A political
spectacle is based on making Belief through make believe (inspired by Richard
Schechner, “Make Believe and Make Belief”). There is a clear guideline given to that in The
Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli. “How a prince must act to win honour”
is the title of chapter 21, in which Machiavelli writes: “(…) a
prince must endavour to win the reputation of being a great man of outstanding
ability.” The crucially concluding question that Charles M. Blow poses
in his New York Times article Trumpism exolts its folk hero is the
following: “How does one fight a fiction, a fantasy?“. This
question overwhelms me. I cannot think of possible answers. Fiction mixed with the
important tool of the sovereign -unpredictability-, our fighting seems to become
futile. Machiavelli, p.81: “I hold strongly to this: that it is better to be impetuous than
circumspect; because fortune is a woman and if she is to be submissive it is
necessary to beat and coerce her.“ Elizabeth Kolbert, the New Yorker-
“Why Facts Don’t Change Our
Minds”, explains what became known as confirmation bias: “(…) the
tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and
reject information that contradicts them”
and includes Jack Gorman and Sara Gorman: “(…)cite research
suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when
processing information that supports their beliefs.” We constantly
create fantasies. We are making ourselves believe and are made to Belief. A fantasy. How can WE fight the arrival
point of creation of fictions? (if “we can
hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others’ begins”? Sloman and Fernbach in Elizabeth Kolbert, the New Yorker-
“Why Facts Don’t Change Our
Minds”)