The goal is to talk with people not to them. Not always possible (some folks are too Bill O'Reilly-ized to reason with) but more possible than many of us think. DRM
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There are a lot things going now that rise above individual encounters no matter how supportive and friendly, that need to be considered. I think we are living in a society in the grip of what could be called the polity of denial. It is something like a psychological pathology and it has many features that are disquietingly like a totalitarian society. I think I would go a little further and say we are moving into a kind of pre-cursor realm.
Consider this from Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism:
The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in the masses' inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important only because it convinces them of consistency in time.
What the masses refuse to recognize is the fortuitousness that pervades reality. They are predisposed to all ideologies because they explain facts as mere examples of laws and eliminate coincidences by inventing an all-embracing omnipotence which is supposed to be at the root of every accident. Totalitarian propaganda thrives on this escape from reality into fiction, from coincidence into consistency.
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In other words, while it is true that the masses are obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects, it is also true that their longing for fiction has some connection with those capacities of the human mind whose structural consistency is superior to mere occurrence. The masses' escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist, since coincidence has become its supreme master and human beings need the constant transformation of chaotic and accidental conditions into a man-made pattern of relative consistency. The revolt of the masses against `realism,' common sense, and all `the plausibilities of the world' (Burke) was the result of their atomization, of their loss of social status along with which they lost the whole sector of communal relationships in whose framework common sense makes sense. In their situation of spiritual and social homelessness, a measured insight into the interdependence of the arbitrary and the planned, the accidental and the necessary, could no longer operate. Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity. Before the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses probably will always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual sacrifices--and this not because they are stupid or wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self-respect. (342-3p)
This particular book of Arendt's has a lot of problems, but it also has remarkable passages and insights.
.From Levi-Strauss (Savage Mind) and in Cassirer (Myth of State) there is considerable development of a similar distinction between the physical world of arbitrary events and human world of consistency and order. The appearance of inconsistent, arbitrary, accidental and fortuitous events in the empirical world of concrete conditions, are all smoothed over into a self-consistent interpretation through transformational systems of mythological thought. Such systems are rational, in the same sense that logic is rational, that is by its own test of internal consistency. There is then an intimate similarity between mythological world of thought together with its systems of interpretation and a totalitarian world of thought. The difference however is that the former has the intention of understanding and explaining the world, where as the latter is fabricated specially to obscure the world.
What Arendt adds here is the socio-political understanding of masses as opposed to classes, where the particulars of class identification have been stripped away, where regional identities have been erased, and where traditional social distinctions between for example urban and rural have been blurred. The result is a mass of people without community identification of any distinctive sort. Such a communal identification is part of the socio-cultural medium through which people can interpret the world and exercise their common sense, act in concert with and express political interests as groups; for example, as a class of heavy industrial workers, a class of rural small farmers or laborers, small businessmen, and so forth.
While Arendt is attempting to characterize the breakdown of 19th Century traditional communities and classes in post-WWI Germany and Russia and the rootlessness of societies undergoing the later phases of industrial revolution, very similar processes of rootlessness, alienation, and homogenization have become a way of life here in the US. These factors then pre-dispose us as a society to propaganda systems, ideologies, and political movements that seem to supply all those absent communal identifications together with value systems, interpretive rationals, insights, and a host of canons, precepts, and axiomatic truths that take the place of what was once called common sense.
So then, what I am trying to do is understand all the miasma of rightwing garbage that blends the neocons, the fundies, wall street, and the all america sap (aka stupid white men) together into a extremely spiteful and nasty political movement that currently holds all political power in the US. The point to understanding it, is in order to more effectively destroy it.
Frankly I do not understand how such pure bullshit has ever gotten hold of this country. But I am beginning to see how. I think the essential features of this shit-world manage to both function as and artificially supply that absent communal identification, which also functions as a form of identity politics, primarily for stupid white men---who not remarkably are its most ardent supporters and not coincidently the much sought after `center' of both Repugnants and Demicraps. The problem then with the liberal, progressive and radical left is that these political ideologies, movements, and parties are all predominately critical of the status quo, and insist on dredging up every disturbing fact, every errant empirical finding, and all sorts of moral, social, economic, political and rational inconsistencies in the prevailing order.
The crude choice dynamics emerges between an apparently positive, smooth, orderly, and established system of assurances and consistencies perpetrated by the Right, as opposed to an argumentative, messy, contentious, disorderly and negative Left.
So by the logic of the above argument, a social mass endlessly exposed to messy, contentious, insecure, and arbitrary changes of the political economy, will more than likely choose what promises to smooth over the mess, reassure the endless doubt, and supply some modicum identification with others.
Chuck Grimes