Listen to the news. Trump administration suspends the nuclear arms control treaty with Russia. The pundits say that this could cause a new nuclear arms race not only with Russia, but also with China, but more important than that, signaling that the relationship between the US and Russia is becoming the worst that it has ever been.
Let me say all this in a different way. US says Russia is not in compliance with the nuclear weapons treaty; Russia says it is in compliance; US says, no more treaty, and here comes the most significant declaration in this dialogue: Putin saying that he would NOT USE NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN EUROPE, unless THE U.S. DID SO. What does that mean? Two nuclear powers declaring Europe as the nuclear battleground. Both the US and Russia targeting Europe.
This comes in the aftermath of Mr. Trump repeatedly calling into question every system of international cooperation involving the United States. To get a taste of the situation, listen to the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo summarizing Mr. Trump’s intentions as, “Our mission is to assert our sovereignty before the international order.”
What is “sovereignty?”
Is it starting a trade war with the EU, tearing up an EU-backed global climate pact, abandoning the Iran nuclear arms control deal, and walking out of a Russia anti-nuclear missile treaty? Does it also include verbally mauling the NATO, the UN, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and in short any organization that links the United States to the world? Does assertion of sovereignty mean: isolate and neutralize the United States, and expose Europe to Russian nuclear might? Can this strategy make Russia the new master of the world and the US the master’s dog? And what would the dog say about the Russian might? Listen to Mr. Pompeo’s recent speech to the European Union: "Russia has developed, produced and deployed a new missile. It is mobile and hard to detect. It is nuclear capable. And it could reach European cities, with little or no warning time." Can you see the Russian plant at work delivering the message of arrival of the new master? To amplify the message Mr. Pompeo adds that today’s EU and its bureaucrats are not ensuring the interests of the EU countries and their citizens. That the EU has failed its member states and their people. Doesn’t this tear down everything the US had previously built so that it would be rebuilt by Russia in Russian image?
This brings me to a blog I wrote some time ago entitled “Destroyer or Not—Making Sense of Mr. Trump.” That article analyzed Mr. Trump based on the foundational factors that I had identified and discussed in my book The Sucker Punch of Sharing. It starts with the fact that every society comes into existence from “shared capabilities” that produce goods and services for the needs of all. And the “shared capabilities” come into existence within a legal network, a structure of societal agreements. These agreements, labeled “law,” are so important for societal existence that they are backed by society’s concentrated brute force, namely the police and armed forces.
Why do humans design their societies as capability sharing structures embedded in a force-backed—legal—framework of societal agreements? Thousands of years ago, there was a scarcity, almost a total absence, of societal agreements and as a result everyone acted as a “brute force applier.” Each carried a spear, sword, or club to amplify one’s brute force when dealing with others. Soon everyone learned that if they go at each other with brute force, not only brute force harms, but also most importantly, no one gets involved in producing goods and services for the needs of 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. The prime purpose of the legal network of societal agreements is to distance the human individual from destructive brute force so everyone’s focus will remain on producing and distributing goods and services and not on fighting one another using brute force.
And here is where Mr. Trump and his actions enter the scene.
If the society is built on laws—societal agreements—that keep everyone away from brute force, what is the first step to destroy the society? To destroy a society, all one needs to do is to undermine its laws, its legal network. When the legal network is deemed dysfunctional, the society has to manage itself using “brute force” and that is the death knell for the societal sharing system that produces goods and services for all. In short, the first step is to EXPOSE THE HUMAN to greater and GREATER LEVELS OF BRUTE FORCE.
That brings us to the second step in order to destroy a society. The second step is to undermine its “management of societal agreements.” The management of societal agreements is directly linked to designing and managing the society’s laws within which the sharing of capabilities produce and distribute goods and services for all. When a society gives up on “management of societal agreements,” it is a recipe for tearing the society apart. This can happen not only within a society but in interactions among different societies. In short, the second step seeks to TEAR DOWN THE MANAGEMENT STRUCTURE for as many SOCIETAL AGREEMENTS as possible.
Finally, to destroy a society, the third step is “to 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 that has been laid out in the historical accounts. In the case of Mr. Trump, the historical knowledge tells us how a SOCIETY GETS CONTROLLED through the MAN PLACED AT THE TOP. For decades the United States has used this method to control other countries. Yet we have never considered the possibility that what we are doing so regularly to others might be reversed and be done to us. The American masses have failed to see the historical possibility that Mr. Trump might be another country’s plant. The history tells us that the US cannot assume that the reverse cannot happen. In fact, it is quite possible that an outsider plants its agent in the position of the US President and through him controls the US society.
Learning from the foundational analysis based on my book and everything we have seen so far in Mr. Trump’s actions, one thing is clear. Mr. Trump is on the path of undermining the country’s legal network, destroying or throwing all its societal agreements into continual conflict, and exposing the nation to higher levels of brute force. He is destroying the United States. And such is the fate of a nation that is very bad at “learning.” No one will read books like The Sucker Punch of Sharing and instead sit and watch nonsense on TV or fool around on iphone and then say, “Oops, what happened?” when Mr. Trump’s master wins and rules the world.
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