Why Stopping Trump Isn't Enough

This essay was originally published in The Huffington Post on September 26, 2016


 I am writing this to say that -- while the election of Donald Trump would be a disaster for America and the world -- preventing his election is NOT enough.

Yes, America's political system is on fire right now. The truth is going up in smoke. While all politicians have shaded the truth from time to time, just about the only time Donald Trump tells the truth is when he says "My name is Donald Trump." And even then, there's the whole Drumpf-thing.

Legendary journalist Carl Bernstein made this "nonexistent truth" point extraordinarily clear, when he said on Sept 18th on CNN that Trump was getting away with a COVERUP of who he really is... and that the media must stop letting him do this! (Can you spell TrumpGate?)

 

But there's a larger point I want to make. Stopping Trump will put out the fire that a President Trump would consist of. We CANNOT have a President of the United States who is a pathological liar! But there is a much larger, anti-truth fire burning across the American socio-political landscape... one that's been burning for decades, if you believe the research Al Gore did (and I do) when he wrote The Assault On Reason in 2007.

Whether Trump becomes president or not, we run the risk of this larger, anti-truth fire destroying the social fabric of our country. They say that a problem well understood is a problem well on the way to being solved. Well, here's an essay I wrote in 2010, in which I detailed the problem. I called this anti-truth challenge a virus back then, and urged President Obama to be the nation's "truth doctor". Maybe that will happen after he leaves office. Would certainly be a worthwhile thing for a former-president (and Star Trek fan, by the way) to do... because he could not just help people learn the truth about the Assault on Reason... he could help people learn the truth about How Much Better Society Can Actually Be. That's where his love of Star Trek comes into play.

You see, while there is an "assault on reason" in which people like Trump try to convince us that "up is down" (global climate change was made up by the Chinese) and "good is evil" (America's history of welcoming immigrants must stop); there is also a "coverup" (whether intended or accidental) of the truth about how much better our world could be if we fully implemented the improvements possible in society that have been figured out by the world's leading sustainable science experts (such as McDonough - Braungart and Amory Lovins) and the world's leading win-win based conflict resolution and innovation / collaboration experts (such as the Harvard Project on Negotiation and W. Edwards Deming).

What does this have to do with Star Trek? Well -- if you combine the work of McDonough, Braungart, Lovins, Deming and an number of others (especially including Buckminster Fuller, whose pathbreaking work with Gerard Piel, the Founder of Scientific American, pretty much kicked off the sustainable development movement in the 1960s before the term "sustainable development" even existed) -- you get the beginnings of a pretty clear and detailed road map to WORLD PEACE....

... the kind of world peace Star Trek shows us we can have in the future once we all learn to be excited about diversity instead of afraid of it... and once we figure out that it's possible to feed, clothe, house, and educate everyone on Earth (eliminating scarcity, which is the root cause of war).

Here's Buckminster Fuller talking about this option in a video that also shows astronaut Buzz Aldrin playing The World Game, which Bucky developed to help people learn to solve problems based on the assumption of abundance rather than scarcity...

 

This is why I say stopping Trump isn't enough. We've got to get the truth out about (a) the larger anti-truth fire that's been burning a long time and (b) the HUGE TRUTH about how much better our world can be thanks to advances in the (hard) sustainability sciences and the (soft) conflict resolution sciences.

What a wonderful world it could be! And once enough people know just how wonderful.... that critical mass of humanity will demand they be given that world by their leaders!

We have the ability to create a world in which everyone can (as Mr. Spock would say) Live Long And Prosper. Let's put out the fires that are burning. And then lets build a new world!