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Why are the presidential candidates employing such negative
tactics and back biting and acting in such un-presidential ways? Donald Trump
has been singled out, but similar accusations have been made against Ted Cruz
and on the Democratic side both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton (one of the
most recent being the trading of insults about qualifications,"Bernie Sanders: Hillary Clinton is not 'qualified' to be president,"CNN, 4/7/16). The complaint amongst those who
expect something more out of frontrunners in an election is that the candidates
are not talking about the issues. But actually the answer to the phenomenon of
shining a negative spotlight on an opponent might be found in Austrian born
economist Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of “creative destruction,” as described in his classic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Schumpeter
believed that capitalism required “the perennial gale of Creative Destruction.”
In order to build you have to get rid of the dead wood. Planned obsolescence is, in essence, a form
of institutionalized "creative destruction" in which a manufacturer knowingly
creates something with a relatively short half-life. So if you're wondering
why the candidates are belaboring the negative traits of their opponents,
instead of concentrating on proposals for a new order, which will set things
right, the answer may lie in the idea that progress can’t occur until the slate
is wiped clean. When critics of Bernie Sanders say he has no real plan about
what to do about the problems of the Middle East, the answer might be that new
policies will only be implemented when the old ones are done away with and
foreign policy becomes a tabula rasa.
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| Tomas de Torquemada |
Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” was the embodiment of the
anti-Christ. Tomas de
Torquemada was the model and he himself would have ultimately been
sentenced to the tortures that Dante envisioned in his infamous ninth circle of
hell, where Satan is trapped in ice. But everyone has a Grand Inquisitor lurking inside them, in the form of a negative doppleganger or alter ego, the
self-immolating spirit that casts doubt on every assertion of the life force.
You may recognize it in the cynicism about motives. You like someone for being
kind and responsive, but immediately begin to look at the compassion they’ve
demonstrated as a kind of barter. You think about extending your hand to
another suffering soul, but then shrink from it fearing that you’re only trying
to inflate your own ego or exonerate yourself from guilt. Every step forward in
time becomes a potential mistake and every act that’s transpired is filled with
regret. The negative might be looked at as a necessary part of the dialectic of
existence. Joseph Schumpeter termed one of the dynamics of capitalism, “creative destruction." Looked at on a micro or macro, on an ontogenic, or
phylogenic level destruction has its place. It doesn’t have to be the kind of
genocide that Pol Pot inflicted on the Cambodian people, but the negative can sometimes be the only way to countermand
entrenched, anachronistic and maladaptive world views. The question is, how does one distinguish between spring cleaning and murder?
The striving to live, what George Bernard Shaw called “the life force,” is not as obvious a drive as it might sound. It's the most
elemental urge of the species, accounting for procreation and host of other
processes including destruction and dissolution. The Austrian economist, Joseph Schumpeter, for example, invented the term creative destruction in talking about one of the forces at work in a capitalist economy. But the inertial force of existence itself may be a mysterious
as death. You see it most clearly in those for whom there is no seeming hope,
those who have lost everything and still want to continue on through a barren
landscape which is often devoid of familiar faces. It’s easy to see why a young
person with all of life before him or her wants to live and all the more
disturbing when a youthful person succumbs to an illness or takes their own life. However, you really see the
life force at work amongst those elderly people for whom work and love, two
elements of life which Freud identified as central, no longer hold sway. Most people are not about to start a new career at the age of
90, though in a New Yorker piece
about his aging process Roger Angell did talk about a nonagenarian pursuit of
love and companionship and even his use of on line dating sites. A Rage to Live was the title of a 60’s movie about a nymphomaniac and then there was the famous biography and movie about Van Gogh,
Lust for Life. Yet no one has ever
accounted for what makes people want to hold on to life, after all hope for any
palpable rewards has passed. It’s like the notion of art for art’s sake. In
those people who want to live, with no strings attached, for as long as they
can, you see the life force in its purest form.
