On Theorism
Hillary Clinton lost because she was a woman. She lost because of sexism and internalized misogyny. She lost because of Russia and because of low-information voters. She lost because of racism, not hers of course. Hillary Clinton lost because of the DNC. She lost because of Bernie Sanders. She lost because of Barack Obama, because of following the twoterm same-party president, and because he didn’t do enough to warn the nation about Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton lost because of Wikileaks. Hillary Clinton lost because of Citizen’s United against a candidate who earned more media than any campaign has ever spent. Hillary Clinton lost because she wasn’t progressive enough. Hillary Clinton lost because she was pulled too far left by the fringe of her party. Hillary Clinton lost because she ran a traditional political campaign – one she had absolutely no control over, by virtue of her being the first female nominee among the patriarchal machinations of traditionally male-dominated power structures within campaigns – and the debate questions, from a mainstream media that wanted to see her taken out, even though they didn’t. Hillary Clinton lost because she didn’t have enough airtime to get ‘her message’ out. She lost because of hostile journalists. She lost because women voted for her opponent after being pressured by their domineering husbands to confirm the undeniable power of the patriarchy. She lost because of the emails she… lost. Hillary Clinton lost because of James Comey. These are all outstanding theories, and oh, so true.
Hillary Clinton lost because she was the most hated politician of all time… and decided to participate in a popularity contest.
There is a way to explain, at length, each one of the multitude of reasons that Hillary Clinton came up short in her twenty-five-year-long campaign for the position of ‘most powerful person in the world’. Each theory is supported by underlying Theory, supported by underlying Theory, supported by underlying Theory. It’s underlying Theory all the way down, for the flat world rests upon a turtle’s back, the turtle positioned atop an infinite stack of turtles. At the base of all the explanatory Theories is whatever the speaker wants there to be. Modern feminists want it to be ‘because men’. Progressives want it to be because she’s a ‘neoliberal’ or because she didn’t support the policies they supported, like giving everyone who already went to college, free college. So-called anti-racists and anti-fascists want it to be because her opponent catered to the vast well of American ‘white supremacy’, however they would like white supremacy to be defined, even if it includes wanting someone to explain the necessity of affirmative action. Millions of Clinton supporters want it to be Russian interference and the demons on social media lashing their jackboot tongues at everyone who thought “I’m with HER” a little too hard. Never Trumpers want it to be Russian collusion with Wikileaks with Donald Trump Jr with a silly fat guy in a golden hotel. Popular media wants it to be whatever keeps Donald Trump on TV longer, as their singular ability to skew fiction and reality for socalled ‘respectable’ people, continues to churn the grist in our ever-rubbernecking societal void.
Donald Trump also wants that. Donald Trump wants all those things. These explanations are all Theory-dependent. They cannot be justified as explanations without reliance on other approved-of-but-not-proven Theories.
Anything rationalized on the basis of Theory will fail in the face of any anti-Theorist.
Donald Trump is the apex anti-Theorist.
All you need to know to be able to understand Donald Trump is that he was a rich kid with a harsh father who wanted to enter a gated society that simply never took him seriously. There is nothing else. Every single thing he does makes sense through that lens, one that is rooted in reality and requires no Theory beneath it to makes sense to every sensible person. Knowing how men act beneath a crushing or absent father among a world they believe is begging for its own destruction in their hands is not something that requires degrees or wokeness or even literacy. If you need proof, choose any school shooter.
Donald Trump requires no Theory and preaches no Theory. Donald Trump is thoroughly describable through two rooted realities – father was over-bearing AND the society he wanted to be part of didn’t want him. There is nothing else necessary to understand him. The reason requires no Theory. It requires no explanation either, to the extent that we must assume an almost saturated majority of Americans would understand how those two basic human narratives connect with their own lives in some rooted way. To believe that this essential knowledge is Theory-based would be to misunderstand humanity.
There are Theories on the back of Theories on the back of Theories that will tell you what exactlyDonald Trump represents. You need not read any. Donald Trump represents the will of the people for whom Theory provides no benefit. You do not need to like or approve of what Donald Trump is, you need only understand that he represents a wrecking ball to the world of Theory. No other explanation is necessary.
Theory tells a white man that the black man in front of him is different in an important way. That is not rooted, at all, in reality. Theory tells American women they were subservient to men, and they were in some way, but that is no longer rooted in reality. They simply are not. Almost no one on either side doubts this. Why pretend? Theory tells us to look out for our own interests until it tells us it is selfish to do so. Theory tells us that money will eventually equate to happiness, even while we learn that was never true in the process of stowing it away or spending it. It has virtually no relation to happiness other than the safety it can provide. In that situation, you don’t even need to discuss money. You only need to discuss what it is to feel safe.
There is nothing more to be understood but the simple reality, rooted deep in the ground.
So, what is Theory?
Theory is anything that forces you to complicate a reality staring you in the face. Theory is anything that validates its own point of view by referring to other unrooted concepts. There is nothing that could make a rooted woman extract the notion that she’s less-than from the world. Theory tells her that. There is nothing about this real world (in America) that confirms that, but we continue, because Theorists win the day. Theorists always win the day.
Theorists win the day because Theorism, at root, is a trick. It assumes we’re stuck in the middle ages when we absolutely are not. You’re hearing, right now, words I typed on a beautiful desk in a nice room in Los Angeles because I chose to read them. What I say is filtered only through the circumstance of whether or not you have an internet connection. Nothing else. We are not in the middle ages. We never were. Theorism tells you that a situation with two sides in Theoretic opposition will come to hatred, and Theorists are right. It does. Because for centuries, we have not looked at ourselves in a way not complicated by Theory. The greatest divisions in our society are moved into being, pointlessly, by Theorists, supported by Theorists, and all of them have the power to appeal to every single Theorist at once while never bothering with what rooted people think. It’s never, never necessary. Every angle of the modern race debate can be propounded for days, without end, while never trying to root. No baby is born racist. Nothing this obvious should ever be hard to understand. We are teaching generations a new way to hate each other for no reason other than that we were told by Theorists ‘this is how to make things better’. It decidedly is not.
Hillary Clinton was the apex Theorist. There is nothing rooted that explains Hillary Clinton’s prominence. You do not have to deny her intelligence, power, or importance to believe this. You need only understand that no aspect of her being could ever have risen her higher than becoming First Lady did. Every positive aspect you could possibly ascribe to her is exhibited by a better female representative in our common world. No rooted person would ever be inclined to think otherwise. Test the Theory. Go ahead. Just remember that I accounted for every conceivable reason to think otherwise already. What is Hillary Clinton without fame and her woman-ness? She’s certainly not the Democratic nominee. She almost lost to Bernie Sanders. She did lose to Donald Trump. She also lost to Barack Obama, which if you’ll remember, was because she was woman, according to Theorists.
Hillary Clinton lost because she’s the most hated politician in American history. No other explanation is necessary and it simply does not matter why she is the most hated. There is only the simple truth, rooted firmly in reality, that she is. You may argue that Donald Trump is more hated, but considering the American people elected him, you have nothing but Theory to explain this. There is only one winner. Most of life is this way. How many things in your life do you spend four years continuing to justify and ‘prove’? There’s a quote out there somewhere about insanity.
In 2016, Bernie Sanders proved to be a veritable roadblock to Hillary’s lifelong quest to be the most powerful person in the world. Bernie Sanders is not a Theorist, but he is sold, to a level where it becomes religious and foundational, that his Theory truly does represent a rooted reality. If you challenge him with Theory, he will not even understand what you mean. He relies on nothing behind what he says. In his mind, there is no Theory to pile on other Theory. He knows the simple worldly truth that ‘things don’t seem right’ right now, and due to his laziness and thick skull, he chose one of history’s most worthless Theories to support – the Theory that no matter how a person lives, he or she or they should never be any better than whoever a Theorist can say has it the worst. This is fundamentally anti-human and every person rooted in reality understands this without the need to support it. Bernie Sanders does not.
Communism has never benefited any people unfortunate enough to have had it tried on them.
Socialism, likewise. There is nothing rooted in reality that can prove otherwise. It works ‘in Theory’ because Theorists in support of Marxist ideologies premise their argument on a Theorybased understanding of human nature. Bernie’s second and third houses were nothing more than common comforts while he was busy convincing people that a hundred-and-fifty-year-old Theory was the path to a just existence. It is not.
Capitalism, at heart, is a simple system of moral trade. It needs no underlying Theory. I have this. I want that. If you want what I have, then we have a deal. This requires nothing other than two rational humans who respect each other’s lives and their ownership of property.
If I worked for this, then it is my own.
Everyone understands this. Theorists have created a society where people believe, ‘I should have thisregardless of whether or not I worked for it’. Reality could never tell a person so silly a story.
How many people with that mindset does it take to sink a small group, a family, a town, a culture? It takes no Theory of relative power, no Theory of economics, nor any insight from religious tradition to know, automatically, that is wrong. The number of people who ascribe to that belief is exactly the number who are now ferrying us across a river to ruin.
There is no rooted person who believes that they were chosen for better and that the world should comport to their way. It is impossible for a person to be born destined. To be rooted is to understand, at base, punishment and reward. The solution to everything is to simply live better. There is no sane person, and certainly no rooted person, who would ever say that they could not have lived better. In the part of our minds constantly bombarded by Theorists, we can find answers. Or excuses. But we’ll call them answers. The motivating factor of every life lived better was the common and honest understanding that it could be. We are told we are ‘enough’ in a world where we are not. We are told we can be anything in a world where we cannot. These simple misunderstandings are capable of sending us immediately to ruin. Why are we pretending?
We are told we already are enough. We’re told we can be anything. To what end? To what end? The rooted person understands this as blatant dishonesty and so a crack in reality emerges. In an instant, the rooted person will, sadly, know the speaker as a liar who should never be trusted. The listener prone to Theorism will be convinced of a new reality while already existing in a conflicting one. They accept the Theory ‘you can be anything’ over reality and live with the contradiction. Time and again, they will be taught by life that they cannot do anything, and that they’re ‘not enough’ in certain aspects of their lives. No one is. No one can be.
The Theory ‘you can be anything you want’ will, for nearly everyone who believes it, fail in reality. The Theorist will convince himself that he was fired because his boss sucks the same way he’d reason his girlfriend left him because she’s a whore. The white Theorist will convince himself that he lost a job to a black man because of affirmative action rather than his inability to stand out among other candidates. The black Theorist will say he lost the job because of racism, and maybe he did, but to fall back on Theory as an explanation of life rather than as the outlier experience of crossing paths with a bad person at an important time is to make a critical mistake. This is a subtle acceptance of Theory that cannot lead you ever to success. Theory is a buffer to the harsh realities that birth the strong soul.
The Theorists have taken it farther, though. A generation of Theorists, raised by Theorists, no longer believe it’s more empowering to say, ‘you can be anything you want’. Now they revert to saying, ‘you could be anything you want if not for this Theory’, the implication being, of course, that the world is stacked against you and no amount of effort or skill can ever break its defenses. We call this empowering. We call almost every declaration of Theory empowering.
Empowering. Ah, the buzz word of Theorist America. Theorists told us how the world could be empowering if only it were different. Capitalists take the buzz word ‘empowerment’ and make it a brand, selling their empowering products to consumers of Theory on social media between rants about socialism on a device built in a Chinese factory with suicide nets outside the dormitories in which they’re forced to live.
I am 41. I am old enough to have known what life was like during the tail end of the cold war, but not old enough to understand what it meant. I thought about whether or not the underside of my desk could protect me because I was told to, not because I understood what atom bombs could do. And we were the last of us. Someone a few days or years my junior would put first memories into a time frame where nothing unsettling happened prior to 9/11. Sure, we had a minor middle eastern war, a minor military excursion in Bosnia or Somalia, but who’s counting, a presidential blowjob, an exploding spaceship, the death of a revolutionary rock star and the murder of two revolutionary rappers, and precious little else. It’s been said our generation, Generation X, is apathetic, but nothing is explained by apathy. Apathy leads nowhere. “If nothing matters, why not just do this to take advantage” AND “if nothing matters, why bother doing anything” are the same. Apathy and its opposite connect in the heads of every Gen-X child. Everything means nothing until it means everything. This is why Gen-X isn’t a brand, not like boomer or millennial. Our formative public moment was watching a symbol of American exceptionalism literally explode in the sky on color television screens in our elementary school classrooms.
We’re left with a world of people who care mostly about themselves while we care mostly about nothing. It’s not quite nihilism, though. We believe in things, but only sort of. Enough to notice, hey that’s important, but not enough to worry that someone else might not
be fixing it while we do our own thing. And where has that left us?
In Bernie Sanders’ years of telling us - completely rooted, yet thoroughly deceived - his
Theoretical ideas are not radical ideas, he often cites how people called Medicare and Social Security ‘socialist’ when they were being passed into law. I’m sure that’s true. Perhaps they were right. More of the federal budget is devoted to either program than to the military – the same military often complained about from the comfort of an American world order. Theorists balance their budgets in the present, future be damned. ‘I have a plan for that and I can tell you how I pay for it’. Elizabeth Warren tried that trick and her frontrunner campaign immediately tanked. When Theorists complain of red scares, one might wonder why the programs ostensibly maligned (rather than correctly described) as socialist have created exactly what the people calling them socialist feared within a relatively short time after they were implemented. Yet no one is there to dispute this. Baby boomers want its benefits. Millennials want to mend the failed Theory with more Theory because they know nothing else. American life expectancy has increased by 12 years since Medicare was passed, changing the expected time to receive benefits from three years to fifteen. Could Theory not have told them this could be expected? No politician in the country has the courage to raise the age of eligibility so they happily push the fight off to be dealt with by younger generations. If Bernie admitted, for instance, that the Green New Deal would bankrupt us in 50 years, where would the outrage of those using the same rationale (future harm) for their climate policy disappear to? Generation X, annoyed yet
unfazed, remains silent.
Bernie Sanders was appealing because he was rooted. But how can he be rooted if he espouses Theory? Well, it isn’t Theory to Bernie. He has actually never argued the substance of his point of view. I’ve witnessed, unfortunately, hundreds of hours of the man speaking. He has never, once, backed up what he says without relying on Theory, and then only employing it when necessary to communicate with Theorists who need Theory to justify their assent to fellow Theorists. For Bernie, the Theory is religious in nature. He does not see the maxim, “the people should own the means of production”, as Theoretical. This is not Theory, this is religion. He believes it the way you might believe in god. You don’t have to explain it, and it’s annoying that someone asks you to. If Bernie’s view is questioned, his response is never to support the underlying Theory of what he says. He simply repeats the same foundational beliefs because to him, they are real. Rooted people deluded by Theory are always dangerous, because they have the capacity to convince people, through their sincerity, that they are right. Luckily, Bernie is suitably incompetent, and worthless in a competitive environment. But he nearly beat the most hated candidate in the history of politics, you say. No. He didn’t. He didn’t come close, even with a huge chunk of his support being an entirely anti-Theorist vote against Clinton. That vote evaporated in 2020 and Bernie underperformed even the losing effort of 2016 as the world of progressive Theorists mistook Clinton-hate for an omen of their movement’s ascendance.
Reality has not borne that out. Bernie’s agenda was so unpalatable that he lost to a babbling
Theorist with a sexual assault claim against him more credible than the allegations for which Brett Kavanaugh’s name was permanently tainted, and by a wide margin.
In 2016, the apex Theorist defeated her first rooted challenger relying on sheer power, various Theories, and the fortunate fact that she was running against a proponent of history’s worst Theory. When she faced a genuinely rooted candidate in Donald Trump, despite a list of flaws as long as hers or longer, another truly hated candidate won on nothing more than his
total disregard for Theory.
Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are alike in many ways. First and foremost, they are both narcissistic, Manichaean demagogues. But even while one is perceived to be on the far right, the other on the far left, they are aligned on multiple issues. In 2016 they expressed similar feelings on immigration. Sanders has since left his rooted position in favor of political expedience, a result of his Theorist advisers who undoubtedly told him that any step toward restrictionism was inherently racist and xenophobic and would be rejected by the same far left we’re to believe he changed in his image. This slight shift to a Theory he couldn’t root was enough to eliminate a segment of his supporters. Why would anyone believe that a man who hasn’t thoughtfully reconsidered an issue in sixty years has finally seen the light and realized that low-wage immigration was actually good for the working class he ostensibly wishes to protect? The true anti-Theorists among his fans have now abandoned Bernie and his cause
because he slipped into the world of Theory, never to return, by endorsing Joe Biden.
Trump and Bernie possessed a certain je ne sais quoi when it came to working class white people, Theorists said. Both had appeal to ‘the little guy’, though slightly different sets of little guys. Bernie’s ‘little guy’ included the sophomore gender studies major ‘creating content’ for hours a day while her parents foot the bill for her life to the tune of $75,000 a year – more than almost any gender studies major could ever expect to make in a world where pay is necessitated by the ability to create value. Trump’s little guy included a froth-mouthed racist in a red hat screaming ‘send her back’ and ‘lock her up’. These were the sorts of supporters who thought part of the candidate’s ‘brand’ represented their own and that they could gain status
by displaying it. That’s not a particularly rooted behavior pattern.
The actual little guy in 2020 America is the rooted person. These are the people who’ve been swept aside by the Theorist economy and the Theorist political process. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are believed, by their supporters, to be among the most honest men to ever have existed. How is this possible?
For Bernie Sanders, his rooted position is so distorted that a communist regime bringing Chinese citizens out of poverty is an accomplishment worth noting, but American capitalism helping to push the entire world out of poverty is just better reason to give people more stuff. He credits Castro for teaching children to read propaganda while dismissing that our children created devices upon which you can hold a library in your hands. Bernie Sanders is the entitled nerd in the nineties high-school movie screaming to all his friends that ‘this is finally the night’ and they’re drunk enough to agree and let him lead. A rooted segment of the left was rightly sick of Theorism and begging for a change, and it came in the form of an angry, blithering old idiot who felt gainful employment was beneath him until age 40.
Donald Trump is a liar of historic proportions, perhaps. Fact checkers credit him with something near twenty-thousand lies. While many of these seem to be examples of intentionally misconstruing things the president says, there are still thousands of examples of Donald Trump saying things that are in direct conflict with rooted truth. I would never deny this. I am not making a defense of Donald Trump. But as with Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump does not fall back on supporting the things he says with Theory. Bernie’s beliefs are quasireligious in nature. Donald Trump believes things are true because he says them or because they give him advantage.
There are different versions of truth and, as Donald Trump vacillates between them and beyond them at will, it’s important to understand them. The primary version is the correspondent (or representational) truth. Truth exists insofar as it matches, in some important way, the available information in the observable or logical world. “There are two apples on the table” is a true statement when there are two apples on the table. This truth can be derived directly from the world.
There is also truth supported by Theory. A person could cite instances of contact with the rooted real world to prove the Theory but it will nonetheless remain unconvincing because there are instances in the rooted world that illustrate the exact opposite. This is Theorist truth – it’s true because someone can prove it to you, on the terms and within the parameters they choose for the conversation. No person with even a notion of skepticism would accept these claims at face value, but the addict of Theory will not only believe it immediately based on charts or credentials, they will repeat their new knowledge verbatim, feeling morally and intellectually justified insulting anyone who hasn’t gained the same special knowledge. A Theorist could quickly see (or otherwise know) the Theory was wrong, but still believe that it could convince other people, because they are, of course, less informed than the Theorist. Noticing this, it would, theoretically, now be their duty to ‘educate’ us. We’re uninformed after all. ‘Once I tell them my Theory, they will see the light and agree’. The gullible convert to Theorism, and convince the lesser minds in turn. At every step in this process, we have people convinced to believe something they know to not be true because agreeing might get them a seat at the adult table, dining al fresco, in the rare air of a knowledge class just slightly higher, and that must lead to… something?
Yet, Theorists repeat Theory far and wide, firing it at every argument, memorized data sets redeployed as endless ammunition. Joe Biden has repeated multiple times, in front of national audiences, that one quarter of college women are sexually assaulted. No rooted person who’s ever stood on a college campus could ever believe that sort of thing. The very studies by which people accept these statements as fact don’t say it either. Was I the first person to actually read the study? I doubt it. I can’t be the first to notice, but it hasn’t stopped the Theorists from repeating it. The honest ones could tell you that being kissed when you weren’t expecting it, being shown a naughty picture, and unwanted sexual touching even if over the clothes were instances of sexual assault included in the one-in-four figure. They could tell you that the campus sexual assault numbers are lower than the numbers for the same female age group outside of the college environment, you know, the real world. So why are we told that campus sexual assault is the problem? Why would anyone lead with such blatantly misleading Theory when they could lead with something rooted? Perhaps it’s because the rooted truth doesn’t support their agenda while the Theoretical truth does.
The only people ever truly convinced by arguments like these are the ones who believe they have added a new layer of Theory to the repertoire. In the future, they’ll use it to batter anyone unfortunate enough to end up in conversation with them. There is nothing to trust in these claims, except perhaps the speaker, but even when you’ve decided to credential a person, that decision often fails. You could misperceive a power imbalance, the person could be trying to manipulate you, or they could just simply be wrong. This could be beneficial among family and close friends, but beyond that, an unquestioning mind is courting disaster. Having strongly held, yet totally unsupported positions is one of the most daunting political problems before us. Unfortunately, most political ‘truths’ are of this sort – convoluted or platitudinal statements that depend on your holding of a prior belief. It’s decidedly unwise to accept what a politician says in this manner.
Donald Trump’s version of truth is more complicated. That there can be more than one truth was the subject of a popular discussion between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. Harris is a gifted thinker and communicator, rooted on many levels, but his reliance on statistical proof and Theory left him incapable of understanding Peterson’s point – that truth exists in its ability to be actionable. For something to be true, it must work. Peterson describes this version of truth as evolutionary. A claim or belief must enable survival. Describing this kind of truth as rooted is elegant in its simplicity. Rooted belief does not rely on any Theory, even one so rudimentary as evolution. Rooted truth is drawn from the world, not applied to it. It does not need to enable survival, as in Peterson’s telling. It only needs to be provably true without appealing to Theory.
Donald Trump does not need to release his tax returns to prove he’s a billionaire. He is a billionaire because he grossly displays unattainable wealth and because he acts like a man who knows he can overpower systems. The Theorist needs this to be proven by bank statements and tax returns. Rooted people don’t care what those things show because Donald Trump is one of maybe five people in modern America who could be immediately cited as billionaires. Jeff Bezos. Bill Gates. Warren Buffett. Do you even get to Michael Bloomberg or Mark Zuckerberg without thinking of Donald Trump first? If you can’t pass this test, even with Google at your disposal, why would you think any rooted person would question whether or not Donald Trump is a billionaire. The statement “Donald Trump is a billionaire” is proven by the fact that he’s one of the first things we think when the word ‘billionaire’ is mentioned. No more explanation necessary, so why would Trump bother muddying the waters by supporting his claim? It’s not that the rooted person believes the lie, they just understand that whether or not Trump has ten billion dollars or four billion or five hundred million makes no difference. Belief is totally unnecessary because whatever Trump means when he says billionaire is the same thing people think when the word ‘billionaire’ is spoken. If a Theorist had full information and shoved a bank statement showing nine hundred ninety-nine million dollars in your chest and said, “I told you! He’s further from being a billionaire than all the money you’ll make in your life”, you would actually pity that person.
Donald Trump said he would ‘build the wall’ and make Mexico pay for it. Did he do that? It doesn’t matter. But is it now a lie based on results? Not by any rooted standard. Trump’s most ardent critic would never say he’s failed in his promise to be anti-immigrant, yet they think they’ve found a gotcha by counting the miles of new wall compared to the total miles of our border with Mexico. They would say he’s never made Mexico pay for anything. But somehow, Mexico is now paying their border guards to stop illegal crossings from the Mexican side. In light of the current pandemic, one can argue that Trump’s travel restrictions to certain countries were ineffective, or too little too late, or poorly conceived of, but they can’t say he was against morerestriction. The Theorists called his initial travel restrictions racist and continue to, even while we see that travel restrictions are a clear preventor of viral spread. What is sheltering at home, after all, if not a very specific border restriction?
There isn’t a rational, rooted American who’d imagine whomever is thrown in Trump’s way would somehow be more restrictionist than he is. He or she will not. Partly because it’s not politically viable in the opposition party, but also because no one can match the degree of perceived identity between ‘Trump’ and ‘more restrictionism’. They’re essentially the same expression. The Democratic primaries saw candidates fight about who would give the most American resources to illegal immigrants and this now stands as the only opposition to Trump the Theorists can muster. In what Theoretical world are they in position to win this argument? Not the one consumed by a foreign disease. I do not have to declare a position on this issue to see clearly which side makes sense to rooted people. But the Theorists give ever deeper explanations.
In a 1946 essay called Politics and the English Language, Orwell wrote, “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
This is the Theorist’s problem in matters of communication and the reason why Theorism has no chance against Donald Trump. You can call the entire roster of ‘body language experts’ to appear on your panel and they will say whatever they say. People will still trust their eyes and ears. Trump means what he says, no matter how he says it. Does Elizabeth Warren mean it when she says she would’ve let a trans teen have veto power over her nominee for Secretary of Education?
But how can I say Donald Trump means what he says? Again, he’s one of the most prolific liars in political history. In a certain way.
The fact that Donald Trump is concerned only about his own image and very little else is as obvious as the fact that he’s unnecessarily orange. It is unmissable. Theorists will pretend this isn’t true and interpret every thoughtless utterance to be a statement with a truth value. The fact checkers will provide a lengthy explanation about how it is not literally true that mail-in voting will lead to QUOTE ‘thousands of people sitting in a living room signing ballots’. Why would anyone care about the literal truth of that statement? Trump is saying that all the ballots could be collected, brought to a room, and then filled out by partisan operatives. That you think this is a nutty, paranoid delusion makes no difference. He’s describing a situation that needs no more description. If ballots could be taken out of a mailbox by someone other than the person whose name is on the ballot, that ballot can be compromised. That is nearly impossible to argue with, but Theorists will try, and fail, by appealing to how multiple states already allow this for absentee voting or how the ‘proof’ of voter fraud is relatively non-existent. You must already know and believe multiple levels of Theory to dismiss the obvious rootedness of what Trump said. You can say it doesn’t happen, but you’ll have a hard time convincing anyone it can’t.
Since I know it needs repeating, no, this is not a defense of Donald Trump. It’s an explanation for something that, apparently five years later, still needs explained.
Donald Trump has been the same person for decades in public life. People either loved him, or loved to hate him. They saw him as the endpoint of the part of themselves that wanted to tell the world to go fuck itself. We now have a Theorist class who imagine that part of themselves does not exist in earnest, so they self-flagellate by telling themselves that they are important allies or that they support this or that cause because they posted about it on social media. They’re not actually mad at the world, they’re just offended by all the injustice, they’ll say. Just how far down for most does the declared desire to help other people actually go before we hit Theory? Not far. Signaling virtue has become a substitute for actually being good.
Donald Trump, having no compass whatsoever for truth, or fact, or verifiable reality, is nonetheless sincere. He bases what he says on whatever benefits him and means what he says. That’s not the same as sticking to one’s word. Again, this isn’t a man encumbered by the need to seem honest. The only compass Donald Trump cares about is the one he has in spades, the ability to A/B test, in real time, and pick the option that has the best chance of benefitting him. You can ascribe every malicious intent to him and still understand that he means the things he says, even when he says the opposite five minutes later, because everything he says is contextualized in who he is.
That this is still misunderstood after five years of bludgeoning is madness. So is pretending that the adversarial relationship between Trump and the corporate press is based on this misunderstanding.
There is no misunderstanding between Trump and the corporate media. There certainly isn’t on Trump’s part. He has called them an enemy of the people. They are, without question, an enemy of his. It seems clear to me that the press believes it’s their job to oppose Donald Trump. In a recent exchange I had with a cable news talking head SLASH journalist, I was informed that I should prefer a media that ‘gets under the president’s skin’ to one who affirms everything he says, as if those were the only two options. If one would like to discuss the undermining of democracy, one might wonder aloud why our media wasn’t investigating the seriousness of the coronavirus when they first heard of it and why they have put a reporter on the ground in Wuhan for the first time in three months. One might wonder how this is possible for networks still using bogus Chinese virus statistics as gotchas to Donald Trump. In the midst of historic hurricanes, we have the privilege of watching Anderson Cooper get rained on, but when a worldwide pandemic breaks out, America’s “trusted news source” can’t put a reporter on the ground in China. One might next wonder why these organizations have dismantled their international operations to streamline the production of content, or how adults can live in a real and dangerous world with twenty-seven-year-old bloggers telling us what real life is like from their apartments in Brooklyn.
The media views itself always in opposition to Trump. If he says x, they say not x. To support ‘not x’, they will book ‘experts’ on x to appear on their talk shows and tell us not only why x is fanciful, but also why only an idiot, or an ist or a phobe could ever believe x in the first place. The Expert will lay out Theories ‘proving’ that x is utter nonsense. This will have no effect on whether or not the country believes x. The only effect these displays have is to call people idiots, racists, homophobes, etc… for believing the thing an Expert says isn’t possible. Being always in opposition to Trump is a profitable point of view and a way to exploit all the people who were already driven by the media into extreme anti-Trump bias. It is no way to inform a people.
In a world where experts are always right, perhaps those people who believe x would be everything they’re accused of being. But that world doesn’t exist. Experts, insofar as actual experts, not pundits, appear on corporate media have been proven wrong nonstop for at least these five years. Corporate media spent a week asking Experts whether the phrase ‘shithole country’ was racist. I’d have been more interested in hearing them define what they believe a shithole country is, and then telling us how and where that diverged from what Trump was saying. Would they do that? Of course not. It must be odd to occupy the position that no country is better than another but also that America is the worst. And what exactly is an Expert on the subject of whether or not an offhand utterance is racist? There can be no Expert on that subject.
Donald Trump has been a troll for his entire life. Nothing has changed. Everything he has said is still entirely understandable through the rubric I presented earlier – he’s a rich kid with a harsh father AND he wants to destroy everyone who made him feel unwelcome. There’s nothing else necessary. Why does Trump want to go to all the parties? Because the ritzy people there don’t want to believe he can get into them. I know these people. Why is he a serial philanderer? Because he wants to show the rich guys with ‘wives they’re no longer attracted to’ that he can have whatever women he wants. I know these people too. Why does he make his entire residence gold? Because he’s taking their sense of prudence and taste and telling them to shove it up their asses. If you think the point is that he has bad taste in décor, you’re neglectful of one of the most basic values in human life – that caring that much about those things in the first place is already the mark of a bad person. I’m not saying I’m immune to that motivation, not at all. We all have unwarranted material concerns, and so does Trump. My point is that you’re misunderstanding his motivation toward these things, and you’re misunderstanding your own. He tortures those people by showing them, in some way, what they are.
This makes him a god in the eyes of his supporters. He looks them dead in the eye and says, ‘I will kill the thing that threatens you’. This is what he does to the media.
The media, at this point, is almost only Theory. There are times where outlets will slip into rooted accounts of stories, but they always attempt to supercharge the stories by convincing Theorists that they’re right too, and they do this by piling on Theories. Tucker Carlson has been largely right about the progression of the Covid situation. He also spends his time talking about ‘our rulers’ and ‘people trying to control you’ and having blithering idiots as guests to second his opinion. Putting on a man like Dave Rubin, who has literally no thoughts, to give his “take” SLASH peddle his silly book makes any actual journalism easy to dismiss. When media figures try to grab other popular figures’ audiences to increase their own, they sell off portions of their respectability. Tucker’s genuinely good work on the Wuhan lab gets eradicated by the neverending fountain of bullshit-red-meat he has to toss out to the dumb dogs who can’t find it on their own just by sniffing around.
To this extent, the media have failed the American people and failed themselves. There is no greater culprit in the pandemic disaster. They are a pandemic disaster. Most major publications have traded their international and investigative reporters for teams of bloggers and social media experts so that the stories enable maximum clicks and share-ability. This practice is not their purpose, stated or otherwise. They are using their institution’s status as the ‘fourth estate’ and the public esteem for the abstract form of ‘journalism’ as a shield for their abuse of the power that credential gives them. What they are doing simply is not journalism.
The American media lives in a zero-stakes game, truth-wise. It does not matter in the least whether they’re right or wrong – not about who will win an election and why, not who won that election and why, not in pursuit of Russian conspiracies that may be in the process of a total backfire, not in drumming up support for a pointless impeachment attempt, not for pushing forward the worst candidates in a Democratic Primary rather than the best and most competent, and certainly not by missing the point at every single step of the single-most important issue of our time. There is no penalty for them being wrong. Fox will say it hates CNN and everyone who hates CNN will agree. CNN, MSNBC, and the entire entertainment business will say that anyone who believes Fox is a stupid racist, and everyone who wants to hate Trump supporters will agree. They are not even for or against the things that are happening in the world. Their only position is, “Those people you hate are wrong. You’re the best.” It’s cynical and nihilist. The last thing it should be called is ‘heroic’.
This is the exact same strategy employed by self-help ‘gurus’. ‘Just do everything you’re doing, but do it with the feeling of intention’ is one of the most vacuous, nonsensical phrases that could ever be interpreted as advice. Nonetheless, The Secret has sold thirty million copies on the genius of ‘you have a better chance of getting what you want if you take two seconds think about it’ and ‘you’re perfect already’.
The media in 2020 exists to breed and feed mass hysteria, and they do so by cleaving the winners and the losers in such a way that the media outlet remains always on the right side of the result. This is, ironically, exactly what a casino owner would do, and just like Trump, they can’t even get that right. The sportsbook sets odds to maximize betting. 50-50 odds can even be acceptable because they charge a vig on the losers. Your proclivity to believe their side is the vig. You are the vig. As long as you keep believing their side of the story, they win.
The public has proven that it will not punish the media as long as the media continues to punish groups of strangers their audience hates. Viewers will not stop watching, so why would they change course? How many blatant, unexplainable errors do they have to make? It’s emerging now that the FBI may indeed have been corrupt in their handling of the Trump campaign investigation to an extent that stops just short of a clandestine coup. The media were complicit in every bit of this. Each night on CNN for three years it was Russia and racism. An unending line of journalists and Experts would appear each night to speculate on this or that and declare to the world that the issue of the day was absolute proof of everything and it would all come crashing down. None of that has happened. Has CNN stopped inviting these people to appear on their network to give ‘Expert opinions’ on other issues about which, it turns out, they also possess no special information? Of course not.
When someone says, “listen to the experts” it is a mark of the ever-dreaded ‘privilege’. What could be more privileged than believing that total strangers, said to be Experts, have everything under control? The knowledge that you’ll be okay if you just wait it out while someone else makes the choices that destroy society around you is what allows you to delegate your moral choice to someone else and then frown about it in pity when things go wrong. And let’s consider what the experts actually do say. Anthony Fauci himself said on February 29th that there was a low risk at that time and people didn’t need to worry about changing their habits. That’s not fake news. He said it. Experts told Trump in his daily briefings that the virus was not a top priority. It’s doesn’t matter that he was told early. Things are not threats until they are.
Experts at news organizations, apparently, didn’t feel compelled to make a national story of the virus. Journalists at the Democratic debate a week before the country began its panic didn’t so much as bother asking the candidates a question about it. Experts told you that Bill De Blasio was the right candidate for New York. Experts opined that an Andrew Cuomo’s governorship was just what the state needed, because he had decades worth of political power at his disposal, being the son of a former governor. Who designed their budgets, if not Experts? Who advised Bill De Blasio to sell off the city’s ventilators because they were too expensive to maintain? Who but Experts would’ve told Cuomo that moving patients suffering from the virus into nursing homes was good and safe? CNN’s resident Expert, Sanjay Gupta, misread the lung x-ray of Chris Cuomo, even while already knowing his condition. When people say “listen to the experts”, well who do you think was wrong in the first place?
Media when combined with Experts presents a powerful force for manipulation of public opinion when speaking to Theorists. Because Theorists accept and rely on credentials, the media knows their audience will accept the received opinion from their Expert. Since actual experts often believe different things about the same issue, it’s impossible to say ‘what experts believe’ in most cases. There is not pure Expert Opinion. Yet, the media boosts the prestige of their chosen narrative by appealing to credentials, and as the Expert says something that affirms the audience’s prior belief, the Expert’s credentials are enhanced by the audience’s favor and by the esteem which the Institution of Journalism still maintains. As the Expert gains in popularity, the network reaps the rewards. The Expert and the media justify one another’s value by exactly how much they lead the narrative where the audience wants it to go, even when the world moves clearly in the opposite direction. Consider, there are still a great number of people on the left who think Donald Trump did not truly win the 2016 election, even though they hear the phrase ‘President Trump’ every day. And I’m not saying they’re ignorant of the facts, I’m saying their bad belief is propped up by having Experts telling them that the thing they know to be true, is not.
If you want an explanation for the political climate right now, there you are. I mentioned earlier how Theories like, ‘you can be whatever you want to be’, create a crack in our understanding. The Theory doesn’t match the reality, and instead of abandoning the Theory, they hold onto it. The gap between the Theory and the reality is filled with malaise and distrust, usually for whatever the Theorist sees as the roadblock to their reality being as good as the Theory says it should be.
This is no different than what’s commonly referred to as Trump Derangement Syndrome, but a version exists on both sides. On one side, Trump is an upstanding citizen, a great leader and protector, and he’s never done anything near as bad as what he’s accused of doing, even though they can see it every day. On the other side, legions of dejected leftists spend their days sharing damning articles on social media about how evil Trump is and how he’ll be out of office any day. It’s not that each side doesn’t have some good reasons to believe what they do. Trump is many things to many people. You can see whatever you want to see.
This is why he creates such controversy and attention. For almost any Theory you hold regarding Trump, reality can show you the exact opposite. The gap here, between Theory and rooted reality, is cavernous. The lengths these two groups of people must go to, to maintain the Theory rather than admit reality, has them feeling insane and it forces them into dishonesty with others and the willfull deceiving of themselves. If you’re forcing yourself to believe one thing when the rooted world says the opposite, you will feel insane and act insane.
There is nothing anti-expert or anti-elite about this framing except the realization that Expertise and Elitism themselves should not be viewed as the privileged diviners of correct knowledge. I want to make clear that I am not saying we should ever disregard expertise. Expertise is necessary, but not sufficient. Expertise should be used as a tool in decision-making rather than an oracle prepared to make our judgments for us. We do not still, at least at the time of this writing, allow an algorithm to choose who we love or what job we do or whether or not now is the right time to try to bring a life into the world. I believe fully in expertise as a concept, but not in every field. Expertise proven by real-life experience and success is one of the most valuable commodities on earth. ‘Expertise’ proven by college degrees and credentials is one of the least.
Similarly, this is not anti-college, but college should be an informed choice, especially regarding cost, rather than an expectation for every American kid who just turned 18. We now require degrees and licensing for jobs that require neither. Now, with colleges being little more than a YouTube video due to social distancing, it might be time to ask whether college is any better at educating people than simply watching the right YouTube videos. Unless you’re learning a technical skill or are in one of the hard sciences, there is nothing you can learn in college that you can’t learn most of through YouTube videos and reading. So, what does the three hundred thousand dollars go to beyond the framed certificate on your wall? Does anyone know anymore? An Expert in the social sciences is no more an expert than Joel Ostein is of religion. His Expertise is functional in the pursuit of his own ends. If that’s expertise, than Donald Trump is an expert.
How many times have you read an article with a headline that starts: ‘Science says’? They’re ubiquitous. These articles are written as clickbait, and the one random study they’ll reference doesn’t come close to supporting the claim in the headline. It not only misreads and distorts what the science did or did not say, it misrepresents the science in whatever way is necessary to push the outlet’s central narrative. This how real science becomes Theory. Scientists can do their jobs perfectly and still have their work misrepresented by people who misunderstand it, willfully or not. Even when the science is perfectly represented, raw science doesn’t become actionable without moral and political input, and this is often where we fail. Our politicians, rather than detailing the tradeoffs of a proposed policy and arguing for why the tradeoffs are worth it, simply list different cherry-picked scientific information and present it to Theorists as unobjectionable proof that their decision is correct. Again, I am not anti-science and neither is this framework but science, as well, is necessary but not sufficient. We’ve adopted the belief that we can extrapolate policy from data when all data can do is inform the choice that must be made by a human who will then be accountable. Scientism comes with the built-in ability to assign blame to the data when the human judgment proves poor.
This is how our representatives evade the consequences of their decisions. If it turns out well, score one for me and score one for the science. If it doesn’t? The politician says he was working with the best information available. This is a trick. If a politician can’t make the right decision based on the best available science, that politician has to be held accountable. The science being wrong cannot absolve the politician from the responsibility of the executive decision made or vote cast.
Moral thinking cannot be delegated. Voters and politicians making decisions based on Theory are excusing their responsibility and personal agency. Jettisoning moral agency, and thus moral responsibility onto an authority figure or a page of data is, in itself, immoral. Likewise, playing to polls and approval ratings. Every politician does this, especially Trump, but again, Trump playing to his own benefit at all times is built into the understanding. Politicians who present themselves as honest and committed and driven by a higher purpose risk their entire careers by catering their actions constantly to the polls. But while Trump’s position is definitional, and thus rooted, theirs is supported by Theory. They’re aware enough of their own craven nature to know they should hide it, but not aware enough to admit it and allow people to understand the kind of politician they are. Instead, they will stack Theory on Theory in an attempt to explain how they were never inconsistent in the first place.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because that is the perfect description for the career of Hillary Clinton, and it’s the reason she lost. Her feminism was worn as a badge of honor in campaigns, but not in practice. She preached transparency for others but is one of the great obfuscators of my lifetime. She was, in turns, a reasonable centrist and an internet social justice warrior. She was a friend to the workers between speeches at Goldman Sachs. She was billed to be the most experienced and competent candidate to ever run for president. Maybe. But if that’s true, how did she lead a campaign that took a gifted nomination, endless structural support, and the joy of facing one of the most hated men on the planet, and completely blow it all in outrageous fashion? And that was the second time she’d done so. Even experience didn’t breed competence.
My point here is not to list Hillary’s many inconsistencies or failings. It’s to illustrate the cost of being transparently dishonest about her own deepest ambitions, indeed her own selfimage. You can say that her advisors steered her wrong, but then who hired them? She relied on a decades-old circle-of-trust sycophants. What would a rooted person expect of those sorts of people? If you need a clearer illustration, look at Trump’s relationship with Michael Cohen. Trump recognized Cohen as a sycophant, got what he needed from him, and then ditched him when the going got rough. The media claimed Trump was disloyal to ‘his people’, as if being disloyal to sycophants who’d degrade themselves to find favor is anything but a mark of good judgment. This is why Trump hires them. Like most of what he does, it’s not honorable, but it is effective. Hillary remained loyal to her sycophants for their years of shameless, servile compliance with the Clinton cause. And again, I say this having supported both at some point. The only purpose here is the distinction, not to make Trump an avatar of good judgment.
Being rooted is not an ideology, it’s simply a way to gauge new information, the things people say, and the things you tell yourself and others. Reliance on Theory forces us into an imbalance between what we perceive in the world, how we communicate that to others, and reality itself. People who are thinking, seeing, and speaking entirely different things can’t hope to effectively communicate with another person this way, because it’s impossible to know which signals to trust.
Imagine a big game hunter. Of his friends and family in the polite classes who are aware of this activity, many freely voice their disapproval. He will occasionally get to hear what, exactly, their problem with hunting is, with or without asking. One objection he often gets is, ‘those animals are endangered’, whether or not they are. He will calmly explain that properly controlled hunting is among the best practices in reviving a species, and that killing off older males before they can kill younger males who should be mating, is crucial for their survival. They hunt the designated animal and kill it. But friends and family members will not change their minds, even after receiving new, real-world, provable, factual information. Why?
Because they were using Theory to explain themselves in the first place, so the rejection of their Theory not only doesn’t solve their problem, it forces them to double down on Theory or believe that the hunter is dishonest, cruel, or stupid. It makes sense that the hunter could be right, but they just know he’s not. The rooted truth is actually far deeper than they realize and more effective as an argument, in that it allows both sides to understand one another. The hunter is hunting for sport, thrill, camaraderie, and to feel somehow connected to the earth, not because he’s a heroic conservationist. The friends and family aren’t activists for endangered animals, and this is obvious because they don’t show any knowledge of which animals are endangered and how they might be helped, and they certainly don’t understand the experience or why one might want to have it. They simply feel a kinship to charismatic megafauna, as many of us do. They find the killing of these beautiful animals distasteful and immoral, though very few are vegetarians.
The Theorist won’t express and deal with his true beliefs, since they’re in some way ‘base’. We’ve convinced ourselves that the Theoretical justification for our feelings is more powerful, as if providing an inaccurate justification for the feeling is more effective than the feeling. That is an enormous mistake. The Theoretical interpretation means absolutely nothing, unless you’re already speaking to someone who shares the same rooted belief. If they find hunting gross, the idea that that a certain kind of species that is, in their minds, exotic simply because it doesn’t live in America, could certainly be endangered, and even if that animal isn’t, others are. No one changes their own beliefs this way, much less the beliefs of other people. People close to us telling us that they care about our behavior is more effective than hearing statistics from a stranger. Underlying whatever explanation they give, is a rooted belief the explanation is expected to support. Instead, it diminishes the rooted belief and communicates the insecurity of the position.
Being rooted is not moral or amoral, it is indifferent. As with experts, a rooted view can’t tell you what you should do. You’re going to do what you’re going to do, but a rooted view allows you to fully consider what it is you’re doing. An action isn’t good by virtue of its rootedness. Interacting with a rooted person, being rooted yourself, says nothing about the truth of what the person is saying. Simply understand that the person really does hold the particular position, and don’t believe any Theory-dependent thing the person says. Rootedness provides no justification for violence outside of self-defense. A rooted framework actually forces a person to assess a violent act in a real way rather that make excuses for his actions.
Rootedness is not, at all, anti-intellectual. It’s quite the opposite. It’s rooted to believe that we do not know, and cannot possibly know, everything, which means that we must rely on second-hand information. This is the ultimate problem that the breakdown of media institutions has caused. With the understanding that the media is now inherently Theorist, we’re forced to do extra work to verify the things they say. Is it any surprise that people are either believing one side of everything or just tuning out completely? But the impulse to verify new information is anything but anti-intellectual. It’s anti-intellectual to think we should believe whatever we’re told in the first place. The verification of information is a search for more information and a deeper understanding. That’s what being intellectual is.
If you’re stuck between two Theories, look for the roots. Whichever root bears more resemblance to the Theories you’re deconstructing has a good chance of being the better explanation. Theorists are obsessed with false certainty. It’s a cause and a symptom of Theory. They understand ‘certainty’ as an attractive, confident-looking position, but when certainty needs to be supported by Theory, that certainty is shown to be insecure. Those are the points where either the Theory or the certainty need to be challenged.
Rootedness has no political goals and takes no political sides, but it is a perfect framework for viewing politicians. It does nothing to speak to Trump’s goodness or honesty, but it does explain why he won and why he may well win again, regardless of what polls say in the middle of a crisis. It also describes the sort of candidate who would know how to prepare for him. Joe Biden has seemed rooted at many points in his life and may still be, but on the most basic issue – whether or not he should be president – it’s hard to be sure he even believes it himself.
We’re convinced that we should have an opinion on everything. We should not. We can Google whatever point of view we want to support and find information supporting that position. Without attention paid to the legitimacy of the information, this gives us the illusion we were right. Worse than that, it convinces us to believe that we are Experts, even on subjects we just found out about minutes earlier. We take the position of the Expert who reinforces our own prior position. Was every Expert advising early action? Lockdowns? Masks? Which experts do you listen to now, but disregarded before? Which experts do you disregard now that they’ve chosen new ones for you? What Theory could you possibly use to explain this? The rooted truth is that you’re not sure who to believe and you’re solidifying your position. This is natural. But it’s not the only way to solidify your position. People have become so over-informed that they’re willing to deny or disregard what they know as soon as a Theorist proposes a new explanation.
Being against Theorism at all times is a pretty effective way to go through life, even for the totally immoral or amoral. I said earlier that Trump was the apex anti-Theorist and he is. His entire being exists to destroy Theory. This is what his supporters see when he says drain the swamp. They believe, with some justification when it comes to the media and the Washington political establishment, that Trump is indeed ‘draining the swamp’. That he’s replacing it with a different sort of swamp isn’t dispositive of his draining the one that’s there. I’m also not saying that this vacuum we’re left with is a good place to be, but it nonetheless may be a good thing that we’re forced to move through it.
The understanding I’m asking you to have is not dependent on any factor of your being. It has nothing to say about the race or gender or religion of anyone. Everyone is part Theorist and most people, on some level, are rooted. There is something extremely honest about being able to understand something simply, and something extremely dishonest about having to try to disprove what we can see with our own eyes while relying on theories so convoluted that no one could ever found any reality atop them. So much of our world currently seems to lack that foundation. I am asking you simply to view the world in a way that requires no prior explanation and work from that. Rootedness is self-justifying. It relies on nothing for support. If it leads you to a different place than me, well, let’s both honor our differences.