[The continuation from Part 1 . The piece as a whole is summarised here
“Idealism is the noble toga political gentlemen drape over their will to power.”
Aldous Huxley
“Most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
So in Part 1 I focused on how ultimately the core nature of all fantasies, even if involving benign activities like stamp collecting, is an enhancement of power for the fantasist. Now however we move on to the more raw arena where it is power itself that is the object of fantasy, and specifically dreams of social-political power. And since here we are in the unfettered world of the imagination, unhindered by the restrictions of reality, and fantasy tends to deal in absolutes, then these imaginings will extend all the way to visions of absolute totalitarian power over all life. And so, “secretly guided by the instincts”, the intellect evolves ideological forms to encapsulate, legitimise and hopefully realise this primal lust for power.
As Huxley says above, with these ideologies and their idealism, beneath the intellectual facades when stripped bare the true essence is the will to power, which in turn is the ego’s dreams of victory over any reality hostile to its desires - which again is the essence of fantasy. We are deep here in the terrain of temptation, and very usefully for that phenomenon we have an almost limitless capacity for self-delusion and self-justification, for whatever state we are in to appear to ourselves as truth. Think of two people in a raging argument, each to themselves completely in the right, the hated other completely wrong. There is naturally huge scope for this kind of everyday phenomenon to play out with ideologies and their followers.
So to recap a little, fantasy is always about the enhancement of power, and in terms of inner logic as this extends this power essence comes more to the fore, even when seemingly dealing with more pleasure based fantasy. And power will come to be power over others. We can regard people like Jeffrey Epstein and Jimmy Savile in this context. But with the political power fantasy, compared to more usual pleasure-based ones, we are dealing from the beginning with ego and power in raw undiluted form, and there exists a potential for harm way beyond the relatively private confines of most fantasies.
Another element here is that the sense of good and evil are intrinsic to us, and so we have a natural affinity for narratives involving divisions along those lines, of good combating and defeating evil: from Sleeping Beauty to Lord of the Rings to basic Hollywood blockbusters we can see this reflected. This is ingrained in us just as is our sense of language, and so it can be very easy for imposters, be it people or ideas, to step in and seemingly satisfy this perennial longing with their good/evil narratives and solutions. Nature abhors a vacuum and, given the fabric of our minds, peoples will everywhere develop language, and similarly given our spiritual nature a sense of truth and good will manifest, but the more misguided and distorted individuals become, the more misguided will in turn be their ideology or good/evil sense and narratives.
With even the most toxic of ideologies there will of course be some good mixed in with the bad - otherwise they could hardly get far in terms of willing followers. But think of say an alcoholic with no desire to stop. What kind of ideal will this person have? Maybe a beautiful pub, with friendly, attractive people to engage with, charming conversation, etc - but the greater truth underlying these natural and elegant trappings is alcoholism. So genuine healthy yearnings, especially the yearning for a sense of belonging and participation in a life of meaning, can be encompassed within a toxic ideology, and so cloak and legitimise its essence. And actually it is essential for the success of the ideology to fulfil the role of the good in the good versus evil dynamic that it taps into and seemingly embodies.
We shouldn’t be afraid of recognising temptations as coming from some hostility outside of us, tailored to the psychological nature of the relevant individual, their particular weaknesses of character targeted and exploited - one person responsive to the thought-stimulus of gambling, another to drugs, and so on. The initial temptation in its attraction appears innocent and even good, especially if sensually appealing, but its nature is to draw one step by step along a gradually distorting and destructive pathway. For the gambling addict, for instance, the seemingly innocent initial excitement and adrenaline rushes can lead onwards to all kinds of obvious financial and personal chaos. So each temptation has an inner logic leading deeper into toxicity if one falls into its river, so to speak. And, to jump ahead, thus modern European nations like Germany, at the heart of scientific and industrial progress, could in the 20th century fall into unimaginable evil. This was the inner logic of the relevant field of temptation. Even here very few people, if any, would have initially consciously set out to bring society to that level of horror, but it was always the evil inner nature at the source of the phenomenon of temptation, and down whose paths they naively and obediently followed.
And now finally, after all this generalising, onto socialism. The socialist utopian ideologies are basically the imaginings of 19th century well-educated Western European intellectuals, very much of the bourgeois background, with the leisure and inclination to form theories of material existence, society, history, etc and the imagined and desired future where all this reality should progress. Despite all the focus on the proletariat, these academically inclined individuals were most certainly not slaving in the coal mines along with their supposed fellow working-class sufferers.
And in this initial wave of socialist utopianism, there was huge focus on the bourgeoisie and “bourgeois decadence” as the declared enemy, and nowadays the white male is vilified. It’s pretty obvious though that all these figures like Marx, Engels, Fourier, Saint Simon and so on were all very much white bourgeois males. This in itself more than hints at the energies of hypocrisy, envy and desire for revenge bubbling away barely beneath the surface. To add, which sector of society now comprises the “liberal” progressive element and its base support? Obviously the educated bourgeoisie again, and so now with obsessive concern with the proletariat having been cut well loose and discarded, time has washed away the illusion that this was somehow at its core a proletarian movement. As an emanation of the educated intelligentsia, it was of course coming from the personal desires of those educated bourgeois individuals. You wouldn’t have heard much in the way of working-class accents in 19th century European academia! And then, just as now, academia is very much the engine room of ideology. The academics, the teachers, etc are basically a kind of ideological civil service for the power fantasy. The media is also obviously very much populated by people from the same kind of milieu and inclinations.
Regarding this semblance of contradiction, though very much of the bourgeois background, this intelligentsia, by virtue of their intellectual bent, were and are in terms of their society ill-cut out for success in the bustling extrovert arenas of business and industry. So if power in a modern material environment in its most crude terms equates to money, then these academically minded figures are outsiders in these power terms, with little hope of significant material advancement. They are not much more than tolerated and should feel grateful for whatever crumbs fall their way from their more worldly “cousins”. To find a living, the intellectual had to be often literally “patronised” by his financial betters. To add, in an earlier era, these less worldly types may have found a relatively natural home in say the monastic world, while in modern times the academic environs is an equivalent.
But though on the outside these more intellectual figures from their privileged backgrounds may appear reconciled to their relative powerlessness, the ego hasn’t simply disappeared, and because of all these frustrations, desires for power, control, revenge, may be all all the more virulently bubbling away subconsciously. As the Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz wrote about the seeming “bourgeois” contradiction in all this in The Captive Mind: “The intellectual’s eyes twinkle with delight at the persecution of the bourgeoisie . . . It is rich reward for the degradation he felt [when within that world].”
His intellectual superiority was unrewarded, perhaps hardly even recognised, but now he conceives a fantasy, an ideological imagining, where it is intellect rather than business acumen, or say military aptitude, that is the most powerful force within this new society of his imagining, and beneath whose mental formulations everyone else will be forced to bow down. So as a quick jump forward, when schoolteachers and academics are using the education platform to do things like subvert children’s sense of gender, beneath the supposed idealism, for the indoctrinator, the agent of temptation, is the thrill of forcing society to bow down to the dictates of this ideological priesthood, to which he or she has the self-righteous pleasure of belonging. The nature of the dictates is basically irrelevant; it is the sensual thrill of power that is at the heart of things.
That’s enough for now. Part 3 next.
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