Machiavellian MAGA

  

The Trump team and their modus operandi

Why do intelligent, hard-working people work for someone like Donald Trump? Cynics might call them sycophants, boot-lickers, minions, or, maybe, leeches. On the other hand, these people may be Machiavellian instrumental egotists. They see their lives as economic models of human relationships and their interactions as transactional. Their moral values have been replaced by continuous cost-benefit analyses.

As such, their actions toward Donald Trump are designed purely for their own life ambitions and objectives. Their only concerns about the fortunes of Trump, his office, or even their country are merely risk factors in their own life. This is quite different from calling them a sociopath, psychopath, narcissist, or sycophant. It describes their motivational and behavioral architecture without assuming a psychiatric disorder. These people can be very rational, socially sophisticated, disciplined, and more than capable of understanding their own actions, perhaps understanding the consequences better than most people because they have a profoundly narrow concept of whose interests matter and how. The key to them is not whether they understand the difference between right and wrong; it is whether right and wrong have any independent authority over personal advantage.

This might imply that these people have an intrinsic advantage by essentially ‘looking out for themselves’ without incurring sufficient social baggage to undermine their long-term prospects. However, these people are not perfect, and their calculations will sometimes be wrong.  Plus, human perception has its limits, and what may look beneficial in the long term today may be disastrous in an uncertain future. Give them credit for forward thinking, but understand that their prescience is extremely limited.

Most of all, these Machiavellian instrumental egotists may ignore the underlying fabric of humanity that advanced homo sapiens into civilization and abstract thinking. This fabric remains somewhat of a mystery to both anthropology and psychology today, and it cannot be normalized, quantified, or easily dismissed without introducing serious errors of omission in predicting outcomes of human behaviors. On the other hand, it may be that these types of individuals have unusual instinctive abilities that unconsciously factor in this fabric, which might explain the unusual success of a few. However, humanity does not openly cultivate this behavior, which might limit its presence.

What is the point?

In many regards, these people behave like calculating machines. Such a comparison would have been very one-dimensional as recently as a decade ago.  However, with Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models, such a machine is much easier to imagine or even witness. The past century has seen much of life quantified and digitized to great economic benefit and perceived social gain. Human interactions are likely to be the next thing quantified, and many of our interactions today are very transactional. As LLMs teach us about life in mathematical terms, the Machiavellian way, albeit more refined, may become a personality norm—or at least a dominant trait of the dominant social class. Something to consider.