The Darkside ethos of Trump Politics

have been challenged to consider the deeper underlying possibility that erstwhile-US President Donald Trump's astounding, if shortlived, political success in the last four years is not accountable for by skillset, nor cunning instinct but by his core human nature. 

    Specifically, it could be the  primitive pre-rational brain that might account for the Trump phenomenon that many political academics can at best only describe but could barely explain.

   The difficulty presents itself when you can't divorce Trump from Trumpism--that is, separate the man from his followers. Trump is such as he is because of his followers and vice versa. So to really understand Trump, you need to look away from him and study, instead, his effect on people. Then you must double back and look to him again to analyze what enables this causation. I have done this and have come to the conclusion it is not so much a matter of what attributes Trump uniquely possesses but of what attributes he shares in common with them.

   It's not as simple as  saying the man is "certifiable" crazy. Americans would be  too self-conflicted to make that judgment. To pronounce Donald Trump truly a deranged person, they must admit to being enablers of a mad man themselves. How can 62-million Americans (in 2016) make the rational decision to elect a crazy individual to the highest office in the land--with the rest of that nation of 330-million tolerating the idea?  Worse, how can this number even grow by 12-million to 74-million in November 2020?

  Of course, with a grain of levity, that is some  explanation in itself. Insanity is doing the same thing twice expecting to obtain a different  result. However, mass psychosis is rare and improbable. But behavioral resonance is much more probable and occurs commonly in nature..

   When you look at a Trump political rally--and the January 6, siege of the US Capitol for all intents and purposes is just another Trump rally on steroids--you can draw a parallel between that and a colony of red Army ants. Each individual red ant is impotent and vulnerable, having no capacity to accomplish a complex task.   But when the whole ant colony is on the march on the forest floor, all other animals better stay clear off its path because the intractable red ant colony cannot be stopped. They will climb over, go around of, burrow under or eat their way through any obstacle, living or non-living.

   Renowned naturalist David Attenborough described a red ant colony   not as a biological community of many individuals, but as a single super-organism. He uses the same description on a colony of bees, termites, wasps, locusts--on most any organized biomass in nature. In all instances, you cannot eliminate the colony by killing single members no matter how many. You have to  exterminate the whole population  in true genocide. You cannot even kill off just the queen insect of the colony--because they keep and maintain special "stem cell" larvae that they can hyper-nourish to produce a new queen. 

   What's interesting is these are insects, having no brain complex enough to process reason. They don't need a rational brain. They don't live complicated lives requiring much  decision-making. They have no individual interests beyond to keep belonging to the colony. Their existence finds meaning only in the survival of the colony itself. Therefore all their instincts are oriented towards total sacrifice for the colony's well-being. It's hard for anyone to imagine a purer kind of loyalty to species--except for Donald Trump, the quintessential political "queen bee."  Being with and, especially, working for Donald Trump requires only one thing, second only to competence: blind loyalty.

   But how does one explain the behavioral template that controls the brain of the stereotypical Trump radical supporter?  Channeling red ant colony behavior, the attitude and persuasion among Trump Republicans is so universal and identical from one individual to the next, it makes you wonder: how is such behavior programmed? 

   The answer for insect colonies, according to Attenborough, is quite simple: it's mimicry and pheromones.  An adult red ant performs an act--say biting off a leaf morsel--in front of baby red ants and then releases a particular odoriferous pheromone that is never used again for another act. The baby red ants mimic the act and form a permanent association with the odor. Each odor is unmistakably paired off with only one act. All growing up ants accumulate this library of "specific-odor-for-action" codes--and there couldn't be too many of them given how simple an ant's life is.  Other naturalists criticize this view because it means ants pass instructions among one another by choosing a specific pheromone to trigger a corresponding response. It may look simple, but that's still communication and education--which the ants' non-rational brains isn't supposed to be able to handle.

   However, Trump followers are humans--having intelligence capable of putting a man on the moon. So everything's on the table, so to speak.  

   In 1960 a neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean proposed a controversial new theory that took Darwinian evolution concept one step further.  He wasn't a rash or reckless Dr. Frankenstein trafficking in sci-fi fantasies. He was  a widely-respected expert on psychology who took more than thirty years to bolster his theory first  before publishing it in a book entitled, "The Triune Brain in Evolution" (1990).  

      In summary, Paul MacLean's theory is that we humans have a brain that functions on three levels: that of a "reptilian" or primal brain, "paleo-mammalian" or emotional brain and the "neo-mammalian" or rational brain. 

   Although hesitantly at first, medical doctors now largely accept this taxonomy. They have even assigned parts of the brain to each sub-brain, calling the reptilian brain the "basal ganglia," the emotional brain as the "limbic system" and rational brain as the "neo-cortex." More interesting is what each sub-brain is chiefly responsible for. The reptilian brain controls everything we don't control--breathing, digestion, body temperature, orientation in space, etc. The emotional brain enables our "fight-or-flee" reflex essential for survival, and defines  our emotions to regulate our relationships. The rational brain handles all higher abstractions like language, planning and creative perception. 

   Under extreme stress, the three brains switch off in the order of decreasing complexity. That means the planning brain switches off first (having to work deliberately, it consumes a lot of time thinking) to give way to our faster-reacting reflexes driven by self-preservation and emotion. 

   But if all hell breaks loose and we're too stressed we can't "think straight anymore," reptilian brain takes over. It doesn't even have to think. It just guides your behavior to whatever action supports the objectives of  aggression, dominance, territoriality, and ritual displays.

    I submit that these three brains do not actually swtich off at all, except on death. They just exchange predominance, but they actually support each other's thinking processes in real time. For instance, reptilian brain worries about dominance. Dominance in what?  Dominance in the competition for basic things like food, clothing, shelter. That's why it triggers aggression to defeat any competition for these things--especially by keeping competition out of the territory.  But rational brain knows that we do not live in the caveman days anymore. Food is not just gathered from trees, or hunted down with bow-and-arrow. Food is procured with a medium of exchange--money--which is obtained from dominance in the field of  competition called work.    Defense of habitat has levelled up to defense of state territorial borders and virtual boundaries of economic systems..

    

    In other words, what reptilian brain knows as aggression for territoriality is defined by rational brain as border control to halt the inflow into the country of immigrants. These immigrants  saturate the employment market by accepting substandard wages.  Trump Republicans complain about laxity of immigration control causing job displacement for privileged whites. 

   Some, of course, are forced to accept the migrant-fueled diverse legacy of America. They  have done well enough for themselves to be employers rather than job-seekers. So they just grumble against having to comply with a federally-mandated high-wage policy. More often, they grouse about inadequate defense of "economic habitat" in the form of limp protectionists trade regulations.  Emotional brain enables them to deliver impassioned speeches for the repeal of those policies. They don't really need a comprehensive overview of the policy--to see the "larger picture" as it were. That's the job of rational brain which took off on vacation already four years ago.

     All the talking points of Trump Conservatism are the unaddressed grievances of the Trump Republicanism's reptilian brain, amplified by the MAGA media's emotional brain, unchecked by genuine Republicans' rational brain.  

    The beauty of all this, for Donald Trump, is he did not need to program these behavioral responses into anyone. Everyone was born with them. So, in fact, Trumpism as a political philosophy is nothing new, it is reptilian and primal at its core. Neither was Donald Trump reinventing the wheel--he is totally clueless. He is just a good observer and an excellent opportunist. He sees a choir singing in perfect four-part harmony, all he does is start flailing his arms in front of his face and claim he was a conductor coaxing the music out of everyone's mouths. 

   To his reptilian brain, that is dominance, pure and pleasurable. For four years, no one could make him out--at least, not as loudly, or as aggressively as he is willing to contend with any challenge.

    This is the darkside ethos of the politics espoused by the Trumpian cult. Channelling the super-organism dynamics of a red ant colony, they act in resonance under minimal central leadership.  Everybody just follows everybody else, moving as one pulsating mass compelled by common self-interest. They have a "queen bee" at the heart of the colony who they don't really need. If Donald Trump vanished today, the MAGA base he leaves behind will create another Donald Trump in no time.

 

  But Trump realized, unwittingly for sure,  that his three brains are not all working at the same time--his emotional brain is the most active. This explains why his weapon of choice is emotional trash-talking--calling everyone names and just generally getting into everyone's nerves, bringing out the worst in people with his lack of empathy. Is it possible he actually understands that if his detractors were hobbled by an angry emotional brain they cannot think rationally? 

    My answer is YES, if we go by how, for four years, Donald Trump was able to drive everybody up the wall in anger and frustration, causing otherwise intelligent people to give away their advantage of a rational brain against somebody who couldn't even find his. Ⓒ 2021 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