Anger, the political emotion and its Christian and medical fascist interdiction

On politics, I draw the line with anger. If there's nothing for you to be angry about, rebel against, fight to destroy; if you've never hated anything in the world; if you think love, love, love means being calmly indifferent, then it's likely not that you have a bad politics as that you aren't political at all. I could never understand people like that. The whole matter of the political is knowing how to direct in the right way what you do as a kind of project based on a passionate opposition to you first found was against you. So many people grow up and join the church, or otherwise devote themselves to normality; that's why it was said that the world's redemption lies with a remnant.  Damned are the peace-takers.

The political is a species of the polemical. It is different from war, and its affects most characteristically include those of anger, which is distinguished from war’s of hate. But it is not Christianity’s universal love either. In that world, there is governmentality or management, which can be good or bad, but not politics, which is a realm not of good and evil but friend and foe, and further is not just conflicts between families or personal groups, but is driven by ideas. Some now think that any public pursuit of contestable ideas or projects is evil or (which amounts to the same thing) madness: an extreme point of the Weberian idea of the state as holding a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, in which nothing outside of the exercise of state power (hence, the police) can be contested, as it will be called “violence.” Opposition is violence, and the opponent of a regime or institutional complex is called a criminal, madman, or hater. The destruction of the political in a society where state authorities aim to exercise an intimate domination of persons is a definition of fascism. The Christian ideology that commands and demands a universal apathetic and indifferent tolerance and refusal of all passions will say that anger, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, is itself crime. But it is the beginning of any genuine politics.

Psychiatry took over from priests in the modern world. It used to be no prideful rage could be tolerated -- even "la rage de l'expression" Godard spoke of, adding, as if in a bid for legitimacy: "moi, poète et peintre." Now no autonomous creative work can be tolerated. To pursue a personal project is to have "increased goal-directed activity," which is considered a sign of mania. What is being attacked is the individual as such, and the idea of any political opposition or any creative projects. Those are tolerated within certain domains, just as selfish behavior is admired and encouraged when it is that of capitalists, and criminalized when it is that of individuals whose activity is not legitimated as part of institutions like property, family, society, and state. The criminal is a self-interested person but so is the capitalist. Human nature should be allowed for, so that there can be the exploitation and domination that are needed, at the same time that it is with absolute suspicion and hatred. The two sides of modern individualism are the property-owner and the person destined to be targeted by the police.