Guest Post by The Zman
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality” is a line from a T.S. Eliot poem that has always been popular on the Right. While the Left does not have a monopoly on utopian thinking, it has never embraced realism. The Right, on the other hand, has always had an element that accepts the reality of the human condition. Not everyone on the Right or even a majority. One reality of the human condition is that most people, even the sober minded, prefer the escapism of fantasy to reality.
The fantasy view of politics is most obvious on the Left, of course. Much of what constitutes our current politics would best be described as a paranoid delusion or maybe even a psychotic break. Six weeks on and official Washington is still playing the game of make-believe over the January protests. For five years they were convinced that invisible Russians using mind control rigged the 2016 election. Left-wing politics, which means mainstream politics, is just a long conspiracy theory.
Another thing that is made obvious with left-wing reality avoidance is that it is deliberate, something of a cottage industry. There are people who invest all of their time patching up the fantasies and inventing new ones. Here’s an example from the conspiracy site Vox, about how Progressives are trying to “catch-up” to right-wing media. The absurdity of the post is not rare. These fantasies are churned out like shark’s teeth in order to have a steady supply of new fantasies for the Left.
This is something most on this side of the great divide get about the Left. They need a devil to oppose in order to have a rallying point. The absurdity of claiming Trump was a secret Nazi was never noticed, because they needed him to be their devil. Since their devils are always imaginary to begin with, they need to be churning out new ones, because eventually the imaginary ones are no longer useful. Progressives have been plotting the final showdown with the Devil since the Mayflower.
The American Left is really just escapism. It always has been, but in a post scarcity world where even the poorest people are materially safe, the escapism has had to conjure increasingly bizarre rationales. Whether it is invisible Russians, invisible Nazis, invisible Klansman and now invisible insurrectionists, the fantasy requires a villain, so they will conjure one when one does not exist. The Left is Dungeon’s and Dragons for mentally unstable, upper-middle-class white people.
Escapism is not just the domain of the Left. Libertarianism is the most obvious form of it outside the Left. In fact, the escapism is so strong it is possible to place libertarians on the Left, next to the orcs and wizards of Progressivism. The political spectrum would then be realism at one pole and escapism at the other. The libertarians generally accept the reality of math, so they would be somewhere between the midpoint and the end point where we find the modern American Left.
In case it is not obvious, the escapism of libertarianism lies in the fact that you can never have a libertarian society. Hans-Hermann Hoppe has explained at length how it is impossible to go from a modern society to a libertarian one. Even if you sort that puzzle, there is no way to maintain the libertarian society within libertarian theory. Put another way, the libertarian society is like any other fantasy world. Its appeal is in its impossibility, not in its plausibility. It is escapism.
For at least half a century, the Republican Party has been built on the escapism of what we now call civic nationalism. Evangelicals, for example, unhappy with left-wing social changes, organized to get their people elected. They finally got one of their guys in the White House and he did nothing for them. The reaction to this burst of reality was the Tea Party movement, which was really just a civic nationalist reaction to the failures of the Bush administration. It too crashed on the rocks of reality.
Donald Trump was the ultimate civic nationalist and he got nothing done. Part of the anger at Trump and his voters is that they accidentally proved that civic nationalism was always a big lie. The fake anger of the Left was always about their escapism, not anything Trump actually did in office. The real venom comes from the GOP, who sense he ruined the game for them. The Trump phenomenon ruined the fantasy of civic nationalism, removing that form of escapism from the system.
This is a truth that the core of the dissident right has always grasped, but never found a way to exploit. Most people, especially people in politics or cultural movements, are not interested in reality. They want a story, a narrative, that makes them the good guy fighting the selfless fight against the bad guy. Politics in general is not about reasoning from fact to some new facts or truths. It is not about making broad generalizations based on observable truths. Politics is about storytelling.
This is the great lesson of the interwar years. The people on the winning side knew the war was a horrible blunder committed by their rulers. Because they were on the winning side, they had an easy story to explain it. The bad guys were to blame, even if their own rulers were reckless and stupid. Ultimately, the fault lay with the losers and they would be made to pay for their crimes. The losers, in contrast, had no story to explain why their rulers lied to them and “stabbed them in the back.”
Into the void raced liberalism, communism, and fascism. Liberalism could blame the old rulers, but it suffered from being a story told by the winners. Communism told a story that failed to include the facts of the war. Communism was always a story about the future, not the past. Fascism, in contrast, offered a story that included the past, the present and a future. To the modern ear, Hitler sounds like a raving lunatic, but in his time, he was a master storyteller. He made fascism a pleasant fantasy.
This is why our present is full of bizarre conspiracies and fantasies. The Left has total control of the institutions, but they keep churning out new fantasies, because they cannot square the circle of who they are. How can the underdog also possess the high ground of society? How can they have control of the institutions, yet the system still suffers from institutional unfairness? The Left is spiraling into madness because its plot has an unreconcilable contradiction at the heart of it.
We are living in an interregnum of narrative collapse. The various right-wing fantasies, like libertarianism, conservatism and civic nationalism have collapsed. Those stories no longer make any sense. Only old people cling to them. The Progressive story is in the process of narrative collapse. The explosion of conspiracy theories and subcultures is due to the hole at the middle of a politics. The future will belong to those who create a new story that adequately explains the past, present and the future.
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I agree about libertarianism. It’s trying to make some sort of logical system out of very incorrect premises. Hoppe can take it further than anyone else I know, but ultimately it is a very dead end.
“The future will belong to those who create a new story that adequately explains the past, present and the future.”
That ‘master storyteller’ was very close. He and his people just didn’t take their ideas to their logical conclusions.
Hoppe, like Walter Block, is a tedious fucker. My eyes glaze over trying to read their shit.
“…those who create a new story that adequately explains the past, present and the future.”
– Zman
You mean like the B3rg* over at WEF?
when people are sitting around a fire, perhaps with the last evening light showing the crumbling ruins of industrial age wreckage somewhere off in the distance, people will tell a mix of stories about those who built those monuments. they were a powerful people, almost godlike, flying through the air, destroying whole mountains, fabulously wealthy, but that their very wealth and power corrupted them, and they became by degrees the slaves of their machines (what are machines? we wont have too many of those around, aside from rusting dead examples.. machines, they were demonic contraptions, like the golem of fairy tales, a kind of deal with the devil, like sauron’s orcs created in crude imitation of living things, to serve their masters in performing work.. the machines could sometimes fool you that they were somehow thinking or alive, but they were always things of death.) , which machines were also, by necessity, made out of poisons , fuelled by poisons, and spewed out poisons. But those people were thoroughly corrupt, they would not let go of the wealth and power, and thus would not let got of their machines. They thought with their machines that they had become even mightier than god himself. They thought they would even become immortal with their machines. Of course all those things were always a delusion, but they were addicted to power. They used their machines to fight wars, to enslave each other, to spy on each other, and ultimately they tried to make the entire earth a gigantic prison built out of machines. Those ruins we see now, where we go collect scraps of metal to make knives and axes and shovels and arrowheads and swords.. those ruins are part of the gigantic prison they built. But their machines were killing everything, poisoning everything, corrupting everything. Those people went insane, finally turning genocidal , they came up with a final plan to wipe out everyone on earth aside from a few of their slaves and of course their precious machines.. of course they had already gone past any hope of salvation, and collapsed in a fiery miserable catastrophe of unspeakable violence, tragedy, and misery. They did kill a whole lot of everyone else. In the end though many of those machine lords died at the hands of their own servants, and many others died from their own machines, which never did have the spirit of life in them and were always demonic prefigurements of death. Nobody heard their last desperate cries because they had surrounded themselves with soulless machines.
Those of us people of the living earth, who escaped their wars of extermination, hiding in the wilderness (in those days what we call the living world, was only a few corners and rugged lands that was called wilderness because there werent any machines there. the machine people hated the wilderness and destroyed as much of it as they could, just out of hatred. Some of it survived and so did some of us) , managed to preserve out humanity and our connection to the spirit of the living world, which lives in each of us. Nobody will ever make machines again.
Damn, nonny, that was at least nine different kinds of weird. You don’t tell kids that kind of shit as bedtime stories, do you?
the people who inherit the earth after this psychotic death cult collapses… will tell a story probably not too far off from that, to explain what happened. they will be the descendants of whoever escaped the empire of the machine.
Of our possible futures, that’s somewhere around number 2 or 3 for best outcome. Number 1 is great but shit drops off fast from there
You’re not far off the mark, with people going crazy, violent suicidal and armageddon type shit going down, however;
Auntie and many other folks love backhoes, land-line telephones, airplanes, and refrigeration as well as LED lighting.
The evil machines at the root of the problem are the computer machines.
Like Elon Musk sez:
A.I. is The Devil.
OK Auntie. I fell into a rabbit hole last night where I found this and wanted to but didn’t come over here to TBP to share it. But now you’ve set it up. You guys should check out at least 10 or so paragraphs.
https://zerohplovecraft.wordpress.com/2020/09/06/key-performance-indicators/
Puts a totally different perspective on “Shit, shave, shower, and a smoke.” don’t it.
Great (neural)link, Ben.
DESTROY ALL THE DEMON COMPUTERS!* (C)(TM).
*( There’s a real movement in there somewhere, right?)
”
“How can the underdog also possess the high ground of society? How can they have control of the institutions, yet the system still suffers from institutional unfairness? The Left is spiraling into madness because its plot has an unreconcilable contradiction at the heart of it.”
Succinct and observably true.
I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!
I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.
(The above is from Richard P. Feynman. I’d rather hang with Feynman than Z-man — Feynman’s got a better narrative 😉 )