Writer Hua Bin's take on the issue of American culture's arguable stupidity

04 March 2025

The gist of this inquiry

Is President Trump playing 5D geopolitical chess, as his hopeful apologists claim?

Probably not

President Trump is, debatably, not disciplined enough to play even 2D chess at a notably high level of skill.

This remains so, even after his admirably determined survival against the Democratic Party's (maybe literal) guns.

On the topic of the President's international doings . . .

. . . Oliver Hua (known as 'Hua Bin') said this:

Trump posted a 33-second AI video on his Truth Social of a future what he termed Trump Gaza, showing how Gaza will be turned into a Dubai-like metropolis with him and Israeli Netanyahu sunbathing on the beach sipping cocktails, a grinning Elon Musk devouring hummus, a golden Trump statue, etc.

Of course, the blissful paradise will arrive after the Jews cleanse Gaza of Palestinians with US help.

This is pure moral evil displayed for all to see.

People say Trump is bat-shit crazy so don’t take him seriously.

People say we live in an Orwellian world where “war is peace” and “the IDF is the most moral army in the world” and in that world, Trump’s behavior is normal.

People say Trump has long been bought off by Jewish money and he is just acting out on behalf of his masters. People say Trump is so stupid that he does not even know what he is doing is stupid.

While all those are true, they cannot explain how such sheer evil and stupidity is tolerated.

We all know most Americans are decent people who would never do anything so plainly wrong like what Trump did. But why was there not an angry uproar?

Why the passivity and indifference? Don’t people think there will be blowback from normalizing the evil and the deranged?

Is there no fear of God anymore?

I think Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” theory can explain what is in play here.

When people witness harassment or bullying but choose not to intervene, we are in a situation of banality of evil.

Evil, according to Arendt, becomes banal when it acquires an unthinking and systemic character.

Evil becomes banal when people build distance from it, justify it and even participate in it. There are no moral conundrums or revulsions. Evil does not even look like evil, it becomes faceless.

When such apathy and indifference is institutionalized, I call the society the Stupidity society, where ordinary people develop a disregard of moral responsibility and passively accept the most deranged rhetoric and behavior and unjust ideologies.

Hmm

I find it challenging to coherently argue against Hua Bin's pessimistic perspective.

It certainly seems as if American and European culture will accept all manner of Satanic disposition as being culturally normal.

Consider the West's stout material (and materiel) support for the genocide of Palestinians. Or the US-Euro block's instigation of the deaths at least 1 million Ukrainians in an insane effort to 'bleed' Russia for no rationally defensible strategic reasons.

Both are inarguably 'evil' actions.

Both being drawn-out doings that cannot claim to have happened so abruptly, that no one had a chance to consider and reflect upon their unworthy merits.

We might tentatively conclude that . . .

The core of the West is putridly repulsive, irretrievably rotten, and has become a morass of unexamined Satanic boilings.

It is the lazily unexamined part of this process that Hua Bin objects to.

The moral? — Even purportedly 5D geopolitical chess cannot escape . . .

. . . the societal requirement that visibly stout standards of ethical decency be maintained.

When decency is not the displayed standard for assertedly democratic cultural foundations, what takes its place?

This conundrum represents the ultimate slippery slope.

American culture's now obvious decline no longer bothers to recognize the velocity at which this slick-slide has increased. We have largely abandoned former political eras' mandatory displays of cleverly camouflaging hypocrisy.

Thus today, we are careening down a metaphorical slope to hell. Without even bothering to persuasively pretend that we remain righteously inclined.

We have, apparently unknowingly, become the Devil. Certainly, the President's Trump-Gaza video could be interpreted in such a fashion.

Will President Trump and the United States morph from devil to butterfly, at some point in this process?

Can something good emerge from moral putrescence, without outside intervention?

Historically, the answer has been 'no'.

The Trump administration would benefit us all, by better finessing its optics. That would require a level of insightful intelligence that I suspect it may not possess.

And so, we are left with a question that asks whether a wildly swinging wrecking ball, by itself, is enough to turn the American situation and its metaphorically hell-bound slide, around.

Does chaos eventually become an antidote to chaos?

PeteFree.com

Writer Hua Bin's take on the issue of American culture's arguable stupidity