Insatiable

 Faced with the spectacle of our two current presidential contenders—both of whom have already had the chance to be president once—I'm forced to wonder sometimes: when will enough be enough? Why is neither man capable of looking himself in the mirror and saying—"you know what? I've accomplished a lot for one life. It's time to pack it in." In short, why is neither man content to rest on his laurels? 

In Trump's case, of course, the explanation is clear enough. He's a pathological narcissist and a megalomaniac to boot. Plus, he faces three more pending criminal prosecutions as soon as he loses the upcoming election. He is therefore like a shark in the water. He has to keep moving to stay alive. This would remain true, even if his personality did not already supply him with the same impetus. 

Biden, meanwhile, is worlds away from Trump in temperament and character. It would be a rank injustice to lump him in with the former president; and I do not in any way mean to draw a moral equivalence between the two. Still—though—Biden's insistence on running for a second term, despite all the warning signs that he may very well lose to Trump in the process, comes across as a self-centered choice. 

Both men's careers, therefore, raise the same question: why not cash in your chips at this point and go home? Most of us, after all, will never get anywhere close to being president at all. Isn't it enough to be president once? (But, perhaps, the sort of person who manages to be president once, is also pre-selected to be the sort of person who cannot psychologically recognize the concept of "enough"). 

Part of the explanation, of course, lies in human nature in general. We are not a species built to accept the status quo. Because as soon as we regard our current life as "good enough," we stagnate. We droop. In a word, we might as well be dead. Human happiness, therefore, does not come about through reaching some sort of ideal equilibrium. To the contrary, it comes from setting ourselves a goal we can never fully attain. 

My sister was showing me a YouTube video essay today from the progressive commentator ContraPoints that was making exactly this point. The video observed that nearly all the joy of narrative storytelling comes not from the "payoff" at the end—but from the process of yearning for an outcome that is never quite attained. It is this same "yearning," ContraPoints observes, that is found in erotic love. 

People cannot rest content with what they have already achieved—that is to say—because it is human nature to yearn. Indeed, we are happier yearning after something than we are possessing it. Because, once we have it, it always disappoints. It turns to ashes. To desire is to have a reason to live; to attain what we desire is, by contrast, to "burst into fulfillment's desolate attic"—as Philip Larkin once put it. 

In this regard, politicians who are insatiable for power are no different from the rest of us. They have found their "infinite goal" (as I once called it, in an earlier blog post). They desire infinite power and to perpetuate this power unto eternity. Since this goal is impossible to attain, by definition, then they can never taste the bitter disappointment of satisfying it. No "fulfillment's desolate attic" for them. 

Just like us, then, the politicians have found the secret of happiness. They have set themselves a task that provides them with a direction in life—but not with a destination, which would only lead to bitterness (for, if they were to actually reach the destination, then life would be over.) As I argued in that earlier post: finding an unattainable but directed goal of this sort is how we make meaning of our existence. 

For many people, though, the infinite and unattainable goal does not depend on compromising the freedom and rights of so many other people. Our infinite goals do not have to interfere so patently with the autonomous desires of other people. Some people find meaning—as ContraPoints observes—in seeking a mystical union with God, or the ideal lover—both of which can be infinitely sought but never found. 

In my own earlier post, I suggested the pursuit of perfect social justice as such a goal. In the closing chapter of Robert Michels's book, Political Parties, he suggests that perfect democracy might be a similar Holy Grail to quest after. His book is often misunderstood as an antidemocratic polemic; the author's true feeling toward representative government is more like the mystic's toward God: 

"Democracy is a treasure which no one will ever discover by deliberate search," he writes. "But in continuing our search, in laboring indefatigably to discover the undiscoverable, we shall perform a work which will have fertile results in the democratic sense." (Paul translation).  

For Michels, democracy is an ideal that can never fully be realized, due to the oligarchical tendencies inherent in all organization and complex society. But it can be approximated. The eternal pursuit of it—however fruitless—is itself a democratic exercise that helps to bring it closer. It can therefore be a source of meaning in our lives—like the pursuit of socialism—even if we will never obtain what we seek. 

In all these pursuits after the unattainable ideal—true love, the complete meeting of the minds, genuine democracy, the socialist utopia, perfect equality, etc.—one can find meaning and direction for a life without violating the rights of other people to pursue their own endless quests. But the same cannot be said of the desire for infinite political power. That one, unfortunately, affects us all. 

It may be that Trump, in his megalomaniacal desire for more, will never be satisfied. Even if he wins the presidency again in November, he may not stop there. Even if he appoints himself dictator. Even if he appoints himself God Emperor of the Universe, as some of his acolytes only half-jokingly desire—he may not stop. Like Alexander the Great, he may then just weep that he had but one world to conquer. 

Philip Larkin's poem already quoted above (a disturbing but memorable one—so memorable, in fact, that it was—bizarrely—the first verse that came to mind for Margaret Thatcher, when she was asked what Larkin poem she most enjoyed—if an anecdote by Martin Amis is to be believed), bids the victims of such insatiable criminals to find consolation in this thought: at least they are not fulfilled by their crime. 

ContraPoints, in the video, quotes a creepy statement from a serial killer, who said he found more pleasure in anticipating his crimes than in committing them. In other words, he too found only "fulfillment's desolate attic" at the end of his murder spree. Larkin's poem observes that such men's victims are "no more deceived" than the criminal himself, who thinks he will gratify some impulse, but finds only futility. 

From another perspective, however, the fact that these criminals and tyrants are not even pleased with the results, after littering the stage of history with corpses, makes it all seem even worse. It is even more insulting, somehow, that we are all to be sacrificed to an ambition that cannot even be enjoyed. As Henry Fielding sarcastically observes, in a novel skewering the concept of the "great man": 

It is a pity that those for whose pleasure and profit mankind are to be hacked and hewed, to be pillaged, plundered, and every way destroyed, should reap so little advantage from all the miseries they occasion to others.

He goes on:  

For my part, I own myself of that humble kind of mortals who consider themselves born for the behoof of some great man or other [....] But [...] when I consider whole nations rooted out only to bring tears into the eyes of a great man, not indeed because he has extirpated so many, but because he had no more nations to extirpate—then truly I am almost inclined to wish that Nature had spared us this her masterpiece, and that no great man had ever been born into the world. 

So it may go with us. After Trump has hollowed out the federal government and staffed it with his toadies, because of his insatiable lust for power; after he has left our democracy and perhaps that of Ukraine and Taiwan too in smoldering ruins, because of his love of autocracy... and after Biden's own intransigent ambition has made this catastrophe possible, by staying in and losing the race, we may find cause to agree. 

After seeing that even then—after having wrought this travesty—even then such men are still unsatisfied—will we say then, with Larkin, that at least they deceived themselves as much as they deceived us? That at least they find no pleasure or lasting fulfillment, at last, in having desecrated the world and ruined so many of its inhabitants? Or will we say, with Fielding, that this just makes it even worse. 

In a poem about the "terrible people" of the world, Ogden Nash once observed that it is bad enough for some people to have more money than others. If the world has to be unfair in this way, he argued, then the possessing class should at least have the decency to "damn well admit that they enjoy it." Perhaps, with Fielding, we can say something similar of the so-called "great men" of history. 

If you insist on feeding us all, Moloch-like, to your ambition—at least don't complain to us afterward that it all turned to dust and ashes in your mouth. Don't come crying to us that you became president twice and overthrew American democracy, just to realize there was no true pleasure or fulfillment to be found in the act. At least, if we are to be sacrificed to you—at least tell us you enjoy it.