Why is Donald Trump so popular? This question has been asked repeatedly, and even more so in this time of insurrection and impeachment.
How has he managed to nurture an alternative universe of lies, deceit and half-truths?
How has he managed to coerce millions of people in the USA and elsewhere into believing his tweeted and facebooked and Fox News nonsense?
How did he inflame political debate and provoke an insidious uprising of vicious thoughts, beliefs and actions – which defy intelligent and logical analysis? Fact checking by the Washington Post and others reveals 30,529 false or misleading statements up to January 13 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Donald_Trump
For many years we’ve proposed a model of six fundamental intelligences:
We all have the ability to be intelligent in several ways. An over-reliance on one of the intelligences at the expense of the others can create imbalance, sometimes catastrophically. Not engaging with or being low in one or more of the intelligences will make life difficult for others as well as ourselves.
In very brief summary, the six intelligences are:
Consider Donald Trump when looking again at our six intelligences.
Is Donald Trump the antithesis of intelligent?
His intellectual incapacity and dishonesty is evident to all who have the will to notice. His political awareness is hugely immature. Can you imagine him reading any book? His instinct is to fight. He clearly uses his basic, unrefined instincts, his combative drives, to direct policy – rather than rationality. He believes he’s a warrior, a fighter and above all a winner. His tweeting, when he was able, was feisty, nasty, base and instinctual. Does he have any personal intelligence or honest insight other than a craving for power? Has he ever engaged all his physical senses for the benefit of others? His propensity for a round of golf doesn’t tick the box of being physically intelligent. If he has any values other than the narcissistic value of self-aggrandisement, they’re deeply flawed in the context of living life well for the good of oneself and others.
People are confused about the appeal of Trump. Do his supporters respond through the triggering of ancient instincts? Were they intellectually convinced by his non-stop rhetoric on Twitter and Facebook? Did he bind them into a social movement that allowed many to feel they were part of a group far bigger and more powerful than their solitary selves? Did he validate their base ideas, their prejudices, etc. and allow them to express racism, etc. as solid values and virtues as though they were somehow the driving spiritual force of ‘true Americans’?
Did he awaken certain types of dark self-knowledge – to legitimise and enable them to look within and actually embrace their violent desires, drives, lusts, longing – and to experience this as some sort of personal liberation – feelings that had been shamefully hidden during the years of civilised liberal hegemony.
Hard right values and a fascistic mentality enable all of the above.
Then, there’s the emotional dimension – the release of what many of us call destructive emotions.
Whereas more enlightened people use their six intelligences to keep in check their destructive emotions, demagogues urge their followers to forget about their better angels and release their pent-up, demonic destructive emotions – anger, hatred, greed, etc.
They become emotionally unintelligent.
This is how people lacking positive values and virtues come to regard themselves as heroic, fearless, saviours of their ‘race’ and their nation.
This is what happens when a nation fails to provide a comprehensive and rounded education for its population – it makes it easy for populism to take root and explode with tragic consequences. This is what happens when a nation fails to build an education system that develops critical thinking, proper values and virtues, the ability to detect and deconstruct populist rhetoric, the adherence to honest debate and the avoidance of lies and deceits.
This is what happens when large sections of a population leave school without self-knowledge and a clear understanding of how to participate constructively in the rights and duties of citizenship; when they have limited knowledge of basic economics, when they leave school without an understanding of destructive emotions – let alone an awareness that the skills that we need to be emotionally intelligent are important and very necessary to live life well.
A commitment to PSHE in school? Don’t make us laugh.
Postscript
Readers who are unfamiliar with our blog posts may wonder why we avoid the concept of emotional intelligence. We’ve written about this elsewhere and we’d invite you to consider our thoughts on it. In short, it’s far more useful to see the six basic intelligences as determiners of whether we become emotionally, personally, socially, instinctually, physically and spiritually INTELLIGENT. If we develop, engage and use those intelligences simultaneously we are able to contain and restrain our latent destructive emotions. As all good teachers say, think before you act. Sounds easy? Tell that to a three year old. Tell that to a rioter smashing down doors, breaking windows, wearing a nazi teeshirt, touting the Confederate war flag, terrifying elected members of civic forums, breaking into offices and stealing papers & artefacts, erecting gallows, demanding the execution of the vice president and the overthrow of an election that was said to be the most secure on record whilst being won by a margin of 7 million votes. Tell that to the President whose ego, vanity and lust for power incited and fuelled their insurrection.
We’d also invite you to read our three posts on Fully Evolved Humans.
https://3diassociates.wordpress.com/2012/12/14/descriptions-of-fully-evolved-humans-part-one/
https://3diassociates.wordpress.com/2012/12/15/descriptions-of-fully-evolved-humans-part-two/
https://3diassociates.wordpress.com/2012/12/16/descriptions-of-fully-evolved-humans-part-three/
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Also from our archive:
More on Multiple Intelligences:
Managing our emotions intelligently
https://3diassociates.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/stirring-the-emotions/
Intelligences portrayed in the film “Good Will Hunting”
https://3diassociates.wordpress.com/2012/10/18/good-will-hunting/
Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural Education:
Educating about values
https://3diassociates.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/british-values-and-smsc-the-department-for-education-getting-it-wrong/
Universal Values
https://3diassociates.wordpress.com/2014/11/03/british-values-family-values-human-values-whats-the-difference/
Character Education
https://3diassociates.wordpress.com/2015/05/05/the-values-and-virtues-of-character-education/
Psychopathy:
Educating a Psychopath
https://3diassociates.wordpress.com/2012/09/04/the-education-of-psychopaths/
