Sergio Troncoso
The question not only of the first presidential debate but of the 2024 election is: Are we a superficial society or a substantial society?
While former President Donald Trump yelled and lied for most of the debate, President Joe Biden stumbled and showed his age. A hardened liar and boaster against an old man who, despite his age, has accomplished far more in the Oval Office than his predecessor. However, according to many reports, Donald Trump is leading in the polls. However, the aging Joe Biden is not being recognized for his impressive track record of job creation, controlling inflation, investing in long-term infrastructure, and even rising stock prices.
I'm not here to argue about the details, because apparently details no longer matter in American political debate.
I’m more interested in what it says about us. Our world of TikTok, of Kardashians being billionaires, of social media and falsely glittering praise is the world that someone like Plato warned about long ago. It’s a world of images that are not real, and our obsession with them. What we lose sight of, living happily in the grip of superficiality, is the concept of the good, which is always difficult to recognize (but is there for those who make the effort).
As an example of how shallow our thinking has become, I am repeatedly struck by an old Trump trick that still seems to work today: “The difference is [Putin] “I would never have invaded Ukraine. Never. Just like I would never have let Israel be invaded by Hamas in a million years. … That's why there has never been terrorism under my administration.”
Trump is using this hypothetical trick to retroactively declare that this never happened or that should have happened under his administration. I wish I could retroactively invest in the stock market. Can you?
If only I could make the decision to cross that street instead of this one, and then instead of nearly getting hit by an e-bike on the Upper West Side of New York, I'd find a diamond ring someone dropped on Broadway. Can you live your life like that? Of course not. But Trump uses this trick over and over again, as if to fool people about his “leadership,” because it does. He fools shallow people who know that you can't live your life like that, but it feels good to think so.
So while the truth doesn't matter in American political discourse today, the false life that Trump lives retroactively, in which everything he does is “right,” has apparently convinced many to vote for him.
Americans trapped in Plato’s cave can no longer see the difference because it is too hard to “see” things like years of savings, sacrifices and investments building reserves; or statistics proving that undocumented immigrants are vulnerable and therefore much less likely to commit crimes but more likely to be victims of crime; or communities where many different racial, ethnic and religious groups exist but work together to solve community problems like a virus, an environmental crisis or a national security issue that, if left unresolved, puts them at risk. all our.
Instead, what we see in our caves is not “success” as a lottery-like jackpot, or “immigrant crime” defined by the latest anecdote of an illegal immigrant committing robbery or murder, or a “community problem,” but simply a personal health decision about a virus, not climate change, simply bad weather.
We are obsessed with superficiality, we disbelieve in long-term success based on sacrifice and good choices, we prioritize individual examples over general statistical truths, we ignore community and collective goals and possessions, yet we celebrate convenient and often selfish individual freedoms (even when they hurt us all).
It’s hard to focus on the invisible effects in the American cave: the hard work and sacrifice that leads to failure after failure for an entrepreneur until he supposedly hits a breakthrough, the years spent by a writer honing his craft to become a much better writer by learning, practicing and experimenting, the values improvised by a new couple who respect each other and sacrifice for each other so that they both have successful careers, their problems and arguments are resolved within a day or two after they arise, and they’re still in love decades later. The invisible effects are not TikTok-worthy, they can’t be made into a succinct, compelling soundbite.
We are too obsessed with what is visibly attractive or visibly unpleasant, too confused by values that may take us a week or more to understand, and too quick to judge someone based on their actions, especially in 60 seconds captured on an iPhone.
I learned my values from my Mexican immigrant parents, who never owned a computer, who worked hard on Saturdays, Sundays, and every summer, who taught their kids to work hard too, and who sat on benches in front of their adobe homes and talked with their neighbors (“social hour,” they called it) as their friends passed by on dusty San Lorenzo Street in Isleta. Imagine talking to your neighbors in person for hours.
We live in a cave of shallow America where we have so often forgotten the invisible but functional and important. Trump is the perfect shallow leader in this cave of America, loving himself above all else, trumpeting his gaudy and false “success” and making his own godlike “retroactive decisions” that are just as valid in this cave as any real leader would have to make in real time.
Unless we open our eyes to see what is out there, what is false, and what the real cost of not knowing the difference is, we will likely elect him again.
Sergio Troncoso is an El Paso native and author of Nobody's Pilgrims and A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son.
