The fool's transitive

the graveyard of enemies

This is the transitive property of mathematics:
"If A=B, and B=C, then A=C”

This is the fool’s transitive:
“If I hate A and so does B,
Then I love B and B loves me”

You may know the fool’s transitive by its more familiar name: “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” As the eponymous “fool” of the “fool’s transitive,” I feel qualified to describe it to you.

A quintessential cinematic example of it is the empowering of the Joker by Gotham’s crime bosses to deal with Batman in The Dark Knight. They end up dead or neutered as the Joker runs rampant, burning piles of their money along with the city as a whole. “A treacherous weapon is ever a danger to the hand,” as Tolkien says.

In the real world, it is the philosophy that has unleashed the cane toad as an invasive species in Australia. First spread to fight agricultural pests, it has expanded like wildfire. While it was (at least initially) successful in some areas, cane toads Down Under failed to eat the pests they were brought in to control and instead compete with local species for food, disrupting the ecosystem and reducing biodiversity.

It is also the philosophy that partly animated the alliance of the US with the Soviet Union against the Nazis, then its subsequent alliance with Afghan Mujahadeen (forerunners of the Taliban) against the Soviet Union. Or our support of Saddam Hussein against Iran in the First Gulf War.

Trump is a major user-inducer of this effect. If you love him, it is probably because you fell for the fool’s transitive. If you hate him, you are either in the process of falling for the fool’s transitive, or at great risk of doing so. (Of course, indifference and neutrality with respect to both Trump and his enemies carry their own risks, in multiple directions.)

But part of why this mindset is so dangerous is that we even apply it when we perceive both sides as our enemies, as long as we can assign one as a greater enemy. This is the “lesser of two evils” trap. In the absence of an absolute good, the brain generates a relative good via contrast and comparison. And it’s funny how often the “lesser of two evils” becomes an advocated-for “good.” The human mind abhors internal contradiction and support by negation is psychologically distasteful and untenable. Something has to give, and often it’s that we lose sight of the broader context in which forces of enmity are driving a race to the bottom in our personal, societal, and ecological lives. And it is a race to the bottom. We end up riding a pipeline of logic made by combining “the lesser of two evils” with the fool’s transitive: “The lesser of two evils is my friend,” or, to put it in absolute terms, “An evil is my friend.”