts about religion appeared in the New York Times Magazine on November 9, 1930.  Here is what he had to say (in part):

Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and longing are the motive force behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present themselves to us.

Now what are the feelings and needs that have led men to religious thought and belief in the widest sense of the words? A little consideration will suffice to show us that the most varying emotions preside over the birth of religious thought and experience. With primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions - fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, and death.

Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal connections is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates illusory beings more or less analogous to itself on whose wills and actions these fearful happenings depend. Thus one tries to secure the favor of these beings by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed toward a mortal.

In this sense I am speaking of a religion of fear. This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the formation of a special priestly caste which sets itself up as a mediator between the people and the beings they fear, and erects a hegemony on this basis. In many cases a leader or ruler or a privileged class whose position rests on other factors combines priestly functions with its secular authority in order to make the latter more secure; or the political rulers and the priestly caste make common cause in their own interests.

The social impulses are another source of the crystallization of religion. Fathers and mothers and the leaders of larger human communities are mortal and fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts men to form the social or moral conception of God.

This is the God of Providence, who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes; the God who, according to the limits of the believer's outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human race, or even or life itself; the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied longing; he who preserves the souls of the dead. This is the social or moral conception of God …….

The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.

The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with this highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.

In his quiet way, Einstein, a deeply religious man, but not one of a specific denomination although born a Jew, projects the mind to the cosmic and religion with it. 

In reading Max Jammer’s “Einstein and Religion” (1999), you get a sense of how controversial was Einstein’s stand eighty five years ago.  Perhaps today it is food for the soul.

Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that resulted in the making of the atomic bomb.  He did so because of Nazism and the Holocaust.  Am I placing candidate Donald Trump in the same sense of Hitler and Nazism? 

Not at all.  I am contemplating a conundrum.  Roman Catholic Cardinal Pacelli, a devout man, was Nuncio of Germany (1920-1939) during Hitler’s rise to power.  He became Pope Pius XII in March 1939 with Hitler invading Poland in September of that same year, igniting WWII.

Historians claim this cardinal and pope didn’t know what to make of the rise of Hitler, or what to do once he had come to power.   The current populace may have its stomach of conventional politicians, but at least it knows what it gets with them.  The Donald is another story.