Reflections on the Eve of History
It's said that, in the midst of their historic struggle for the soul of modern physics, Einstein dismissed Niels Bohr's probabilistic theory of quantum mechanics by saying "God doesn't play dice." Bohr shot back, "Einstein, stop telling God what to do."
As of 6am this morning, I threw my dice for Donald Trump, and fate will write the rest of this story. Today is a chapter in a tale that will play out for generations to come. Having become a character in a stage drama I began by watching from the balcony seats, I feel compelled on this eve of history to share my story.
I made my first public prediction that Donald Trump would be the next US President in July 2015. At that time, CNN said there was a greater than 99% chance he would lose. It mattered very little to me then. I had no emotional, spiritual, or human interest at the start.
I made my prediction based on a theoretical framework for prediction, planning and performance I've been developing called The Green Star Paradox. Since the details of the framework are incidental to this story, I'll briefly summarize to say it's my amateur and lifelong attempt to present a kind of grand unified theory of the principles marrying hard sciences such as physics and astronomy with soft sciences such as psychology and economics. It's also an umbrella theory that covers frameworks for interpersonal dynamics, such as State Value Theory and Genetic Market Share Capitalization, each of which I'm eager to publish about in the future.
My interest in Trump began as a purely academic one. Every good-humored attempt to apply the Green Star Paradox to the Presidential election showed a strong probability he would win, and this result itched at me. My scribble pads suggested Trump was unstoppable, and I'd walk outside, or turn on the TV, and hear Trump was unsavable. The dissonance crackled.
I resolved to study Trump in excruciating detail. I expected to find some elementary error that would make the dissonance disappear so I could proudly return to a model of reality that had some semblence of actually matching reality. But it was not to be.
Politically, I was, at the time, still a libertarian, which is a group rather actively against Trump even on this Election Day, so I was not then caught up in a rolling snowball of wishful thinking. As I wrote in my initial blog article 9 months ago, my belief in Trump's victory long preceded my actual desire for it.
As the weeks of Autumn 2015 passed, I felt I had a front-seat ticket to perhaps the greatest Greek odyssey of our time. A man who persisted on a Sisyphisean climb, pushing the boulder of his own destiny up against the impossibly tall, cold, snowy slopes. And all on a world stage, with his ultimate victory or crushing fall on full display in eyes of the heavens.
And he was all alone. So alone that none spoke publicly of any redeeming quality in him whatsoever. I watched as every institution abandoned him, as he became toxic by association, as he became as desperately avoided as disease. I watched him become vividly painted to all who saw him as a racist, a sexist, a bigot, a homophobe, an Islamophobe, a fascist, a misogynist, a chauvinist, a Nazi, a personification of Hitler, a nasty, vile, disgusting, subhuman piece of filth not worthy of normalization through treatment with civil language.
I watched his supporters get ritually beaten, bloodied, and chased down. I saw their cars and belonging destroyed, their events canceled, their opinions de-platformed from colleges & universities, from public parks, from online forums, from mainstream news media. I saw their voices silenced, their careers threatened, and their friends pressured to disassociate so as to not invite aggression themselves.
And I started to develop sympathy. Whatever sterile, agnostic scientific curiosity began this story, it transmogrified into the very living, breathing, embodiment of one man pressing onward and upward into the winds of fate, with the gale force of the world against him.
You have heard me, for well over a year now, very publicly and full-throatedly defend Donald Trump. I agree with the wisdom of his underlying policy positions on taxes, maternity leave, border security, illegal immigration, fiscal policy, and most elements of his foreign policy. I also think he is uniquely positioned to do a tremendous amount of good for the world in eliminating waste, fraud and abuse. Reasonable minds can differ on all these issues, my opinions are my own.
I cannot thank deeply enough the people I've met along the way on this journey. New friends, old friends, those who have reached out in support, and equally those who have challenged me or helped me become a better man in the process. I am tremendously excited at the new directions this path has taken me, and feel privileged to have had such an unparalleled look behind the curtains of the insider operations at the highest level of government and business. Much ink will spill from my pen in the weeks and months to come. The stories could truly fill a Roman library.
As I watched the light come through my office window as I stayed the night here and prepared to be the first to my polling station in Brooklyn, I felt, for a shameless guy, a rare sense of regret. I could have fought harder. I could have persuaded more effectively. I felt disquieted.
Amid the lessons learned this year, the most salient has been the simple bearing of witness to how man, committed to his purpose, can smirk and persevere even in the face of what seems like the gods themselves yelling stop. With this thought, I waved down at the city of Manhattan from high atop a glass conference room on the 34th floor of a law firm, hailed a cab in a sleepless but tireless dawn, and headed to a Brooklyn voting booth on Marcy Avenue to vote for Donald Trump, smiling if only to myself, that neither Heaven nor Hell, neither God nor the Devil, could stop me from doing that.
