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The Power of Freedom and the Freedom of Power
A political column appeared in, I believe, the Washington Post way back in the 1980s that a graduate school buddy at the time brought to my attention. I can’t swear to the details and would love to hear if someone knows where to find it, but it went something like this:
The columnist had a friend who was studying marine biology — specifically researching the schooling instinct of minnows. A minnow, it seems, swims with the school because if it strays too far from the group in pursuit, say, of a piece of food, an alarm goes off in the minnow’s brain forcing it back to the safety of the school.
The biologist had succeeded in identifying the portion of the brain in the minnow that was responsible for this warning signal and, with a tour de force of delicate brain surgery, managed to remove that portion of the brain from a single minnow (without killing it) and ultimately place it back in the school. The result was that the “brainless” minnow immediately became the emperor of the school. Wherever it wanted to go, everyone else was bound to follow.
The columnist suggested that this kind of behavior was analogous to the Ronald Reagan approach to leadership and particularly (as I recall) his advocacy of the Star Wars (i.e. Strategic Defense) Initiative. When Reagan strayed too far from political orthodoxy there was simply no warning signal to pull him back into the school … and the rest of the political class was bound to follow.
I hope that here at Ricochet, where Reagan is viewed as a saint (a view which, by and large, I share), the brilliance of that analogy is nevertheless not lost.
Because, whether it can be said to apply to Ronald Reagan or not, it surely is an apt explanation for Donald Trump.
Trump, of course, says many things that resonate with what the conservative base believes deep in its heart. The invasion of illegal immigrants is, for instance, really the issue that ignites the fire of people who feel their government has time and again betrayed them. Trump gets that (as so few do). So he is to this degree cognizant of the rest of the “school.” But the appeal of Trump is only partly his ability to identify the problems which frustrate and infuriate the base.
The real Trump magic is the power of freedom that comes with not really giving a damn what anyone thinks. He knows the truth. But others know (at least some of) the truth as well. Yet while professional politicians like Jeb Bush are calculating the impact of every word, forever scheming how to get the school to follow, Trump just says:
I don’t have time for political correctness and neither does this country.
Here’s what I have to say and here is why it’s important. You want to fixate on peripheral details? Go ahead. The rest of us have work to do.
He says he doesn’t want to automatically endorse the eventual Republican candidate and forgo the possibility of a third party run? Why should he? If he believes that what he is saying is good for America, might he not think that the threat of running a third-party campaign gives him some essential leverage in impressing his message onto the platform of the eventual nominee? What’s wrong with that?
Again, he is proceeding from confidence and it is bracing.
And that just about sums up the whole phenomenon. Every world leader and every huckster knows it by heart: say it loudly with enough confidence and a lot of people are going to buy it.
But there is a deeper – even a profound – significance to the brainless minnow school of thought (yuk, yuk). And that is that every one of us has a little schooling instinct alarm lobe in our brains. And suppressing that alarm lobe is the key to all self-confidence. Because whether it is in a boardroom or at a bar, that alarm is trying to prevent us from saying or doing anything that will be seen as, you know, weird.
The problem begins when that alarm starts to get out of control. You may think, while you are standing there stammering after boldly walking all the way across the room, that you just don’t have anything to say to this foxy girl sitting there in front of you. Wrong. You have lots to say. But the alarm says: “Don’t talk about baseball!” “Don’t talk about video games!” “Jesus, don’t mention the mole on her neck!”
Soon enough, the alarm has you convinced that everything you have to say is weird. You are standing there, all processes frozen, and eventually you ask if she comes here a lot. And before long you notice it…there in the cockpit, that familiar smell – you’ve smelled it before. Yep, it’s smoke.
What separates the good pickup artist from the bad – what separates the good politician from the bad – is having that schooling alarm under control. But pace the Gospel of John, it is not always the Truth that sets you free. What sets you free is something more ephemeral or else something entirely beside the point. Alcohol works wonders. So can a history of success.
In Trump’s case, what sets him free is at least partly money. And I say God bless him.
Published in Culture
What I find so troubling about these defenses of Trump, or maybe just explanations of why it makes sense to support Trump, is that they focus, as they must, on the visceral reaction that certain people have to Trump’s “tell it like it is” approach.
But what his defenders never speak of, and I suspect they never think of, is what Trump will be like as an actual day-to-day president, suggesting laws, appointing judges and justices, as commander-in-chief, trusted with all the nation’s secrets and our nuclear arsenal, dealing with world leaders, and so on.
They don’t think of these things because it is too horrifying to contemplate.
I’d like to see how that school of minnows does when placed in a pond full of predators. Does the new emperor minnow lead them all to their doom?
At this point, I don’t think anyone (maybe even Trump himself) has any really understanding of his motivations for trying to become president.
I understand his motivation quite well I think. The man is an attention [prostitute].
No great mystery to it.
It is without a doubt the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever come across that there are people who seriously want to entrust a man with the power to wage war when this man cannot suffer gracefully the slings and arrows of Rosie O’Donnell or the questions of Megyn Kelly, but we expect him to take the measure of Putin, Khamenei, and Xi Jinping.
I can hear it now: “Khamenei is stupid. He has no class. He’s a bum. I’m worth billions, billions, and he can’t even afford a new turban. Remember those hostages that the Iranians held for 444 days? Well, I like the ones that weren’t captured. And Putin, what does he know about running a country? He’s just a glorified circus-bear trainer. And Xi, he wasn’t nice to me, so I’m not going to be nice to his country.”
The funny (scary?) thing is that this isn’t even much of an exaggeration.
Part of the reason I think it’s important to figure out what’ so appealing about Trump is that I want other Republicans (that I actually trust are conservative) to learn from what he’s doing.
I suspect that another “brainless minnow” with principles would do far more to halt the Trump phenomenon than just wishing he’d shut up or go away.
Christie comes closest to embodying all the “good” things about Trump without all the baggage of the bad things. The say it like it is approach, even to the point of shouting down hecklers. If he would be clearly as strong on immigration as Trump he could really go places. In the meantime, what does it say about the Republican party that the front runner is dismissed so easily? The Republican establishment types talk as if it’s a foregone conclusion that Trump will not be nominated. When has the frontrunner ever been dismissed like that?
I would hope Trump would be mugged by reality if got elected (sort of the way Obama was in some respects) and that that type of stuff wouldn’t actually happen.
Let’s buy Khamemei a turban
Wow, all this talk in the OP about brain alarms and mind control is starting to convince me that, no matter what anyone says, the Presidency just might be brain surgery after all.
Luckily, there’s one guy running who should be able to sort all that out.
And it’s not Donald Trump.
I think this particular candidate even addressed the ‘brainless minnow’ example, as it pertains to Washington, D.C., in his closing statement the other night.
Many Trump supporters view the illegal immigration debacle and stifling political correctness to as more clear and present dangers and therefore consider them much higher priorities than many other concerns (decorum and day-to-day operations being amongst them).
It’s relatively easy to forgive someone on the small stuff when you get the big stuff right. On the other hand, if you get all the little stuff right, but the big stuff wrong, you still lose at the end of the day.
Let’s be honest. The Megyn Kelly kerfuffle is really, really small stuff in the total scheme of things. It will be forgotten in a week’s time, yet the pundits and media let it totally dominate the discourse since the Fox debate ended. Meanwhile, the other GOP candidates continue to fail to overcome the GOP’s accumulated trust deficit and continue to fail to convince many voters that they’ll get the big stuff right (not only in word, but more importantly, in deed).
So Trump continues to rise in the polls.
I am not a full-throated Trump supporter, but your point that some things are more important than decorum and, for that matter, more important than party unity is right on.
Appearances are that “party unity” must ultimately mean “legal status for illegal aliens” and we *know* what that means (hint: begins with A and rhymes with travesty). If Trump is, in fact, opposed to amnesty (I am not entirely certain that he is) and if he is the only one who maintains that position then I hope he does run as a third party candidate.
I’m not a Trump supporter either, but I am an extremely dissappointed GOP voter, so it’s not too difficult to see where Trump’s support is coming from.
I was thinking of an old adage:
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
When I thought it appropriate to extend it a bit with:
“But fool me three times and I’m an abject fool.”
The little stuff, as you call it, is really very big stuff, too.
Does it matter whom President Trump appoints to the Supreme Court? Only for the next 30 years.
Does it matter what commander-in-chief Trump does with the armed services, whether he increases or decreases them? Whether he manages to maintain an adequate defense posture?
Does it matter whether President Trump keeps all the terrorists at bay? Or gets us into a very stupid war, or a really bad treaty with our enemies, or fails to support our allies and by doing so fails to deter our enemies?
Does it matter whether President Trump understands what sort of economic policies regarding taxes, regulation, etc., are good for the economy?
Or does only the number of immigrants matter?
Man with the Axe, some of us believe that the end of the United States as we know it is about thirty years away if we keep on this same track of abandoning sovereignty. (hint: the number 7 billion features prominently in that analysis). There is no other issue that matters if we lose this.
There are indeed many issues to consider. But the issues are not independent of each other. I find it helpful to attempt to prioritize issues and try to understand the dependencies that exist between them.
For example, there are ‘x’ workers supporting ‘y’ welfare recipients.
At what values of x and y are there no longer enough dollars left to pursue any of your other priorities?
What tax rates are required for ‘x’ to support ‘y’?
At what values of x and y do the x’s start deciding it’s no longer worth it and ‘go Galt’ ?
What factors affect ‘x’? What factors affect ‘y’?
It doesn’t take too long to realize that the huge waves of unskilled Third world illegal immigration starts affecting just about everything that you hold dear – from the size of the military you are able to maintain to the quality of your child’s education.
Couple that with robotics and automation increasingly eliminating much need for unskilled labor and the problems only get worse.
So yeah, the illegal immigration issue is a huge one that ripples through many other aspects of our society.
Man. Nothing like coming to Ricochet to find a Reagan = disabled fish analogy to explain the plain impact of plain leadership.
Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is proceeding despite fear. Nowhere does this require extirpation of some fear center or desensitization to fear. Just leadership.
I hope the impolitic simplicity of that is not lost on the authorship.
Yup.
People feel as though he is not going to back down to anyone for any reason.
This post is an excellent analysis of the mood out there. :)
Americans love their villains and the freedom they enjoy. The greater the difference between acceptable norms and the inner dialogue, the more the slaves to conformity love the free. Especially when the free is an aggressive male.
This is of course the country that made Les Grosman a thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFz7rZY_DDI
(the official theme song to my MBA graduation in my own mind anyway)
Don’t disagree with any of this.
Courage is controlling that warning alarm and not letting fear control you. So I don’t think the analogy by that columnist with Reagan was correct. But I think it was brilliant nevertheless. From a liberal perspective the conclusion that Reagan must simply not hear those alarms going off was very clever.
But the alarm is there and it threatens to undermine the most courageous man or woman. Even a great general might take a shot of whiskey before heading into battle.
Apology accepted. [muffled thud]