US culture is an incubator of ‘extrinsic values’. Nobody embodies them like the Republican frontrunner
Many explanations are proposed for the continued rise of Donald Trump, and the steadfastness of his support, even as the outrages and criminal charges pile up. Some of these explanations are powerful. But there is one I have seen mentioned nowhere, which could, I believe, be the most important: Trump is king of the extrinsics.
Some psychologists believe our values tend to cluster around certain poles, described as “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”. People with a strong set of intrinsic values are inclined towards empathy, intimacy and self-acceptance. They tend to be open to challenge and change, interested in universal rights and equality, and protective of other people and the living world.
People at the extrinsic end of the spectrum are more attracted to prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth. They are strongly motivated by the prospect of individual reward and praise. They are more likely to objectify and exploit other people, to behave rudely and aggressively and to dismiss social and environmental impacts. They have little interest in cooperation or community. People with a strong set of extrinsic values are more likely to suffer from frustration, dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, anger and compulsive behaviour.
I see it more like a slime mold, or bio film. There is energy here and there, some poisons there, some predators, and basically everything is controlled by the gradients of energy.
Lets assume for a moment that large states work like that to a degree. Not purely like this but to a large or at least significant degree. This is not meant to be dehumanizing: With individual humans you can have intelligent conversations but in large masses we maybe don’t work like that at all. A view like that is completely ignored in mainstream media and politics. Possibly because it’s bonkers, but humor me:
Ideology or values isn’t what guides these processes, it’s what’s secreted by specialized cells that form symbiotic relationships and in return receive more energy from large concentrations of chemical energy. Lets call them “intellectuals” and the concentrations of energy “capitalists”. It’s not a conscious process, but over time certain secretions helped increase the power and energy reserves, and in tern replicated and diversified and was further refined. Billions of cells in this biofilm can thus create complex behavior.
So humanity could work quite similarly except that humans are of course intelligent and would be much smarter on their local level, just doing their obs, advancing their careers, making that money. All that is needed to be completely stupid on a global level is that certain viewpoints are suppressed as “radical”. One method might be:
“Well it’s about extrinsic and extrinsic values! The individual cells…” bla bla bla… sorry I just get so angry at this shit. Public relations is about mass psychology, how people can be categorized and then marketed and manipulated to. So yeah values do play a role but they are more like a technology, a tool wielded by those with all the money to pay the smartest sociopaths.
Instead you have to look at the rules and systems that are in place and create these outcomes and in tern generate new outcomes. Like the details. And many have been manipulated in favor of… . A major property of our civilization is extreme wealth inequality and therefor power imbalance, a few people owning everything. Or systems like how people are filtered before they become journalists and spew ideology in turn.
There is a modern definition of fascism which is about instilling a belief in “Inequality through mythological and essentialized identity”
So that’s happening presumably because inequality has gotten so bad, the old formula don’t work any more. So new ones, or old ones in new style are tried. Most likely it will be rejected but it proved a good distraction and helped further wealth transfer.
But the old formula lead to this situation. In a way that makes the old formula just as bad. Because anyone who tries to mess with primary motivation - moving along energy gradients - is filtered out. When was the last time you read an article about the psychologically corrosive nature of advertising or PR?
So how are we ever going to change this if we’re all constantly pulled back into this illusion?
But things are breaking now. For one we’re still on the worst case climate change pathway RCP8.5 - we haven’t diverged a bit in 30 years: Because we are absolutely unable to make rational logical decisions as a civilization. This is very strong evidence that what we’ve been doing doesn’t work on a fundamental level.
But tell me more about the extrinsic values of Trump :D The guy belongs in psychiatric care, the real issue is how can a sick person like that get so rich and powerful. We cannot expect amoral systems to produce productive results. It’s got nothing to do with values.
Geez sorry this is way too long of a rant lol
It’s fine. It’s good to vent. The first half of your post with the microbe analogy got at the important issue that our systems our what causing the problems. This is not being disputed. I get disliking intellectuals over complicating things and missing the point. However in this case, this intellectual’s point is that there is a self reinforcing mechanism in those systems.
Neo liberalism leads to fascism. Neo liberalism creates economic inequality that gives fascists room to reach the masses via blaming peoples’ problems on an out group like migrants. But Neo Liberalism also entrenches that inequality as a value in the people living under it. So when the fascists arrive and promise to uphold that inequality and in fact expand upon it, there is already a large group of people who believe the fascists are establishing the natural order of things. I often see people online asking the question how can anyone support Trump. Whether Trump realizes it or not he does embody what his supporters value. Trump is very much a symptom.
I read through it, it does a good job of covering the many facets of fascism. Ur Fascism also does a good job of defining fascism. However I am not defining fascism where you quoted me. I am defining the divisions in America. We are a divided society. But not in the way most people think. It’s not left vs fascists. We have people on the right fighting for late stage capitalism because they grew up with that and have made its flaws their values. We have people on the left who have no interest in fighting for our democracy. They have grown up with the flaws in our democracy that enable minority rule and made those flaws their values.
You are right, we can’t expect late stage capitalism to have productive results. This idea is not an abstract concept and is really less about Trump. Again he is just a symptom. This gets at how people feel about our systems of government and economics. It really does have to do with what people value. People, myself included, often say the Republican Party doesn’t stand for anything. That they have no values and the voters are just rooting for their political party like it’s a sports team. While the Republican Party itself doesn’t have a real platform, their voters do stand for something. They stand for capitalist system where a minority of them can be rich like Trump.
Yes, things are getting bad because of our systems. But there is no point at which things will get bad enough to make people realizes the system needs fixing. I think this idea explains the why behind the saying people use when describing Russia “and then it got worse.” Living under flawed systems that generate inequality doesn’t make people want to change the systems. Instead people normalize the systems. So if we rely on things getting worse and assume that eventually people will be forced to try to fix the systems we will be disappointed. They will in fact create even worse systems, based on the flaws they internalized as values, that then make things even worse. It is a feedback loop.
Unfortunately this individual didn’t do a great job of getting his point across in the article. I clearly haven’t done much better. I can really only insist to people that there is a valuable idea here. We need people to reexamine their values. Or else people on the right are going to keep voting for Trump and people on the left are not going to be interested in upholding democracy, our best tool for enacting positive change. edit: typos