{"id":312395,"date":"2026-01-26T12:00:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T12:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=312395"},"modified":"2026-01-22T08:25:18","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T08:25:18","slug":"trumps-ideology-trashes-human-dignity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/01\/trumps-ideology-trashes-human-dignity\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s Ideology Trashes Human Dignity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Within a World System that Crushes Human Dignity<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

21 Jan 2026 – <\/em>It is important to remind ourselves that the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights was perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the 20th<\/sup> century. That century was otherwise a long nightmare of torture, murder, and mutual slaughter (see Jonathan Glover\u2019s Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century,<\/em> 1999). The resounding foundation of the 1948 Declaration resides in its Preamble \u00a0affirming that \u201crecognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.\u201d \u00a0Glover shows in great detail that ignoring this principle characterized the genocidal nightmare of much of the 20th<\/sup> century.\u00a0 Nevertheless, the UN Declaration was the culmination of a two century-long work of \u201cenlightenment,\u201d deriving from the initial 18th<\/sup> century recognition of human rights by such thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Immanuel Kant.<\/p>\n

The human dignity movement has yet to transform human civilization into one of peace, justice, and freedom. It struggles against immense systemic forces that I describe below. Yet it is our one real hope for a decent future for humanity on planet Earth. In the words of historian Samuel Moyn in his book The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History <\/em>(2010), a world civilization based on human rights must succeed or humanity will fail and human civilization will come to a miserable end. My recent book Human Dignity and World Order <\/em>(2024), shows that the dignity marking our common humanity needs to take the form of democratic world government under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. <\/em>There is no way this can happen under our current fragmented world system, described below.<\/p>\n

In ethical terms, all fascist and neofascist movements embrace a perverted \u201cprinciple of utility\u201d (or \u201cUtilitarianism\u201d) to justify their cruelty and contempt.\u00a0 The principle of utility declares that \u201cAction X is right if it promotes the greatest good of the greatest number.\u201d\u00a0 Hence there is nothing that is intrinsically wrong. \u201cAction X\u201d can be anything at all, such as torture or genocide, which is to be justified by some imagined \u201cgreater good.\u201d\u00a0 This is the very opposite of what Immanuel Kant had posited as the essence of morality: \u201cAlways treat every person as an end in themselves, never merely as a means.\u201d\u00a0 To treat persons as ends in themselves means to recognize their inviolable dignity, Kant explicitly affirmed, that is, their intrinsic human rights.<\/p>\n

If persons have dignity, they cannot be used as a mere \u201cmeans to an end\u201d as utility attempts to do. Hence, the \u201ccommon good,\u201d must be the good of all as mediated through the dignity of each. Philosopher Alan Gewirth shows in The Community of Rights <\/em>(1996) that each person person has dignity and worth because we are free agents capable of projecting a future and actualizing that future. Our innate \u201cfreedom\u201d is practically a synonym for \u201cdignity,\u201d since neither of these concepts can be commodified or reduced to a merely natural process. As philosopher Emmanuel Levinas declared: a human being contains more than is possible to contain.\u201d We transcend our natural, manipulable physical selves in multiple ways. Our dignity, like our freedom, can be termed \u201ccosmic\u201d or \u201contological.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kant\u2019s thought, of course, was framed within a Christian tradition with its roots in the Gospels. When Jesus gives \u201cthe Great Commandment\u201d in Matthew 22 to \u201clove God with all your heart, soul, and mind and love your neighbor as yourself,\u201d he declares that the entire revelation from God (and the covenant with God) is summed up in this commandment.\u00a0 And when, in Matthew 25, the cosmic Christ declares \u201cwhen you have done it to one of these my brethren you have done it unto me,\u201d it becomes clear that every person<\/em> partakes of the image and sacredness of God and therefore possesses an inviolable dignity no matter how insignificant they appear to be within society. The so-called \u201cChristian\u201d followers of Donald Trump entirely ignore these foundational principles of their religious tradition. Sometimes they even distort their false God into a utilitarian like Trump by believing that Trump may be evil but he is being used by God to bring in the Parousia<\/em>, hence, we have another instance of individual dignity being sacrificed to some imagined \u201cgreater good.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cUtility\u201d means that any \u201cX\u201d can be sacrificed for the greater good; hence, even an innocent person can be sent to the gallows if the authorities believe that some greater good will be served by this. Similarly, during the Cold War, the CIA blew up school buses in Italy and committed other terrorist atrocities in order to blame this on the \u201cCommunists,\u201d for in the CIA\u2019s perverted thinking, the sacrifice of a few school children was nothing compared to the great good of defeating Communism.\u00a0 Similarly Donald Trump blew up boats and their passengers in the Caribbean with no evidence of wrongdoing and no due process, claiming the greater good of inhibiting drug trafficking to the USA.<\/p>\n

The targeting of some out-groups as enemies immediately denies their human dignity.\u00a0 The Trump ideological cover begins with targeting \u201cillegal immigrants,\u201d which then soon spreads to all immigrants, which also, we have all seen, spreads to all who look non-white. But once some group is excluded from their intrinsic human dignity, the slippery slope has begun.\u00a0 Dignity is simply no longer recognized as the basis for governmental authority and legitimacy.\u00a0 If some citizens are murdered (like Renee Good) as part of the effort to \u201ccleanse\u201d America of impurity, then no one is any long exempt from being the \u201cX\u201d that is to be sacrificed on the way to some imagined \u201cgreater good.\u201d\u00a0 Nothing is forbidden in the quest to \u201cMake America Great Again.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Kant\u2019s stunning 18th<\/sup> century focus on the recognition of human dignity as the core of morality, along came Hegel in the 19th<\/sup> century with his vast metaphysical vision of \u201cfreedom\u201d dialectically emerging from the processes of human history. The \u201ccunning of reason,\u201d he said, was using the wars and destruction taking place everywhere in the service of this great goal. Here we have another version of the perverse doctrine of utilitarianism\u2014history is sacrificing many in its metaphysical quest for an emergent better world. 20th<\/sup> century French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas pointed out that Hegel\u2019s \u201ctotalizing\u201d vision violates the \u201cinfinity\u201d (infinite worth) within each person, that quality which gives us our inviolable dignity and demands \u201cthou shall not kill.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thomas Jefferson was also part of the emergent 18th<\/sup> century recognition of human dignity. All persons, he declared, were \u201cendowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.\u201d\u00a0 This principle became embodied in the US Constitution.\u00a0 The Constitution is a flawed document, to be sure, in which citizen representation in the federal government is very undemocratically apportioned, but nevertheless, it embraced the notion of the due process of law<\/em> as a right of all persons within its territory.<\/p>\n

Let us be clear. Early modern science through the 19th<\/sup> century appeared to reduce<\/em> humanity to nothing but another physical species among the proliferation of life forms on Earth, even challenging human freedom under its trilateral concepts of mechanism, determinism, and atomism (discussed below). Nevertheless, a counter narrative had been emerging since such Renaissance in works such as Pico della Mirandola\u2019s Oration on the Dignity of Man <\/em>(1486), followed by Blas\u00e9 Pascal\u2019s intuition of an \u201cinfinity\u201d in humans that defies our apparent insignificance within the vast cosmos (1662). This counter narrative on human dignity came to a widespread awareness in the 18th<\/sup> century \u201cEnlightenment\u201d and led to the democratic revolutions against tyranny in France and the USA. Today, the 20th<\/sup> century paradigm shift to evolutionary holism has at last provided a scientific framework compatible with our recognition of dignity and freedom.<\/p>\n

The USA Constitution recognizes citizens\u2019 rights that government cannot suspend, and these rights are ultimately protected by due process of law for any and all persons accused of something by governmental authority. It is this right to due process that Trump\u2019s ideology is attempting to suspend, first for persons in the country who are not citizens, but immediately following upon this, for all who look different or are legal immigrants, and ultimately for all who get in the way of the immense drive for some perverted \u201cgreater good\u201d (like the killing of Renee Good) and many other victims of the militarized ICE war on everything in America that these neofascists dislike (such as \u201cDemocrats\u201d or \u201cprotesters\u201d).<\/p>\n

A number of eminent contemporary philosophers of law have reached similar conclusions about the necessity of law protecting human dignity through specifying due process with respect to human rights (e.g., John Finnis, Ronald Dworkin, Lon Fuller, and David Luban). Luban, in Legal Ethics and Human Dignity <\/em>(2007 ) argues that law recognizes each human being as a personality \u201cwith a story to tell\u201d and that the court system makes possible each person telling their story even in the face of governmental authority. He says that \u201cthere is nothing absurd about connecting human dignity with legal personality and human rights\u201d (67). In fact that is the very essence of a legitimate legal system.<\/p>\n

It is well known that USA first lady Eleanor Roosevelt was a leading force in the formulation of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A sense of human dignity was perhaps also behind the \u201cNew Deal\u201d of her husband, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who felt that workers should share more equitably in the wealth they helped create by receiving social security, employer based health insurance, and other benefits from their participation in the common welfare of the nation. This attribution of dignity to American workers was to be undercut, not only by subversion from the US oligarchy of wealth, by also by the US imperial struggle with the \u201cevils of communism\u201d in which the dignity and rights of people around the world were discarded by US invasions, overthrows, subversions, and sanctions.<\/p>\n

It is also true that the communism of the Soviet Union used state power to crush human dignity among its citizens and to ensure ideological conformity.\u00a0 It claimed (in a twisted interpretation of Marx) that the ideology of human rights was a bourgeois subterfuge to cover exploitation and domination. To an extent this was true, of course. The rhetoric of human rights by the US imperialists was unconscionable. Nevertheless, we all intuitively know that a world system based on universal human rights is possible.<\/p>\n

In this respect, the motto of the French Revolution extoling \u201cliberty, equality, and fraternity\u201d (or \u201ccommunity\u201d), remains intuitively correct, and neither Soviet communism nor American capitalism approximated this three-dimensional ideal. Liberty <\/em>requires recognition of human dignity, but so do equality<\/em> and community.<\/em> In the name of the dignity of each, the private accumulation of wealth must be apportioned properly by enforceable laws to create real \u201cequality before the law.\u201d And the promotion of community necessarily means that the majority of the community recognize that their dignity is protected by the laws and not sidelined for the benefit of the rich (like Jeffrey Epstein), or \u00a0some \u201cMAGA\u201d ideology, or some preferred oligarchy. The philosophical consequence this French revolutionary ideal is a democratic socialism<\/em> in which the private accumulation of wealth is limited to where it no longer destroys both equality and community (as it does today in the USA).<\/p>\n

Therefore, to place Trump\u2019s ideology within a larger context, the corruption that has infected the Executive Branch of the US government has its roots in the self-defeating world system that we have inherited from the early modern, post-Renaissance development of science.\u00a0 Thinkers in the 17th<\/sup> century were beginning to draw conclusions about the nature of the world that the scientists were discovering.\u00a0 Their views were synthesized by Sir Isaac Newton\u2019s great Principia Mathematica <\/em>of 1687.\u00a0 The universe, they believed, was a giant mechanism<\/em>, deterministically <\/em>following the iron laws of \u201cbodies in motion,\u201d and it was fundamentally atomistic<\/em>, in which the parts could always be dissected into their component elements to revel how things worked.<\/p>\n

The immense paradigm shift of the 20th<\/sup> and 21st<\/sup> centuries has proved all three of these ideas wrong: the universe is not mechanistic<\/em> but organic. For organic realities, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The universe is not deterministic<\/em> but includes an emergent freedom and openness to evolutionary change, and the universe is not atomistic<\/em> but holistic, with everything interdependent with everything else. Nevertheless, the basic components of our world system today were institutionalized in and around the 17th<\/sup> century with its dogmas of mechanism, determinism, and atomism.\u00a0 Most scholars point to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 as the beginnings of the system of sovereign nation-states.\u00a0 The atomism of dividing the world into autonomous territories with absolute borders recognizing no effective laws above themselves seemed natural to many thinkers of the 17 and 18th<\/sup> centuries.<\/p>\n

Our world system remains an interlocking mechanism of corporate capitalism and militarized autonomous nation-states, institutionalized as such more than 350 years ago. As political scientist Christopher Chase-Dunn writes: \u201cThe system of unequally powerful and competing nation-states is part of the competitive struggle of capitalism, and thus wars and geopolitics are a systematic part of capitalist dynamics, not exogenous forces\u201d (1998, 61).\u00a0 These two components of our world system derive from the discredited early-modern paradigm that could find no conceptual room for human dignity or human rights. In the 17th<\/sup> century, British thinker Thomas Hobbes summed up our human condition as a \u201cwar of all against all.\u201d MAGA is essentially an attempt to go back in history at least to the 19th<\/sup> century where imperialism and naked power in the service of ideology were not seriously questioned, a war in which the only determining factor is not moral principles based on human dignity, but who has the most power.<\/p>\n

The standard notion of capitalism formulates a mechanism<\/em> for extracting profit and wealth.\u00a0 Invest capital in an enterprise, procure resources and the elements of production (including labor or \u201chuman resources\u201d), distribute the product effectively for sale in a competitive market, and reap private profit from the process. No limits are placed on the quantity of private wealth deriving from this mechanistic process.\u00a0 The wealth adheres to atomistic corporations and individual wealthy persons who may use this private wealth as they see fit, which (the theory maintains) will nearly always be in the interest of themselves and their enterprises. Hence, \u201chuman resources\u201d are just part of a mechanical equation for accumulating unlimited private wealth.\u00a0 Our intrinsic human dignity is recognized nowhere in this system.<\/p>\n

Like capitalism, the system of sovereign nation-states adheres to the early-modern model of mechanism, determinism, and atomism.\u00a0 Each atomistic sovereign nation pursues its \u201cnational self-interest\u201d within a competitive framework in which all other nations are doing the same. Like the wealthy atoms of capitalism, some nations become more powerful than others with the result of imperialism and\/or wars with other nations promoting their own self-interest. As with capitalism, nations struggle with one another for wealth, power, resources, and markets. Within this nation-state-capitalist system, the emergent counter-movement focusing on human dignity challenges every one of these early modern assumptions.<\/p>\n

Recognition of human dignity is fundamentally compatible with the new paradigm emphasizing organism, freedom, indeterminism, and evolutionary holism. This formula that \u201crecognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world\u201d is a principle emerging from the holistic evolutionary process that applies to the whole of human civilization and to every person under the principle of unity in diversity. Holism means all\u2014everyone, as well as the wholeness of our planetary ecosystem. That is why the Earth Constitution<\/em>, structured democratically on this principle of unity in diversity with its guarantee of universal human rights to all persons everywhere, must be the true North Star of all our thought and action.<\/p>\n

All forms of neofascism attempt to impose special interests and fragmented prejudices on all the others. They cling to an outdated paradigm involving endless war and power-struggles, and refuse to \u201cgrow-up\u201d to a level where love, compassion, tolerance, and evolutionary holism supersede the war of all against all with its dehumanizing assumptions. The cosmic gift to human beings is precisely this capacity for evolutionary holism in which are are tasked to bring out of history a planetary civilization of \u201cpeace, justice, and freedom,\u201d or, in similar words, a planetary civilization of \u201cliberty, equality, and community.\u201d Our struggles against Trump take on a larger meaning beyond defending democracy within one nation-state.\u00a0 In essence, they are struggles on behalf of universal human dignity for all of humanity.\u00a0 The key turning point in this struggle will involve the ratification of the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.<\/em><\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Dr. Glen T. Martin:
\n– Member, <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/em><\/a>
\n– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
\n– Founder\/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
\n– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
\n– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
\n– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
\n<\/em>www.earthconstitution.world<\/em><\/a> \u2013 Email: <\/em>gmartin@radford.edu<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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