The Toxic Toupee on Adventures
Thoughts about how authoritarianism became the favored form of governance in the US.
The great Danish storyteller H.C. Andersen wrote fairytales for children in the 19th century.
If I had more time, I would write a contemporary fairytale in the style of H.C. Andersen, called “The Toxic Toupee on Adventures”. Here is the storyline.
A toupee is possessed by an ancient curse. It travels restlessly around in search of a human body to infest. Its ultimate goal is to turn society into a Kingdom ruled by a rich elite. Whenever the toxic toupee jumps up onto the head of a human, it overtakes their mind and spirit like a zombie parasite. Whoever wears it feels a strong urge to put on a suit and tie, adopt Trump’s mannerism, rhetoric, and imagination abilities, and gradually turn more orange in the face each time they lie like Pinocchio’s growing nose. Because the curse is not bound to a human form, it cannot easily die or be killed. The only way to defeat it is if enough people recognize the curse for what it is, and society is structurally changed to prevent it from obtaining power.
The Toxic Toupee would be written as a bedtime story for children, but the adult who reads it aloud will easily catch the subliminal message. The story is really about the authoritarian takeover project. The moral is, when Trump dies, the driving force behind this project will live on. The mission is to further the gap between rich and poor, control people’s thoughts by taking hold of the information ecosystem, and destroy national and foreign communities by sowing hatred, distrust, and division which distract people from the power grab from above.
Another key aspect of the authoritarian project is to co-opt innovation in the private sector, and ultimately decide what gets made by whom to extend centralized control, stay on top of the political narrative, and squash dissent before it arises. Arguing with or making any demands against the government is a strict breach of protocol, explaining why Anthropic was very publicly designated a “supply chain risk” by the Department of War for failing to accept the government’s terms of service which included a demand for unrestricted access to their technology.
Trump is not the initiator or the leader of the authoritarian project in the US; he is merely an agent of it. Certain conditions in the American society have allowed the authoritarian project to move forward. Of course, I am in no position to exhaustively identify and analyze what exactly has gone wrong– a lot of it is based on national culture, history, past political priorities and decisions that I don’t have insights into. However, as a European, I have noticed three specific and distinct flavors of American society which have greatly contributed to the authoritarian progression:
Information asymmetry, namely between tech billionaires and the rest of the population
The politicization of everything
The blurring line between reality and science fiction
In the paid segment below, we will take a deeper look at each of these conditions based on recent news and viral stories in tech.
