Even if the people with whom Donald Trump has filled his cabinet are narcissistic fools (as I suggest in ¶ 21), we must give them their due: they are narcissistic fools who have mastered leadership skills which apply far beyond any one institution. Those skills are the ones involved in making decisions according to the tenets of rational choice theory. Absolute confidence in them is basic to Trump and his world, which is wholly predicated on the idea that the skills needed to build and run a business can be transferred smoothly to everything else. This is lunacy; if Cold War philosophy had not accustomed us all to think that the skills involved in rational choice management are the only skills the rational mind has to offer, no one would accept it.
If we follow Aristotle a bit farther, we see not only that it will not work, but how it will fail. For according to Aristotle, the leadership of the people Trump is bringing to Washington will, in time, fall victim to time itself: “Time,” as he puts it, “is the enemy of ousia.” The passage of time alone destroys ousiodic structure, the kind whose leading positions the Trumpians are trained to occupy.
Why? Because time for Aristotle is not the kind of abstract and do benign ticking-away that it is for Newton. It is, cryptically to be sure, the measure (arithmos) of motion (kinesis). Motion, for its part, is “the actuality of potentiality quâ potentiality.” This even more cryptic phrase can be understood by contrast with what Aristotle thinks is the more basic case, the conversion of potentiality to actuality. In this sort of actualization, something that is not yet comes to be: the cut wood is now potentially a house, and when it is put together it will no longer be potentially a house, but actually one. In between those states of the world, however, there is a sequence of states in which that goal, the built house, is having effects in the world in that it is directing the movements of the people building the house. In that sense it becomes actual while remaining potential, for the house is not yet built. To focus on something as a goal is thus to “actualize it quâ potentiality.”
This applies to all motion for Aristotle because all motion for him is basically goal-directed: seeds grow into plants in order to fulfill their natures, and stones fall to earth (in his view) in order to fulfill theirs. We can circumvent this extravagant teleology by noting that no individual motion can go on forever, and so each has an end point of some sort; talk of that end point as “fulfilling” some nature or other is unnecessary. We can still say that any currently existing motion is “potentially” at its end point, and only when it gets there will the motion be complete: only then will it be a motion organized enough to be measured. Its measure is time, which presupposes this sort of organized motion. Beneath such orgsanized motions we do not find stasis for Aristotle. We find, as for Plato and Hegel, a sort of entropic pullulating.
Organized motion kills ousia because to say that the material components of an ousia are in motion is to say that they have end points of their own. Not all of these can be imposed by an organizing form. In particular, the subordinate members of a social organization never do only what the managers tell them to do; being human beings, they have all sorts of other plans, goals, and motivations as well. The pursuit of each of these moves the organization, or part of it, in ways not determined by its form. It therefore constitutes a weakening of the dispositional authority of the form: it diverts energy, we may say, away from the central directives even if it does not explicitly contest them. Time itself, the measure of motion, thus weakens ousiodic structure. Thus, no form in matter can last forever for Aristotle; time itself destroys it.
It is these weakenings, moreover, that make it necessary for form to be particular. The master of the slave Aristoxenus never tells him to have any task completed within an hour after lunch time because he knows that Aristoxenus, being elderly, falls asleep after lunch. Nor can said master rely on advisors to tell him about Aristoxenus, because maybe they, too, are elderly enough that certain things escape them. The kind of “specificity” required of the leader of a social organization is the kind provided by what Aristotle calls syzên, living together.
This kind of specificity is denied by the modern theory of corporate leadership, which incorporates the many idealizations of Cold War philosophy, some of which I mention in Chapter Four of Scare. Just as rational choice theory presupposes perfect information on the part of the chooser, so this view of leadership presupposes perfect obedience on the part of one’s subordinates.
Alas for the theory, nothing human is perfect: orders, plans and policies get lost in the diverse complexities of human goal pursuing, and that is no occasional accident. It follows from the very nature of time.
So it will be for Trump’s cabinet picks: in time, their schemes will fall apart, not only as the Washington “swamp” seeks to subvert them but, and more irresistably, as the individuals who are supposed to realize them simply do other things, like go to sleep. For a while Trump’s cabinet picks, like the billionaires and generals they used to be, may be sheltered from knowing about this by their subordinates. But civilian governance has outside scrutiny that armies and corporations don’t, and news of the failures will eventually come out. At which time the supposed transferability of leadership skills will come into play—and the leaders, frustrated and humiliated, will leave.
How long will it take? How long will the Trumpians last, issuing orders that are neither obeyed nor disobeyed, and formulating strategies that don’t exactly go awry but don’t work as intended either? Aand how many lives will be destroyed in this process?
Aristotle, l’m afraid, does not tell us.