February 9, 2021

The other side is personalizing their purpose. It was extremely obvious with Trump in demanding loyalty in his worship-the-ruler purpose with government. It seemed like a method of control. But it is the same result visible in the entire crowd of insurrectionists. They are talking about opponents as persons, not social processes.

That standard is recognizable at the philosophical level, where corrupters assume they have the answers to everything and their only failures are due to opponents who don't accept what they are doing. Seeing that motive jump out in a dramatic way in the insurrectionists is a surprising degree of absurdity.

They are attacking persons. Their goal is to remove persons from their problem—not in a philosophical sense but in a hateful attack sense. They weren't trying to get the police out of their way in overrunning the Capitol building, they were attacking officers with hate. They were "foaming at the mouth," one officer said.

One of the chants of Trumpers is "own the libs." That means their focus is on opponents as persons. They focus on named persons in Congress. They try to take out persons in Congress as their solution.

What it means is that they don't see their problems in terms of realities; they assume their problems are caused by persons opposing them.

It's as if they were all micro-dictators like Trump trying to solidify power through allegiance. But that view is superficial and inaccurate. It isn't that they are like Trump but that Trump is like them. In other words, it's more basic than control over organized activity; it's a reality problem.

The most significant element of the underlying corruption is the absence of the essential realities. Without realities, there are just persons. Trump sees government as nothing but persons who support him. The realities of government are missing from his view. Similarly, his followers only see their problems as persons, not as realities. The complex realities that determine whether problems exist are missing from their view.

At the starting point, corruption is a self-centered view of everything, where the answers flow out from the person and the only problem is someone opposing what self wants. It takes an absence of reality to get that way. Missing reality reduces existence to self vs. others.