This was a comment to one of my Facebook posts that I found interesting… not sure what to do about it, but it has a ring of truth: “ The question was posed, "Why do people continue supporting Trump no matter what he does?" A lady named Bev answered it this way:
“You all don't get it. I live in Trump country, in the Ozarks in southern Missouri, one of the last places where the KKK still has a relatively strong established presence.
They don't give a shit what he does. He's just something to rally around and hate liberals, that's it, period.
He absolutely realizes that and plays it up. They love it. He knows they love it.
The fact that people act like it's anything other than that proves to them that liberals are idiots, all the more reason for high fives all around.
If you keep getting caught up in "why do they not realize this problem" and "how can they still back Trump after this scandal," then you do not understand what the underlying motivating factor of his support is. It's fuck liberals, that's pretty much it.
Have you noticed he can do pretty much anything imaginable, and they'll explain some way that rationalizes it that makes zero logical sense?
Because they're not even keeping track of any coherent narrative, it's irrelevant. Fuck liberals is the only relevant thing.
Trust me; I know firsthand what I'm talking about.
That's why they just laugh at it all because you all don't even realize they truly don't give a fuck about whatever the conversation is about.
It's just a side mission story that doesn't matter anyway.
That's all just trivial details - the economy, health care, whatever.
Fuck liberals.
Look at the issue with not wearing the masks.
I can tell you what that's about. It's about exposing fear. They're playing chicken with nature, and whoever flinches just moved down their internal pecking order, one step closer to being a liberal.
You've got to understand the one core value that they hold above all others is hatred for what they consider weakness because that's what they believe strength is, hatred of weakness.
And I mean passionate, sadistic hatred.
And I'm not exaggerating. Believe me.
Sadistic, passionate hatred, and that's what proves they're strong, their passionate hatred for weakness.
Sometimes they will lump vulnerability in with weakness.
They do that because people tend to start humbling themselves when they're in some compromising or overwhelming circumstance, and to them, that's an obvious sign of weakness.
Kindness = weakness. Honesty = weakness.
Compromise = weakness.
They consider their very existence to be superior in every way to anyone who doesn't hate weakness as much as they do.
They consider liberals to be weak people that are inferior, almost a different species, and the fact that liberals are so weak is why they have to unite in large numbers, which they find disgusting, but it's that disgust that is a true expression of their natural superiority.
Go ahead and try to have a logical, rational conversation with them. Just keep in mind what I said here and be forewarned.””
Hate. Passionate, sadistic hate. This explains it all. I've wondered so many times how they can still support trump. I just didn't understand how their evilness binds them so tightly. I thought being a good person was a strength. Now I can see that all these "christians" use their rejection of good to defeat those who are really good and kind. I've lost all hope for a better world.
“They consider liberals to be weak people that are inferior, almost a different species...” What a chilling statement. I do not doubt Bev’s words. Their “passionate, sadistic hatred” of liberals is Thanatos writ large to my mind. And once that death drive goes full berserker, and finds purchase in similarly neglected/downtrodden areas across the country (where people often have more time to strategize and amass weaponry than those hustling to survive in urban areas), the likelihood of civil war increases exponentially.
Definitely think this is in play. These people have been coddled in their stupidity for a decade now, and they are now dragging us down with them at incredible speed.
Wait. I’m being so for real when I say this. I thought we all knew this. How can we not have collectively experienced this hatred, felt the flecks of saliva on our cheeks, without seeing it for what it is? I’m aghast.
Oh and just to clarify a couple of things, to them anything left of where they are (which now includes everyone from Bush style neocons, through the centre, to full on leftist anarchist/communists) is a “liberal”. And yes none are more so hated than the “liberal”. Than the marginalised “liberal”. Than the marginalised non-white “liberal”.
The time to fight for our lives and the lives of those we love and our descendants might have passed already, but I suggest I’d rather do that than starve to death in an offshore torture camp.
This kind of comment is precisely the reason I left Facebook entirely and migrated over here to Substack about nine months ago. The binary rhetoric on Facebook is so destructive. This woman’s certainty and her generalized “othering” is the kind of rhetoric that’s just what’s keeping everything fucked up.
This is a very insightful essay, Daniel. It reminds me of Norman Mailer calling for a political consciousness that embraces the dark side of the human psyche. To translate that into concrete terms of action, I see nothing more promising than the leftist populism of AOC and Bernie Sanders, which builds on the animal spirits of ordinary working people struggling to maintain a life of dignity. In my humble opinion, such a movement is the most viable opportunity to unite the hundred million of us who favor the Constitution and the New Deal, the most significant of all institutions produced by the Enlightenment in the New World. With help from your essay, I can see that it's going to take broad-based emotional fervor to motivate us to return to a rational order that maximizes the common good.
Attractive as some of Bataille's opinions might be, encompassing as they do the arational/shadow side of our nature, they seem a bit unbaked to me. Or maybe I'm unbaked even after all these years, ha ha. Maybe incoherent is a better word. When I used to work with schizophrenic patients some of their musings were equally ornate and contained nuggets of what in isolation seemed like brilliant gems of insight. On the other hand, they never ultimately held together in anything remotely like a useful guide to making one's way through this turbulent and awe-inspiring world we live in.
I agree that there is a LOT of unrecognized stuff going on, IMO just out of view, but not all that complicated to understand. Take the ugly distortion of masculinity you explore. Yes, it's all those things, and yes it's tragic that it leaves out the heroic strength, generosity and effervescent exploratory, outgoing courage and curiousity that makes real men so magnetic to women. IMO this has been very unfortunately kicked to the curb during our current exploration of the dark side of the greed and lust immature males are so subject to, most especially those forces when they are distorted by a culture obsessed with possession, dominance and heirarchical notions of success. American boys lack mature role models. Most of the ones they're presented with a just physically large and agile athletes or rappers, or cinematic he-men with limited self knowledge, limited ability for intelligent restraint and a lack of appreciation for the higher reaches of the male psyche.
What if we, like the Kwakiutl, DID hold potlatches in which a man gained status by giving away the goods he amassed via his prowess as a hunter and a maker of useable goods? What if he could attract a fine woman or women to his bed via acts of extravagant, even irrational generosity that lifted community boats like a mighty tide? Don't you imagine that culture like that might act in all ways to knit its members into lasting networks of mutual support and celebration. Perhaps there are some, but during my studies of the Kwakiutl I did not find any downsides to their displays and practic of generative largesse. If that is true, maybe we should look to something as concrete as a model for change. Of course this is just stuff off the top of my old gray head and there's much more to take a look at, but please, don't bog down in the weeds.
I have no brilliant response to this, but it was another fantastic piece and you ended with all the best questions. You are onto something very important. I am going to think about this first through the lens of my own personal aversion to those excesses and darknesses within myself, see where they come from and how they impact the way I move through the world, for insight. What’s going on out there is obv going on “in here.”
So many nebulous thoughts came into my head as I read this essay. And the potlach ceremony popped into my head at one point. It seems our indigenous ancestors, whoever they were, wherever they lived, knew more about human nature than our supposedly enlightened civilization ever did. We have abandoned initiation rituals and ceremonies for welcoming newborns into the community - the whole Earth community not just into a specific religion like Baptism, as well as initiations into adulthood for adolescents (and especially males who aren’t initiated by their bodies like women are), in a bid for being rational and scientific. We ignore our spirits, our souls, the fact that we are more than flesh, blood, bone. That we are “part of” it all, not isolated “sovereign”(the way people use that term today) individuals with empty space around us. I’m looking forward to your next essay that takes this further. Even if most (or at least many) people wouldn’t grok what you’re writing about here, nor would they be willing to take the time to actually try, it’s important (to me anyway) to use any language, any stories that may penetrate someone’s resistance to understanding what is going on. Certainly we will not be able to reach those like the folks Bev, in the comment from FB that you copied here, wrote about. But there are others who aren’t that far gone (fingers crossed) who may be reached. And for the rest of us, we need all the ideas and points of view we can get to inform our own words and actions.
I think you nailed it with this statement: "We are experiencing an upsurge of the irrational, the daimonic, rising up from the deeper strata of the collective unconscious."
It's interesting to consider the idea that the irrational, the cthonic, the shadow eros you reference through the ideas of Bataille in your essay have, in fact, been present among the left since Romanticism in the early 19th century and certainly since the rise of Dada and Surrealism in the early 20th century. However - and this is a big "however" - as much as these gestures of the irrational and true spiritual freedom have been manifest in the cultural expression of people left of center, so often they have not penetrated into the realm of mass politics. Your essay provokes much needed reflection on multiple themes which humanity must now face with urgency; chief among them is this very tension: What form does the irrational/cthonic/dark eros imaginary take in a *mass culture society and in mass society politics?* Artistic expression and ritual on the small and local level seems to have a track record of being much more capable of handling the perils of the shadow than does its expression on the mass cultural scale. Having grown up Catholic, I can understand aspects of the communion and baptism rituals of the faith as possessing beauty and meaning. However, my experience of Catholicism was one of terror and psychological abuse. And the long and ignominious history of the Catholic Church can be considered as an object lesson in what happens when what is beautiful and non-rational on an intimate level gets projected onto a mass scale. How engagement with the shadow & the unconscious can be present in mass scale politics without turning truly dark and destructive is a vexing question indeed.
My current opinion is that the delusions of fascism can only be defeated by the offering of actual policies - around climate & ecology, economic justice, the carceral state, health care, etc. - that then permit the peace and well-being people need to to be able to pursue ritual on the scale of the local. Neoliberal corporate Democrats have been adamant in their refusal to offer any such policies. They will lose to the post-truth fascists until they do.
Your essay is, much like the latest Emerald podcast the trickster jumps sides was for me, such a helpful frame through which to see our situation and keep our sanity, to see the forest while in the trees.
Hey Daniel - I love this article. It amazes me how you can create so much content of this depth and scope in so little time, but somehow you do! I look forward to the next one!
Perhaps there will arise a new protocurrency that can throttle the unchecked collective ego and foster a broad collective consensus not centered on annihilation through the eye of an end state omega point. Something with a bit more gravitas than sm likes.
I've thought along similar lines for a long time. I'm liberal, but my fellow liberals do a lot of ridiculing of what lays outside of their worldview. The irrational is reasserting itself in what seems like the worst possible way nowadays.
What an excellent and so helpful analysis getting a the psychological foundation of what's happening. "Fuck the Liberals" alone (see the below comment) wouldn't be enough of a motivation for this level of (self) destruction - there has to be a much deeper drive (which is what Daniel talks about)...
Excellent essay. This helps in making sense of the mass cult and cruelty, Trump enacting "a kind of ritualized sacrifice or offering...the absolutely wrong path to address the crisis of meaning and loss of myth." This helps satisfy the bewildered a little bit, like me, in the search for causes. A lot of writers are talking about Trump's ego and chaos and causelessness. David Brooks just wrote in the NYT about how the dear leader needs to dominate for the sake of power itself. The need to display dominance and grab attention obviously seem primary. Brooks also writes we need a similar fervor of civic uprising: "The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power." That speaks to your last statements about the need for our movement to "incorporate myth and mysticism, Eros and archetype, into our politics, without being subsumed by them." Yes, and now how to achieve it? It seems inevitable with minds that engage complexity that a rival power will engage humble souls that can admit faults and mistakes, and that's too rational for maga to ever accept. Nevertheless, We must be Rising Up ourselves with urgency...without waiting to change any maga minds...!
This was a comment to one of my Facebook posts that I found interesting… not sure what to do about it, but it has a ring of truth: “ The question was posed, "Why do people continue supporting Trump no matter what he does?" A lady named Bev answered it this way:
“You all don't get it. I live in Trump country, in the Ozarks in southern Missouri, one of the last places where the KKK still has a relatively strong established presence.
They don't give a shit what he does. He's just something to rally around and hate liberals, that's it, period.
He absolutely realizes that and plays it up. They love it. He knows they love it.
The fact that people act like it's anything other than that proves to them that liberals are idiots, all the more reason for high fives all around.
If you keep getting caught up in "why do they not realize this problem" and "how can they still back Trump after this scandal," then you do not understand what the underlying motivating factor of his support is. It's fuck liberals, that's pretty much it.
Have you noticed he can do pretty much anything imaginable, and they'll explain some way that rationalizes it that makes zero logical sense?
Because they're not even keeping track of any coherent narrative, it's irrelevant. Fuck liberals is the only relevant thing.
Trust me; I know firsthand what I'm talking about.
That's why they just laugh at it all because you all don't even realize they truly don't give a fuck about whatever the conversation is about.
It's just a side mission story that doesn't matter anyway.
That's all just trivial details - the economy, health care, whatever.
Fuck liberals.
Look at the issue with not wearing the masks.
I can tell you what that's about. It's about exposing fear. They're playing chicken with nature, and whoever flinches just moved down their internal pecking order, one step closer to being a liberal.
You've got to understand the one core value that they hold above all others is hatred for what they consider weakness because that's what they believe strength is, hatred of weakness.
And I mean passionate, sadistic hatred.
And I'm not exaggerating. Believe me.
Sadistic, passionate hatred, and that's what proves they're strong, their passionate hatred for weakness.
Sometimes they will lump vulnerability in with weakness.
They do that because people tend to start humbling themselves when they're in some compromising or overwhelming circumstance, and to them, that's an obvious sign of weakness.
Kindness = weakness. Honesty = weakness.
Compromise = weakness.
They consider their very existence to be superior in every way to anyone who doesn't hate weakness as much as they do.
They consider liberals to be weak people that are inferior, almost a different species, and the fact that liberals are so weak is why they have to unite in large numbers, which they find disgusting, but it's that disgust that is a true expression of their natural superiority.
Go ahead and try to have a logical, rational conversation with them. Just keep in mind what I said here and be forewarned.””
Hate. Passionate, sadistic hate. This explains it all. I've wondered so many times how they can still support trump. I just didn't understand how their evilness binds them so tightly. I thought being a good person was a strength. Now I can see that all these "christians" use their rejection of good to defeat those who are really good and kind. I've lost all hope for a better world.
“They consider liberals to be weak people that are inferior, almost a different species...” What a chilling statement. I do not doubt Bev’s words. Their “passionate, sadistic hatred” of liberals is Thanatos writ large to my mind. And once that death drive goes full berserker, and finds purchase in similarly neglected/downtrodden areas across the country (where people often have more time to strategize and amass weaponry than those hustling to survive in urban areas), the likelihood of civil war increases exponentially.
Definitely think this is in play. These people have been coddled in their stupidity for a decade now, and they are now dragging us down with them at incredible speed.
Wait. I’m being so for real when I say this. I thought we all knew this. How can we not have collectively experienced this hatred, felt the flecks of saliva on our cheeks, without seeing it for what it is? I’m aghast.
Oh and just to clarify a couple of things, to them anything left of where they are (which now includes everyone from Bush style neocons, through the centre, to full on leftist anarchist/communists) is a “liberal”. And yes none are more so hated than the “liberal”. Than the marginalised “liberal”. Than the marginalised non-white “liberal”.
The time to fight for our lives and the lives of those we love and our descendants might have passed already, but I suggest I’d rather do that than starve to death in an offshore torture camp.
Boom
This kind of comment is precisely the reason I left Facebook entirely and migrated over here to Substack about nine months ago. The binary rhetoric on Facebook is so destructive. This woman’s certainty and her generalized “othering” is the kind of rhetoric that’s just what’s keeping everything fucked up.
This is a very insightful essay, Daniel. It reminds me of Norman Mailer calling for a political consciousness that embraces the dark side of the human psyche. To translate that into concrete terms of action, I see nothing more promising than the leftist populism of AOC and Bernie Sanders, which builds on the animal spirits of ordinary working people struggling to maintain a life of dignity. In my humble opinion, such a movement is the most viable opportunity to unite the hundred million of us who favor the Constitution and the New Deal, the most significant of all institutions produced by the Enlightenment in the New World. With help from your essay, I can see that it's going to take broad-based emotional fervor to motivate us to return to a rational order that maximizes the common good.
I agree that working with animal spirits is key.
Attractive as some of Bataille's opinions might be, encompassing as they do the arational/shadow side of our nature, they seem a bit unbaked to me. Or maybe I'm unbaked even after all these years, ha ha. Maybe incoherent is a better word. When I used to work with schizophrenic patients some of their musings were equally ornate and contained nuggets of what in isolation seemed like brilliant gems of insight. On the other hand, they never ultimately held together in anything remotely like a useful guide to making one's way through this turbulent and awe-inspiring world we live in.
I agree that there is a LOT of unrecognized stuff going on, IMO just out of view, but not all that complicated to understand. Take the ugly distortion of masculinity you explore. Yes, it's all those things, and yes it's tragic that it leaves out the heroic strength, generosity and effervescent exploratory, outgoing courage and curiousity that makes real men so magnetic to women. IMO this has been very unfortunately kicked to the curb during our current exploration of the dark side of the greed and lust immature males are so subject to, most especially those forces when they are distorted by a culture obsessed with possession, dominance and heirarchical notions of success. American boys lack mature role models. Most of the ones they're presented with a just physically large and agile athletes or rappers, or cinematic he-men with limited self knowledge, limited ability for intelligent restraint and a lack of appreciation for the higher reaches of the male psyche.
What if we, like the Kwakiutl, DID hold potlatches in which a man gained status by giving away the goods he amassed via his prowess as a hunter and a maker of useable goods? What if he could attract a fine woman or women to his bed via acts of extravagant, even irrational generosity that lifted community boats like a mighty tide? Don't you imagine that culture like that might act in all ways to knit its members into lasting networks of mutual support and celebration. Perhaps there are some, but during my studies of the Kwakiutl I did not find any downsides to their displays and practic of generative largesse. If that is true, maybe we should look to something as concrete as a model for change. Of course this is just stuff off the top of my old gray head and there's much more to take a look at, but please, don't bog down in the weeds.
Love it!
Gracias.
This is the most provocative essay I've read yet on our current decline.
thanks Laura. Please share it!
I have no brilliant response to this, but it was another fantastic piece and you ended with all the best questions. You are onto something very important. I am going to think about this first through the lens of my own personal aversion to those excesses and darknesses within myself, see where they come from and how they impact the way I move through the world, for insight. What’s going on out there is obv going on “in here.”
Center for applied jungian studies has a great course on dark Eros.
So many nebulous thoughts came into my head as I read this essay. And the potlach ceremony popped into my head at one point. It seems our indigenous ancestors, whoever they were, wherever they lived, knew more about human nature than our supposedly enlightened civilization ever did. We have abandoned initiation rituals and ceremonies for welcoming newborns into the community - the whole Earth community not just into a specific religion like Baptism, as well as initiations into adulthood for adolescents (and especially males who aren’t initiated by their bodies like women are), in a bid for being rational and scientific. We ignore our spirits, our souls, the fact that we are more than flesh, blood, bone. That we are “part of” it all, not isolated “sovereign”(the way people use that term today) individuals with empty space around us. I’m looking forward to your next essay that takes this further. Even if most (or at least many) people wouldn’t grok what you’re writing about here, nor would they be willing to take the time to actually try, it’s important (to me anyway) to use any language, any stories that may penetrate someone’s resistance to understanding what is going on. Certainly we will not be able to reach those like the folks Bev, in the comment from FB that you copied here, wrote about. But there are others who aren’t that far gone (fingers crossed) who may be reached. And for the rest of us, we need all the ideas and points of view we can get to inform our own words and actions.
I think you nailed it with this statement: "We are experiencing an upsurge of the irrational, the daimonic, rising up from the deeper strata of the collective unconscious."
It's interesting to consider the idea that the irrational, the cthonic, the shadow eros you reference through the ideas of Bataille in your essay have, in fact, been present among the left since Romanticism in the early 19th century and certainly since the rise of Dada and Surrealism in the early 20th century. However - and this is a big "however" - as much as these gestures of the irrational and true spiritual freedom have been manifest in the cultural expression of people left of center, so often they have not penetrated into the realm of mass politics. Your essay provokes much needed reflection on multiple themes which humanity must now face with urgency; chief among them is this very tension: What form does the irrational/cthonic/dark eros imaginary take in a *mass culture society and in mass society politics?* Artistic expression and ritual on the small and local level seems to have a track record of being much more capable of handling the perils of the shadow than does its expression on the mass cultural scale. Having grown up Catholic, I can understand aspects of the communion and baptism rituals of the faith as possessing beauty and meaning. However, my experience of Catholicism was one of terror and psychological abuse. And the long and ignominious history of the Catholic Church can be considered as an object lesson in what happens when what is beautiful and non-rational on an intimate level gets projected onto a mass scale. How engagement with the shadow & the unconscious can be present in mass scale politics without turning truly dark and destructive is a vexing question indeed.
My current opinion is that the delusions of fascism can only be defeated by the offering of actual policies - around climate & ecology, economic justice, the carceral state, health care, etc. - that then permit the peace and well-being people need to to be able to pursue ritual on the scale of the local. Neoliberal corporate Democrats have been adamant in their refusal to offer any such policies. They will lose to the post-truth fascists until they do.
Your essay is, much like the latest Emerald podcast the trickster jumps sides was for me, such a helpful frame through which to see our situation and keep our sanity, to see the forest while in the trees.
Hey Daniel - I love this article. It amazes me how you can create so much content of this depth and scope in so little time, but somehow you do! I look forward to the next one!
Perhaps there will arise a new protocurrency that can throttle the unchecked collective ego and foster a broad collective consensus not centered on annihilation through the eye of an end state omega point. Something with a bit more gravitas than sm likes.
There used to be something called “wisdom” but I guess it just didn’t work out….
I've thought along similar lines for a long time. I'm liberal, but my fellow liberals do a lot of ridiculing of what lays outside of their worldview. The irrational is reasserting itself in what seems like the worst possible way nowadays.
Hi Daniel,
What an excellent and so helpful analysis getting a the psychological foundation of what's happening. "Fuck the Liberals" alone (see the below comment) wouldn't be enough of a motivation for this level of (self) destruction - there has to be a much deeper drive (which is what Daniel talks about)...
Brilliant. Thank-you, Daniel ❤️
Excellent essay. This helps in making sense of the mass cult and cruelty, Trump enacting "a kind of ritualized sacrifice or offering...the absolutely wrong path to address the crisis of meaning and loss of myth." This helps satisfy the bewildered a little bit, like me, in the search for causes. A lot of writers are talking about Trump's ego and chaos and causelessness. David Brooks just wrote in the NYT about how the dear leader needs to dominate for the sake of power itself. The need to display dominance and grab attention obviously seem primary. Brooks also writes we need a similar fervor of civic uprising: "The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power." That speaks to your last statements about the need for our movement to "incorporate myth and mysticism, Eros and archetype, into our politics, without being subsumed by them." Yes, and now how to achieve it? It seems inevitable with minds that engage complexity that a rival power will engage humble souls that can admit faults and mistakes, and that's too rational for maga to ever accept. Nevertheless, We must be Rising Up ourselves with urgency...without waiting to change any maga minds...!