After birth, people seem destined to pursue the full development of their personalities. Humans are mortal, but their choices seem to stem from a desire for happiness when they are full of life.

The Age of Enlightenment is an epoch in European history in which man began to emphasize reason, individualism, and skepticism as central themes that illuminated human intellect. The Age of Enlightenment is traditionally said to have started around the middle of the 17th century (1650).

“Religiosity” is a word that is not easy to define. This word refers to religious orientations and beliefs but also denotes dimensions that are related to cultural orientation, experiential, ideological, intellectual, consequential, creedal, communal, doctrinal, moral, cultural, and many more.

A substantial number of philosophes and philosophers from the Enlightenment era argued that the secularization of modern civilization would create a decline in levels of religiosity. Max Weber claimed that the more rationalization replaces traditions, values, and emotions, the more secularization would devalue mysticism. Marquis de Condorcet argued that expanding knowledge in the natural and social sciences would lead to an ever more just world of individual freedom, material affluence, and moral compassion.

People formed communities and started to provide benefits for our society long before the writers, intellectuals, and scientists of the Age of Enlightenment started to preach to people the need to cast off superstition and fear or to challenge traditional religious beliefs.

Contemporary history is a subset of modern history. The world is safer now as compared to when people lived during the Age of Enlightenment. The advances made in the natural and social sciences are prolonging longevity. Evolution is progressive. If the arguments that were made during the age of Enlightenment on how human choices would continue to be motivated by the desire for happiness are true, the world should be evolving exactly as per the way the philosophes and philosophers of the Enlightenment era predicted would be ensuing.

The present epoch in our contemporary history is coined the Information Age (also known as the Computer Age). The Computer Age is characterized by a shift in contemporary business and science from an economy based on traditional industry to one that is based on information and computerization. The United States is one of the world’s leading nations for innovation and technology.

If mankind pursues enlightenment to understand mysteries and to strengthen good in the world through understanding what causes evil acts, one would think that the citizens of the nations whose knowledge in politics, philosophy, science, and communications was radically reoriented as of when the Age of Reason began until now would by now be beginning to exhibit a shift in behavior that would tend to support the idea that this steady exposure to happiness or knowledge expanded their ability to be more tolerant as compared to people whose knowledge didn’t evolve in the same way. In other words, this enlightenment accompanied, over time, a radical shift in the behavior of people, making them appear to be more tolerant, to correlate such an incremental positive change in attitude to all the accompanying material things that are providing benefits to our society. It is important to detect this shift in behavior to validate that indeed, when human choices are motivated by the desire for happiness or knowledge, people do manage to triumph over the weakness of the will—doing wrong when you genuinely knew what was right.

On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump was elected as the 45th President of the United States. The Bible says that no man is perfect, and Donald Trump will not pretend to be one. Donald Trump pledged to work on making America great if elected president. Most Americans voted for Donald Trump so he could make America more effective. It’s hard to get two people to agree, let alone a whole country. Strangely, for one reason or another, as of the date Trump moved to the White House, there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of enlightenment thinkers to opine, enlighten, or inform the public on what Trump should have done or not done, said or abstained from saying, but an excess of them.

Liberalism is a guiding ideology that expands the privilege of an individual, thus permitting a person to have access to enlightenment and the right to self-expression. The criticism directed at Donald Trump and his team regarding the management of the US government may be intended to ensure that, when comparing alternative concepts for America’s benefit, the chosen option truly serves the best interests of the country. Let us also remember that some people believe they have the right to express their opinions about Trump or anyone in his administration, because not all people work for the government; Americans hire people to work in government to work for them. Thus, there is nothing wrong with expressing opinions.

But if the sought-after goal of improving people’s knowledge is to make humans more tolerant and provide fundamental benefits for our society, and if what Weber, Emile Durkheim, Marquis de Condorcet, and others from the Age of Reason argued would take place when more and more people become modernized and rational, then the choices people would start to be taking would be destined to emphasize the relative importance of human reason over religiosity.

The bold statements or opinions that some Americans are mounting both in action and in words on how Donald Trump should move forward on his campaign promises or on how to handle his job, along with all its dynamics, tend to dribble down toward one conclusion. It looks as if it is not entirely true that when the knowledge of humans gets expanded in the natural and social sciences, this rise in knowledge is accompanied by an automatic readiness on the part of people to cast superstition, mysticism, traditions, values, and emotions, understood to embody religiosity, when more and more people become modernized and rational.

If Donald Trump (a person of logic, or for that matter an anti-logical man) understands that the information age is converting human choices for the desire for happiness to be no longer dependent on general or common types of creativity and is becoming dependent on the ability of select people to push the boundaries of their scientific and technical limits to provide benefits to our society. Now, the people who are distracting Donald Trump from focusing on how to make America great are also divided over the removal of statutes that belong to forefathers who lived in the 15th century, like Christopher Columbus. Some individuals do not want to stand up when the national anthem is recited, and this issue could be discussed indefinitely.

Then, if despite all the modernization and knowledge that the United States has gained, there is still a large segment of the population in this country that does not comprehend something as basic as recognizing that a human being cannot be doing two things at the same time, then there is a good chance that the US could fall behind during this ongoing race between the superpowers over who will project the most technological power in the 21st century if the president and his team are continually distracted from focusing on the most important thing for America, and this is how to keep America great again. This is because the condition to make America or any country great in the 21st century is no longer about how to pile additional atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, or ballistic missiles or show new airpower superiority; hence, such weapons or technology were all invented in the 20th century. Now, the condition to make America or any country great is how to ensure that any weaponry that is technology-based doesn’t get hacked or breached. This means that a country doesn’t need to possess a hydrogen bomb to project power on a global scale or pose a threat; it only needs one brain and one computer with internet access, both of which are abundant in all countries. Therefore, since people develop weaponry to serve as a backup plan when diplomacy fails, if the American people continue to distract Trump and his team, the people of this country are wagering on national security becoming compromised if this country fails to keep up with its competitors. If countries that possess weapons of mass destruction feel threatened, the US can only deter such a threat if it possesses the right technological capabilities.

Now, if a large segment of the population in the US is not comprehending what is at stake if America doesn’t stay great, then one assumption between those two scenarios has to be true: either modernization doesn’t make people become rational and detached from religiosity as the philosophes of the Age of Enlightenment argued, or the choices that Donald Trump is picking could indeed continue to make America stay great. This is because all the projects that Donald Trump wants to pursue, from building walls to stopping North Korea from having access to nuclear power, Iran, etc., are what make America great, not the removal of old monuments or the erection of new ones.

The rise in the number of people who are now, along with Trump and his team, examining what the human condition in the US and around the world should be like is alarming. The actions of the people who are criticizing, questioning, or opposing this president don’t seem to support that when human knowledge increased, this rise in knowledge did accompany a shift toward people beginning to foster peaceful connection or being more tolerant, as most philosophers pointed out, the desire for happiness would also be infused when people begin to emphasize the relative importance of human reason over religiosity. This civilizing mission that man embarked on as of 1650 doesn’t seem to deepen people’s desire to begin to emphasize the importance of happiness over the relative unimportance of religiosity, as per the way Weber, Durkheim, Marquis de Condorcet, and others argued would take place as more and more people become modernized and rational. To the contrary, the choices that some American people are debating over after Donald Trump began to work to expand the access of the American people to more happiness tend to support that the exposure to knowledge, which the American people are benefiting from because they are subsisting in one of the world’s leading nations for innovation and technology, seems to have made some people impatient and driven them to start to use their rationalization to consecrate their knowledge to seek more happiness or social justice. Thus, trapping mankind in a paradox that is worse than how the case was initially before knowledge started being used as a means to make people ready to emphasize the importance of the mind over the relative unimportance of the human body or before the date when humans began to address the question of the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual. This phenomenon is because the number of people who are now informing the planning process on how Donald Trump and his team should run the government to achieve practical results for the American people outnumbers the number of people who the government employs to achieve this task.

If, as I said, the more a person knows, the more he or she becomes impatient and his or her desire for happiness increases, how do the American people and other nations manage to agree on how to translate their search for more happiness into politics, with the best forms of government being neither a tyranny nor a democracy? It’s a big question. Particularly, after knowledge made many people now in the US and elsewhere think that their opinion on how any government should function to arrive at political and ethical truths and/or to increase happiness is the right prescription. For example, will the American people be able to voluntarily consent to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the majority’s decisions in exchange for the protection of their remaining rights, especially as the number of individuals involved in the planning process appears to be growing larger than those officially assigned to this task?

Forecasting is the process of making predictions about the future based on past and present data. The events that are taking place in the United States as of January 20, 2017, to stop Donald Trump from moving forward with his work plan could be interpreted to mean that everyone in this country is now living in this just world of individual freedom, material affluence, and, most importantly, moral compassion that the philosophes of the age of Enlightenment depicted would be the case when people begin to establish ethical systems based on human reason rather than religiosity. Man has not managed to triumph over how to stop doing wrong when a person genuinely knows what is right in the US or elsewhere. Likewise, no one is now sharing his or her wealth with others to increase the happiness of those who are poorer. To the contrary, the behaviors that are being exhibited tend to support the idea that modernization could be weakening people’s ability to be tolerant, contrary to what the philosophes of the Age of Enlightenment and Socrates claimed human reason could achieve when ultimate wisdom starts to come from knowing oneself.

No one knows how the speculation that I am reporting in this synthesis will unfold or what its extent and impact will be in allowing Donald Trump to do his job. Will the constant incremental change in people’s knowledge accompany an equivalent incremental change in people becoming more tolerant so people in the US start to arrive at political and ethical truths? This is also something that no one has the answer to. It is only when the American people finish delegating to technology the action that the human body was programmed to serve in the natural world that we will know if this will be helpful to make America great or if this move will set up the American people to confront another civil war.

If human choices are indeed motivated by the desire for happiness, then Donald Trump deserves not only all the support we can provide him but also all our respect.