Trump Ego And His Rubes VS Intellect And Sound Judgment

I see this political contest as having been a struggle between ego and intellect, with ego favoring despotism and intellect favoring democracy. Let me explain.

In my mind it is the ratio between ego and intellect that mostly determines whether or not a person is moderately liberal or moderately conservative or just plain moderate, with the political extremes of far right and left being ruled in large measure by primitive ego.

Ego is the base foundation of the mind. Its primary mandate is to insist on the survival of self and one’s genetic inheritance and the group (tribalism), and thus it directs one to seek advantage at every opportunity — the me, me, me impulse of a child. Folks deep into ego determination are said to be narrow-minded.

As I see it the mind is divided into three parts — the basic ego foundation, Intellect and cognition. Let’s get the cognition part out of the way here. Cognition (IQ) is the brains CPU. The degree of cognition determines how quickly one can ingest, recall and calculate facts. It does not necessarily determine how rationally one connects the dots of those calculations. That remains up to the mix of ego and intellect.

For instance Ted Cruz is a world class debater because he has instant recall of a mountain of facts and thus can quickly overwhelm his opponents in a most impress way, even though in hindsight review what he says might amount to nothing more than gibberish.

This brings us to the heart of democratic thinking — intellect. Intellect is the ability to see the big picture beyond one’s own self-interest, to rise above mere tribalism and fear of the “other.” Liberals, except for the most fanatical of liberals, are strong in this component of the mind.

Precisely how intellect becomes enhanced is a little murky. It can be purely innate with some. It can come from the social conditioning in which one grew up. Or it can come from a sophisticated level of education one might happen to be exposed to. Or more likely it is some combination of all mentioned. Demographics clearly indicate that college educated folks favor Hillary over Trump, being as the Donald, like all demagogues and would be dictators, panders to those dominated by primitive ego.

So why does a playboy misogynist like Trump appeal to evangelical Christians. It is all about the survival mandate of the base ego. Fact is that the pure ego survival instinct is so strong that it convinces us (at least at the pure ego level) that we are just too darn important to forever disappear upon our physical demise. It is therefore out of the survival, no matter what, mandate of ego that springs humankind’s religious impulse.

Moreover, the truth is that the electorate doesn’t care if one is the Devil as long as it is convinced that he is their Devil. Therefore all Trump need do is to proclaim his desire to appoint conservative judges to reverse the Supreme Court ruling on abortion, and because both political and religious fundamentalist are narrow-minded egotist at heart, being only mildly influenced by intellect, he becomes their (evangelicals) guy.