Why Hide It?
Honey badger don't give a f*ck
What is the purpose of false modesty?
Mark Twain once said, “Man is the only animal that blushes—or has the need to.”
Behaviors resembling human sociality can be found in more than a few other species. We can identify pair-bonding, play, collective problem-solving, and empathy in other animals, but the sign systems humans effortlessly share amongst themselves are not as apparent.
Human language is on a different order than any other species’ mode of symbolic communication. While apes and dogs have shown they can come to interpret the meanings humans assign symbols—they can understand sounds or shapes representing items or behaviors, but they are incapable of assignation. There is no other species where virtually all members have an innate capacity to assign representations and what they represent.
While it’s common understanding that whales and dolphins have a language, I have not heard of researchers facing the difficulties of translating what we would expect to be a variety of sign systems, differing by cultural group over geography, as we find with humans. Why would the dolphins of Long Island Sound in the North Atlantic ever be expected to speak the same language as dolphins off Patagonia in the South Atlantic?
We would be surprised if the humans living on either shore did.
Sea mammals’ languages may be more like bird calls—communicative and individualized, but instinctive and without significant variation. Sounds with set significance, instead of fluidity and improvisation.
In academic circles, this becomes a political concern, as how we come to conceptualize language and culture are expressed in praxes. What is culture? How much (or what) of it in process is the process, or in another way of putting it, how much is being and how much is becoming?
To what extent do we rely on concepts of culture as a repository of possible behaviors and meanings, and when doing so, to what extent do we miss culture as a generative force or milieu? For those who think of culture as nothing but a repository, it makes sense to declare “official language” and it becomes possible to imagine the “final dictionary.” When it is time for a wedding, they open the vault and select all the required pieces—bride (dressed in a gown), groom (in formal menswear), officiant (religious preferred), witness (with a significant personal relationship to one or both in the wedding party), parents and family in attendance, an aisle down the middle with guests segregated by primary relationships to the bride or groom, et cetera.
These are the folks who are most upset when others utilize culture as a generative milieu and were among the first to plan a wedding with two men as participants—or two women. Freaks them the fuck out. Of course, the appeal to normalcy was made by the participants, where they cited a marriage license as a state-issued, legal contract that thus could not be withheld based on the sex of the participants. What seems culturally out-of-bounds was itself contextualized as a reinforcement of the state and contractual coupling.
With the second Trump Administration we are watching them operate within this sphere. While the efforts to dismantle state social support systems and programs have been undertaken in a blitzkrieg, under a rubric of “efficiency.” As I have noted, efficiency requires a declared goal and a method before any process can be tested. Why were these social supports created? What was the purpose? How are they going about achieving their why?
If greater efficiency was a goal, there would have had to have been a period of assessment, prior to actions being taken (it is inefficient to act without thinking). There was not. Clearly, “efficiency” is a cover.
Why do they bother?
Same thing with economic policy—why expend the energy to push the lie that anyone other than consumers pay the tariffs? Because people won’t like that? So what?
And the demolition of U.S. military hegemony—why play like Pete Hegseth was not selected as Secretary of Defense because of his lack of ability and his active addiction? Trump has spoken often of his older brother, Fred, the former TWA pilot who drank himself to death; citing Fred as the reason he does not drink alcohol. Why then handpick a guy who made the most alcoholic promise, ever—to quit drinking if he was named Secretary of Defense, for as long as he had the job?
Aside from his normal aversion to reading, why did Trump continue to claim he “never read Project 2025,” even after having won the election?
Perhaps it’s a holdover, a habit from manipulating slave morality his entire life, claiming moral standing via having been a victim to cover instigating and perpetrating. Always accuse your opponent of what it is you are doing, because it makes you morally superior and allows for the “whataboutism” that is MAGA’s stock-in-trade. The violation committed may be wrong, but the only reason for having done it is because it was being done to him, and that makes it fair, to simple minds.
It’s cowardice, ultimately. That is why. Despite repeated public assertions of his own Master (“Alpha male”) status, Trump’s language and command of culture is not that of a Nietzschean Übermensch. He is constantly seeking approval, or trying to sneak around because he does not want to be caught. He subscribes to slave morality more than he is capable of manipulating it, thus he is susceptible to slave revolt.
Machiavelli averred that it is superior for a ruler to be feared than to be loved, because the people can lose their love for a leader. It’s a bigger step to take, but history also shows the people can lose their fear, too.
#BankruptElon