First published, 7th October 2018
Here’s a blond/e joke: before the pleas are taken from the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials at the end of the Second World War, the president of the Tribunal, Lord Justice Colonel Sir Geoffrey Lawrence addresses the twenty four Nazis in the dock: “Before we begin, gentlemen, which one of you is the blond haired, blue-eyed Aryan god?” There’s an awkward silence of some two minutes, before Hermann Göring shuffles to his feet and announces: “Unfortunately, Adolf will not be with us today.”
Actually, I think there are two jokes here. It’s a BOGOF.
Joking aside, human beings don’t see what’s in front of them and equally often, perhaps, do see what isn’t there at all. I mean to say, no one at the opening of Hitler’s Haus der Deutschen Kunst in 1937 saw the joke, a joke that was amplified by the opening of the Die Ausstellung “Entartete Kunst”: Hitler’s binary opposite ‘house of horrors’.
History repeats itself, which is to say people don’t change, which is to say history is another illusion. But for fun, one can always ask what the hell people were thinking, then and now, of course. Maybe it’s an increasingly urgent question to ask in our own wave particulate of time. Teresa May’s recent performance art piece entitled: Road Kill Dancing Queen – ‘unveiled’ on the last day of the Tory Party Conference (attended by a gallery of misshapen and deformed self-caricatures straight out of the mind of Otto Dix) raises the question. The grotesquerie that is the Kavanaugh–Ford installation, described recently as: “A freak show collage of ‘beerfully’ contorted reminiscences on a Bürgerbräu-Putsch post boof dryhump of unrequited lust” begs the question.
The answer to what people are thinking, when polarisation in culture and society escalates to a sort of juxtaposed stand-off between a Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung ‘us’ and a degenerate ‘them’ is, of course, nothing. Dialectical materialism is a fraudulent construction of the mind. We see a universe of bipolarity that is as fictional as it is objective. I mean, we cannot all help but see Ursa Major but it’s not really anywhere other than in our collective state of delusion. Just little white dots. Little white dots…
Reality, in a world of alternative facts, is what we make it. And that’s sort of okay until what we make it is taken over by what others make it for us. Bipolarity, the devious carving up of unity into binary opposites, is a permanent feature of consciousness and is how we make nonsense of the world. It requires the bending, not of reality, but of language to work its magic. ‘Socialism’ and its perceived opposite ‘capitalism’, for example, don’t refer to anything. There has only ever been feudalism. The word ‘democracy’ equally skates mindlessly over the surface of social realities that are hardwired into the way we are.
I was recently accused of being a nihilist. I didn’t read this as an insult but a red card thrown up to shut me down. I had transgressed by suggesting that democracy in the United States was, in particular, a fraud, a façade that rendered the deep concerns over the Trump administration bizarre, to an outsider. I thought, naïvely, that everyone knew that the world was fundamentally on a permanent feudal default setting.
But Americans, with their two coastal strips and nothing between, save tumbleweed, can be oddly two dimensional. The interesting thing about Levitsky and Ziblatt’s recent How Democracies Die – What Histroy Reveals about our Future is how it cites a seemingly endless list of anti-democratic practices and policies that goes back at least to the Declaration but suggests, nevertheless, that the present administration represents the most concerning downturn. There have always been cheats, frauds, lies, deceptions, corruptions, manipulations, from voter purges to gerrymandering, robbing of native lands to slavery and the suppression of African American suffrage (notably most enthusiastically by the so-called Democrats), bent corporate funding, bribes in all but name, manipulation of the judiciary, dismantling of regulation and law, the eager snuffing out of fledgeling democracies in South and Central America by way of foreign policy, and so on and on. There is no shape to the endless list, no falling of Rome. If anything, the most troublesome thing about Trump is that he truly represents the average American. He speaks and thinks like them, if not for them.
Actually, there is some ‘shape’ in the flat list of events that might be said to comprise the narrative of history. There is a cycle that lies within all Raubwirtschaft socio-politico-economic systems. All systems of human organisation are essentially kleptomaniacal. A small minority of humans appropriate increasing quantities of resources and factors of production over time from the remaining population. Unchecked, the need for more becomes unsustainable within the borders of the kleptocracy. This is fine, if the state can pursue with success its plundering policies against neighbours. However, if not, the ruling élites have effectively overreached themselves, destroyed, in some way, the Hegelian master-slave balances that kept the thing going. They are then ripe for shaking or taking down by the next ‘dynasty’. And so on.
Maybe I speak like one from the ‘underground’ by suggesting progress (or, indeed, its opposite) is an illusion. The language of history and political rhetoric bewray our need to construct unrealities that we hope might make the monotony more contoured.
Again, the worst rhetorical device is that of binary opposition. The theses and antitheses of rival tribes, the discourses of group or social identities are particularly dangerous when the ruling kleptomaniacs utilise them, not in the hope that there might be syntheses but with the aim of enhancing division and distraction while they get on with nicking stuff unnoticed. There are one or two voices out there of those who are intelligent and perceptive enough to see through the subterfuge. I suppose Jordan Peterson might be one such soliloquist. It is intriguing to see how media forces seek so desperately to drag him back out of no man’s land into the trenches and how articulately he resists, declaring a sort of descriptive objectivism while firing off the occasional prescriptive round.
For those of us confused by the plethora of hashtag tribal conflicts, dispirited by the failure of forgotten third way possibilities, anxious to take the right side in a fake debate, here’s the offer of a window seat at the back of the bus:
“They play it safe, are quick to assassinate what they do not understand. They move in packs ingesting more and more fear with every act of hate on one another. They feel most comfortable in groups, less guilt to swallow. They are us. This is what we have become. Afraid to respect the individual. A single person within a circumstance can move one to change. To love herself. To evolve…”
Erykah Badu, Window Seat
https://youtu.be/9hVp47f5YZg