Up until about 7-8 years ago I was eternal optimist. There were simple things I still believed in and could still hold in tension the flaws and blunders of life and people. That was almost squeezed out of me completely. And still, here we are in another election cycle that will probably prove to be more insane than the previous two.

The solution, for David Brooks, is one I will choose to take: don’t let this infect my brain.

I don’t want to have the optimist in me snuffed out completely because I might then be able to anticipate every move someone like Donald Trump may take… and I have to go to some very dark places to anticipate things like that.

Brooks explains:

I have consistently underestimated his depravity. I was shocked at how thuggishly Trump behaved in that first debate with Joe Biden in 2020. As the Jan. 6 committee hearings progressed, I was stunned to find out just how aggressively Trump had worked to overthrow the election. And then, just last week, in reading his federal indictment, I was once again taken aback to learn how flagrantly he had breached national security.

And yet I can’t quite feel ashamed of my perpetual naïveté toward Donald Trump. I don’t want to be the kind of person who can easily enter the head of an amoral narcissist.

Brooks lays out his personal worldview that is very close to mine:

I cling to a worldview that is easy to ridicule. I hold the belief that most people, while flawed, seek to be good. I hold the belief that our institutions, while fraying, are basically legitimate and deserve our respect. I hold the belief that character matters, and that good people ultimately prosper and unethical people are ultimately undone.

I also know the reality of the tyrant and narcissist that will work to unravel every part of society just to have their own way. It is personified in someone like Donald Trump, but the past several election cycles have proven there is far more than one man willing to tear down structure and morality to serve their own good.

And we need to hear the warning (even if we don’t heed it, which we’ve proven to be able to do so far in the past 7-8 years):

As Aristotle observed all those many years ago, tyranny is all about arbitrariness. When a tyrant has power, there is no rule of law, there is no governing order. There is only the whim of the tyrant. There is only his inordinate desire to have more than his fair share of everything.

Standards and categories that have held us together as a society get tossed around and ultimately tossed out.

The categories we use to evaluate the world lose their meaning — cruelty and kindness, integrity and corruption, honesty and dishonesty, generosity and selfishness. High-minded values begin to seem credulous and absurd, irrelevant to the situation at hand. Trump’s mere presence spreads his counter-gospel: People are basically selfish; raw power runs the world. All that matters is winning and losing. Under his influence, subtly and insidiously, people develop more nihilistic mind-sets.

I HAVE to share this column from David Brooks. We need to understand the ultimate results of our choices. We need to have record of these warnings so that in another few generations someone will be sifting through the ash heap of what had once been our society and find at least SOME part of us who saw what could happen and stated it plainly.

Over the coming months, we face not merely a political contest, but a battle between those of us who believe in ideals, even though it can make us seem naïve at times, and those who argue that life is a remorseless struggle for selfish gain. Their victory would be a step toward cultural barbarism.

I cannot bow to selfish gain to the detriment of brothers and sisters in my world around me. I will continue to believe in ideals and strive for what makes us ALL better.