A friend sent me an evaluation of why Trump won, by Professor Christopher Robichaud, Senior Lecturer in Ethics and Public Policy at Harvard/Kennedy School of Government. “The problem isn't the electoral college. The problem isn't that we didn't have a full primary. The problem isn't Harris. The problem isn't that Dems didn't have the right message. The problem isn't even inflation or the border. The problem is so much worse than any of those things…Simply put, the problem is cultural.” He goes on to characterize that cultural reality so you understand what he is talking about.
I see the truth in what he is saying, but to deal with it we need to understand why it is the way it is and he doesn’t get into that. So, I’m taking a stab at it. The basket all our eggs are cracked in is economic, where a few people have most of the goods. People not sharing in the bounty are pissy about being left out, and, thank you billionaires, they voted for Trump.
So, how did we get to the few having so much? We can look at it objectively, as rugged individualism still running rampantly with the best racers winning the money game. But an even bigger box is where evolution has gotten us. Although we’re fully developed as bodies, the unseen element of us is a thinking capacity that’s moved from grunting to Shakespeare but still has a ways to go.
We make machines and build skyscrapers, but humanity is still learning to be itself. Before science showed us we’re interconnected, Jesus and Buddha and mystics through the ages knew it. In a species that goes from the most exquisite to the most depraved, they are the high-end oddballs who broke through our materialist shell to a non-material ream that permeates and envelops us. From Freud on, the rest of us have been tapping into it to understand how being human works so that each one of us can work better, but our blueprint has more. It’s us all intertwined, making the world work better. On the way to our oneness we’d thought there weren’t so many that were so far behind the frontrunners, but that’s the shocker Trump delivered and is what’s there for us to work on.
Being in it together, everybody contributing to create the good life, is life or death for us now. People who keep so much of our goods for them and theirs, whose toys are nuclear and who devour the planet without replenishing her, are attached to what’s in the present reality and aren’t looking to the disasters climate that’s untended to will bring on.
Catastrophe is on its way, moving fast. Even faster than us using up Earth’s resources that took millions of years to develop. Attention must be paid. We took over from nature and it’s up to us to create new operating systems.
We don’t have much community, where we would think together. We got into private homes when we had money to buy them, but scaling up that way materially was misguided. We are happier when we are engaged with each other. Connecting with others, working on moving forward, we’d be in the land of the free and the home of the brave even before we were totally operating from its highest principles. When I was a child we were proud of an America that seemed like it was forever, but the universe had something else in mind, and, like having to apply ourselves individually to do well, we need to work collectively at creating the human family’s success.
Here’s something to help us do that. Decades ago, when the human potential movement was bustling in my L.A. living room, Peter Russell was the cream of the crop doing talks to help us understand the thinking layer of humanity. Peter lives in England and I hadn’t seen him for a long time before this hourlong Zoom he did last week for The Scientific and Medical Network, when I was just as taken with what he said about our human development now as I had been a few decades ago.
Peter is newly on Substack. With not much here that deals with what life’s all about he’s a great addition, and you can subscribe to his Spirit of Now communications here:
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The rich getter richer. The disparity feels so vast. When is enough enough. Having money seems to numb you to reality. It’s unbelievable that we live “together” in a world that is so separated.
Suzanne all of your posts since the election have been outstanding and powerful. We are in it now and this is what it is. If we don’t face all of these critical issues we are done as a planet.