Trump and the Karmic Dilemma

by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ October 2, 2020

Amid our death spiral battered by endless lies, conspiracies, and absurdities, we are facing Donald J. Trump and his associates infected with COVID-19. Or maybe not. Perhaps this is a desperate scheme to escape another disastrous debate or an idea to claim a divine recovery and gain power as the chosen one?

The complete loss of credibility of anyone involved, in any way, with the Trump regime, including any medical professionals, means we no nothing. But Ockham’s Razor rules. Trump’s complete failure to even admit the pandemic, followed by endless denials of the need for any countermeasures, more than explains what has happened. The accelerating list of those infected by Trump makes this a real case of COVID-19 in all its dangerous forms.

We have no idea of his condition, but any positive statements, unless verified by multiple fully independent authorities, is probably a lie. But that is only a statistical projection. It is also not the problem facing us. He and many of his associates are now in the hands of a novel coronavirus.

The problem is how to respond to this situation. In America, we have only two possible positions, either wishing him and all infected around him well with a fast recovery or making it clear the stupid shit got what he deserved. A quick look at Twitter shows endless iterations of these positions, but both seem wrong and totally inadequate to the situation.

This discomfort is another indication of the collapse of the old Western-based global paradigm set. Culturally we are torn between science and an absence of spiritual morality that we need in this horrendous situation epitomized by Trump.

The failure of Western civilization to evolve a scientific-based spiritual morality is leaving us both desperate and exhausted. At this late stage of the modern West’s final empire, we know the cause of diseases and biological problems and can cure many of those, but chose to ignore spiritual evolution. All that remains is distorted and tattered folk versions of classical Western religion.

In the Western paradigm, biological problems have no cause other than random genetic mutation or accidental exposure to constantly evolving viruses and germs. We do not control those things other than following scientific rules to prevent them and seeking prompt treatment. The scientific age’s great compromise was to limit science to strict physical reality by accepting limited concepts of causation and abandoning any effort to understand the moral relationships of actions and consequences.

The 17th-century assumption was that this compromise would allow science to take over the physical world. Simultaneously, the traditional Abrahamic religions could have the rest (metaphysical world) until they died a natural death. The previous century’s Wars of the Reformation, having ended in exhaustion, seemed to confirm the value of avoiding unnecessary conflict while letting religion end itself.

For most of Europe, this proved to be a slow but accurate expectation. Unfortunately, populations in different development stages evolved the old Christian religion into a justification for willful ignorance to maintain racism and bigotry. The abandonment of formal and scientific logic in the maintenance of spiritual morality allowed folk religions to destroy the value of spiritual ethics. All reality became physical, and a different reality was spiritual in competition.

The unbridgeable gap between empirically logical science and antiquated religions based on ignorance and myth that could maintain believers only by destroying their scientific knowledge is a significant disease vector in the death of the American ‘modern’ age.

Trump and his entire retinue of increasingly insane followers are both a cause and a result of this. The Trump Plague has fallen on Trump, and we have no way to articulate it as a result of his actions. The mythic form of traditional Western religion requires a supernatural creature judging and punishing immoral acts while human society can only hold people accountable for clearly articulated legal failures. Because spiritual morality exists only in the discredited paradigm abandoned five hundred years ago, there is nowhere to go.

While institutional structures in collapsing culture are rigid and inflexible, human society develops around the wreckage. We have had a hundred years of this in America tied to new spiritual concepts imported, innovated, or merged to fill the growing gaps of a radical materialist and physical greed-based culture.

We live now in a planetary culture with karmic rules. Although most do not understand this and related concepts’ full philosophical and spiritual sophistication, everyone is familiar with karma. Karma is the universe’s delivery of a pie to your face.

Karma means action in the ancient language of northwest India. For most human civilizations, this has been the center of intense spiritual and philosophical debate for some five thousand years. Karma is both an action and the consequences of that action. It is scientific with no mythic deities in Western terms, but it assumes the morality of activities and the actor’s moral intent.

Karma is the burden that you carry through life (lives, as an endless cycle of rebirths, is assumed but not essential) based on what you choose to do and why you chose to do that. The judgment of an action is what effect it has on the wellbeing of all around you. In Buddhist traditions, now the most dominant source of new spirituality distinct from the traditional religious forms; you carry the responsibility and will payment will come in misery in this or your next life.

This payment is not some divine judgment but the result of ignorance of this universe’s rules and its unity. Very much as ignorance of Newton’s third law of action and reaction delivers its judgment when you step on a rake instead of picking it up and get smacked in the head. Anyone would then pick you up and wipe off the cut on your forehead and tell you something about physics.

The first karmic dilemma was the movement from early Buddhism that held each individual responsible for their stupidity and a later way that allowed others who had already learned enough to have lots of positive karma to take over some of your load. Even later, this became something inherent in the universe itself that sought to assist all components in balancing and reducing suffering among all sentient beings.

Donald Trump and everyone around him is seriously out of balance and increasing suffering. The irony is that in this view of the universe, Trump’s intent to get everything for himself tied to his actions causing the deaths of tens of thousands of people triggered a massive and early smack in the head.

So it is ok to both wish for the removal of suffering, may the headache you got from the rake end soon, and state that he and all the others around him should look very carefully at what they did to get into this situation. Many people can assist in their education if they wish to learn, but they need to ask because the natural law that caused the rake to smack them in the head is not going away.