Lessons from Trump

What do we need to learn from him?

Douglas Rushkoff coined the term, “media virus,” to describe how memes replicate themselves. I see Trump as a “media fungus,” revealing the spread of corruption and rot through our political, economic, and cultural systems.

I hate that I am thinking about Donald Trump again. But here it is.

On Monday, I wrote:

I see Trump as an extraordinary example of a performing artist / wizard (albeit a malicious, self-centered one) who has reached a psychic zone where he lives completely in and from the present moment, with no regret, no retrospective capacity, no shame or guilt about anything. I detest him, yet I find something amazing, magnetic, about this. Trump has inspired other narcissists like Elon Musk and Russell Brand to follow his lead into utter shamelessness and braggadocio, changing the tonality of our culture.

Let’s dive deeper into this today, with the assistance of Gary Lachman’s Dark Star Rising. Lachman tracks the origins of Trump-ism in modern occult movements, ranging from chaos magick to Traditionalism to the American “New Thought” movement, exemplified by Trump’s personal guru, Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking.

Essentially, New Thought proponents believe reality can be entirely transformed through the power of the imagination combined with focused will. Lachman traces the roots of the New Thought movement back through history: “The beliefs of New Thought are rooted in ancient occult ideas, insights into the magical nature of the mind and reality that informed the philosophers of second-century Alexandria and the geniuses of the Renaissance, and which today are seen to be more and more in line with our understanding of physical reality at its most fundamental level.” Lachman — an important, under-recognized scholar — will be an upcoming speaker on our Future of Consciousness seminar, which you are still welcome (and encouraged) to join.

About Trump, Lachman writes:

According to some reports, Trump’s at times ruthless belief in his own powers and abilities may lie in his interest in an obscure and somewhat “magical” philosophy known as New Thought, Mental Science, or, as it is sometimes also called, “the power of positive thinking.” … From Peale, Trump learned the great secret, that “the mind can overcome any obstacle.”…

Trump’s faith in his instincts and his ability to “move quickly and decisively when the time is right” go hand in hand with his perception of the fundamentally fluid nature of things, their volatile character, an insight that reaches back to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus and which informs recent developments in science, like chaos theory. It also provides the basis for chaos magick. “Anything can change, without warning,” Trump believes. “And that’s why I try not to take any of what’s happening too seriously.”

Embracing the freedom to manipulate reality on a large scale while not taking anything seriously, remaining detached, is a powerful magical approach.

Another interesting (and short) book on these themes is Ken Wilber’s Trump and the Post-Truth World: Wilber proposes, following his Spiral Dynamics model, that Trump’s success has to do with the collapse of the “Green” stage, the “worldcentric” level of consciousness achieved in the 1960s, responsible for movements of social and ecological justice, Feminism, Gay Rights, and so on. The deficiency of the Green level, revealed by extreme Postmodern relativism and Deconstruction, is its incapacity to define “truth” — authority or objectivity — in a positive sense. The world becomes chaos and flux, with outcomes to be determined by pure force or willpower: “In a culture of nihilism, in an atmosphere of aperspectival madness where there is no real truth, truth becomes whatever I most fervently desire—in a sea of nihilism, passionate narcissism is the key determinant.”

Like thieves in the night, Trump and the Alt Right broke into the mainstream via this ideological gap or aporia. Wilber envisions, hopefully, this collapse to be necessary before we reach the next, second tier, integral stage:

Integral theories and metatheories are increasingly gaining ground, and wherever they do, they automatically correct the green dysfunctions that they unearth. Little by little, in other words, an Integral awareness is helping to embody an evolutionary self-correction in its very actions.

Some of us have been waiting on this for a while now. For reasons I might explore in another essay, I am no longer so sure it is coming. (The Future of Consciousness seminar is, partly, a referendum on this).

I remain fascinated by this question of whether or not we are, indeed, on a species level, in an evolutionary process leading to a higher level of individual and collective consciousness, as Wilber and others propose. Or is this idea of inevitable progress a delusion unconsciously reflecting Judeo-Christian faith, which predicts a Messianic return and collective Redemption as the culmination of history or the “end of time?” Are we, instead, in an inevitable cycle of degeneration and decline, as Traditionalists like Rene Guenon and Julius Evola (occult influences on the Alt Right) believed?