I Am Again Politically Homeless!
Part 2 of 2
The Trump 2.0 Meltdown, Revisited.
Part 1 outlined how the Trump 2.0 administration has gone haywire, with the equivocal stance of Trump himself and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, over the Epstein client list being the last straw. I raised the idea that those in “our” “visible” government, including Trump, are scared of something — note the Woodrow Wilson quote atop Part 1. That something may have paid her, or Trump himself, a visit. It would have happened after that day in February when she made a big show of having the Epstein client list on her desk. Now even Trump wants us to forget the whole thing, prompting pushback from his support base.
But now what? With Trump 2.0 compromised, what should we do?
Let’s consider the Big Picture, as I like to call it.
As I discuss at greater length here (see especially section 7), our present political-economy is structured to render most of us dependent (on an employer or the government), broke (or at least permanently cash-strapped or in debt or both), ignorant (with formal education long having been indoctrination into official narratives and obedience to authority), and with learned helplessness (remember, “You can’t fight city hall”).
And unorganized, as it’s hard to accomplish anything if we’re fighting one another over a dozen or so cultural issues, even if these issues are legitimate in their own right (abortion, “gay marriage,” biological men in women’s sports, etc.).
Social media algorithms incentivize extreme statements and online behaviors. Big Tech corporations learned how to monetize outrage by feeding users what their behaviors (likes, clicks, etc.) indicate they prefer, so users supply “content” for free and see ads that attract their attention and prompt them to whip out their plastic.
The point: almost four decades of welfare-statism in reverse (redistribution of wealth upwards), sometimes called neoliberalism, plus changing technologies, have led to a neofeudal or techno-feudal dystopia which is accelerating at breakneck speed, especially as AI is more and more integrated into everything. Jobs, some of which paid six figures, are disappearing.
Sometimes I think “progressives” understand this better than conservatives, who never use the word neoliberalism to describe what took hold during the Reagan years. Be that as it may, nothing will change unless we change it, creating new systems, building from the bottom up and not from the top down. These systems by necessity will have to operate outside established moneyed interests. Building them up will take time, thoughtful and careful planning, and effort.
Figuring out how best to do this could well occupy the remainder of my time on Planet Earth!
My immediate future will focus on integrating Christian worldview insights with Stoic ones (see this, on the overall compatibility of the two).
Christianity and Stoicism.
Christianity tells us that when all is said and done, this is God’s universe. He is in charge. What that means: whatever discomfort it causes us, He is using the Anglo-Euro-Israeli axis to work His will, which will culminate in establishing His Kingdom on Earth — whenever that happens (and despite dispensational theologians, no one knows God’s timetable).
In the meantime, He never promised that our journeys through life would be easy. Most of the Prophets and Apostles lived very difficult lives. Paul was eventually beheaded.
By the way, my position is not, and will never be, that “International Jewry” controls the world, despite the prevalence of Jews in the upper echelons of global finance, Big Tech, corporate media, the entertainment industry, and so on. Go back and read the lead quotation. That’s my best bet, who ultimately is running all the bread and circuses: the father of lies (John 8:44). And as C.S. Lewis observed, his best trick has been to convince the entire intelligentsia of the past three centuries that he doesn’t exist and that the very idea of his existence is ridiculous.
That’s the Big Picture: that when all the dirt settles — all of it — things will turn out to have made sense, in accordance with the transcendent, universal Logos underlying Creation.
Meanwhile, we’re not God! Have we forgotten?!
Stoicism picks up at this point. Its emphasis is small scale, we might call it. Elsewhere I’ve distinguished Stoic physics, logic, and ethics. The great Stoic philosophers of the Roman era — Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius — all emphasize the third, that philosophy must supply counsel, or it is worthless. That’s the intent here.
The most important counsel the Stoics offered — Epictetus describes it best — is to distinguish “what is up to us” from “what isn’t up to us,” i.e., what we control versus what we can’t control. Then the bulk of our attention should be focused on what we can control.
The Stoics held that we cause ourselves endless disappointment, resentment, frustration, stress, anger, health problems, and sometimes worse, because we’ve not disciplined our desire to control what we can’t control. We end up beating our heads against the wall.
The weather, traffic, the economy, etc., are obvious examples of things we can’t control.
Nor can we control what Trump does, nor what the federal government does; nor what the Democrats do. Nor the billionaire oligarchs.
Were a major war to break out right now, we peasants would have no control over who starts it, how it starts, or how it finishes. When it comes to the war machine and its powerful backers, protests are about as useful as butterfly wings on a cement truck.
As Epictetus counsels in numerous places in two major works collected by his pupil Arrian, the Discourses and the Enchiridion (Manuel), we should begin by determining what is up to us and letting the rest go. We can’t control what happens to us, or what happens in the larger world. We can only control our responses, emotional and otherwise. When we learn to do so, we find tranquility; and we also open up space to help others find greater tranquility if they will permit it.
On that small scale, it’s worth noting that neither can we control the beliefs, thoughts, actions and reactions of others. We can only control our own.
We can try to persuade, but we can’t coerce others into believing what we believe.
In many respects, Stoicism looks to be the perfect personal philosophy for life in repressive societies — which, historically, has been most of them. Stoicism flourished following ancient Greece’s failed experiment with democracy and then during the heyday of the Roman Empire. Epictetus, by any measure one of the greatest of the Stoics, spent the first 30 years of his life in slavery. He knew abject powerlessness better than any of us will ever know. He walked with a limp because his owner Epaphroditus had deliberately broken one of his legs when he was in his teens. Epaphroditus worked for Nero and was understandably terrified of the man. No one could control Nero. Doubtless Epaphroditus took out some of his frustrations on Epictetus, who came away understanding that ownership and great power were not keys to inner peace or tranquility, or wisdom.
But powerlessness isn’t a necessary condition for learning and practicing Stoicism. Marcus Aurelius, another of the greatest Stoics, was Rome’s Emperor! He was history’s only true philosopher-king. He realized early that with power came responsibility — and possibly as much suffering as slavery, since the expectations that come with power only serve up slavery of a different sort.
Marcus Aurelius had to deal with wars, betrayals, plagues, and the deaths of several of his children. There is no doubt that despite being Emperor, he suffered! His Meditations were written for his eyes only. Writing was, for him, therapy and counsel. He never set out to write a philosophical classic. The paragraphs that became Meditations were to discipline his mind and actions, based on the premise that one could maintain Stoic virtues of courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom, despite temptations of power in a hostile world.
Stoicism doesn’t postulate a personal God above it all. It postulates a universe of order, in the sense of Aristotle’s Logos, but otherwise leaves the matter open. Can Christianity fill that gap? For Christians, if they are honest, must grant the wisdom of Stoicism’s dichotomy of control in this life. What they have is salvation, which is not of this world. If we meditate long enough on this, I think we realize that our present circumstances justify withdrawing from politics and political parties.
Withdrawal and Repurposing Liberal Arts Learning Today.
Withdrawal is not cowardice. It is not abdicating responsibility. It is strategy.
I’ve written material on withdrawal (now dated). In a sense, I have withdrawn, physically at least, by living in a foreign country in a situation where U.S. politics affects me little beyond what I allow by giving it my attention.
Speaking of attention … it might also be good to review David Foster Wallace’s brilliantly moving commencement speech, delivered way back in 2006.
Wallace singled out a fresh purpose for liberal arts learning, whether about Stoicism or Christendom or anything else.
It shouldn’t be described as learning “how to think.” Many people understandably find that off-putting. We know “how to think”! they will say. At least unless the indoctrination factories we dignify by calling public schools have “educated” it out of us!
No, the liberal arts learning we need now is not about how to think but, as Wallace succinctly puts it, what to think about. How to control our attention, where to focus it, and with what attitudes. These are things we can learn to control. They are within the scope of “what is up to us.”
Wallace provides the context by warning his young listeners of how little their educations have prepared them for the humdrum of adult life, for the vast majority of adults. At work, perchance doing something we find personally meaningless. Stuck in traffic, getting home. Realizing there’s no food in the fridge, and having to divert to go to the supermarket, at an hour when half of the rest of the city is doing the same thing! Annoying shopping carts with bad wheels, having to dodge other carts driven by people not paying attention. Then in the checkout line.
What are we thinking about?
What would Epictetus ask, were he with us today?
I think he’d invite us to consider: must we resent having to do this? Is this helpful at all? Or is doing so only causing us unnecessary stress? Must we dwell on our sense of being “stuck” until it fills us with impotent rage?
Or … can we look around, observe, perhaps find interest where we didn’t see it before because our resentment was in our way?
Perhaps realizing that nearly all the other shoppers are in the exact same predicament we are!
Perhaps also realizing that the checkers behind those cash registers have jobs that are worse, more frustrating, even lower-paying, and more thankless than ours. And expressing a little empathy when our turn comes to have our selections rung up. Being kind, or at least polite and courteous. Helpful in other small ways, such as positioning our selections so that the bar codes are readily visible and she doesn’t have to hunt all over for them.
That’s controlling our responses to situations and even taking charge where we can: and by being kind to another struggling human being, you might just have made that person’s day a little better!
We must learn to exercise that kind of attention and attitude control, however challenging it is to anyone who grasps that Big Picture. To be sure, you can augment or increase your level of control over your surroundings through learning. Mastering the art of cooking, for example, will increase your control over your nutrition and, via that, your health — always remembering that food corporations and big grocery chains aren’t in the health business, they’re in the money business. Growing vegetables in an outdoors garden places you in direct contact with the natural systems that permeate God’s Creation!
Maybe that’s why another Stoic, Musonius Rufus — notable as Epictetus’s mentor, and during his era thought of as the “Roman Socrates” — contended that farming was the ideal occupation for a philosopher!
There’s enough to learn from our surroundings that we should be able to forget about politics if we want to — aside from those things we need to know because they might affect us and then developing workaround strategies to protect ourselves. The eventual collapse of Social Security might be an example. You can’t control it. But you can create what I call a “cash stash.” You can add to it daily, watch it grow, and let it build until you have enough to feed, house, and clothe yourself for six months. And then a year. And then longer. Barring an emergency, you can keep building it indefinitely! You can invest it! Or just use it to keep out of debt!
What about hyperinflation? some will ask. The collapse of the currency itself. Yes, it’s possible, which is why I own gold and silver — the physical metal, not “certificates” — and a few collectables that could be bartered if it ever comes to that. I also own property, which is a useful asset anywhere if only because you’ll have a place to sleep no matter what the economy does. The rule of thumb is not to keep all your assets in one place, or in one form.
While I didn’t control all the circumstances that made owning those assets possible, I control what I do to maintain them.
What about Bitcoin, or other cryptocurrencies?
Frankly, I’ve never trusted them. Crypto, by its nature, is entirely digital. Online images that picture coins with the infamous Bitcoin symbol on them are just that: images. There are no physical Bitcoins, just wallets protected with two encrypted keys which, if lost, your money is irretrievable. A controlled Internet would quickly circumvent us peasants using crypto. I tend to trust what I can hold in my hands or keep in my safe. But that’s just me. Do your homework, exercise your judgment, learn what works best for you, and then do it.
On Not “Retiring”: Taking Care of the Remnant.
Now for that other query: what am I doing back here, having allowed Trump 2.0’s collapse of credibility to draw me back in?
I reread this, for one thing. Every truth-teller should study this essay.
Picture the Prophet Isaiah, singled out by God and ordered by God to preach jeremiads in Ninevah, telling them that their society is in a moral tailspin. But also being told that the city’s powers-that-be would try to drive him out and that its masses couldn’t care less.
Why bother? Isaiah naturally wanted to know.
“You don’t get it,” the Lord returned (I’m paraphrasing a paraphrase; you can read the original at Isaiah 1:1-9). “There is a Remnant there you know nothing about: quiet, isolated, each one muddling through as best he can. Drawing strength from intellect and character, not from what’s in his bank account or from having impressed anyone.
“When things go completely to pieces, the Remnant will be the ones who pick them up and build a new civilization. Your job—” I’m now thinking in terms of what the Lord might say to Isaiah today “—is to reach out to the Remnant and reassure them, tell them that their lives and missions and values are worthy, and that they are not alone. You don’t know who they are, or where they are. You won’t find them on TikTok saying ‘Look at me, look at me, look at me!’ Culturally they’re invisible, but they’re out there. And if you do your best, and do it honestly, they will find you.”
Albert Jay Nock’s “Isaiah’s Job” saved my writing career twice before. Writing these pieces is worth doing, even if only a very small Remnant is interested. I have no illusions about influencing regional, much less national, much less global, conversations. But maybe something I write in these spaces will help you.
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Steven Yates is a (recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and hereticl notions, including about academia itself.
In 2012 he moved to Chile. He married a Chilean national in 2014. Among his discoveries in South America: the problems of the U.S. are problems everywhere, because human nature is the same everywhere. The problems are problems of Western civilization as a whole.
As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!
He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.
Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.
His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.
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