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The dark side is that slapdash recusal can degenerate into a form of internal book burning, a crank's bonfire. The hyperactive recuser lives next door to the know-nothings and crackpots. He is liable to mutter to himself in public. Intelligent recusal must be elegantly done. There are rules. No ethnic slurs. Avoid recusing yourself on entire countries, such as Canada. Do not go scything down whole fields of knowledge. (On the other hand, I long ago recused myself on the subject of economics, about which I am a moron, and have not suffered a day's unhappiness because of it.)
Creative recusal means that you refuse delivery on unwelcome items of knowledge. In a world of intrusive information, it is rewarding to turn off your hearing aid in the midst of a particularly cretinous and gaudy aria. In an epoch when fame is the coin of the globe, it is satisfying to slam a mental door on Trump.
Recusal does not discourage curiosity. On the contrary, it allows curiosity to breathe and put down roots. It clears some of the junk out of the garden, pulls up a few weeds. In my garden, I say, weed out the Trumps. You may choose to cultivate the Trumps. Let a hundred flowers bloom.
The average citizen has no power over Trump except the sovereign right to ignore him. The exercise of optional knowledge. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, if a 90-story grandiosity occurs in Gotham and no one is there to witness it, then have either of these events occurred? The second event undoubtedly has. Trump involves certain pharaonic consequences. He sprays his name on buildings and airplanes: a very, very rich graffiti artist. Trump is a man whose ads speak of his apartment buildings as enactments of his "philosophy." Hugh Hefner is another man who has a "philosophy." We live in a Periclean age.
History proceeds in gossip and fractals. Fractals are the mysterious and apparently irrational forms proposed by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who says that reality has shapes undreamed of by Euclid and surprises that ridicule the idea of order. The shape of a mountain is not a cone. Clouds, coastlines, tree branches, commodity prices, word frequencies, turbulence in fluids, stars in the sky, reputations, fame, the passage of history itself (think about the past ten months) -- all these are fractal shapes.
The mind is the grandest, most mysterious fractal. It takes its shape from what it holds, and therefore, Zen-like, sometimes grows more graceful because of what it has kept out.