If we were to accept the world view of most Republicans, it would mean that the Democrats have been engaged in a series of evil conspiracies to rig the presidential elections against Donald Trump and, tied up with this, to put Trump in jail. Tied up with this, there also is the notion that the Democrats have been trying to minimize the participation of Joe Biden in the supposedly corrupt business schemes of his son Hunter and to minimize the equivalence of the seriousness of this participation in relation to Trump’s supposedly inappropriate criminal interventions in the 2020 presidential race. What is interesting is that the Democrats have been pretty straightforward and transparent in terms of their attitudes towards Hunter Biden’s problems. Their feeling has been that if he has broken the law, then he should pay the consequences. And there has been no connection made between Joe and Hunter with regard to Hunter’s business dealings. When the two talk on the phone, it’s about travel and fishing.
When we speak of conspiracies, what we are basically talking about is secret plots of one group of people to do harmful things to another group of people. The Republicans seem much more aware of supposed plots, both the ones that they imagine the Democrats are involved with towards them, and the ones that they generate with regards to winning elections against the Democrats. So why is it that the notion of conspiracies seems to be so particularly important now to the very existence of the Republicans?
It seems to me that conspiracies serve two very important purposes for the Republicans. First, conspiracies serve to act as free-floating abrasive islands of grounding within the experiential vacuums within which these Republicans dwell. Now normally when one thinks of grounding, one thinks of a fixed physical location, where a person can develop some kind of roots. But I have come increasingly to realize that one can find grounding in psychological concepts as well. Like religious beliefs. And conspiracies are particularly good as an abrasive kind of grounding for people who want both a sense of grounding as well as a kind of abrasive stimulation to pull them out of their numbness. In an experiential vacuum world, any sense of grounding, psychological or physical, comes in patches, as in the sensory distortion patches found in vacuum and tension-pocket environments, environments that are simultaneously full of places that are understimulating and overstimulating.
At any rate, conspiracies are a very good form of stimulation as well as grounding for modern people who are extremely numb. And this is why Republicans both perceive so many conspiracies everywhere as well as create so many. Very simply, Republicans in today’s world seem to be more immersed in numbness than Democrats. Trump, of course, has taken advantage of this. As a one-person fountain of abrasive stimuli, he is able to draw the numbest among us to him as the foundation of what can only be described as a quasi-religious cult. Of course, the Democrats are indirectly drawn into this system, because Trump’s speech as well as conduct inspire the abrasive stimulation of fear and concern in anti-Trump people, which serves to also pull these people out of the numbness in which they are immersed.
In other words, the primary group of people affected by Trump are the people who become his followers. These are the people most deeply immersed in numbness and who are most susceptible to the notion of conspiracies to pull them out of this numbness through the creation of abrasive pockets of grounding. But then there is the secondary group of people affected by Trump which is the group who are very much against everything he stands for. For them Trump is a negative disruption just as for the Trumpster, Trump is a positive disruption. The anti-Trump people are not as deeply immersed in numbness, but they are affected by it nevertheless. However, for them, Trump represents too abrasive of a response to numbness, one that threatens to destroy the fragile psychological grounding that is represented by the American constitution. Nevertheless, the anti-Trump people find a perverse kind of abrasive grounding in the real conspiracies that they perceive being made by the Trump people. These conspiracies force the development of patches of abrasive attitudinal grounding in the anti-Trump people, something that helps then to survive the entropic disintegration of the experiential vacuum from modern technological society in which they live. By standing opposed to Trump’s conspiracies they feel the rush of a kind of stimulation, that, if it weren’t present, would leave them in a numbing boredom. In other words, if Trump’s conspiracies weren’t present in their lives as a form of ongoing irritation with which to deal, the Democrats would have to find some other equivalent source of abrasive irritation with which to replace them. Something for us Democrats to think about when we fantasize sending Trump on a one-way trip into outer space.
Artículos Relacionados: