I am always intrigued when a nation’s leader points at his “accomplishments.” What does that mean? Are accomplishments a measure of how the leader is serving the nation or a measure of distractions to keep the eyes of the nation away from what the leader actually does?
For millennia every society has tried to plant its man as leader of another society. Consider a known plant—the Shah of Iran. He was a servant of the Unite States, yet he could point at a long list of “accomplishments” in the nation he ruled. The list of Shah’s accomplishments would include construction and expansion of the nation’s road, rail, and air network, encouraging and supporting industrial growth, achieving high economic growth, completing land reforms to make millions of farmers landowners, and establishing literacy and health corps to serve the needs of isolated rural population. What does that say?
I look at a listing of Mr. Trump’s accomplishments and they include appointing one Supreme Court Justice and over 75 federal judges, blocking foreign aid from being used for abortions, cracking down on illegal immigration and sanctuary cities, issuing an order to remove two federal regulations for every new one created, engineering historic tax cuts, withdrawing the U.S. from Paris Climate Agreement, reversing environmental rules on coal industry, facilitating the Keystone Pipeline and opening up vast federal areas to oil and gas exploration, presiding over economic and stock market boom, lowering unemployment and bringing back manufacturing jobs to America from overseas, rebuilding nation’s military, destroying ISIS and facing down North Korea’s strongman, issuing an order that enforces First Amendment protection for religious liberty, replacing Obamacare piece by piece like repealing the individual mandate, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and cracking down on MS-13 gangs. Let us call this list impressive.
Does the long list of impressive accomplishments remove any concern one might have on Mr. Trump being a plant of another country? If the United States continues to have a long list of accomplishments—low unemployment, high stock market prices—would it matter who is the country’s leader? I recall as part of my military training I was told that I should obey even a pencil and march before it and salute it if it is declared to be my commander. Does the same apply to the society’s national leader? Are we OK to have a pencil in the white house as our national leader so long as the result is zero unemployment and very high stock market prices? In that case would it be relevant that Mr. Trump might be another country’s plant destroying the United States at its foundations while hiding behind a long list of accomplishments?
In my previous article “Destroyer or Not—Making Sense of Mr. Trump” I pointed out three areas where Mr. Trump might be taking an axe to the society’s foundations. Let me go over those points and see if Mr. Trump’s accomplishments can take care of them. First, every society comes into existence from “shared capabilities” that produce goods and services for the needs of all. The sharing of capabilities takes shape within a legal network—a structure of societal agreements. Among the myriad of societal agreements when some are labeled “legal,” they are so important to the societal existence and well-being that they are backed by society’s concentrated brute force—the police and armed forces—to make everyone enter into those agreements. The focus of the societal agreements—especially the societal agreements that have been declared “law” is to keep “brute force“ out of human interactions.
Over millennia humans have learned that if they go at each other with brute force, not only brute force harms, but most importantly, no one gets involved with producing goods and services for others. So for thousands of years humans have sought ways of keeping themselves out of the brute force domain so they can share their capabilities in order to produce goods and services for one another. From that perspective, the prime purpose of the legal network is to distance the human individual from the destructive brute force so everyone remains focused on producing and distributing goods and services and not fighting one another.
Does Mr. Trump’s accomplishments keep the US force network strong? Or with Mr. Trump continually tearing apart the society’s legal network, for example undermining institutions like FBI, CIA, and the Department of Justice, is it possible that the list of accomplishments does little to offset the harm done to the society’s force network. YOU DECIDE the net effect. Does the positive force of accomplishments offset the negative effect of tearing apart the society’s force network? In my previous article I pointed out that an enemy does not have to focus on undermining the society’s capability sharing—undermining its economy. Undermining its laws—its legal network is all one needs to do to bring down the societal sharing system and turn the country into a defeated one. This millennia-old technique uses not military confrontation but a planted leader.
So I repeat that law is nothing but a form of “societal agreement.” Every society gets created through development of societal agreements. Among all societal agreements, the laws are the only societal agreements that get backed by the societal concentrated brute force. All other societal agreements compete with one another for priority and for one day becoming law. Without societal agreements, the society ceases to exist and reverts to a collection of individuals dealing with one another through brute force. Every society that wants to prosper must manage the collective of societal agreements well and reach BALANCE among all competing societal agreements. Given this foundational view of societal agreements, do Mr. Trump’s accomplishments point at improvements in designing and managing the societal agreements? Again I am going to let YOU DECIDE the effect. Do Mr. Trump’s accomplishments bring societal agreements together to reach a balance that benefits all, or the reverse, setting the societal agreements against one another and tearing the society apart in confrontations? It should be obvious that a planted leader would be most interested in creating confrontations if the aim of planting is to bring the society down.
Finally, to destroy a society, the citizens “must not pay attention to history.” HISTORY is a knowledge base that tells the story of how societies have fared in the past. As such, history is a tool of learning from the past. When societies do not learn from history, in ignorance they repeat and fall into the path of destruction laid out in historical accounts. In my view, humans in general and Americans in particular learn little from history. The history tells us that for thousands of years every country has thought about controlling other countries and the most effective mechanism is to control a country’s leader. Appoint and control a country’s leader and you have a good chance of controlling that country. The Shah of Iran was a US plant. We know that. Is Mr. Trump somebody’s plant? To answer it we first face the complexity of identifying the plant. Then we face the challenge of managing “societal agreements” associated with the planted leader. There are various societal agreements as to the question of a planted leader. In the United States some societal agreements say no way, some say absolutely yes, and some do not take a position. At the moment we do not have a way of assessing the situation to reach a knowledge-based conclusion. Normally in a country like the United States it is the Senators and Congresspersons that are supposed to be the managers of societal agreements, but they are no longer interested in doing that job. Instead, no different than the planted leader, they’re most interested in “personal survival.” That is why the Senators and Congresspersons have failed to see the historical possibility that Mr. Trump might be another country’s plant. We know that for decades we have tried to influence and control the leaders of other countries, and the history tells us that the US cannot assume the reverse cannot happen. In fact, it is quite possible that an outsider has already planted its agent in the position of the US President and through him controls the US society.
Here is my final thought. Regardless of Mr. Trump’s list of accomplishments, so long as Mr. Trump pursues an open policy of undermining the society’s legal network and throwing its societal agreements into continual conflict, there is a strong possibility that Mr. Trump is another country’s plant. Whatever that country would want Mr. Trump to do, he will do. At the moment what that country wants is to destroy the societal foundations of the United States—destroy its force network and destroy the balance in its societal agreements. Sitting and waiting for arrival of “proof” would be simply too late. Once a society’s foundations collapse, it is very hard to bring them back. That is what the history tells us.