#irrationality

« Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places.

“Foreign to Olympus, a stranger coming to the city from the mysterious landscapes of the sea, the mountains, or the east, Dionysus, the god who subverted the traditional structures of the sacrifice, was at the same time the privileged son of Zeus, the first cousin of the king of Thebes — his native city — and the god who offered to man the possibility of establishing the most intimate communication with the sacred by means of enthusiasm and possession. The very being of Dionysus is the focal point of all of the important contradictions which human reason is unable to bear alone: between identity and otherness, presence and absence, imagination and reality, the absolute and nothingness, power and fragility, life and death, eternity and transition. An irruption of the sacred into the world, of the miracle at the heart of day-to-day life, of the irrational in the center of the city, he is the very paroxysm of tragic tension.”

"The lesson of Wuthering Heights, of Greek tragedy and, ultimately, of all religions, is that there is an instinctive tendency towards divine intoxication which the rational world of calculation cannot bear."