Chinese Culture defeats Trump. Obama explains Why

Dr. Heinz Dieterich June 29th , 2020 Director, Center for Transition Sciences, CTS-UAM

The House of China, CTS-UAM

Autonomous Metropolitan University, UAM

Coordinator, World Advanced Research Project, WARP

1. China triumphs, Washington fails

After six months of fighting the Covid-19 pandemic, there are two global experiences that stand out: China's extraordinary success against the pandemic and the US government's catastrophic failure in the face of the global epidemic. The abysmal difference in effectiveness between Beijing´s and Washington´s policy manifests itself atrociously in lost human lives. 125,000 people have died in the American Union; in China, about 4,640. Taking into account that China's population is more than four times that of the United States, it turns out that the number of deaths in the United States relative to its total population is about 96 times higher than in China. In other words, if the American Union had had the same death-to-total population relationship as China, only about 1,150 U.S. citizens would have died in the world's richest country.

2. Obama explains Trump´s Disaster

Many Western analysts have tried to explain the abysmal difference in the death toll between the two countries. However, it was former U.S. President Barack Obama who has been more accurate in his diagnosis, than many others. Based on his wealth of international experience and subjective intelligence, the former president of the imperialist Empire has understood that the reason for the terrible White House failure to adequately confront the Covid crisis, compared to China, lies in culture. To be more precise: in Trump's lack of culture. In a recent phone conversation, Obama characterized Trump's policy as "selfish, tribal, divides, and sees others as enemies". The result of this kind of policy is, that it turned the White House covid-19 management into “an absolute chaotic disaster”. In other words, it is Trump´s lack of culture and civility, which lacks three fundamental softwares of any successful realpolitik--soft power, hegemony and intelligent algorithms-- which explains, why the United States has 2.488 million confirmed covid-19 cases and the Middle Kingdom only 84,726. Obama is right to call this catastrophe, Made in the USA by Trump´s “The Art of Ignorance”, an absolute chaotic disaster. However, if culture is the work of the fine arts, l'art pour l'art, how could it produce a hecatombe of more than 125,000 people killed under Trump's governance and on his watch?

3. Culture: the essential political algorithm

Obama's diagnosis is correct, if we understand the concept of "culture" in depth, not in its trivial media meaning or its false bourgeois or aristocratic solemnity. Understood scientifically, culture is, together with economics, politics and the military, one of the four basic social and power relationships, which constitute a human society. Its "mission" in the society-state macrosystem is twofold: to ensure the synergic integration and optimization of system-complexity and its almost infinite number of events of different logical status: random, deterministic, probabilistic, chaotic,etcétera. The means, with which those aims are achieved, are the analytical, normative, emotional and symbolic languages available, which funtion as horizontal and vertical interphases of the system. In this sense, the function of culture can be compared, mutatis mutandis, to the function of the operating system (OS) in a computer, that consistently integrates all elements of hardware, software, energy and human input into a miracle of productivity and efficiency.

4. Cultural lobotomy of the subordinate social classes

Being culture an extraordinary (meta-) software for the control (or emancipation) of minds and a vital algorithm for the effective administration of giant modern nation-states, it is no surprise that the ruling classes of modern capitalism use all their scientific and aesthetic power to prevent the development of an autonomous scientific-ethical culture for the masses and by the masses. The class character of capitalist exploitation and domination requires the cultural lobotomy of the subordinate social classes as a conditio sine qua non of their subordination. Eight scientific stratagems are used to achieve that aim.

5. Eight scientific bourgeois methods of cultural lobotomy

Eight manipulative cultural stratagems of mind control currently serve this purpose: the manufacture of consent; perception management; truth decay; social identity theory; fake news; the mental drowning of the receiver with torrents of irrelevant data and trivia; the old monotheistic religious opium of the people (Catholicism, Islam, Judaism), as Karl Marx said (Opium des Volkes), and the new "opium for 21st Century deculturate peoples," evangelical obscurantism.

The combination of these softwares, applied on the basis of contemporary digital technology, eliminates the humanistic attractor of global development, that dominated global politics since the European Enlightenment. Consciousness, justice, emancipation, revolution, etc., are no longer vectors that guide the social and political praxis of the masses. Its place is occupied by an algorithm, the essence of which is not the optimization of these values and the social transformation necessary to achieve them, but the narcissistic display of personal data in the arenas of global commercial autoerotism (facebook, twitter), which lack objective importance and reasoned decisions. The objective basis of this perfect deculturation at the service of capitalist elites is twofold: the new productive forces of cyberspace and the mindset of the global middle classes, which are the bulwarks of liberal bourgeois democracy.

6. Xi Jinping, Merkel, Putin

Presidents with culture in the scientific sense, that is, the ability to understand, rank and optimize the dialectical movements of objective reality, are not very common. Xi Jinping, Putin and Angela Merkel are possibly the only ones today, who would meet the respective requirements to be classified as such superior protagonists of history.

Xi studied chemical engineering at the famous Tsinghua University and later obtained a Ph.D. in Law. Chemical engineering is a multidisciplinary science that uses the principles of chemistry, physics, mathematics, biology and economics, to solve empirical problems at different levels of reality, from nanoscales to macro scales. During the Cultural Revolution he lived and worked for years among peasants in extreme poverty. Both life experiences undoubtedly manifest themselves as decision-making influences in his historical Project of Chinese rejuvenation.

The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, also studied in the field of transition sciences, obtaining her Ph.D. in a very prestigious research institution in the socialist German Democratic Republic, with a thesis in the very complex area of quantum chemistry-physics. She also participated as a militant in the socialist youth movement (FDJ). The cultural and life differences between Xi Jinping and Angela Merkel and the culture-free populists Trump and Bolsonaro are indeed dramatic. In abstraction from the objective conditions, there is no doubt, that the successes of Merkel as the steering force of the complex, heterogeneous and giant European Union and president Xi Jinping, as the dialectical leader of the Middle Kingdom, are due to their cultural sapiencia.

7. The essential algorithm of social transformation

The superiority of Chinese culture over the one-dimensional software of the illiterate White House stems from its dialectical spirit, formulated thousands of years ago by Confucius, Lao-Tse, Gautama Buddha (the Enlightened) and Sun Tzu, among others. In the words of Confucius, written 2,500 years ago: The new must be the product of unification on diversity; not to stand on the destruction of diversity, as happened in the European conquest of America.

This sophisticated algorithm of socio-political transformation, which in Western philosophy is present in the concept of “dialectical overcoming” (dialektische Aufhebung) in Hegel, Marx and scientific socialism, permeates the thought and practice of the Chinese avant-garde. It contrasts sharply with the vulgar, mercantile and chauvinistic positivism, which dominates the Weltanschauung and the imperialist pragmatism of the current American power elite. President Xi's public commitment to treat any Chinese coronavirus vaccine as "a global public good," and Trump's criminal attempts to monopolize a first vaccine for his social-darwinistic project "America first," illustrate the cultural-political abyss and class character between Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and Washington's imperial nationalism and capitalism.

8. War against China

"We are at war, make no mistake about it. The Chinese unleashed a virus on the world," declares the powerful director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy and close Donald Trump adviser, Peter Navarro, on imperialist television and adds, that China owes the United States "some form of compensatory damage" after the pandemic. Attempts by Republican lawmakers to impose respective laws and private companies, to form an international alliance against China are advancing in Congress. It seems, that the U.S. political class has already forgotten that it has lost four wars in Asia: in China, Corea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. And that there is no chance, that their primitive mercantilist-tribal culture could prevail over China's sophisticated culture and real power, anchored in a stable strategic alliance with Russia and, increasingly, with the German-dominated European Union.

9. The Tiger and the Dogs

You can't expect the U.S. power elite (C.W. Mills) to have understood Sun Tzu's Art of War or the ancient Chinese sapience that says, "When tigers reach the plain (far from their mountain), even dogs dare to affront them": 虎落平阳被犬欺, hǔ luò píngyáng bèi quǎn qī. Hopefully, Trump´s illiterate imperialist White House team will listen to the worldly-wise imperialist Barack Obama, before embarking on a war against China, which they will never be able to win. But, that can lead humanity to the apocalypse.