Transcript
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another DailyJim. Today is the episode for Tuesday, January 23rd, 2024. I say the episode for that date because I am an hour and a half past the end of the day where I am, I wanted to record it earlier and then I got caught up reading about the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire, the Nazi Party. And what else? Oh, ancient Chinese philosophy. Because today I want to talk about how all of that might relate to Donald Trump, and where we find ourselves uh related to the conversations I've talked about the last couple of days about peace and love, et cetera. So I was watching uh CNN today as the presidential primaries, especially the Republican primary was happening in New Hampshire. And Donald Trump, I believe won by about 10% somewhere around that. Um And then after the polls come in, after the, the numbers come in, the analysts on CNN give their perspectives. And there's one analyst named Van Jones and uh I really like to listen to her perspective over the last couple of years. I saw him speak in Oakland, California. Gosh, 2014, 2015 sometime around then, and just have really appreciated his opinions. And, um, what he talked about today was worry that.
People may see Donald Trump as the peace and prosperity candidate. And so what he talks about is that uh you know, we are many people may look at Trump and see chaos. You know, Nikki Haley said something like chaos follows Trump. And yet he said some people may look at Trump and see him as, may maybe calm or whatnot, but see the world as chaos and even say to themselves, you know, when Trump was in power, we didn't have these wars. And then he said he may, people may see Trump as a peace and stability.
And it reminded me of the conversations that I've had the last couple of days, I guess conversations, but the recordings of the last few days about our desire for peace, and how I actually think our desire for peace sometimes leads to violence and leads uh to even or conflict avoidance.
So if people think Trump may be the candidate for peace, maybe people are afraid of the wars and the chaos and they just want somebody who will come in and give certainty to a situation.
And I think a lot of times the uncertainty can cause a lot of different emotions.
In conflicts, but the conflict doesn't always have to be violent conflict. It can just be disagreement, it could just be different perspectives on a specific issue. Um For example, if two people are going out for dinner, where do you want to go? That question can provide conflict because maybe one person wants to get pizza, one person wants to eat salad or one person wants to go to an expensive restaurant. One person wants to go to an inexpensive restaurant. So just there can be conflict. Um And I think one way to avoid that conflict or to create quote unquote peace is to make sure that one person always makes the decisions. And in a democracy that kind of scares me because to have one person always making the decisions is not really democracy. Um It's not representative democracy, it's not direct democracy, it's much more autocracy, it's much more authoritarianism where one person is making all the decisions. And I think a lot of times that comes from a desire to have peace, I just want to have peace and clarity and I just want things to be simple and I don't want, I don't want to ruffle any feathers. I don't want to feel this, feel that et cetera, et cetera. And so I think there is a drive for a lot of people who want to have that peace and think that it can come from having one person make all the decisions. Now, the challenge with it and the reason why I was trying to look up a lot of these empires and histories and such was.
I don't know if that actually works in the long term, maybe in the short term, it gives us the perspective that conflict has disappeared. Um And that if peace is the definition of absence of conflict, but, the conflict is still there. It's just we're not aware of it.
Often, we just don't know what's really going on. My dad was talking about, he had heard about some Trump voter and I don't know what channel it was. Some channel was talking about a Trump voter that was just very angry about this, angry about that. But then when people asked him what he was really angry about, he didn't really know what he was angry about. And I think that's what can happen sometimes when we try to be at peace is that we just disconnect from these internal conflicts that are happening from these external conflicts that are happening. And we don't even know what we're feeling or all the reasons why we might be feeling that way.
Because we don't almost want to admit that it's ok to have conflict and that the conflict exists and even being grateful for it, this idea that the conflict will disappear. How will the conflict disappear right now? I'm debating, I'm feeling tired, I want to sleep, but I'm feeling guilty. I didn't do this early enough, but I'm feeling super excited to share this with you. I'm also feeling a little out of breath. Um I'm feeling a little slap happy because I'm so tired. So there's kind of a mix of emotions happening here and those emotions are wanting me to do different things. So I just, I think this desire for peace can lead us to choose people um in our lives or to make decisions in our lives that would give us the.
Facade that we are at peace. Give us the impression that things are at peace. Even. I was reading about uh the Roman Empire and how it, you know, started with the Roman Republic, moved in the Roman Empire and it was called the Pax, Romana. And um one person was saying, you know, it wasn't so peaceful but it was this nice. It gave a, a, an impression that there was a lot of peace underneath.
You know, it's a very good story to tell somebody to make it look as if there's no internal conflict and how many nation states, how many families, how many relationships, how many companies, give the impression that we're totally at peace. Everything's chill, man. I knew in Tanzania, I knew like 35 ways to say, I'm chill. Everything is fine. There's no problem like how, how much of our drive for peace makes us give the impression that we're at peace when we really aren't when there's a lot of conflict happening and we just avoid it instead of just admitting it and deal with it. Um And even appreciate it, appreciate the the vivacity of, of differing perspectives and wants and needs and feelings and thoughts and behaviors and all these things. So this is way over time, but it's still less than 10 minutes. So I will end now because this conversation is something I could probably be really excited to talk about over and over again. And, um, yes, I'm not going to go back to Wikipedia and read more. I'm actually going to go to sleep. So, if you're curious to talk about this more, please join on the forum. We'd love to have you there and, uh, keep this conversation going. All right. Take care.
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