Book 2: THE FOUNDATIONS OF MADNESS: The Diaries of a Mad Optimist, Volume 2 of 6

Book 2: THE FOUNDATIONS OF MADNESS: The Diaries of a Mad Optimist, Volume 2 of 6

Book 2: THE FOUNDATIONS OF MADNESS Judge Luttig knows who Trump is, and the founders of the United States, too, saw him coming. Because they had seen it all before in Europe and England, and learned something from it, indeed from all of recorded human history. It was the ancient Greeks, after all, who coined the word “kakistocracy.” Why “waste” my time talking to Ivan? Because he is an archetype of a class of human beings. He is representative of those whose minds are ripe to be hijacked by men of such corruption that they cannot fathom it as corruption, but see it instead as its beatific inverse: “transcendent virtue.” They take the promissory words of a master con man as an irresistible Siren Song of Salvation—their personal salvation. Ivan is a window into the power of tyrants to speak to their pain and deepest resentments, to harness the brains and bodies of weak, stupid, injured men who seek to join a cause “greater than themselves”—but a cause that will only serve to re-inflate their deflated selves and “take back” what they think is rightfully theirs. And they are thrilled at the prospect of doing so at the expense of everyone they’ve emotionally targeted for retribution as the cause of their own broken manhood and the “ruination” of their “homeland”—their “Motherland” or “Fatherland,” i.e., their “Promised Land.” Ivan has provided us with a full description of his AK-47-toting “default self”—and then shown us what his commitment to the Bible has done to make himself “a different man,” as if there actually were a difference. I have argued from the evidence that there is no difference except one of strategy, and that all of it is merely the logical outcome of his articulated “foundations,” the fruit of his own roots. I have also argued that there is power in consciousness, but I am left with only the hope that Ivan acquires enough of it, in the teeth of his hatred of “wokeness,” to understand what has happened as a consequence of our shared adventure, and be as shaken as I have been. ... Is there a deep connection between such things as the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the various hidden goings-on leading to the events of January 6, 2021, the overturning of Roe v Wade, the invasion of Ukraine, the destruction of Gaza, the assassination of Alexei Navalny, the Alabama court ruling ... that in vitro fertilized eggs are not merely possible future children, but actual children, babies bearing the "Imago Dei," etc.? I believe there is no conspiracy at all that connects "the dots," but something else, something my friend Ivan tells me is "all about foundations." I fear there is something humanity has done little to face up to, the possibility that Ivan Ayman is right about this: it is all about "foundations," foundations he cannot see that are indeed the foundations ... of madness. Joseph Richard February 23, 2024