Friday, November 15, 2024

Does Trump have a long view?

In spite of his first presidency and outré pronouncements, President-elect Trump is an unknown, at least regarding his views on the current radical acceleration of human physical and mental evolution, in which after a period of 300,000 years where we did not change much, we are undergoing unbelievably rapid change right now, stimulated by revolutions in AI and biology. In a few decades, the post-World War II generations alive today will register as primitive humanity, and yet Trump, along with Harris and all the political leaders of the world, says not a word about the imminent shift.

At the current overwhelming pace of societal change, 4 years is a long time, so Trump is positioned to be an important influence on upcoming human evolution. Many people wonder how such a man attained this position. The answer is that Trump is a strategic thinker. The buffoonish caricature portrayed on Saturday Night Live is based on a persona that Trump uses strategically, and clearly the strategy has been accurate. We can debate Trump’s morality, but let's drop the idea that he's dumb.

You might argue that though Trump is politically shrewd, he does not care about future Earth and humanity; he does not have a long view.

We can only guess, but however Trump does or doesn’t evolve in his second term, our proclaimed democracy needs an update, a new representative force in addition to political parties and candidates who are fixated only on the next election. Perhaps we could take an idea from Isaac Asimov and create a foundation (from the novel of the same name) or a trust, made up of scholars, experts, and, crucially, retired English teachers, whose mission would be to consider future decades, centuries, perhaps millennia. That could be a welcome improvement after the exhausting, silly and wasteful national election campaign we just endured.

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