Trump and twitter: like hand in glove

he most consequential pronouncements today are made on Twitter, that phenomenally-popular app that foists the challenge on people, in so many ways, to summarize the meaning of life in 280 characters or less.  

No, it has not been acclaimed as the official channel of the United Nations, or the lingua franca of international legation. In fact, it is largely ignored by state institutions worldwide. Its only ticket to fame or notoriety is the fact that Donald Trump loves it. And because he does, this one man--the single most powerful individual on planet Earth--is able to command the attention of every person living in urbanized society with a cellphone in his or her hand. In 21st century terms that's everybody and his mother, father, sister, brother and cousin.

   No amount of persuasion will make Donald Trump give up this piped-in system of inflicting his random thoughts on people who love him, hate him and everyone else in between.   It is more than a bully pulpit. The Whitehouse is a bully pulpit. It is possible to be oblivious to it. But not to Twitter--it is every bit the essence of what is  being suggested in the movie Inception (Warner Brothers, 2010).

   If you wanted to obtain the greatest power on earth, what would it be?

   It would be the power to plant an idea in the mind of someone without that person becoming aware of the implantation.  It is the ability to control people's future behavior by injecting all the factors that would elicit that behavior someday, but without triggering any defensive or evasive response today. The only state in which an individual's mind could be penetrated without pushback is in the subconscious. Therefore, the venue for an operation to implant the seed of future conviction is in one's dreams, during one's sleep. In a nutshell, that is inception. It's also roughly the plot of the movie.

   It is conventional wisdom to say that Donald Trump is intellectually shallow. But i suspect that his mind is more devious than he is getting credit for. His random ramblings of thought might actually be a complex and deliberate political algorithm that informs his reputably predictable decisions. The mistake that his adversaries and victims--that might even include me--have all commonly made is to reckon his tweets using the metric of character, instead of intention. He makes comments that stretch credulity--but often it is enough to make you doubt what you do believe. He has used Twitter not only to cry "wolf!" but to sing a wolf song endlessly that you no longer care to wait for the real coming of the wolf. You just stop caring if it even comes at all. To too many, Donald Trump's tweets are just an indication of his insanity, never suspecting that they are the doors to their own vulnerability. They see his obsession with Twitter as a flaw of character, and not a deliberate pursuit of intention. In reality, it may be that Donald Trump is not really trying to impress anyone, or to prove himself dominant over everyone else--he just wants everyone to think he is absurdly harmless enough to let pass by. 

   Everytime Donald Trumps tweets another absurd recitation of falsehood and half-truths, it sends everybody scrambling to fact-check him. He has prescribed the relationship between himself and the rest of the world: he is the inceptor, everybody else are  the reactors. 

   That is why the phrase "standard issues of the day" has lost its meaning. The issues we discuss today, relevant or not, are the matters Donald Trump is fulminating about in his latest tweet. He directs the universal political dialogue towards the trivial and inconsequential by being trivial and inconsequential. The power of Twitter does not consist of the influence of Donald Trump. It partakes of how he has discovered, and now utterly exploits, the helplessness of his captive audience. 

   The traditional clarions of public opinion are stilll there, of course: the editorials and opinion columns of learned scholars, political scientists and close observers. But even they are renegades from academia. The forum of political discourse has long departed the proverbial agoras of Greek scholarship. Because of technology, nuggets of wisdom are now just a Google away, no longer the product of personal research, sometimes not even of personal understanding. The average person today gets his opinion from bumper stickers.  Who still has the time to read? When the level of political discourse is limited to 280 characters, truth and wisdom itself is truncated. With the great spotlight of education extinguished, it yields a society of the philosophically blind. And, sadly, in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed rises to become King.Ⓒ 2020 Joel R. Dizon

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON