What It’s All About—The Math of Love and Hate

Don’t worry—no mathematics background required.

A year ago, after the election, I decided to focus on writing. After four years trying to prevent a recurrence of Donald Trump and the cabal that propped him up, I decided I would write every day about how it happened in spite of my efforts. This has yielded about 365,000 words or 1,000/day—the equivalent of three non-fiction books. The goal, as the title of my blog says, has been to explain the increasingly evident psychological war on democracy—but that terrain has expanded, because the deeper I went the more I saw the same dynamics.

In the last year, I’ve covered a huge amount of ground, including deep explorations into current events and key figures, geopolitics, history, neuropsychology, political theory, philosophy, religion/metaphysics, and hard science. But all of it aims toward one goal: to get to the bottom of the gut-wrenching process of destruction—and self-destruction—that blossomed into full-fledged American catastrophe.

We are all watching the equivalent of a wildfire rampaging across the institutions of America, a whole-scale immolation of much of what we all felt—if not fully believed—was somehow immutable. This is why complexity science is important: it’s the way you model a spark becoming a wildfire, a butterfly starting a tornado, or a backfire panicking a crowd. It is part of the lens we need to construct to fully understand how a single aberrant individual like Donald Trump became an existential threat.

Open Adaptive Systems Theory & the War on Complexity

You can look at him as a neurological phenomenon: a man and a machine around him that increase fear and captured the amygdala of the nation. You can see him as a malignant narcissist collapsing under his own shame and terror—and taking us with him. You can see him as a political phenomenon—with disturbing historical antecedents. You can see him as a neo-bastardization of German existential philosophy and moral inversion. And you can see him as a war on complexity.

All of these lenses reveal the same pattern. All of this is correct at the same time.

But what holds it all together? Simple math. On every level, Donald Trump is a negative factor. He reduces; he subtracts; he hates; and he unbinds. He lowers the complexity of the brain by hijacking the amygdala. His narcissism is a psychological singularity of hate and ego-terror. He reduces politics and philosophy to self-worship. He has no ideology or metaphysics whatsoever—he is amoral. In many ways, he is extremely easy to understand. He has just one single dimension: Donald Trump.

The signature emotion of Donald Trump is hate—but let’s break that down. Hate is a negative emotion—quite literally. Mathematically, it reduces connection; it reduces the number of dimensions available to the mind; it reduces the number of other people available to connect with; it is brutally simple, and simplifying.

Love and its sibling empathy, on the other hand, are positive emotions—they are literally additive mathematically. They bind, not divide. They bring more connection, layer, and structure. This increases the dimensionality of a system—another way of saying it increases the system’s complexity.

When you add hate to contentment, you get terror. When you impose rigid order on terror, you get paralysis. This is the control Donald Trump and his allies want.

So what is the solution? Math says the answer is love. Love breaks paralysis and leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment settles into stable contentment. And isn’t that what it’s all about?

While I’ve produced a whole lot of words, there are none I’m happier to write: Love is scientifically better than hate. In the end, love is actually the answer, as corny—or mathematical—as that sounds.

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