Never Refuse Wine
On America's Slow Armageddon of Mediocrity
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Hey Girl. It's Me, Tom Friedman.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
The Tyranny of the Ego
She exploited Nietzsche, but the man was clear that each individual should determine their own ethics after arduous self-discovery ("You have your way. I have my way. As for the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist"). For Rand, morality was already prescribed by the imperatives of authoritarian capitalism; all that was left to do was to obey them. One of Nietzsche's many philosophical projects was to attack the idea that true ethics were embedded within the universe or society; compared to him, Rand is practically a Hegelian. Her philosophy of "egoism" is thus exposed as extreme, radical conformity to elite norms, and her conscription of Nietzsche into her philosophy is no less a ridiculous case of reactionary appropriation than the Catholic church exploiting the moral authority of Christ to justify the Pope's golden throne.
Ultimately lonely people like Rand are the rank and file of authoritarian movements. The final chapter of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism describes a blighted landscape of loneliness as the breeding ground of all authoritarian regimes. "Isolation and impotence, that is the fundamental inability to act at all, have always been characteristic of tyrannies. Political contacts between men are severed in tyrannical government and the human capacities of action and power are frustrated," she writes, anticipating the savaging of the welfare state, unions, civil society, and other unifying and public organizations in general throughout the neoliberal era. Arendt also promoted Adolph Eichmann as an archetypal fascist in contrast to the stereotype of the nationalist fanatic. "The aim of totalitarian education," she says, "has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any." For every Nazi berserker, there were probably ten, fifty, or even a hundred others who kept the machine running for them, all careerists who were just interested in getting ahead, or getting by.
In fact, Arendt says, "organized loneliness is considerably more dangerous than the unorganized impotence of all those who are ruled by the tyrannical arbitrary will of a single man." It is in the dissolved societies that Arendt describes in which criminal organizations, cults, fascist groups, and other organizations of the rampant Id emerge from. Lacking a real community to provide him dignity and a sense of self-worth, the individual is easy prey for the promises of these authoritarian groups. It is in these organizations that "everybody is educated to become a hero," as Umberto Eco wrote in "Eternal Fascism." Collectivism is not the opposite of egoism, but its flipside.
It's worth quoting at length Lezsek Kolakowski's comments on the "anarchist" philosopher Max Stirner, whose The Ego and His Own was The Virtues of Selfishness for nineteenth-century Germany:
This is probably true of every authoritarian regime. Even in the Soviet Union, the archetypal collectivist tyranny, Gogol's bloodless bureaucrat thrived in the bureaucracies inherited from Tsarism. His grasping careerism was the engine of the authoritarian regime. As Eric Hobsbawm has noted, the Soviet Union was not in fact totalitarian in the classical sense, but depended on a totally depoliticized- not mobilized- citizenry, and operated through a very tiny minority of careerist strivers. A system that promotes the most grotesquely self-serving members of that society to the top is the best explanation for the success of a man like Gorbachev.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
On The Tenth Anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks, Reflections on 9/11 Truthers as Self-Worshipping Cultists
The 9/11 truth movement is a cult. Like most cults, it recruits its members through the two-pronged deployment of belittlement and flattery. With one voice, it threatens that if you disagree with them, then you’re a “retard,” “sheep,” “liar,” or “disinfo agent.” But, the second voice says, if you only believe what they say…. why, then you’re part of an elite vanguard of heroic freedom fighters enlightening the masses. (I’m not sure why it would be worth anyone’s time to enlighten a mass of people that one thinks are all cowards and frauds, but never mind.) It’s the same principle that underlies the “good cop, bad cop” routine: resist, and you face the bad cop; merely cooperate, and you are soothed by the good cop. All the truther has to do is assent, to submit- which necessitates no effort whatsoever- and he is immediately transformed from a sheep to a hero. And you can only be one or the other. The miniscule ratio of effort to reward is the chief appeal of joining the truther movement, not any “evidence” it has for a government conspiracy.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Israel Massacres Protestors; Israel And Press Blames Protestors' "New Tactics"
"Palestinians Test Tactic of Unarmed Mass Resistance"
Palestinian activists are calling it a preview of new tactics to pressure Israel and win world support for statehood: Masses of marchers, galvanized by the Arab Spring and brought together by Facebook, descending on borders and military posts — and daring Israeli soldiers to shoot.
It could prove more problematic for Israel than the suicide bombings and other deadly violence of the past — which the current Palestinian Authority leadership feels only tainted their cause.
After attempted border breaches from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Gaza left 15 Palestinians dead Sunday, Israeli officials openly puzzled over how to handle an unfamiliar new phase.
"The Palestinians' transition from terrorism and suicide bombings to deliberately unarmed mass demonstrations is a transition that will present us with difficult challenges," said Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
This slanderous nonsense needs to be repudiated and it needs to be repudiated now. Probably 95% of Palestinian resistance or more is non-violent, unarmed, or characterized by mostly symbolic violence such as throwing stones at tanks. If the first intifada received the attention and hosannas that it deserves as the model of Gandhian resistance that it was, then we would never have to hear about how there is "no Palestinian Gandhi" or that the Palestinians have just discovered non-violence. (The Palestinians are perpetually discovering non-violence; according to Ethan Bronner, they had just discovered non-violence some 13 months ago- only 17 years after the first Intifada.) The fact is, Israel and the US media do not want a Palestinian Gandhi. If they did, then the hundreds of Palestinian Gandhis that are doing the slow work in countless Palestinian villages or the other hundreds that are rotting in Israeli prisons (or those that have possibly been shot) would receive the same front-page attention and encouragement that Mohammed Elbaradei is receiving in Egypt. With one caveat: most of those Palestinians that are educated enough to hold the social status of Elbaradei have left the country, as Palestinian civil society has effectively been destroyed by the occupation.
And let's repudiate the Israeli PR claim that these protests caught their security forces off guard, which the above article uncritically regurgitates. There were Palestinian Facebook campaigns promoting an uprising; there are regular non-violent Palestinian protests in which walls or fences are torn down; the Nakba is generally expected to be a time of disorder. The idea that what are likely the best intelligence agencies in the world (either Shin Bet or the Mossad) were caught off guard by all this stretches credulity. More likely, Israel simply didn't care. They just fell back on their default response, honed during the first and the beginning of the second Intifada, their invasion of Lebanon, and their massacre in Gaza: if the Arabs act up, we're going to respond with overwhelming, violent force. "The only thing the Arabs understand is force" has been the battle maxim of Israel since 1948- earlier, in fact. It's because of the press' sole focus on current events and their structural need to spot "trends" that they would think that Israel would act differently in this single, lone instance.
When you read the above headline, don't read it literally. Read it instead as "now that the Palestinian revolts are happening in the context of the Arab revolts, the Israelis are starting to realize that violent repression may be unfavorably compared to that of other regimes in the region, and that this may cause unacceptable damage to their country's public image." The press' staggering revelation that Palestinians indeed protest unarmed may be too late, but if Israel is pressed to muzzle its response to resistance to its occupation, it may not be entirely too little.
Update: Hard to believe that I just read this in The Economist.
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Thoughts on the Left and Libya
Friday, April 8, 2011
Knowing Thy Enemy and Not Yourself: Why American History Should Be Taught Like Soviet History
"There's a good reason why nobody studies history; it just teaches you too much."- Noam Chomsky
Yet while Soviet propaganda is reflexively and correctly described as such, American propaganda is euphemistically referred to as advertising, campaign rhetoric, PR, talking points, or is simply normalized and thus dismissed as being a natural part of politics. A Soviet-approach to American history would've exposed Obama's "Hope" and "Change" slogans as propaganda and would allow us to be more critical of the commercial advertising that permeates our society- initially designed quite consciously to control mass behavior (see Adam Curtis's excellent documentary The Century of the Self).