BY SEAN WALSH

When I was a child and showing worrying signs of growing up to become me, my parents put me up for investigation by all manner of psychologists and other con-artists. The experts gave me these “psychometric” tests and also exercises in something called “numerical reasoning”. Some of the questions went a bit like this:

What is the next number in the following sequence? 2,4,6,8,?

There are several ways of answering that. A professor in a liberal arts college would refuse to play on the grounds that numbers are racist. Most other people would give the safe answer “10”.

A genius, on the other hand, would say that the next number can be anything you want it to be, perhaps not even a number at all, because as Wittgenstein points out no rule can determine its own application ¹. Why not insist that the rule is “add 2 until you get to 8 and then add 13”? Who’s to say that “21” is wrong?

The consensus thinker will participate in the test. The genius will interrogate the assumptions behind it.

This is what the genius does, he just sees the world differently and yet within the parameters of formal logical consistency. It is not quite true when people say that “genius is very close to madness”. Chesterton points this out in Orthodoxy, that the madman’s mind moves in a perfect but very narrow circle. The genius, in contrast, thinks consistently but imaginatively. And in ways that ought to shock the rest of us.

There are a few geniuses in public life. Bowie was one, I think. Bob Dylan, whose lyricism always finds the transcendent in the very ordinary (check out his X account) is another ².

Donald J. Trump is clearly a genius, and whatever this Middle East “peace” turns into he has created an inflexion point that would have been beyond the imaginative scope of the lifer diplomats, credential class pundits, regime academics, “experts”, and other tireless and tiresome defenders of the “right way of doing things” – the people who would keep the “received wisdom” hooked up to machines and permanently on life-support even though it has been deprived of oxygen for about fifty years.

These career sequence-fetishists, all of whom would have answered “10” without blinking, are the New Platonists who insist on the existence of the restyled Universals of “shared values” and “fundamental human rights” which are decent enough as flourishes in an address to the UN or on the Senate floor but which have unforgivably been allowed to become base currency in the more serious business of international statecraft. “Banners and balloons” diplomacy, if I can borrow a phrase from the critics of the Second Vatican Council.

Trump has looked at the assumptions behind the “international rules-based order” orthodoxy and has concluded, correctly, that its advocates are trapped by sequence or process paralysis. He has spotted that there are no “shared values” between the countries of the Middle East, but that there are common interests, and that these are better defined in the grounded language of the business deal than in the worthy but useless abstractions of the has-been Neo-Cons or their globalist equivalents on the Left.

And let’s take a moment to take-in what we might call the “overall aesthetic” of the Trump foreign policy paradigm shift, and the replacement of the career envoy with the part-timer on sabbatical from his normal job as a real estate billionaire, whose chief qualification is if not to be actually related to Trump then at least to be mates with him.

The 47th President of the United States of America has learned from his predecessor, the 45th holder of that office, that there is no “norm”, “protocol” or “established way of doing things” that wouldn’t benefit from being completely ignored or (even better) discarded altogether. Because these are the polite traps laid by the permanent government to give the temporary (elected) interlopers something to do while they get on with whatever it is the “powers and principalities” have instructed them to do. Which, whatever it is, will not have yours or my best interests front and centre.

They didn’t expect Blue Collar America to stick it to them in the person of a brash TV producer who made camp cool again and whose genius can’t be contained by the etiquette of “correct” sequencing. Whatever happens tomorrow, the Middle East is better for their impertinence today.

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^{1 There is a great but controversial treatment of Wittgenstein’s thoughts on this by Saul Kripke in his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982).}

^{2 Dylan’s genius is shown in his contemporary performances which are basically piss takes of his stupidly loyal (from his point of view) followers. Peter Hitchens is, though I hate to say it, astute in pointing this out.}