Information Theory and the Trump Assassination Attempt
Exploring recent events at all levels of abstraction, from the object-level to the meta
If nothing else, the Trump assassination was an incredible coincidence. As
puts it, “Trump gets grazed by a bullet, bleeds flamboyantly from a tiny wound on the outside of his ear, and is barely hurt. This is astronomically improbable. Our situation is mythological: We wouldn’t believe it if we saw it in a film.”Pinchbeck traces a mythopoetic arc around recent events. We start with the status quo of Joe Biden, the “weak king” whose frailty mirrors our own—a king who reflects a “collective failure of resolve, willpower, intellect, cunning, feeling, and courage.” Americans see themselves in their President, and it isn’t pretty.
As in all myths, the “normal world” that precedes the story is disquieting, stagnant, and heavy with the sense that something is wrong. It needs to change. And whether we like it or not, the myth rips that world away from us.
And on July 13th, 2024 that world was ripped away and the events swiftly mythologized—particularly by Trump’s supporters. Trump himself attributed the event to divine intervention, claiming that “God was my side” and he “wasn’t supposed to be here.”
You don’t need to be religious to feel a sense of significance at the above image. Whether Trump is taken as symbolic savior or antichrist, there’s something about his attempted assassination that feels like it’s part of a story.
This is the mythological level. It’s not the only way to interpret these events, but it’s an important one.
Information Theory
In information theory we talk about different levels at which we can analyze events. Some choose to focus on mythos and story, like we just did, but another choice is to meet events head on. What actually happened. The facts. Aside from how anyone views or interprets them.
This is called the Object Level, and this Less Wrong post argues that it’s become neglected. Instead of hammering down the facts of what happens, we satisfy ourselves with a general Gestalt, and then rush to make and consume reaction content. How will this affect voters? How’s that photo of Trump playing in the polls? Is Kamala electable?
The Object Level is high resolution: intricate and finely detailed. It’s also low abstraction: with few Big Concepts drawing things together.1
At the other end of the spectrum are various levels of meta. Meta is when we talk about the discourse around something, or the discourse around the discourse—we’d call the former ‘first order’ meta, the latter ‘second order’ meta. We can even extrapolate to the nth order meta where things are so nested and convoluted that we’ve lost count. As we move up the levels of meta, we adopt concepts, hopefully useful ones, but at the cost of a growing distance from the concrete details of what we’re discussing—in other words, we gain abstraction at the cost of resolution.
I’ve designed this meter to help us track where we are on this spectrum:
In this article I’ll go through different ways of looking at the Trump assassination attempt, starting with the object level and ramping up the meta as we go.
Object Level - mainstream
Abstractions are important, but I’d argue that when it comes to political analysis, it’s crucial to remain grounded at the object level. If we can’t explain what actually happened, analysis aside, then we don’t really understand.
So what happened on July 13th, 2024? The mainstream consensus is as following:
20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks showed up at a Trump rally in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.
He shot at the former president with an AR-15. The first bullet grazed Trump’s ear, leaving him unharmed. Subsequent shots killed one person and injured two others.
Crooks was shot dead by the secret service.
Trump, having been told the shooter was neutralized, stood with his face covered in blood and started pumping his fist in the air, repeatedly shouting “Fight!” The crowd cheered, and photojournalists took photos of Trump with his fist in the air.
Crooks was bullied and lacked friends. His politics were unclear: he was a member of the Republican party, but he donated to the Progressive Turnout Project. His motives remain unclear. Bomb-making materials were found in his car.
Several rallygoers brought their attention to Crooks, but they weren’t able to intercept him in time. Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle has since resigned.
If we wanted to, we could go even higher resolution. Comb for every detail, follow the secret service hearings, go full journalist and interview relevant parties. But we’ll leave it at that for now.
I know some of you reached for your tin hats at the first mention of ‘mainstream,’ but don’t worry, I’ve got you.
Object Level - conspiratorial
According to a new poll, 20% of voters believe it’s “credible” that the Trump assassination attempt was an inside job. The two basic conspiracy narratives are as follows:
The Trump orchestrated this to make the man look good
The Biden Camp/CIA/Deep State orchestrated this to kill Trump and bungled it
According to the same poll, 33% of Biden supporters and 12% of Trump supporters believe one of the two theories, presumably respectively.2 This should put to bed any claim that liberals are the less conspiracy credulous side of the aisle.
There’s no evidence for either of these, and neither really passes the common sense test (particularly the former—no sniper in the world is accurate enough to deliberately and reliably get the ear). Intuitively it makes more sense to me that some random kid wanted to kill Trump, security was disorganized, and things went off in the random, chaotic, lucky way that life so often does.
Shift in Trump perception / Propagandistic level
Meta level 2: Talking about what people are talking about
In the wake of recent disaster, it’s probably wise that a collective soul searching is taking place. And of course, the major figure being re-evaluated is Donald Trump.
I saw an interesting Twitter thread by Liv Lovelace. It’s about how her dislike of Trump has lost its emotional heft since the shooting. As she puts it, “I no longer instinctively dislike the guy. I still *know* he's the wrong choice, but I don't *feel* negative towards him.” She describes it as though she watched an episode from the villain’s perspective and he ended up being a pretty cool guy.
She chalks this up to “propaganda,” a sticky concept indeed. There are two main thinkers who’ve impacted our thinking on the topic: Edward Bernays and Jacques Ellul, each of whom wrote a book, with both books, confusingly, titled Propaganda. Despite sharing a book title, the two men hold very different views. Bernays considered (deliberate) propaganda a necessary tool for swaying public opinion and maintaining order in a democracy. Ellul was more cautious about propaganda, seeing it as a dangerous force with the power to undermine individual autonomy and corrode democracy.
Bernays would likely point to the iconic image at the start of this article as an example of the power of images and emotions. If someone were to write an op-ed making the argument that Trump was just like the soldiers at Iwo Jima fighting a heroic battle against enemies that represent the worst of what humanity has to offer—well, it probably wouldn’t convince anyone who wasn’t already on board. But the photo kicks the argument right into the gut. While one’s prefrontal cortex yammers about Trump’s policies and how this changes nothing about him as a politician,3 that voice is suddenly sounding pretty pedantic, and uncharitable, and, well, downright small. There’s a man. He was shot. And he’s standing, fist in the air.
Narrative / Mythopoetic level
Meta level n: Compound nesting
We exist within nested systems—but it’s not clear what is nested within what. Jacques Ellul might view the tendency to narrativize as nested within the larger system of democracy, creating a kind of existential mismatch: the system relies on our sense of reason to function, but our reason is so often undermined by sentiment.
But there’s another way to look at it—that we exist within a larger human narrative, in the context of which democracy is a mere chapter. Certain story elements echo through time, and these patterns are called archetypes, and represent the mythological layer of the human experience.
puts it as such: “An American hero-slash-villain who is bloodied but unbowed. Now he will rise from the ground to save-slash-destroy us. Look: a lucky photographer has framed the moment in a way that resembles one of that nation’s best known images of liberation.Nobody needed to plan this. It is myth in action. What we call ‘politics’ is always a manifestation of what is happening in the depths, but in the depths move forces that are beyond us. Sometimes you see images that make this clear to you.”
We exist in the normal, vaguely foreboding world. We live our life with a vague unease, and then—something bad happens! Almost! But triumphs! Death-and-rebirth! Suddenly Trump is looking different, even to his enemies. False prophet or true prophet, does it even matter? Is our rational function being deceived, or are we right to follow our intuition here?
Carl Jung believed these patterns that seem to echo through history exist in the collective unconscious, though it’s not totally clear what that term means. Kingsnorth and Pinchbeck seem to believe it’s a literally existing spiritual layer. But even if you don’t believe in the spiritual, our intuitive and emotional selves might pick up wisdom our rational minds miss, from a combination of hot cognition, genetic memory, and dreamlike creative associations.
Conclusion
In the wake of Trump’s assassination, it’s fair to say that things feel scary, intense, and imbued with significance. Given how flattering the symbolic and mythic associations are to Trump, it’s no surprise that liberals and conservatives are reacting differently. The liberal impulse, in this moment, is to disenchant the narrative, reduce its significance and ground us back at the object level.4 While the conservatives move is to embrace the transcendent, lose themselves in the spark of the moment, and urge others to do the same.5
Rudolf Steiner, a late 19th/early 20th century spiritualist, identifies two archetypes of evils that menace the modern man: the Luciferian and Ahrimanic. The Luciferian path is one where freedom, creativity, intuition and spiritual exploration are pursued, but to an excess—leading to disconnection from reality, and narcissistic absorption in one’s own insights. The Ahrimanic is coldly rational, materialistic in every sense, skeptical to the point of total disenchantment. This path risks turning the world into a machine.
At this moment, the liberal and conservative impulse both track to self-interest, and onto the two evil-ish failure modes described above. I’d argue that integration is a more fruitful way forward, and can be broken down into the following steps:
Remember that all levels are important: from the Object Level, through the levels of meta up to the mythopoetic. A full human cultivates both a brain and a soul—with only one, we are divided into Scarecrows and Tin Men.
When we encounter others operating from a different sets of abstractions from our own—treat that person as a chance to learn. You don’t need to adopt their views wholesale, but but by approach them with openness, interest, and sincerity you may gain some perspectives you might otherwise miss.
If we boil things down to a simple cliché (a useful exercise at times), we might just say that the whole is stronger than its parts, both on an individual level, and collectively.
We can’t do away with concepts entirely, short of eliminating language and reverting to grunts and gestures (insert joke here about the level of political discourse).
Wouldn’t it be refreshing if for once people’s outlandish speculations went against type? Like if the progressives were all, “we hate Trump, but we gotta admit, this was definitely a CIA operation to take him down.”
Hopefully your prefrontal cortex notices this kinda thing regardless of your political alignment
Pinchbeck is a notable exception, contending that “Trump continues to have an occult field of protection around him that protects him from harm.”
These dynamics have changed a bit since Biden dropped out and Harris got the nomination, but that’s beyond the scope of this article.
Some notes:
Re "As in all myths, the “normal world” that precedes the story is disquieting, stagnant, and heavy with the sense that something is wrong. It needs to change. And whether we like it or not, the myth rips that world away from us"
Amusing performative contradiction/enaction: not all myths are bleak. Many speak to hope, faith, valour, and our ineffable capacity to endure. Myths make civilizations. We've just become deaf to those ones
"I know some of you reached for your tin hats at the first mention of ‘mainstream,’ but don’t worry, I’ve got you."
I love this languaging
Re "Intuitively it makes more sense to me that some random kid wanted to kill Trump, security was disorganized, and things went off in the random, chaotic, lucky way that life so often does."
YES. The world turns on curious rolls of dice sometimes. Collectively we must confabulate explanatory mechanisms within the frames of the structures that support our collective's existence. Ie render them intelligible to the constituents of the collective. All very cute. But sometimes it's just dice
Re "It is myth in action. What we call ‘politics’ is always a manifestation of what is happening in the depths, but in the depths move forces that are beyond us. Sometimes you see images that make this clear to you"
Yes. I love this