[FRIAM] Hope or Despair

[Jochen Fromm]

Many scientists and journalists feel desperate now that Mr. T-Rump will rule the world, especially climate scientists like Eric Holthaushttps://twitter.com/EricHolthaus/status/817503888500633600
What are we going to do, hope or despair, resist or surrender? I'm not sure if we are heading towards climate hell, criminal abyss or nuclear apocalypse, or if America is just turning into Trumpistan...https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/opinion/america-becomes-a-stan.amp.html
Do you remember this odd meeting where Trump met the bosses of the big IT-companies? None of them looked happy, but they all came. It felt like Sauron is going to meet the Ring-wraiths. Each of the Ringwraiths already owns a ring of power. Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple have enormous power, some say a single one of them is worth more than all corporations at the Russian stockmarkets together. In Tolkien's epic story Sauron is beaten by the Hobbit Frodo who destroys the ring of power in the mountain of doom. Frodo seems to stand for the ordinary Joe, i.e. the ordinary people, who eventually give up the desire for power. Now if everyone would give up using Twitter and Facebook, Mr. T-Rump who lose his social media power there immediately, he would become bored of politics and quit. Too good to be true.
Likewise if the ordinary Joe would give up his desire to become great, rich and famous, then Trump wouldn't have been elected in the first place. Isn't it remarkable how Tolkien has observed that totalitarian dictatorships rest on the shoulders of the ordinary people? In Russia it is similar, the dictatorship here rests on the few shoulders of the small people, who depend on the welfare state that feeds them and tells them lies.
-Jochen


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