Trump’s mind and the reality show within: why China should worry
Tom Plate says the self-regarding mind of Donald Trump, as revealed in a recent impromptu interview, proves again that he is no Obama. And that adds a new layer of uncertainty to the US relationship with China
Recent US presidents, at least in public, would speak of China only after the vetting of practically every word, as if an errant one might prove seriously chancy. The bilateral relationship is too complex and freighted with too many tensions, and the stakes too high, to have it otherwise.
Absurd as that may seem, there is ample precedent for this view in classical philosophy. Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753) defined reality as nothing more than a product of, and dependent on, the human mind – for what can really be said to exist outside the mind? Here in the quaint words of this landmark Irish philosopher: “All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth – in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world – have not any subsistence without a mind.”
The self-regarding mind of Mr Trump could be said to mirror this. Last week, a New York Times reporter caught him in a Berkeleyan mindset, as it were. The interview covered tout le monde, even though its duration was but a half-hour.