George Monbiot suggests that we can see human values as clustering around two poles, extrinsic and intrinsic (To beat Trump, we need to know why Americans keep voting for him. Psychologists may have the answer, January 29). There may be something more at play.
In 1980, the physicist David Bohm wrote about explicit and implied orders in reality. Before the advent of quantum theory, said Bohm’s colleague and biographer, David Peat, science was about the order of space and time, separation and distance, mechanical force and effective cause, which Bohm called the explicit order. He posited a deeper order, more congruent with quantum theory and closer to our unconditioned thinking. He called it the implicate or wrapped order.
Previous attempts to grasp this “something” outside of us include the terms immanent and transcendent, originated from Latin in Late Middle English. More related to Monbiot’s exposition: in 2009 Iain McGilchrist published a book subtitled The Divided Brain and the Emergence of the Western World. Running, but preferably considering your actual Trump.
Janet Dubé
Peebles, Scottish Borders
One element that encourages the glorification of wealth, power and success is the ubiquity of game shows. There seems to be no end to the ingenuity of show makers in finding ways to pit individuals against each other for fame and financial rewards.
A competition that celebrates deception, like The Traitors, seems particularly ridiculous. However, they all emphasize the value that winning is the pinnacle of ambition, enhanced by plenty of razzmatazz. I abhor the whole exploitative plight of them and despair for the fate of the planet, which will depend on cooperation to survive.
Hazel Davies
newtonle-Willows, Merseyside
The two-party system, George Washington noted in his 1796 farewell address, “has committed the most terrible enormities and is itself a terrifying despotism”. Donald Trump is only the denouement of a divisive, despotic, binary politics: “binary voting” in elections and binary voting in decision-making.
Peter Emerson
Director, the de Borda Institute
