The Destroyer of Worlds
3rd February 2025
ZMan is having fun.
a character in the Asimov novels called The Mule. This was a character called the “destroyer of worlds” because he literally destroyed whole worlds, but he also destroyed the conception of the world. In fact, his very existence was a threat to accepted understanding of the universe, because the universally accepted conception of the universe precluded the existence of The Mule.
This has been the issue since Trump arrived on the scene. The people atop the post-Cold War world and the post-Cold War world itself, were all based on the assumption that a political character like Trump was impossible. The days of populist, nationalist and picaresque political actors was done. The present and future belonged to the Davos persons, the boys and girls who were produced by and benefitted the most from the managerial ideology that dominated the West.
What Trump’s success in 2016 represented was the nullification of the managerial order because according to the logic of managerialism, men like Trump had no place in the system, so they could never be a threat to the system. Instead, they were marginalized to the fringes of managerial life, the place where things are made, fixed, and created to keep the mechanics of the world going. They had no place in the world where decisions were made by the great and the good.