… I’ll be honest- I thought that was pathological narcissism, TBH. But then, I’m not a psychologist.
Trump gives us a peek into his moral compass
I’ve never needed to really look for it- it’s plainly obvious in that his moral compass is “What do I get out of it, regardless of who gets hurt?”
This opinion of mine has become cemented pretty solidly watching the coverage of his multiple trials and the ham-handed ways he’s tried to weasel out of having to pay the piper.
Personally? I take doing good as a challenge, because it’s all too easy to be evil, but being good does have it’s own rewards and costs so much less than being evil over the long run.
From what I understand, solipsism is like narcissism on steroids, but then again:
Neither am I.
I’ve just known more than my fair share of narcissists in my day, and none of them come even close to TFG when it comes to being pathologically self centered.
Everything is transactional to Trump. When you combine “If you don’t have heaven, what’s the reason? Why do I have to be good?” with his amoral behavior, I have to conclude that HE doesn’t believe in God and an afterlife.
Imagine a politician who donates to various charities that I support.
If they’re doing it because they truly believe in the causes those charities support, and if they continue that support after they get elected, that makes me happy.
If on the other hand they do it solely because it’s a way to convince and/or trick me (and others) to vote for them, and once in office they pivot 180 degrees, that small initial gain for the charities could be outweighed by the damage they do to the charities and their causes by the policies they enact. Now I’m pissed by their bait-and-switch but they’ve got the duration of their term to do more damage to those causes I support.
As a concrete example, imagine they expressed support for Planned Parenthood and women’s rights during their campaign but sponsor a draconian abortion ban bill after they get seated in Congress. I’d feel pretty betrayed by that candidate, but getting them out of office before the next election likely is going to be pretty difficult.
Their action (donating to the charity) is the same in those two scenarios. The ultimate effect of that action depends on why they took that action: genuine support or cold political calculus leading to a backstabbing.
And if the politician keeps giving to PP, despite not actually giving a shit after the election? To keep your vote? PP still gets the money. What matters if the pivot or lack thereof, I’d argue.
And again, I don’t think people are just that simple. Most often, it’s a combination of reasons for people doing what they do. And often times, why they do things might not even be fully clear to them.
The outcome matters generally speaking. And yes, we could dig up every single possible permutation of “what if” but again, we might want to focus on the rubber hitting the road, given just how complicated people’s actual motivations might be, and how none of us do things for purely altruistic, selfless reasons at the end of it. There is no real purity in motive, because it’s never one singular reason for doing things.
But what if they really DO believe in the mission of Planned Parenthood, but then they support an abortion ban as part of grand bargain to get other priorities (say gun control) passed that you don’t think are as important or disagree with? In the end it is actions that matter, at least to me. And of course this question has been debated by Christians for a long time. Do good works matter? Is grace due to faith alone? Or are the elect predestined? After all, if God is omniscient, he should KNOW who he will select for salvation even before they are born. At some level, and omnipotent and omniscient God is the philosophical equivalent of multiplying by infinity. Logically, you can get all sorts of wonky answers even if you don’t worry about trying to square that with the fucked up nature of the Universe and His supposed omnibenevolence.
Then, no, they don’t actually believe in PP’s mission and they certainly do not believe that women deserve equal rights.
There is absolutely NO reasons to trade women’s rights for other goals, UNLESS you don’t give a shit about women, except as breeding stock.
But over and above all that, the OUTCOME matters. Not to say that motivations don’t sometimes, matter, but that is usually when they directly impact the outcome. If one is feeding the poor, does it matter if at the end of the day, one or the single motivation is someone trying to get into heaven? Does it matter to the person who has food in their stomach by someone’s direct actions of feeding them? Now, if someone makes that food contingent on the person being fed converting, that’s a different story entirely. But if it’s about feeding people, the motivation (which, again, are likely multiple) matters less. Someone got fed. That’s a positive.
I kind of suspect Trump hasn’t really given any thought to an afterlife for himself one way or the other because he doesn’t entirely understand he’s going to die someday. You might want to go to heaven. He’s just going to have one term as president after another, forever.
And you’ve hit the nail on the head. Politics is about trust. You vote for a representative who you trust to, well, represent you. If you can’t trust them to do that one task, you have no business giving them your vote.
However, that’s rational thought talking. We have plenty of evidence that untrustworthy politicians get reelected time and again. They lie on the campaign trail, then lie in office, and continue to lie after they’ve left. And yet a certain large fraction of their constituents continue to give them their support. We just have to accept that these people are extremely stupid, and won’t be swayed by logic; to successfully oppose them we have to figure them into our calculations and policies.
Do morons deserve representation? Of course! It’s still a democracy. But that means the rest of us have to have a way to deal with the occasional moron representatives; limiting their ability to damage society and responsible governance. So we have rules about majorities and supermajorities that are supposed to keep them manageable. What’s new this time is the republicans have allied themselves with the fools in order to hold the majority for themselves.
As we’ve never seen the likes of this unholy alliance of greed-pigs and morons before, at least not in modern times, we’re apparently not well-equipped to deal with them.
Somehow I don’t think Trump would be as chill as Constantine. “Well, aren’t you a peach?” (I have to run that movie though an accent translator, or it’s crap.)
And yes, we could dig up every single possible permutation of “what if” but again, we might want to focus on the rubber hitting the road, given just how complicated people’s actual motivations might be, and how none of us do things for purely altruistic, selfless reasons at the end of it. There is no real purity in motive, because it’s never one singular reason for doing things.
