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Showing posts from November, 2016

President Trump: the fall of Rome and the collapse of industrial society.

President Trump: the fall of Rome and the collapse of industrial society. My Psychohistory maillist said: " The "id candidate" has won.” America’s unconscious, the return of the repressed. Psychoanalytic models for understanding collective behavior. Sounds right to me. We already know that resentment drives anti-establishment movements. Trump supporters represent the American unconscious: a little boy, angry at being frustrated in his desires and fearful of losing his self-coherence if he turns to his mother for succor. And monied though Trump is, Hillary is too much the face of the existing system. He’s the rich kid who makes trouble right alongside the class losers. So everyone who feels rejected by the elite can find it easy to identify with him. Or, more simply, (sociologically, rather than psychologically) America has failed sufficiently to educate her populace. Conceiving of education as a private benefit rather than as a public good, and refusing