Briefly

I’m having dinner Thursday night at a restaurant where I haven’t been in awhile and I’m sitting at the same table where I had my first date with a woman about six or seven years ago. (I might be a bit off on the time frame.) I’ve never told this story publicly, but I might as well. This was a woman I met online and everything seemed great. We arranged to meet here and things went well enough that she invited me to her house, which was nearby. I’m going to skip the details, but the key fact is that she finally told me — hours later, at her house — that she is married and her husband was out of town. She wanted to keep seeing me when he wasn’t around, but I left her house and never spoke to her again. It was a very odd experience.

The man in the suit here is a malignant narcissist. When I first saw this picture of Donald Trump giving a “thumbs up” sign as he posed with a baby who survived the murderous monster in El Paso a couple of weeks ago, I assumed that even his supporters would be horrified. To anyone who understands normal human reactions, it is a shocking demonstration of a man who believes the world revolves around him, but I’ve been surprised to see some people say his reaction was perfectly normal. The truth is that it’s the pose of a man without empathy — someone who is so accustomed to trying to promote his own empty false self that he doesn’t even know how to fake the proper response to such a horrific event. An emotionally healthy person would focus on the child at such a moment, but Trump looks as though he’s at a campaign event with the child of a happy donor. This has nothing to do with ideology or party. The man is mentally ill.

I’m slowly accepting the fact that people who want some form of socialism or controlled economy genuinely don’t understand that new goods and services are created by the voluntary interactions of free people. They seem to view the world through the lens of a static supply of semi-abstract “resources” which can be distributed in some theoretically “fair” way. But they apparently don’t understand that resources are almost useless unless paired with ideas, ingenuity and voluntary cooperation. The things which make life easier to live (in the physical sense) all come about because of this voluntary interaction and trade to bring added value. If you misunderstand this core truth — that the supply of good things increases through voluntary human interaction — you will assume the world is a zero-sum pie to be divided. And you will ultimately try to force the rest of us to obey you. That is evil.