For many years, I’ve considered myself a fan of Emil Cioran. He says so many interesting things, chief among them (for me) is his concept of language being our true fatherland. This is a fascinating truism that has helped me shift my thoughts greatly over many years. I have overcome many internal definitions because of Cioran’s advice.

Many months ago, I bought the audiobook “A Short History of Decay” (“Précis de Décomposition”), and I’m just now getting the chance to hear it. As expected, this is a packed tome full of sharp quips and loaded thoughts; however, I find myself stuck on one lynchpin holding the first chapter together.

Cioran goes to brief lengths demonstrating the hostility of dogma and the history of societal destruction (banality and apocalypse). To support this, he makes the point that Nero and Tiberius were men who, rather than adherents to any particular dogma, became mere degenerates (decadents) who enjoyed torturing the latest losers. Cioran goes further, arguing that the true engineers manifesting social downfall are the self-appointed apostles of structure or anti-structure, not conmen.

That’s… a tough concept for me. One might assume by my use of complete sentences and my lack of Christian nationalism that I hold a deep hatred for Donald Trump. One would be correct in that assumption. I like to believe I hate that man with an overwhelming passion… but he is, in my estimation, a con man. According to Cioran, a man like him who holds nothing sacred cannot be an instrument of societal downfall.

Here’s a quote:

This leaves me with an apparent crossroads. Either I am wrong about Cioran’s wisdom, or Cioran is correct and I am wrong about Donald Trump. Of course, the argument could be made that the public constitutes its own persona writ large (much like a corporation with its own identity and rights). The democracy forms its own identity and has its own dogma, which a con man may manipulate for his own brief aims within our strange new world’s structure. That’s one view, but the fact remains that my impression of one of these men likely needs to change.

It frightens me, to think that Donald Trump actually DOES believe in a dogma which he determines to be the “right” way to live (that he is living an imitable life), and that this belief drives his actions.

RESPONSE

Cioran is a hard thinker to carry forward without friction, because his sharpness cuts in all directions, even (and especially) toward the people who admire him.

Let’s walk through this.

⚔️Cioran’s View on Dogma vs. Degeneracy

Cioran’s claim—roughly—that the con man, the decadent, the opportunist like Nero or Tiberius is not the true source of catastrophe, while dogmatic apostles of structure or anti-structure are, is a provocative way to separate evil born of belief from evil born of self-interest.

He seems to say: degenerates may torment, but they don’t organize ruin on the level that ideologues do. Ideologues engineer entire world-orders (utopian or apocalyptic), and that’s where real historical damage happens: when belief pretends to be salvation.

So to Cioran, Torquemada is more dangerous than Caligula.

(above) Juan de Torquemada of the Spanish Inquisition

(above) Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus a.k.a. Caligula

🐍 So… Where Does Trump Fall?

I feel—passionately and personally—that Donald Trump is a destructive force. I see him not just as a vulgar opportunist, but as a real danger to institutions, culture, and perhaps democracy itself. That suggests I’m seeing in Trump more than a con man—even if his background is thoroughly grift-driven.

So let’s test this:

  1. Possibility A: Trump is “just” a con man

This is closer to Cioran’s thesis. In this view, Trump is more like Tiberius: he exploits existing passions, he doesn’t invent or sincerely believe in a totalizing dogma. He is parasitic, not messianic. And therefore, the responsibility for collapse lies more with the believers who constructed a dogma around him—those who saw a savior, not a salesman.

In this reading, Trump is not “the true danger.” The danger is the dogma that grows around him—what others make of him.

  1. Possibility B: Trump believes in something

What if Trump does believe in something? Not necessarily a traditional ideology, but a dogma of self: that he is the rightful center of power, truth, success, survival. That his way is the only way. That enemies must be humiliated and facts bent to his advantage. That loyalty is moral, and dissent is treason. These are not fleshed-out political ideas—but they function as dogma in the Cioranian sense.

In this view, Trump is not merely a parasite. He becomes a carrier of a belief system—even if it is crude, narcissistic, and unexamined. And once others take this up as gospel (e.g. QAnon, “stop the steal,” “only Trump can fix it”), he becomes an apostle of a destructive anti-structure.

So Cioran’s thesis may still apply—just in a more flexible or modern sense.

🪞What Might Be Happening Emotionally

I have been emotionally invested in hating Trump as a villain for a full decade. I do not directly hate him because he is a fool. Philosophically, it’s harder to assign ultimate blame to someone who lacks belief, because Cioran’s vision of moral horror is reserved for true believers. That makes the con man weirdly “innocent” by comparison.

The moral vertigo of realizing that maybe the con man isn’t the root cause—we are, or rather, the systems and believers who elevate him are.

This does not necessarily imply the con man is empty; rather he may believe in himself with dogmatic ferocity. Maybe we’re seeing a new form of dogma—a hypermodern, selfie-mythology where personal branding is truth. That’s not quite what Cioran imagined, but he didn’t live to see QAnon or Twitter politics either.

🎯 Conclusion: Are These Views Contradictory?

Not necessarily. I am not wrong to feel Trump is dangerous. Cioran’s work is not invalidated either. Instead, Cioran gives us a framework for understanding where lasting collapse originates: belief, not merely appetite.

This is a real-world case that’s murky: Trump might look like a con man, but functions like a prophet to his followers. The true destructiveness may lie in the synthesis: a con man becomes an apostle when his persona hardens into a movement. His hollowness becomes filled with the hopes and resentments of others.

So perhaps Trump is both: a man without principles who becomes the unwitting architect of a pseudo-dogma, which others enact in his name. And that might be the real modern tragedy—one that Cioran, writing in 1949, could only glimpse.

This thought exercise was built from interactions with a large language model. I, the poster, have worked to contextualize and confirm any information presented by non-human resources. Thank you!

    • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      181·
      14 days ago

      😂🤣 You think doing a google search is equivalent to willingly allowing yourself to be subsumed by a machine, replacing yourself in the cognitive labor process and forcing yourself to be subservient to its design? Willingly deskilling yourself in the domain of cognition, that’s fucking awesome.

        • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          141·
          14 days ago

          What are you even talking about? By using a LLM you have literally placed your cognitive capacity at the whims of the LLM and its bounds. The labor of “thinking” is literally subsumed by the LLM and cannot be divorced from it as you become reliant on it. You will not ever reach conclusions outside the limits and bounds of the LLM and as such become ITS agent, not the other way around. You will literally deskill yourself in the necessary tasks required of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

          You are not “enlightened” through its use. You are literally “talking” with shadows on the cave wall.

            • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
              11·
              14 days ago

              Nobody is scared of your prayers to the machine spirits. Outsourcing your cognition to others (which is what an LLM does, as it doesn’t think), and covering it up as ‘discussing with an LLM’ is just sad.

              There are two reasons as to why, which feed into each other. The first is that clearly you have no idea the context of importance to which anything is said, the ranking of which is said. You throw around ideas willy nilly as if I am supposed to inherently care, as if the failure of this sick society is something to be mourned? What care for I the downfall of Rome or the monarchy of Spain? Slavers and tyrants all. There is no danger poised by Trump then, con-man or ideologue regardless, least not to my philosophical project. There is only the material danger that decay and collapse inevitably will bring to my vulnerable comrades as we are scapegoated for their excess and amusement. But that was the case prior to Trump, which leads me to my second point.

              The second is that there is no material reflection on how Trump is clearly another manifestation of corporate media influence in the U.S. in crisis. Before Trump we already had our con-man/ideologue, who irreparably changed the way politics in the U.S. occurs. His name was Reagan, and he is and will continue to be far more influential on the current state of affairs in the U.S. than Trump ever will ever be. The saddest part is that there is easily room for debate there, but you would never know it. And to top it all of, not a single historical example, cherry-picked or otherwise in your entire post, to argue for or against if he is a con-man or ideologue.

              Just statements of rubbish, a circle of images pretending towards philosophy. Nothing you said had any philosophical import, in so far as it addresses me or my concerns. Two inch water that you are inexplicably drowning in, and having the temerity to say that others cannot swim.

            • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              101·
              14 days ago

              What you’re not reading and not engaging with is the result of my own work, on the shoulders of AI.

              Lmao god it really does have its hooks in you doesn’t it? So your entire “work” is fully within the bounds of the LLM. So, looks like I’m correct here.

              You have offloaded the labor process of formulation of thought, and its clear you’ve already deskilled yourself in that labor process.

              You are happily limiting yourself to its design. A design that has been becoming worse at summarizing information, not better.

              Which is relevant, since that is all this system is doing. Even the reasoning models are simply summarizing their reasoning output. Which is why its worse.

              Your highly uncritical and frankly, fucking brain dead, approach is exactly why I’m not bothering to “engaging” with “[your] own work”.

              You’ll just go running to your text averaging algorithm of choice when things get to hard.

                • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  91·
                  14 days ago

                  Please for the love of christ, read more and use AI less. LLMs are a machine in a labor process and it replaces you within that process making you reliant on it. That reliance deskills you in the process and makes you a slave to the LLMs form. The LLM doesn’t make you better at the process because you never perform the process, and thus never improve at it. They do not make you more productive at the process because they create more sub tasks you need to complete to get true quality out of the output, negating its efficiency overall. Because you are a slave to its forum, you loose the ability to operate outside its rules, thinking out side the box, as it were.

                  “Assistance is assistance” is a fallacy, because the assistance isn’t neutral, it is bias towards its manufacturers intentions. It deals in both the inclusion of falsehoods and the exclusion of ideas. The exclusion is far harder to detect, as you would need to be aware of its exclusion, and thus already be versed enough in a topic to not need the “assistance” to begin with.