Understanding Trump
Donald Trump’s “agonistic”* display of dominance:
From Wikipedia:
*“Agonistic behaviour is any social behaviour related to fighting. The term has broader meaning than aggressive behaviour because it includes threats, displays, retreats, placation, and conciliation.”… “Some forms of agonistic behaviour are between contestants who are competing for access to the same resources, such as food or mates.” [In the case of Trump, election.] “… it involves tests of strength or threat display that make animals look large and more physically fit, [such as Trump’s behavior displayed in The Apprentice and during the debates] a display that may allow it to gain the resource before an actual battle takes place.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agonistic_behaviour (My bold)
In social species, young males compete with each other to establish their rank in the hierarchy using these “agonistic behavior.” When the time comes to establish the leader of the pack, they do not have to fight at the risk of killing each other, which is good for their survival, their ranks in the hierarchy are already established; when the time comes they “gain the resource before an actual battle takes place.”
Trump won the election just for being himself; it did not matter what he did or say for his supporters, The Apprentice already made him a winner to the eye of his viewers.
His role in The Apprentice is THE ONLY REASON why his viewers-now-supporters have elected him and will still follow him even if “he kills someone on Fifth Avenue.”: The problem with that is that The Apprentice was an “alternate reality” produced by experts to capitalize on his dominant personality. A dominant personality that he builds through all his life in subsequent “alternate realities,” produced by $1) his dad’s money, 2) his lawyers’ legal schemes, 3) The Apprentice producers, and finally 4)by himself, while using the power of his Presidency to propose to his eager supporters an “embellished” reality promoting him.
Trump is true to himself: he has a dominant personality but one that only works in “alternate realities” as those mentioned above. That is why he has to create his own, now that he is president.
Nobody else on Earth could still be in control as he seems to be after all he has done and say; too bad he cannot use his dominance in reality to fix the mess in which we are at the moment! Why not MHGA, Make Humanity Great Again?
I am an optimist. I believe that he could be a definite asset for humanity if he converts himself, along with the capitalist economy, since he is presently the ultimate dominant person on Earth — although the lack of empathy of both Trump and capitalism would render this “conversion” challenging.
I am presently writing in absentia, a PhD dissertation that will formulate the present conundrum of humanity in solvable terms… as I try to do here with this one.
This, after having been and still am an outsider of science during my two general BA and my unspecialized MA in ZooAnthropoSociology undertaken throughout my life to become a learned generalist, to find out why science cannot formulate in solvable terms the problems created by progress. I indeed decided forty-five years ago to undertake a second general BA to become a generalist, after a first eclectic BA equivalency and after having read in Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth that:
“Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.” (My bold)
It is during this process of becoming a comprehensive thinker that I have uncovered why specialization is indeed the main factor of our “failures” as a species — the subject of my PhD thesis.
