What Simone Weil Said about Donald Trump & His Administration
Simone Weil spent a great deal of her life wondering why human beings were attracted to the use of force in everything that they do, even when this use of force obviously—to her, at least—destroyed their happiness. And the word “force” here refers not only to physical force, which she found on full display in Western “classics” like The Iliad, but also to emotional and psychological force which can lead to derangement and mental illness. Here she is in First and Last Notebooks (1970) writing on one of the vital human qualities that force destroys—temperance.
The idea of measure has been lost in every sphere (e.g. record-breaking in athletics). Everything is corrupted by it. Including private life, because temperance has become unthinkable. Outside the sphere of external observances (bourgeois formality), the whole moral trend of the post-war years (and even before) has been an apology for intemperance (surrealism) and therefore, ultimately for madness. . . .
“An apology for intemperance . . . and therefore ultimately for madness. . . .” Are we not seeing these apologies or defenses of intemperance and madness streaming hourly from the White House? Isn’t our President’s personality grounded essentially in intemperance? Of course it is, and we all know this. Intemperance has simply been normalized at the national level by the White House.
Our question, then, and the big question for the media, is this: Do we respond to Trump’s intemperance with our own intemperance?
My answer is simple enough: on a personal level (which includes the spiritual, the psychological, the emotional), temperance, not intemperance, is the balance I’ll always try to find.
But on the political level (which includes the rhetorical, the social, the public), temperance as the informing energy of my response to what is happening in the White House moves dangerously close to capitulation.
In short, force often requires force as the necessary response, although we can define that responding “force” in many ways. So, nowadays, I’m looking for creative and powerful definitions of force that will fit the struggle currently confronting this country while preserving at the same time the temperance, the strength of spirit, that will allow me to get through this struggle with my temperate spirit intact.
That’s a lot to ask of myself, I realize, but asking a lot of myself is the beginning of a forceful response to our President and his destructive administration.
