Andrew Fiala, Ph.D.

Creative activity gives life meaning, purpose, and joy. Parenting and friendship are among the most obvious of life’s joyful activities. You can also make art or conduct laboratory research. You can master a musical instrument or learn a foreign language. You can cook, quilt, or scrapbook.

But some of us also seek dangerous and strenuous physical activities that tests our limits and remind us of our mortality. We climb mountains, run marathons, or compete in contact sports. We enjoy the sweat and adrenaline. The burning muscles and the risk are delightful.

To be human is not merely to work, eat, and sleep. We also enjoy the delight of moving gracefully across the earth. Human beings are free and playful beings who decorate the planet with color and light, beauty and gladness.

Wonder, Beauty, and Joy

Skiing combines the thrill of speed with the serenity of ice-covered mountains. It involves the camaraderie of the ski lift and the après-ski bar, as well as the quiet solitude of evergreen trees and soft snowy glades. Skiing takes you where the mountain air is crisp and cold. It requires you to cut a path through the snow using gravity, muscle, and skill.

Skiing demands a lifetime of practice. The weather and snow conditions are ever-changing. Each slope provides a new challenge. When the wind howls and the snow turns icy, it can be nasty. But when fresh powder beckons on a bluebird day, nothing is more wonderful.

The best ski days are rare. Indeed, the sport only exists for a few precious winter months. It is the scarcity of skiing’s exquisite days that makes them so precious. And even the worst day skiing provides an opportunity to hone your craft.

When I think about skiing, I think about the fleeting nature of beauty and joy. Every so often, life presents us with wonder and delight. We should celebrate those rare gems that sparkle in the dark. Much of the time, we slog through the muck. We work and pay our taxes, do the laundry and empty the trash. But there are moments of elation that make us whoop and holler, and laugh out loud.

When I think about skiing, I think about the transformative power of those rare moments of exhilaration. At its best, skiing is pure play. Human beings are at our best when we play. Creativity and play are the source of beauty, wonder, and joy. Skiing can be like falling in love, or welcoming a newborn child, or writing a poem. The thrill of these playful jewels lingers, giving brilliant color to the dull grey of quotidian life.

Void and Presence of Mind

When I think about skiing, I also think about presence of mind, and what it takes to master an art. Mastery and effort are connected to virtue and happiness. Skiing is an activity that requires intensity of focus and deep concentration. It requires a kind of non-thinking mindfulness that is central to mastery in any art.

This state of focus and flow is enchanting. In it we discover presence and vitality. In concentrated alertness, there is no room for intrusive thoughts. On the steepest slopes, the only thing that can be thought is how to link one turn to the next.

One of my favorite novelists, Haruki Murakami, wrote a simple little book, What I Talk about When I Talk about Running. He explained, “As I run, I don’t think much of anything worth mentioning. I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.”[1]

I have run a few marathons and triathlons. When you swim, you can get lost in the rhythm of breath and water. At some point, on a long run, you lose track of time. This kind of immersion in activity is what occurs in pure play, when you lose yourself in activity.

Skiing provides access to the void, necessitated by the speed and danger of the sport. On the top of a steep slope, you inch your skis out over the edge. You peer into the abyss. And then you leap. Once launched, instinct takes over. You can’t think about what you are doing. Instead, your body moves itself, responding to the slope, the snow, and the pull of gravity. Your hips, quads, and core engage. You turn to slow your fall. And then, you turn again and again, dancing across the fall line, carving a curving line with grace and skill. Distraction means disaster, as you play with gravity.

In each turn, there is a moment of freedom as you fall and accelerate. You control your descent by driving your skis into the snow. The skis bend. You feel a bounce. And then you turn again. In powdery snow, the motion is less forceful and more free. Your skis float and flow. You ride them on a cushion of snowflakes and cold air.

Somewhere in these turns, the void is found. Yes, you are thinking. The mind races along with your skis, looking for bumps and surveying the ever-changing condition of the snow. You feel gravity’s pull, the pressure of boots on shins, and a burning in the quads. There are ten thousand things present in your mind. But also, you are skiing in the void. Present to the mountain, attuned to the snow, you are lost in mindful emptiness.

Skiing everywhere

Murakami employs running as a metaphor for writing. Writing requires endurance, focus, and continuous training. Intense concentration occurs when writing. The mind expands to include sentences, paragraphs, pages, and chapters. When presence and void occur in writing, the words flow through you and you disappear into the page.

Skiing is like that. There are moments when you disappear and there is nothing but motion and snow. It is gravity that does the work, pulling you down the fall line. All you do is control the fall, carving the snow in graceful turns.

This effort can be intense, and the void is hard to find. Beginners are exhausted after their first grueling journeys across the snow. But skill and experience make it easier and more playful. The master skier reaches the bottom quickly and with style. His thighs still burn. But instead of exhaustion, his expertise produces exhilaration.

Disciplined practice leads to elegant poise in all kinds of creative activity. The artists of life are accomplished skiers who know where to turn, when to slow down, and when to gather speed. Their motion is precise, controlled, and graceful. They still feel the pain and understand the danger of dancing across the fall line. But rather than struggling against gravity, they transform existence into play. Their falling becomes a poem or a song.

Samuel Beckett once said of human beings, “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” This is a cynical indictment of a meaningless universe. Skiers know better. We savor the light and enjoy the ride. If life is a process of plunging through time and across space, we can dance as we descend. We can transform our falling into a nimble work of art. No one can stop gravity or time. But we can control our speed. We can seek smoother snow and carve graceful turns. And every so often, there is bliss on a bluebird day.

[1] Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (New York: Knopf, 2008), Chap. 1.

Our Cultural Crisis

President Trump seems to have understood the point. But he is wrong to think that pop culture is somehow supposed to celebrate the mythic “greatness” of America. American art has often mocked that myth while revealing deep cracks in the American edifice.

In my recent newspaper column, I discussed recent cultural clashes involving the Super Bowl halftime show, Melania Trump’s vain documentary, and Bruce Springsteen’s protest song, “The Streets of Minneapolis.” I argued that art and culture have existential and political power:

Songs and images expose our humanity, our beauty as well as our ugliness. Powerful art demands that we question our values and decide where we stand… The existential import and political impact of the arts should not be underestimated. When conflicts of culture are as glaring as they are today, we are forced to consider what we love and who we are.

I quoted James Baldwin, whose life and art are instructive. Baldwin was a gay Black man who suggested that artists are often at war with society. This means, of course, that artists will provoke a backlash. Baldwin noted, in “The Creative Process,” that artists are often “despised while living and acclaimed when safely dead.” He explained:

I am really trying to make clear the nature of the artist’s responsibility to his society. The peculiar nature of this responsibility is that he must never cease warring with it, for its sake and for his own.

Baldwin referred to artists as “disturbers of the peace.” Building upon this idea, I argued, “Art can be propaganda. Art can also pacify, and entertainment can distract us from reality. But the best art provokes by illuminating the fissures of this broken world.”

Propaganda, Power, and Protest

The idea that art should celebrate American greatness imagines art as political propaganda. Governments often use art as propaganda. Authoritarian regimes seek to control the arts as a way of consolidating power. Tyrants build monuments to themselves. And American democracy celebrates itself with icons like the Statue of Liberty.

Art functions as propaganda when it aims to ‘propagate’ a message or idea. George Orwell once said, “Every writer, especially every novelist, has a ‘message’, whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda.”

If this is true, the crucial question is about the kind of ‘message’ motivating the work of art. Art can be used by reactionaries or by revolutionaries. Art can praise the powerful and amplify authority. Or it can express solidarity with the powerless, and seek their emancipation.

Some memorable works of art blatantly celebrate power and authority. The pyramids proclaimed Pharaoh’s divinity. The monuments of the ancient world commemorated the glory of Greece and Rome. And the cathedrals of medieval Europe manifested the power of the church.

But there has always been a different kind of art, which protests power and gives voice to the powerless. Greek drama functioned in this way. The tragedies of Sophocles mocked tyranny, while the comedies of Aristophanes lambasted the “ignoramuses and rogues” who ruled Athens.

Or consider opera. Opera is often viewed as stuffy and conservative. But it could be revolutionary. Mozart’s Don Giovanni poked at the pretensions of the aristocracy, while Beethoven’s Fidelio features a political prisoner who sings from the dungeon, “I dared to speak the truth boldly, and chains are my reward.”

The Rebellious American Tradition

In the American tradition, art has been used to celebrate national greatness in the Trumpian sense. Mount Rushmore is an obvious example. But critical themes are more common. This nation began, after all, as a slap in the face to British power.

During the American revolution, arts and culture were employed to drum up support for the American cause. But as the new nation grew, the heroes of American letters were often more interested in criticizing American power than in celebrating it.

Emerson and Thoreau condemned conformity, slavery, and militarism. Mark Twain denounced American imperialism. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck and other modern authors offered critical reflection on the decadent and disconsolate lives of Americans. And the Black literary tradition viewed the American dream as either “a dream deferred” (in Langston Hughes) or as “something much more closely resembling a nightmare,” as James Baldwin put it in The Fire Next Time.

The pop music of the Super Bowl’s halftime show has almost always been counter-cultural. Blues, jazz, and rock were invented by dispossessed Black Americans. The genre was developed further by hippies and counter-cultural icons like Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead. Even country music has its “outlaws” like Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash. One of the most iconic images of American music is Johnny Cash flipping off the camera when he played at San Quentin.

Art can be protest or propaganda. Artists can sell out, or they can sing truth to power. Authoritarians want art that flatters their egos. But art does not exist only to gratify the powerful or commemorate mythic greatness. It also disturbs the peace. And in America, art has often been a middle finger and a slap in the face.

The grammar of tyranny is pre-modern and un-American. Thomas Jefferson explained, “Law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual.” And the American libertarian author Lysander Spooner warned, “The single despot stands out in the face of all men, and says: I am the State: My will is law: I am your master.”

The Trumpian “I”

One of Donald Trump’s linguistic quirks is his tendency to speak in the first person when talking about matters of state. Trump often talks as if he alone controls the nation and decides the fate of the world. In a notorious recent interview with the New York Times Trump said that the only thing that limits him is, “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Consider Trump’s remarks about invading Greenland at the World Economic Forum in Davos:

We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be, frankly, unstoppable. But I won’t do that. Okay? Now everyone’s saying, ‘Oh, good.’ That’s probably the biggest statement I made, because people thought I would use force. But I don’t have to use force. I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force.

People were relieved to hear Trump say “I won’t use force.” But the autocratic grammar is disturbingly capricious. Apparently, the President simply decides this stuff, without consulting Congress. Perhaps a few sycophants whisper in his ear. But decisions of global import are a matter of his mercurial will.

Consider, for example, how tariffs on foreign nations come and go according to the President’s mood. He explained recently that tariffs imposed on Switzerland were the result of a testy conversation he had with Switzerland’s president. He said, “She just rubbed me the wrong way.”

This first-person linguistic habit is linked to Trump’s jokes about being a dictator. After his official Davos speech, Trump spoke to members of the ruling elite, bragging about how much he has benefited the oligarchic class. That’s where he said, “Sometimes you need a dictator.”

He seemed to imply that this was all a joke. But Thomas Jefferson would not be laughing.

A Smug Savior

Perhaps Trump fancies himself a benevolent despot. He explains his fantasy about the Nobel Peace Prize by appealing to his own benevolent power. At a recent press conference, the President bragged about saving millions of lives by resolving wars across the globe. He said, “I saved millions and millions of people… I saved probably tens of millions of lives in the wars.” And, “I saved millions of people. So that, to me, is the big thing.”

It is absurdly grandiose to claim that he alone saved millions of people. And it is terrifying to think that the lives of millions depend upon his benevolent will.

Trump appears to believe a self-aggrandizing narrative in which he is kind of savior. In his January 2025 inauguration speech, the President said (referring to a failed assassination attempt), “My life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.” He has repeated this point several times, including in a speech to a joint session of Congress in March, 2025.

The same theme appears in a notorious tweet from early 2025: “He who saves his country does not violate any law.”

Trump is clearly fascinated with his own power. He often brags about how he imposes his will on the world. For example, in a rambling press conference, the President joked about renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of Trump.

I was going to call it the Gulf of Trump, but I thought that I would be killed if I did that. I wanted to do it. I wanted to… I’m joking, you know, when I say that… The Gulf of Trump, that does have a good ring, though. Maybe we could do that. It’s not too late.

Trump is intoxicated with his power to name things after himself, as I argued in another column. Even if the Gulf of Trump idea is as much of a joke as his claim about being a dictator, these wisecracks disclose the smug hubris of Trump’s tyrannical “I.”

The Alarming Hubris of the Tyrannical I

It’s frighteningly absurd that decisions of global import are subject to the President’s hubristic whims. Sophocles warned that it is hubris that breeds the tyrant. The tyrannical “I” is hubris made manifest in grammar.

Several implications follow.

The tyrant’s “I” is supposed to be absolute. This means that those who oppose his will are guilty of treason. As Creon explains in Antigone, “Disobedience is the worst of evils.” This explains why Trump frequently accuses his opponents of treason, including Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, James Comey, and Mark Kelly. He conflates opposition to his will with treason to the state.

The tyrant’s “I” replaces reason with whim. Such puerile imperiousness is unmoored from reality. Tyrants make up their own facts because they can. The tyrannical manipulation of truth helps shore up the chaos generated by the tyrant’s arbitrary will. Consider for example, Trump’s absurd justification for renaming the Gulf of Mexico: “It’s the Gulf of America because we have 92 percent of the shoreline.” In truth, the U.S. has less than half of the coastline of the Gulf.

Not only is the tyrannical “I” divorced from truth but it is also untethered from the spirit of democracy. Our nation began with Americans denouncing the tyrannical and arbitrary will of King George in the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution’s separation of powers is supposed to limit the arbitrary caprice of the executive branch. Our government is supposed to be of the people, by the people, and for the people—not the willful imposition of one man’s mood.

Trump has not yet crossed the Rubicon. As I argued in my book on Trump and tyranny, our Constitutional system is strong enough to ensure that Trump remains merely a would-be tyrant, But under Trump, “we, the people” has increasingly become “me, myself, and I.”

In a follow up interview with CBS, the President said something similar.

I’m a moral person. I don’t like seeing death. I don’t like seeing our people hurt. I don’t like seeing the other side hurt either. You know, when we went into Venezuela, we lost nobody, but a lot of people on the other side were, were killed. I don’t like that. Somebody else would say, “Oh, that’s wonderful.” I don’t like that. So yeah, it’s limited by my morality and I have a very high grade of morality. So, therefore, it’s limited.

An authentic moral thinker would never speak of himself as having a “very high grade of morality.” Humility is a key feature of morality, along with deference to moral (and legal) authority, rules, and traditions. Even if one rejects these sources of morality, a careful thinker needs to make an argument. But Trump makes no arguments. Nor does he recognize his own flaws, even as his whims shake markets and destroy international alliances. The claim that he does not like seeing people hurt rings hollow, as federal forces employ violence, and the President demonizes those who dare to question his authority.

Trump rarely speaks of justice or human rights, love or the golden rule. He does not cite any moral idea, tradition, or thinker. Nor does he appeal to anything other than himself as a source of moral authority. This leads to his most abominably hubristic recent claim, “I think God is very proud of the job I’ve done.”

No morally articulate person would ever say such a thing.

Trump’s way of speaking is arrogant and imbecilic. When he said in the CBS interview, “I don’t like seeing death,” he avoided the word “killing,” thereby also avoiding the question of who is responsible for these deaths. And he only emphasizes the impact of “death” on him, aesthetically and emotionally. He doesn’t like seeing it. But he never says its “wrong” or “evil.” He offers no sympathy for the victims or their loved ones. Nor does he offer any argument about whether these killing are justified. Morally articulate people make arguments using abstract moral concepts. Trump says, as a child might, “I don’t like it.”

Trump’s “Values” in Context

In my book Tyranny From Plato to Trump, I showed that Trump lacks fluency in the language of ethics. I concluded that he is “morally inarticulate” and that he lacks a “moral vocabulary.” I also showed that Trump’s moral imbecility is an anomaly in the often inspiring tradition of the American presidency. Our greatest leaders were fluent in the language of morality. They spoke of values in inspiring ways.

In his Farewell Address, George Washington linked American greatness to magnanimity, justice, and benevolence:

Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all… It will be worthy of a free, enlightened [and] great Nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.

In the darkness of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln spoke of the need for humility and penitential prayer:

When our own beloved Country, once, by the blessing of God, united, prosperous and happy, is now afflicted with faction and civil war, it is peculiarly fit for us to recognize the hand of God in this terrible visitation, and in sorrowful remembrance of our own faults and crimes as a nation and as individuals, to humble ourselves before Him, and to pray for His mercy.

Barack Obama and George W. Bush also spoke in morally elevating ways. Whatever you think of Bush, he often spoke morally and with conviction. In a speech in honor of Ronald Reagan (July 11, 2004), Bush said:

Reagan believed that the gentleman always does the kindest thing. He believed that people were basically good, and had the right to be free. He believed that bigotry and prejudice were the worst things a person could be guilty of. He believed in the Golden Rule and in the power of prayer. He believed that America was not just a place in the world, but the hope of the world.

Obama spoke often and eloquently of empathy and the Golden Rule. Indeed, there is an entire website dedicated to Obama’s thinking about empathy. In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama said:

A sense of empathy… is one that I find myself appreciating more and more as I get older. It is at the heart of my moral code, and it is how I understand the Golden Rule—not simply as a call to sympathy or charity, but as something more demanding, a call to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see through their eyes.

It is difficult to imagine Trump saying anything like this. He does not speak of empathy, magnanimity, justice, or humility. And for Trump, the Golden Rule is the punchline of a joke he is fond of saying: “The golden rule of negotiation = He who has the gold makes the rules.”

The Egoistic Abomination

Trump appears to view life in terms of power and leverage, as a Hobbesian battle of egoists seeking advantage. In such a world, there are no promises that must be kept, duties that must be upheld, or loyalties that endure. This way of thinking represents a degradation of morality, and of Presidential rhetoric. Trump’s “values” also run afoul of ancient wisdom that warns against hubris, cruelty, and foolish self-regard. Let’s conclude by returning to the book of Proverbs.

These seven things are an abomination to the Lord:
A proud look,
A lying tongue,
Hands that shed innocent blood,
A heart that devises wicked plans,
Feet that are swift in running to evil,
A false witness who speaks lies,
And one who sows discord among brethren.
(Proverbs 6:16-19):

One of the ways this works is by creating “tension in the mind” by deliberately exposing the brutality of repressive violence. As King explained in the letter he wrote while in jail in Birmingham, this is “a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.” He saw Socrates and Jesus as models. Today, the “tension in the mind” is caused by a Minnesota mom being shot dead by an ICE officer who called her a “fucking bitch.”

Against such brutality, nonviolence is understood as mobilizing the active power of love. In “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” King explained Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha as “love force.” King said, “the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence was one of the most potent weapons available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.”

I discuss nonviolence in more detail in my book, Nonviolence: A Quick Immersion. Here I want to emphasize the variety of nonviolent actions. King’s heroic model of going to jail in an act of civil disobedience is merely one possibility. Scholars of nonviolence, such as Gene Sharp, have identified nearly 200 different nonviolent actions, organized in three general categories:

• Symbolic protest and efforts at public persuasion (for example, letter writing or standing/marching with signs);

• Non-cooperation (for example, work slow-downs, boycotts, or tax-strikes); and

• Direct intervention (for example, civil disobedience such as sit-ins or “occupations” of public space that result in arrest).

The study of nonviolence involves trying to understand how and why these actions can be effective. In my book I explained some of this in more detail:

These are the methods of noncooperation including: staying home from work and school, boycotting businesses and events, work slow-downs, tax resistance, and so on. These methods can be very effective, when employed broadly and strategically… Active nonviolent protest is more assertive, involving mass demonstrations, picket lines, and other public and symbolic activities.

The heroes of nonviolence take a step beyond merely refusing to cooperate. They engage in active nonviolence and in some cases civil disobedience. A step beyond noncooperation takes us to active public protest: marching in demonstrations and picket lines, writing editorials and making public speeches, and so on. As step beyond that occurs when protesters put their bodies on the line in confronting violent opposition, including in some cases the police. Finally, the last step is to put oneself in opposition to unjust authority by breaking the law and publicly challenging the legitimacy of the law and its authorities.

History shows that the tactics and strategies of nonviolence can be effective. There are no guarantees however. State-centered monopolies of violence are durable and brutal. But the hope is that with patience, tenacity, creativity, and hope, nonviolence can be employed to produce a better world. In my book, I conclude:

In its broadest sense, the work of nonviolence is oriented toward developing what is called “positive peace.” In the short term, the pragmatic methods of nonviolent protest can be effective. But the nonviolent imagination extends toward the creation of a world in which there is solidarity, justice, compassion, truth, and love. The proponents of nonviolence maintain that in order to create that world, we must employ means and methods that embody what we imagine. It is only by using the methods of nonviolence that we can hope to convert, transform, and build.

Nonviolence is not quick or easy. State violence can be brutal. And political leadership is often stupid and sometimes wicked. But the hope is that in the long-run human beings are better than this. The hope is that we can build a better world by creatively employing the power of love, intelligence, and nonviolence. Let’s conclude with the words of Dr. King, written in his cell in Birmingham Jail:

Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.