“God is not found in the soul by adding anything,” wrote the medieval German theologian Meister Eckhart, “but by a process of subtraction.” I assume he meant the letting go of worldly attachments, hence the Christian centrality of alms-giving and rituals of fasting and material abnegation. But humans—loss-averse by nature—and Americans in particular have found subtraction a difficult act.

Before there was athleisure and people still “dressed up” to go out, a sartorial rule held that before leaving the house you should look in the mirror and subtract one thing. But in today’s baroque culture of eternal abundance, even one thing seems too much. Americans’ preferred solution to any problem that involves themselves is to add. During COVID lockdown, our first impulse was to hoard and then to binge-buy superfluous gadgets. Despite the ignorance of anti-vaxxers, reasonable people aggressively wanted to be vaccinated (addition) rather than socially distanced (subtraction).

Out of college, I briefly had an editing job at a computer magazine and noticed how innovation was all about the created need for more categories of more—“peripherals” and “add-ons.” I started thinking of people that way. The superfluous types invited to parties to fill a room were “peripherals” and “add-ons.” You might think subtraction would be more resonant in our lives given that we’re always trying to get rid of people. But people usually subtract (“ghost” in standard parlance) when they want to add one or more new people. In other words: zero-sum as social contract.

For generations, Americans have accepted the illogic of chronic addition when intermittent subtraction is needed. With both high blood pressure and cholesterol, they readily take drugs instead of subtracting the bad stuff from their diets. And now with Ozempic and GLP-1s, a class of drug used for weight loss, instead of purchasing and eating less food by choice, they pay for an expensive drug that suppresses their appetite. And because it’s not just fat they lose on these drugs but muscle mass, they have a new need to buy protein supplements. The market for whey, the liquid byproduct of cheesemaking that used to go to waste, has been “turbocharged by the growing use of GLP-1 drugs,” according to the New York Times. The paper also brought to our attention what is perhaps the greatest irony of Ozempic subtraction: restaurants across price ranges are offering those on GLP-1s “miniature meals and tiny tasting menus.”

No sentient news reader could remain oblivious of the fact that the August 7 “tiny tasting menus” article was concurrent with articles from Reuters, AP, and The Guardian about Palestinians in Gaza being killed or wounded by Israeli forces as they tried to get bags of flour to feed families on the verge of starvation. Having a sniper relieve you of starving to death is probably the ultimate subtraction. With “the horrific scale of suffering among Gazans . . . nearly invisible in the Israeli media,” the Israelis have tossed aside addition (a two-state solution) for the totalitarian subtraction of ethnic cleansing.

As Reuters reported on August 20, an Israeli Defence Ministry planning commission approved a widely condemned Israeli settlement plan that would cut across land that the Palestinians had sought for a state, bisecting the occupied West Bank and cutting it off from East Jerusalem. According to the newspaper Haaretz, “If the Israeli plan comes to fruition, the entire population of the Gaza Strip would be crowded into about 19% of its territory.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spun this brutal subtraction as a well-earned addition—prime waterfront real estate, as his totalitarian buddy Donald Trump promised investors. There’s a disco song from 1976—“More, More, More” by The Andrea True Connection—that I always think of when I imagine Trump in his prime. More, more, more is not just Trump’s modus operandi; it’s the only operable pathway within his cognitive thinking. “We’re working together,” Trump said of Netanyahu on July 29. “We’re going to try and get things straightened out for the world.”

Months before, Trump had attempted to add Canada and Greenland to the United States via intimidation while Elon Musk’s DOGE was busy subtracting the work of federal agencies. Though Musk is gone, America will have 300,000 fewer federal workers at the end of the year. And though Trump failed with the territorial addition, he is succeeding in creating a fascist dictatorship of extortion and racketeering by assuming all the powers of a complicit and/or docile Congress as well as running protection rackets against all the estates that are supposed to protect our democratic society—higher ed, medicine and hospitals, law firms and professional services. And nearly all have capitulated with the blessing of a neutered Supreme Court.

In this moral equation, the additions will go directly into Trump’s pocket and those of his oligarch enablers. But the subtractions for us—the voters and the supposedly loss-averse people—are almost impossible to contemplate. Unconstitutional ICE deportations and incarcerations without due process are subtracting both essential workers and weakening the rule of law. Sending federal troops to take unwarranted control of cities is subtracting protections of the Fourteenth Amendment. Trump’s schizoid tariffs are needlessly increasing prices for everything and causing economic anxiety in the markets. The legislation he strong-armed through a Republican Congress takes from the poor and working class through the imposition of tariffs and gives it to the rich in extending his own tax cuts.

For me, the greatest shock in all this is the catatonia of the centrist elite from both parties—those with comfortable investment and/or retirement accounts who think they can wait out Trump’s mania until the midterms. Their philosophy appears to be: lie low and hold on to your job whatever it takes. (When profit is your one and only goal, NEVER subtract!) They are willing to do this as the poor and marginalized bear the brunt of the pain from cuts to Medicaid and SNAP while food, utilities, and housing costs skyrocket. This catatonic elite will look away as food from American farmers intended for both Americans and the world’s starving people is rotting without immigrant laborers to harvest it. The fact that this is happening while people on Ozempic look for restaurants to serve them tiny portions of a great variety of food is the metaphoric icing on the cake.

This is not to say that the poor and marginalized would be any more willing to sacrifice their own financial livelihood to save democracy. They, too, enjoy our culture of abundance where the abundance masks a perilous financial insecurity just beneath the surface. But even if you don’t care much about the most vulnerable among us, you ought to at least care about the American economy.

As the economist Richard Wolff tirelessly warns, America’s profit-driven and increasingly unequal capitalist system was diminishing our global standing against China even before Trump 1. And now as Trump 2 turns us into a “rogue country” running a global protection racket, we are pretty much doomed. China has mastered the mixture of public-private investment in growth and infrastructure that characterized the United States in the immediate postwar years. Wolff calls Trump’s actions the desperation of a failing empire and a falling global power. Our primary greatness—our middle class—has been subtracted.

Alienating allies and antagonists alike is extremely foolish. The world aside from Israel has turned against us and the markets will too. Trump’s firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics head because of bad jobs numbers, his firing a Federal Reserve Governor because she’s a Black woman, his pressuring the Fed to lower rates by 150 basis points or more when inflation is on the rise and the stock market is booming are killing trust and taking the dollar down.

“This is authoritarianism,” the conservative lawyer George Conway told CNN in regard to Trump’s retribution against enemies like John Bolton. “It’s time for Americans to wake up. This is serious. Donald Trump . . . people may laugh at him because . . . he appears to be such a clown, but he’s profoundly dangerous because he has the power of prosecution.”

Conway’s message is geared to the catatonic elite. Your bank account, your wealth, your comfort will be taken away, too, as Trump destroys the bedrocks of freedom, justice, and truth in his quest for power and glory. The more, more, more guy is on course to be the world’s greatest subtractor of intrinsic value. In the Meister Eckhart scenario about the soul, Trump’s only way of finding God is to subtract the soul itself. §