I’m not sure how to feel about Trump. I don’t mean that I have trouble deciding on an emotion, more that I have trouble mustering any emotion at all. On election night, I felt. I cried, too, not certain what this meant for the world, not certain how much worse this outcome really was to the alternative, and the uncertainty provoked a sense of fear. Enough fear to make me cry.
But in the month since, I haven’t cried at all. Beyond some off-hand comments here and there, I’ve hardly even thought about the impending second Trump administration. I like to think I’m taking a wise, Taoist sort of approach. A Zen sort of approach. Like the Chinese farmer in that classic story: when apparent misfortune befalls him and everyone cries, “How horrible!”, the farmer simply replies, “Maybe.” And when the misfortune becomes fortune again and everyone cries “How wonderful!”, the farmer simply replies, “Maybe.”
That is what I like to think.
But the truth, as usual, is more nuanced than that. There’s an element of calm, derived from a conscious decision to choose faith over despair, to choose not to need to know yet and to find joy in each day instead. But there’s also an element of dissociation. It’s not that it hits me and I rise above anxiety to faith. The truth is that it doesn’t seem to hit me, like I’m cognitively blocked from it behind some invisible membrane and the weather’s just fine over here. Tucked away at the end of a dirt road, deep in the woods, thirty minutes from the nearest small town, in a far-flung rural corner of a very blue state, the goings-on in Washington D.C. don’t seem to mean much. The laws and tension trickle down, but daily life is more or less the same.
“Self-fragmentation,” writes Dr. Gabor Maté in The Myth of Normal, “Is one of the defenses evoked when the experience of how things are cannot be endured. Only those who know real life to be an insufferable bane are impelled to check out from it.”
Perhaps the calm I feel is just a symptom of the pain I’m blocking out.
I’ve been trying to get back to the real world, trying to unsplit and face what’s really going on. I watched Jon Stewart talk about the election in the hopes it might probe me into feeling something more. Mostly, it made me feel nostalgia for my childhood, back when Jon Stewart was our lifeline to sanity amid the gaslit dystopia of Bush’s America. These days, he seems tired. Everyone seems tired. Maybe the thing I feel right now is tired.
Is that the real world? The exhausted collective psyche I mean. The way my face has so many more lines than it used to. The way everyone walks around these days as though they’ve been walking for a long, long time. The way it’s hard to feel excited about social movements, hard to muster the hope for change, hard to hold onto the belief that what we do really matters and any of us humans has any clue how to influence the world for the better.
Maybe the realest feeling is the apathy. What’s realest is our disconnection from apparent reality. When the tangible world outside your door is completely dissociated from the things you tell yourself are most important, then what is it you can really connect to? I’ve never seen Donald Trump in the flesh. He’s only ever existed on my screen, in the memes, in the endless, endless media about him. But he, the living, breathing human, has never been real in my world.
And with that unreality, all the drama surrounding him feels so far away, tucked like the sun at night beyond the horizon where I can’t feel it anymore. Like the light of distant stars taking years sometimes to reach us here on Earth, so that when we look up, we’re seeing things that are no longer happening. Some of the stars we see light up the sky are already dead. Washington has a new king. It’s very, very important, I’m told. In the abstract, I fear very much for very many. In the here and now, I’m tired.
What reality is it that we’re living in, exactly? What world is this, whose kingdom? What haunted, afflicted world?
The world is not such a unified thing. There is the objective world, whatever is really going here. That world is something none of us will ever experience directly. Then, there is the mental world, the world of concepts and meanings. That world is wholly subjective, something we continuously experience but cannot truly share with anyone else. Between them is the phenomenal world, the intersubjectivity of our internal world with the external environment. The way that the landscape before you feels palpably different when you wake up with a hangover than it does when you step out the church door after getting married, the way different things sing to your eyes when it’s raining than when the sun is shining, the way the din of city traffic hits you differently than the sound of an owl in the forest alone.
In trying to ground myself back in reality, which world do I mean? Which version of reality is the real one? A president is a concept, so any fears I have about Trump fall into the category of the mental world. The concept of a president can only be a thought, a thought that can influence the way I experience more tangible aspects of the world, but still nothing more than data in my mind.
It doesn’t feel like dissociation. It just feels like, in the face of so much real, breathing life unfolding right outside my door, the concept of a faraway president is like a dead, imaginary thing.
Presidents, borders, nations, laws: all of these are mere products of the imagination. They exist only because, and only for as long as, we believe they do. Without belief in them, they cease to exist. As such, they are not wholly real.
Which begs the question: how much of our feelings do they really deserve?
Or, put another way, is dissociation from them such an incorrect response?
There’s a process by which mental constructs gain power in the material world, one that requires our implicit, often unconscious, agreement. When the belief in an idea is strong enough, it can impact us physically without us believing in it too. Think of a king who mobilizes an army to raid the villages of distant peasants who might theretofore have had no idea that the king existed at all.
How unfortunate it is that we spend so much of our lives at the mercy of mental constructs we never really consented to believe in.
And the Chinese farmer answers back, “Maybe.”
Because if thoughts have the power to shape the world, then our thoughts have such power too. In seeing how much arbitrary concepts carry real weight, we can’t deny our capacity of call things into being. Right now, most people around me may believe that the office of the president exists, that it has meaning. So too could we stop believing, and all that meaning would evaporate.
Beholding the phenomenal world is like looking through a camera, with changing thoughts adjusting the lens to bring different planes into focus. To pull focus from one plane, we must shift it to another. To stop relying on a distant demagogue to manage the systems that (purport to) meet our basic needs, we must rely on something else. We must build and bolster new systems, closer ones, more decentralized and democratic ones that allow us all greater control over our lives.
Is that the promise of the next Trump era, that it can catalyze a mass divestment from the state?
And the Chinese farmer answers back, “Maybe.”
These days, the virtual world keeps screaming predictions at me. Trump won’t destroy democracy. Trump will drag America into a fascist dictatorship. Trump’s nominees will destroy the country, or they won’t be confirmed at all. The world will be safer with less antagonism from Russia. The world will be more dangerous as strongmen and their genocides proceed uninhibited. It’ll be chaos, it’ll be deadlock, it’ll be carnage, or nothing will much change.
The point of all this predicting, I think, is to help people feel safer. Even the most terrifying predictions are cast to defend against an even more difficult feeling of uncertainty. Better the devil you know. When you know, or think you know, what’s coming, you feel more in control.
But the Chinese farmer in me merely laughs and shakes his head. Silently, he points inward, to the plane of reality we so seldom pull our focus to. That, none of that out there, is what we can control. No real safety is found in trying to control that.
If we want to feel safer, we must master this: the space in here, the way we look at things, the things that we believe. The president is nothing but a thought.
So you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I don’t know how to muster much emotion for that thought. I care very much for the people, for close friends and for so many people I’ve never met whose safety hangs in the balance right now. What I don’t care for is unquestioned allegiance to the belief that a concept has intrinsic power over us. I don’t think what’s happening in Washington D.C. matters more than what’s right outside my door.
That world, over there, is intangible. I cannot see it with my eyes, cannot taste it on the air. I can’t hold it, mold it, press myself into it and feel what it’s like against my skin. The more I fixate on it, the more dissociated I become.
But this world, right here, this is something I can feel. I can see it, smell it, listen to it speaking and speak back. It’s not insulated from that conceptual world that carries so much undue power. It’s not separate. It’s simply closer, more immediate, and with that, more real.
This is the world where we really live. The other one, the conceptual one, it matters. But it will never matter as much as the sensuous, present world. No matter how much we focus on made-up concepts far away, the living, breathing world around us is all still right here. This is the world that needs our focus. This is the world that needs our love. This is the world that’s falling into disrepair the longer we fixate on made-up worlds of would-be kings.
This is the world I choose to feel for. And all those people shouting on my screen, all those anxious predictions and placid reassurances, all that falls away. Disintegrating into smoke, evaporating out of sight, until all I can see is what’s really been right here all along.