Why Donald Trump has the mind of a cat |
Trying to understand Donald Trump has become a high-stakes intellectual sport. Is he an evil genius? Or a grossly insecure man-child? Is he a neo-fascist? Or a useful idiot for Big Tech? Maybe he’s a bit of all of the above.
I have my own theory: Donald Trump is 95 per cent cat.
I reached this conclusion after reading John Gray’s Feline Philosophy: Cats and The Meaning of Life – a welcome Christmas stocking filler over the festive period. Ostensibly exploring the differences between cats and humans, the book centres on the work of Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century Enlightenment thinker.
Spinoza is regarded as a founder of modern atheism. He rejected the Judaism of his birth and the Christian theology of his day to construct a naturalistic understanding of human beings and our place in the universe. Humans are animals, God is nature: These two propositions sum up his philosophy, which was admired by great minds from Albert Einstein to Jeeves from the PG Wodehouse novels.
What has this got to do with Trump? Well, Spinoza tells us that humans have animal instincts because we can’t be divorced from nature. Chief among these instincts is what he called conatus – a “striving” or “effort” within all living things to enhance or preserve their activity in the world. Humans are inherently trying “to maintain and extend their........