US Election Special: An Emotional Response to Donald Trump

Some days, without fully understanding why, we can wake up feeling sad. No amount of self-help books can alleviate the sensation that there is something terribly wrong with the world. Perhaps the mind focuses on the injustices endemic in human systems. Or perhaps a glance at the suffering in the animal world is enough to provoke the darkest of emotions. One doesn’t need to wander through the tortured labyrinths of Kafka to intuit the imperfect webs of power that keep the world in spin. Watching the US elections should be sufficient.

There is ample expression of “the universal sorrow of life” in world culture. In her beautiful book, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, noble laureate Olga Tokarczuk writes that sorrow is the quintessence of life, the fifth element of consciousness. In Tarkovsky’s masterful film portrait of Andrei Rublev, Theophanes the Greek, quoting Ecclesiastes 1:18, says “For with much wisdom comes much sorrow, and as knowledge grows, grief increases.” In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas gazes at a mural found in a Carthaginian temple dedicated to Juno that depicts battles of the Trojan War and the deaths of his comrades. Aeneas is moved to tears and speaks of “lacrimae rerum” or the “tears of which the world is made.” The traditional Christian sensibility holds that the mortal world is “a vale of tears”.

In each of these expressions, there is a sense of sorrow providing a key to a higher plane of knowledge. The traditional Tibetan Buddhist perspective is to embrace suffering as an “opportunity” to cleanse the mind. The seas of transient worlds soften the sharpest pebbles with time. Mortality humbles the ego. Sorrow is the first step towards empathy:

O, I have suffered,
With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel,
Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her,
Dash'd all to pieces. O, the cry did knock
Against my very heart.

In William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Miranda speaks these words as she watches a storm ravage a ship at sea.

The US elections poses a different kind of tragic spectacle. A belligerent billionaire, inflated by stories of his own greatness, who consciously stokes racial hatred to win votes, is defending the most powerful seat in the world. In the last four years, the consensus of his consciousness has helped discredit the Paris Agreement (one of the most vital international agreements of our age) and legitimise nativist nationalism (a false response to real underlying socioeconomic woes). One wonders how the depressing gestures of Donald Trump’s mercurial put-downs and chauvism can provide “a key to a higher plane of knowledge”.

When Aristotle formulated his ideas of “catharsis”, his gaze was limited to the purifying power of Greek Tragedy, with its emotive displays of often well-meaning heroes (Oedipus, for example), falling into the traps of their own limited awareness and fates. The sadness we feel uplifts and energises, restoring the proper emotion to the proper place. Unfortunately, the absurdist sensibilities, a la Pinter or Beckett, have a much more complicated relation with “consolation”. Existence, Trump reminds us, can be dark and meaningless indeed. When, as private citizens, there is nothing we can do except put our votes in a box, and hope for the best, perhaps the only correct emotional response belongs to the stoics: endurance.