A Conceit of Contempt
In the human journey to create the most peaceful, stable, and perfect society, the ancients considered many issues, conditions, and regimes to govern themselves. In Book IV of The Republic of Plato, Socrates, while brainstorming a perfect society with his students, suggests that if virtues like wisdom, moderation, and courage were established in a city there would be no need for laws. Further, that if each man pursued his particular and unique skills to the best of his ability to affect what economists later termed “division of labor” and “economic specialization” while taking care to manage his appetites by his commitments to reason and goodness, that a natural harmony—a state of justice—would prevail.
More than two thousand years later, our founders had a more skeptical view and laid down a Declaration and Constitution to provide a framework within which laws would be made to guide and guard our pursuit of living in peace and harmony. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson both maintained lists of virtues they frequently reviewed to assess their compliance and self-govern their characters. These lists and the founding documents of our nation were strongly influenced by the ancients (in particular Cicero) as well as English and Scottish philosophers of the Enlightenment.
Franklin suggested the founders had given us a “republic if you can keep it” at the time of our nation’s birth. In our nearly two-and-a-half centuries of the American experiment we have kept it. In the election of 2024, a majority of us selected a leader who, unlike the ancients and our founders, has no apparent subscription to any virtues (let alone a discernible conscience) and believes norms and laws—in addition to serving in our military—are for “suckers and losers.” My, how far we have fallen.
Trump’s conceit of contempt targets virtues and laws in the nature of elitist arrogance that holds he is above following any rules meant for people lesser than he, what the Greeks called the hoi poloi, meaning the masses. As a result, whether or not our republic makes it to a third century is now a serious concern. A rogue virtue-free leader may appeal to America’s maverick mythology, but also risks all we have built as the exemplar of freedom in the world. In the next four years, we may look more like Victor Orban’s Hungary than the United States of America. One might feel that our founders would be extremely disappointed, but I expect they would also be surprised the republic lasted this long; late-life correspondence between Jefferson and John Adams shows that founders didn’t believe the republic would make it out of the 19th century.
However, in the election of 2024, this conceit of contempt was not only expressed by Trump. It was at the core of the losing campaign by Harris and the Democrats, albeit of a different nature with different targets. Their conceit of contempt was an elitist form of judgment deployed with the blame ‘n shame game, which can be an effective form of manipulation (commonly deployed by organized religions), […]
It is Up to Women
There is one thing the vast majority of Americans agree on in an otherwise deeply divided nation: we all wish this election would end sooner rather than later. Politicians have discarded the art of persuasion for crass tools of manipulation that strain our democratic sensibilities to the breaking point. The new American machine of political outrage has turned discourse into a bloodsport while the now-banal deployment of deceit has produced a leaden blanket of exhaustion […]
From Resilience to Transcendence
What do we live for?
We arrive screaming pulled from the comfort of our mother’s womb. Whether we leave this world with someone at our side, or alone, we all hope someone remembers us—at least for a while. In the years between our beginning and end, we forge a life we call our own. Failures and victories mark our path which, full of transgressions and glory, defines who we are, then once were.
Soon, we are forgotten. […]
Rebooting American Dynamism
Every day and all day our world, dominated by online media, demands that we stare at our feet. Especially the flames at our feet that politicians, pundits, influencers, family, and friends warn us are ready to consume us all. Most of these folks fan the flames rather than attempt to extinguish them in a twisted attempt to get attention at the expense of our well-being. Fear mongers have become endemic in our society in the […]
The Election as Reflection
If humankind survives, someday historians and eventually, archaeologists, will look back at today to wonder how a society that had largely achieved all of its ambitions—that successfully achieved an abundance of prosperity—went to war with itself. That some external threat or cataclysmic event did not do them in; rather, that they defeated themselves. They will study how the greatest empire in the then-modern era—the United States of America—imploded. Jared Diamond’s, Collapse: How Societies Choose to […]
Reverence for Me
As a writer, I am always searching my mind for what I think, know, and believe. Moreover, trying to find patterns between them to explain myself, the world, and the relationship between the two. Then, to write it all out coherently enough to maintain my bearings—my sanity. Finally, to share it if I think it might benefit others.
Painters paint with the stroke of colors, chefs paint with food and spices, and writers paint with words. […]
Three Steps to Resilience
Every so often in America we experience unsettling times. In my lifetime, I recall the late 1960s, late 1970s, and early 2000s as being spans of two to three years when there was decidedly more uncertainty in America than certainty. When political, economic, social, and/or security concerns left my head and heart troubled. Every day had an edge to it and, at times, it was unclear we would come through it. Occasionally existential dread, but […]