The problem is that eventually, you start to believe it, and I certainly know a few people who sincerely believe Trump goes around grabbing pussies, etc., as if they never heard of groupies, or parsed the actual words.
So, again, the NY Times and David Brooks...
We've got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.
There's the Sun Tzu saw about if you don't know your enemy... well, not being aware of an enemy's strengths or actual weaknesses is not knowing one's enemy. The problem with narcissistic/borderline "splitting" is that once someone is bad, they're all bad, and there's no "good" or respectable traits - thery're all seen as defending the indefensible.
The literally cannot imagine Trump is smart, because he doesn't talk like them, despite having gone through Wharton school of business at U Penn in a day and age that it was absolutely, provably, a challenge.
Much of the Globalist/Elite failing is hubris. The Enemy of the Elite *cannot* be smarter than they are. They *are* the Elites!
ReplyDeleteHow many times did Sun Tzu deal with this lot before he crystallized his "know your enemy" thesis? People who think that they are the "smartest man in the room" relative to their opponents are always primed to fail.
If you can't conceive of your enemy able to out-fight, out-think, or out-plan you, you can't effectively anticipate his actions or counter his moves.
Truly Third Law in action.
It's entirely possible for two intelligent people to start from the same point and land on two different sides of a debate. Truly smart people understand this. Middling intellects don't - they assume that since they are smart, anyone who arrives at a different conclusion must therefore be not-smart. That's a huge failure.
ReplyDeleteI can certainly see how a different weight of values can result in people coming to different conclusions, but there remain some things that I simply cannot believe people think are true.
DeleteI've also noted that mid-wits (smarter than average, subgenius) tend to accuse one of showing off if you actually use your vocabulary.
Deletethe thoughts that run through my head of course are "but I'd have to work harder to 'talk down'", followed by "when I do people get pissed for just that", and "even when I use simple words, because I don't like using a more complicated word than necessary, I can tell from your response you didn't actually get what I meant beyond the most basic, 'captain obvious' interpretation"