We must not resign ourselves to living in a world of zero-sum cruelty

Zero-sum cruelty.

While there are many ways to describe the way many of our leading figures view our world, that sums it up best to me. A mixture of purely zero-sum thinking and a near-gleeful embrace of cruelty has filtered horizontally through social media and from the top down amid the second Trump Administration, which - given U.S. cultural, economic, political, and military power - has had a significant influence on the rest of the world.

Consider Trump's approach to trade. He believes someone must always be taking advantage of someone else. With this worldview, if you're not taking advantage of your trading partner, your trading partner is taking advantage of you. Rather than helping those who are weak, weakness should be exploited. Rather than expecting restraint and wise judgment from the strong, the strong should be unleashed to do whatever they want. It's reminiscent of Thuycidides' famous quote, "the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must".