According to The Independent, Trump produced this statement:
“He also insisted to supporters: “We did nothing wrong and we have tremendous support.””
During his election campaign, Trump said that his support was such that he could get away with killing or murdering someone openly, in the street. That with respect to such ‘support’, he could do no wrong.
This link between moral determinations of right and wrong and their seemingly assumed contingency on the presence of popular support, isn’t just characteristic of Donald Trump.
It is something that has grown to increasingly characterise general culture.
Whether or not, the media culture of soap operas and reality television shows have in some way promoted social consensus as an absolute value with utter disregard for any other kind of ethical or moral determination, is a question that needs to be asked and answered.
With the growth of marketing culture seeking and inventing new desires to unleash, new affects to liberate, in their own desire to further entrench and implant their profit cycles and schemes, no other consideration seems to be left but the rule of such libidinal contrivances, the absolute enslavement to such a sovereignty of mechanised desires.
It’s always their desire to achieve market saturation. They don’t want to change that desire just because markets can get saturated, or environments can be damaged, et cetera, so they implicitly rely on the promise of infinite markets, markets of infinite extent. It’s a promise that they constantly sell; whether it’s US evangelism and dominion theology; US marketing practices, et cetera; without actually doing anything towards infrastructural fulfilment of that promise.
So it’s always about those ‘full desires’, as it were; those ‘absolute commitments to’, and ‘total coincidences with’, whatever figure of desire has been selected or is being promoted.
Superlative hyperboles; hyperbolic superlatives.
You’ll notice that lots of musicians and entertainers, when being interviewed, constantly say, “Absolutely!”
They are in accord with the mores of promotional obligation characterising the general culture or society that their promotions are directed to. It’s a cultural habit of verbal emphasis that is in line with the tacit injunctions of a hidden fundamentalism, a silent tyranny that never speaks.
Derrida had quite a lot to say about the metaphysics of such libidinal plenitude, as it were. About the rhetorics and characteristic expressions of such cults of hyper-enthusiasm; about the slippages of their signifiers and signifieds. It’s easy to observe the radical narrowness of conception characterising such cults, the characteristically dogmatic approach with which their acolytes present anything and everything; constantly territorialising and attempting to reduce all else to the dumbed-down, base terms of its radical insularity, it’s absolutist and totalitarian insularity, it’s tyranny of insularity.
Whether it’s Ayn Rand’s libertarianism, a kind of ‘politics-for-one’; L Ron Hubbard’s Scientology, psychoanalysis for stupid people, which actually becomes the blueprint for the society of psychic surveillance and control, according to all the whistleblowing reports about Scientology; or in the 21st-century, things like Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology, dumbed-down, market appropriations and retreads of philosophy.
All of these are characterised by the trope of restatement according to insular assumptions and the granularised conceptions and outlooks belonging to those assumptions.
It’s a sociopolitical and sociopsychological configuration, a grid of simplistic, lcd, libidinal circulation mobilised only according to its own operations and nothing else.
Those of a supremacist ilk openly advocate policies of social iniquity and exclusion, yet cannot themselves live up to their own standards of inclusion.
Even Buddhist philosophy is falling victim to these would-be, mass-market, mandarins of mediocrity; these experts of banality resentfully attempting to colonise anything and everything beyond the limits of their insular boundary; endlessly secreting their granularised discourses of insular assumptions as the slime of an imperialising domestication.
With all of these instances of radical narrowness, there is always the excuse and justification that they are catering to those of even greater insularity and ignorance! That somehow the existence of an allegedly greater ignorance can somehow justify the promotion or propagation of an allegedly lesser ignorance?
[redacted ]”if others agree with Cranthimus that i’m some sort of crypto-Hegelian “Trumpian Buddhist” watering down Buddhism for the “stupid masses” then let me know and I’ll see what I can do to fix that.”
Note how the individual predicates his-her hypothetical decision on a consensual determination (“if others agree”), when s/he ought to really know and be able to determine for him/her -self, the truth values in question.
But this seeming submission to consensus is conducted to hide the fact of numerous failures of logical discernment and objective apprehension by this promoter of a domesticated and defanged, appropriated and banalised, consumer Buddhism.
S/he produces opinionating pronouncements about various areas of Buddhist philosophy and teachings, as if those pronouncements were objective facts rather than errors based on inadequate understanding. Whenever those pronouncements are proved to be erroneous, there has never been any admission of error, of even its possibility. Instead, displays of disingenuousness are produced, irrelevant misdirections, et cetera. Such petty juggling of red herrings is usually the sign of a political promoter rather than an exploratory thinker.
(Note the misleading quotation marks of “stupid masses”, as if it was verbatim quotation, when it was actually an interpretive reduction meriting single quotes.)
For such political promoters, of Buddhism or anything else, philosophy and theory are merely pretexts for some other motivation.
For them, mistakes are never opportunities to think afresh, because they are not thinkers, they are merely calculators of social position. This is why such political promoters lack theoretical and speculative ability, because really the list of their aims was always much more basic and mundane, and self-improvement was not on that list.
Those aims are wholly taken up and exhausted by social reactivity.
Whatever brand of politicisation might be involved, the centrality of social reaction doesn’t change.
This can even be observed with the most unpleasant, All-Trite, exclusionary, and ostensibly individualist, promoters on the Internet. They constantly abuse others and indeed their platform is the justification of such abuse. But when all their arguments and positions are defeated, they straightaway appeal to the very people they abused and treated so badly – the hypocrisy is quite astounding, in a way.
There is one common denominator between most of these promoter characters – they are largely from the USA.