Generator
I’ve been thinking that I ought to explain to you why and how I transformed from just another Jersey City yuppie into just another Jersey City yuppie who wants to ignite a revolution of perspective.
That means, unfortunately, that we’ll have to talk about trumpism.
America Fails the trump Test
In 2015, trump walked down that ridiculous gold-plated escalator and grabbed America by the pussy for the first time. That violation has been simultaneously infuriating, humiliating, and personal.
I was like most of us back then in that my reaction to trumpism was a mixture of disbelief and revulsion. I surely didn’t think trump would actually win. It’s not that I was so naive that I trusted the GOP’s base would resist trump’s naked appeal to racial resentment. I wasn’t so cynical, though, that I believed trump’s strategy would earn him 270 electoral votes. To me, back then, Americans were better than that.
I was wrong, though. Very wrong. Trump’s electoral victory was, for me, a deep betrayal. It’s not that I believed before trump’s election that there were no racists in the United States. (Rolls Eyes.)
But trump’s election did shake me awake from a dream - a delusion, maybe. At least since Obama, I’d fantasized that most decent Americans agreed about what outright racism looks like and what outright misogyny looks like. And I believed that for most Americans, the existence of that kind of bigotry, in any candidate, or in any other person, was a deal breaker.
I’m Shocked Into Reality
That outlook was unrealistic. Obviously so, in retrospect. The 2016 election revealed to me the unsettlingly large number of Americans who tolerate bigotry. In their candidates, in their friendships, in their families.
I struggle, as I write this, to find words sufficient to communicate how utterly that new-found knowledge changed my relationship with America. And Americans.
In a flash, I realized that over the course of my life, I’d anchored some portion of my identity in basic assumptions about how America and Americans regarded race, racism, and racists. trump’s election seemed to prove those assumptions wrong.
Somehow more troublingly, the people who elected trump didn’t all fit the stereotype of backward, racist, southerners. Many trump voters were the same people I’d grown up with. I’d played sports with them. I’d known their parents. I’d smoked pot with them. I’d trusted them. I’d even loved them. The resulting cognitive dissonance stung me in a way I’d not anticipated.
Living through that awful aftermath was like walking across a bloody battlefield the morning after the fight. It was ghastly - a nightmare of shock and sadness. I struggled mightily during those furious days.
On one hand, I strained to resist the urge to make every white person a proxy for trump’s followers.
On the other hand, a surge of potent solidarity seemed to connect me to every non-white person I came in contact with. I’ve often felt a certain solidarity with POC in general and with black men in particular. It’s a natural response, I think, to the experience of being a minority in America or, really, being in the minority in any larger group.
But my interactions with brown folks in the wake of trump’s election weren’t run-of-the-mill-we’re-both-non-white-in-America-and-that’s-intrinsically-challenging solidarity interactions. They were imbued, instead, with a deep empathy unlike anything I’d previously experienced. It was intense, and it was focused, and it was personal.
I Get Really F**king Angry
My initial shock and confusion gave way to, frankly, anger. I’m not a particularly angry guy. Passionate, yes. Intense, sometimes. Angry? Nah. But man, after trump’s election, I was angry.
I wasn’t as angry with trump or his base as you might expect. trump is, at bottom, an (bigoted) opportunist who’s taken advantage of the American public’s depleted confidence in government institutions for personal gain. He’s a low class charlatan. From that perspective, his behavior while despicable, was in some sense, rational.
trump’s base? They’ve been radicalized by the likes of Fox News, 8Chan, Alex Jones, and right wing pastors. They’re suckers for the sort of white grievance narrative that trump delivers so capably. I doff my metaphorical cap to the trump team in this narrow and deplorable sense. They expertly mobilized America’s ambient bigotry in a way that rivals the KKK in the 1920s.
Still, trump, and his allies in right wing America, did more or less what I expected them to do in 2016. (Though, admittedly, they were far more successful than I’d expected.)
I was far angrier in the wake of trump’s 2016 victory with the millions of:
Relatively moderate Americans who regarded trumpism as mere politics as usual. I mean the folks who proclaim that #bothsides are the same. Or those who justified trumpism by assuring themselves that he’d “shake up” the Washington “establishment” and stick it to the “political class.”
People for whom “voting their conscience” in 2016 was more important than holding the political (and moral and ethical) line against trumpism. Those voters wasted their political energy, and all-too-often their votes, on opposing the only candidate positioned to beat trump in the 2016 general election.
But all of that outrage pales in comparison to the unique disdain I reserved for those who regarded their day-to-day lives as so important, that they couldn’t be bothered to participate in the political process at all.
All of those relatively moderate Americans were the object of my ire. I’d regarded them as my allies who would grasp the gravity of the threat trumpism presented to democracy and to justice. I’d believed that moderate America, would rise up and help defeat trumpism.
On November 11, 2016, moderate America betrayed my trust. Fundamentally. And god damn, I was angry about it.
Then I Find a Solution
Such was the evolution of my quest to reconcile the rise of trumpism with my lifelong conception of my homeland. I searched desperately, pathetically, for an answer that might relieve me from the cognitive dissonance trump’s election wrought upon my psyche.
As part of that process, I stumbled, ineptly, upon Moderate Rationalism. Moderate Rationalism is my (decidedly) proto-philosophy that aspires, explicitly, to discover a method of existing in a world grounded fundamentally in:
Trusting good ideas like: reason, rational inquiry, and science.
Rejecting bad ideas like: faith, superstition, conventional wisdom, and dogma.
(For a more complete discussion of Moderate Rationalism, see Impeller.)
Many of even the most moderate among us (including me) cling to beliefs that fly in the face of reason. Those beliefs, all-too-often, indulge the more solipsistic and barbarous elements of human nature.
Worse, our leaders routinely craft policies based on those terrible ideas. All of that is especially true when, as is the case in 2020, the world’s middle class feels increasingly pessimistic about the future.
There are only so many ideological extremists in the world. They, and their toxic doctrines can, at least theoretically, be contained.
Thankfully, there are far more moderates on our planet than there are extremists. By definition. But how does one persuade the relatively normal, moderate citizens of the world that their unwillingness to ground their worldview in reason is undermining the very tenets of Western Civilization that makes their moderate lifestyle possible?
It’s not clear to me exactly how to reach that goal. But I do know that Just World Fallacy (JWF) is going to try. JWF will venture into the vast maze that is human nature and try to deduce how America got to trumpism. We won’t shy away from the truth even when (especially when) it contradicts our deeply-held beliefs. Courageously, we’re going to go find out where we’re wrong.
In-so-doing, JWF will employ every tool at its disposal. We’ll use evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology. We’ll use philosophy. We’ll use anthropology and sociology. We’ll use physics. We’ll use the scientific method.
We’ll use reason.
Along the way, we’ll get to know each other better. We’ll talk to each other about how we find meaning, and the drive to keep living, in a world as precarious and overwhelming as the one we all inhabit.
This essay is part of JWF’s opening statement - an origin story, perhaps - for a continuing discussion. It takes courage, real courage, to subject one’s own belief system to the cold, impersonal light of reason. Most aren’t up to that task. I often question whether I’m up to the task and I’m the guy writing this thing.
But I cling to the belief that you and I want, deep down, to reconcile our lofty ideals about the way we ought to live our lives with the way we actually live our lives. And I trust that we want to do that in a way that’s intellectually honest.
That process of exploration and reconciliation is the adventure on which I hope you’ll join me. Your contribution Matters
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Postscript
This post is titled Generator because it describes the experiences that motivated me to embark on the JWF project. They generated my desire to ignite a revolution of perspective.
The image associated with this post is just a power station generating power.
