I’ve written before about the worrying underlying forces at work within the personality of one of Taiwan’s prominent figures, and poked some good natured fun at the man and his immediate family.
To my mind they are figures of fun and not to be taken seriously, as they say and do things that clearly show they are unfit for high office.
Taiwanese are sensible and pragmatic people who will also see them as having little more than entertainment value, and have proved they are even now unfit for the office that luck and circumstance has allowed them to occupy.
My sincere hope is this particular one will disappear down the plughole of history when his term is over, and voters then can redirect their attention to the important and smarter people in the public eye and what the political debate in Taiwan should really be about.
I said a while back I had a self-imposed scale of idiocy and would not write about this individual unless they said, or did, something spectacularly stupid. Sadly, that time has come.
Declaring yourself as ‘unique’. We are all unique in one way or another. Physical manifestations like fingerprints and DNA are obvious, but we also all have unique personalities. None of us think or act in an identical way to others.
That’s not to say there are not unique individuals scattered through history who have made their mark on the world.
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Einstein, Nelson Mandela to name but a few. Add to that Jesus, Napoleon, Muhammad and William Shakespeare…you get the idea.
It’s obvious that we can’t check whether any of these in this short list declared themselves ‘unique’ before they actually proved they were, although Einstein was famously self-deprecating.
It seems to me to declare yourself unique among your peers before you have actually achieved very much shows a staggering level of arrogance and complacency that is ill suited to high office and is akin to delusions of grandeur. One wonders who in my short list above considered themselves unique before they achieved greatness, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.
If you Google ‘delusions of grandeur’ it says - Specifically, a delusion of grandeur is a person's belief that they are someone other than who they are, such as a supernatural figure or a celebrity. A delusion of grandeur may also be a belief that they have special abilities, possessions, or powers.
I won’t go on to describe what it says about people who display such symptoms but look back at God Complex and Dunning-Kruger Effect and you will get the idea.
I’ll not even start about the signals that publicly comparing yourself to long dead Chinese Emperor who had an unbalanced wife, sends to people. Maybe the signal is you don’t know your history before blurting such things out. (Many thanks to the history scholar who pointed this out to me)
One wonders what the next press conference will yield in terms of a painful to watch self-harm performance. It’s like watching people debase themselves on reality TV or, at the extreme, Jackass. I don’t suppose he will ever attempt to skateboard off a shed roof into a swimming pool, although he seems to be attempting the political equivalent.
As I think I’ve said before, it’s like trying to drag your eyes away from an awful road accident…you can’t help but look…but it’s painful and messy.
His so-called advisors really should watch his last performance carefully… illogical statement followed illogical statement. The government was bad for imposing quarantine as it damaged the economy…the government was bad because they were not doing enough to stop imported cases.
As usual he came up with none of his own or his parties' ideas and just ranted.
They, his advisors, need to let him calm down and talk to him in a dark room, sitting quietly with a cup of milky tea and gently tell him some truths…
If they dare, to someone who thinks he is somehow “unique” in the world.
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