Trump and the so-called 'Hicks'

By supporting a man who seemingly is demonstrably and exclusively self interested, some create and advertise the inference that they too are only self interested. There’s a decided down side to this approach, as I expect the acolytes well know.

Personally, I would call Trump disabled. His disability is what I call an empathy deficit disorder. There are more pejorative labels but I prefer a more relaxed name.

People with empathy deficit disorder have difficulty understanding things like love, friendship or why they should care for others. They have difficulty understanding subtle facial expressions, have difficulty trusting anyone but they do know about some of the blunter human emotions, like fear. That is because the standard viewpoint of persons who do not suffer low or absent empathy is that persons who do suffer are monsters. Indeed, the typical mass media articulation of the condition is that persons with empathy deficit disorder are latent or actual mass murders. The actual prevalence of empathy deficit disorder is very hard to a measure because the empathic population is actually more dangerous, and unknowingly, they drive the empathy challenged population into the closet, where a lot of other people are hiding out.

The difference between chaos and order is very thin, as the storming of the Capital building in Washington aptly demonstrates. The term ‘civilization’, which circulates in schools, means little more than the culture of cities. Although cities provide a certain amount of anonymity to their citizens, the close confines of neighbours requires more strictures than rural areas just to let the ‘civil’ jurisdiction more or less function.

For as long as there have been cities there have been serious conflicts between their denizens and those who live rurally. Pastoralists, or literally, those who pasture the animals, get quite quaint coverage in some sources like the Bible, where Jesus gets identified as ‘like a Shepard’. Actual Shepards had to be able to travel. The horse facilitated this need and with it the pastoralists didn’t need the civic walls; indeed, those walls became because cities needed to defend themselves from the free and free wheeling pastoralists. It was the later who raided the cities and escaped before the cities’ foot soldiers could catch them.

Thus, Attila, thus Genghis Khan and even thus Napoleon, the latter originating from the very rural island of Corsica. These people all thought of themselves as embodying true freedom. They looked down on the rigidly controlled citizens of cities as little more than slaves, although this included a considerable degree of wishful thinking and bravado. For each of them must have known what fear was when they couldn’t muscle their way through. After all, Attila, left Roman Gaul after the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451, never to return in that direction and Napoleon’s fears are well known to have left him immobilized at various points. More importantly, in all of these examples, the conquerers prospered for very short periods of time. The Hunnish empire lasted barely a hundred years and its real threat to an internally crumbling Roman Empire lasted little more than a few decades. Genghis Khan’s unitary Mongol Empire lasted less than a century before fragmenting, and little was left of any of its parts after about 275 years. Napoleon, not even two decades. Their ranks of admirers generally don’t seem to care to know about the severely fragile nature of these freedom fighters’ regimes. When compared to the millions of deaths for which this trio was responsible, including in most cases, their own, the alacrity in the historical record is of dubious merit, whatever the measure.

But one can see the hints of the basis upon which natural selection created a very broad range of empathy in the human genome. If more support for this proposition is desired, I refer you to Dr. Jordan Peterson’s well articulated argument that what women want are ‘controlled monsters’, who find their morality and heroism in the paradoxical conflict within each person, usually male. The high levels of empathy deficit disorder within the business community has had mixed results. However, those results include improved standards of living for enormous numbers of people.

The reasons that empathy deficit disorder persons hide in business suits and gangs are manifold. Two obvious reasons are a) money counting is a semi-empirical way of approximating social values when a person’s brain does not provide a more subtle tool; and, b) wealth provides some defence from the hordes of empaths who have decided to be lazy about applying their skills to this fraction of society. For the purpose of removing the pajoritive 'psychopath', I am chosing to substitute oxi-empatias (meaning persons who cannot empathize; singular: oxi-empatia). I think we must reach some conclusions using various factors, namely: a) the shared hiding strategy of oxi-empatias; b) the absence of any transparent advocacy groups anywhere, at least so far as I am aware, to directly push society to understand this part of our populations' predicaments; and, c) the failure to include some supports for people growing up with this predicament. Oxi-empatias are pretty upset that there is, in practise, no safety net for them and no state support to help them understand the societal norms that their brains refuse to supply them. (In the US, this social failure may help account for the resistance toward socialized medicine in this segment of the population, since so many Oxi-empatias realize it will be a practical interference to both their own medical needs as well as to any accommodation of their continuing furies). For example, although there is a diagnosis in the DSM 5, under the heading antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), it is hard to imagine that someone could obtain a disability social safety net payment only on the strength of an argument that the person was suffering PTSD because, as a sufferer of antisocial personality disorder, mainline society was scaring the living shit out of them.

One of the frequent means that Oxi-empatias cope, is to find partners to help lead them through the social mazes. That partner is very often someone they marry. Then they have to practise faking at least an essential minority of affectations, checking with the partner frequently to see how close or far they are straying from typical norms, so as not to infringe the wrath of the incorruptible portion of the empathy-normal societal majority.

If you look at Trump through this lens, all his behaviour makes sense. Even his apparent incompetence can be accounted for by the fact that stable societies and thereby stable economies depend upon a symbiosis of these different parts of the social compact, even though the arrangement has largely been one of secrecy.

So, now that Trump has made his point, and, in the process, demonstrated what it will take the world to survive climate change, follow his suggestion and put the pretext away that this has been a conspiracy of hicks. This very well may have been a carefully planed and carefully ended attempt to create a fuller social collaboration between its various parts, allowing humanity to survive into the future. Brian Pannell