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Notes -
Sounds like Russell conjugation to me. I have principles, you have dogmatic identities.
But I think I see what you’re getting at. There’s clearly some trait that makes a motivated outsider hard to control and to read. Maybe a word like “obstinacy” or “agency” fits better?
One of the points made by the book Moral Mazes (also community discussion) is that Moral Mazes (the book is about the management hierarchy at large non-financial companies in the pre-shareholder value era, but the general principles apply to any sufficiently unethical bureaucratic hierarchy) are total institutions, and that anyone who has built a career in one loses the ability to understand people who are motivated by things other than office politics.
(Incidentally, once you understand the concept of a Moral Maze, the term Swamp as used by anti-establishment politicians clearly refers to the coalition of corporate, governmental, and machine-politics Moral Mazes that work well together because they understand each other in a way they don't understand startup founders, family-owned businesses, or charismatic non-machine politicians like Sanders and Trump).
Donald Trump has been a GC in his father's real estate empire, a real estate developer in his own right, a reality TV star, and a charismatic outsider politician. None of these careers involve working in a Moral Maze. If he is ethically compromised (and he probably is), it is about money and/or sex, not office politics. I can absolutely believe that a career bureaucrat or career machine politician would struggle to grok him.
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