Rage is in, moderates out, and it's something (for us on the left) to celebrate
Today there is lots of rage.
Whether such "negative" affects are "good" or "bad" is irrelevant. Those who speak as such are demanding you adopt a morality that accords with what they want.
Welcome to my rant. It's risky. For one thing, in America the stupid people who are the majority and are usually silent unless they are sanctioning you in same way will say that you didn’t speak or write correctly. Did you digress? Are one of your sentence structures incorrect? School talk is fascist to begin with.
Besides, of course the police can fuck with you for this and then they'll bring in doctors to fuck with you even more.
Which is a way of saying, this is “crazily” digressive. But I choose to write that way sometimes.
And there's a truth in this: since some people who like sugar in their coffee are criminals, and since anyone might be, and functionaries can wield statistics which show what particular targeted persons "are likely to" do (or suffer-- it may little matter to them, as the police and medical/carceral order is not regulated by any morality except in limit cases), if they decide to take you out and fuck with you, they can.
The people exercising power over others are not responsible for the consequences of their actions, though they do have ethical codes prescribing the limits of what they may do as part of their routines of social control and management of the populations that must be controlled, whose "violence" (rebellion or disobedience) are hyper-feared. The victim is always the one held responsible.
You will be targeted for your dispositions, which the managerial state regards as evil by definition. Your dispositions can be used to take you out. They can only be used against you. That everyone is equally a “sinner” is always irrelevant. That would be of interest in a total state. Such states have been weakening for some time, hence the efforts to bring them back. Which likely means a lot of violence.
Your reactions will be used against you. You are allowed to cultivate them because it’s profitable.
When people that what you do or say is “interesting,” and they like it, that means you’re being exploited. Performativity is normally used rhetorical as policing, but the expression it exploits and depends on is encouraged among “artists.” That could mean those of us who try to make sense of our experience of the world by making thought-provoking artifacts. But it does not mean that. It means people who are excellent in their performance so that audiences can applaud them in order to gratify by proxy their own frustrated narcissism. In a society in which it were normal for people were curious about the world we live in, people would talk about art and engage in beer brawls. It’s polite instead to smile and affirm your “like.” It doesn’t mean anything. Mean anything, what a joke, who do they think they are.
A narcissistic culture is not the opposite of a repressively authoritarian one; rather, they go together. In a fascist culture, or simply a police state, people are celebrated as special so that they can be targeted as such and taken out. That way people are better controlled.
Fools want everyone to love them. A totalizing state is kind to everyone in theory. It may be murderous in fact. A class of people charged with much authority is constitutionally unable to recognize the barbarism they participate in. After all, they are polite and civilized. Maybe you aren’t. Friends criticize each other and are willing to quarrel; a really hateful enemy will be very friendly in the sales kind of way and bring you a Trojan Horse. It is wise to be civil and friendly. It is wise to be friendly to people you do not like at all. Cultivate authenticity as you do this? Compliance breeds contentment. You can avoid hating your enemy, which is risky as it leaves you more vulnerably exposed, if and only if you have superior forces with you. Most of the time, people don’t. The state apparatus in societies like ours spends a lot of its resources and will take up much of your time in preemptive strikes against potential dissidents. That’s what they target. If you think it is because you did something wrong or have some personal problem, then you’re a fool. You may be right about both of these things, but so what? Never speak truth to power, and never try to persuade or negotiate with an actual or potential jailer. In an effectively fascist society or police state, this can be a hard lesson to learn. Political opposition is “terrorism,” just as disobedience is “violence,” dissent and the disposition thereto, which all disaffection potentially is, is “mental illness.”
Female rage is not against patriarchy. It's real causes are more or less the same as male rage. Same with black and white rage.
People get angry when they feel wronged or when very frustrated.
Moralists say this is bad. But it is normal and true of everyone. Moralists are hypocrites. That is not because they are moral. Morality asks, since here we are now, what is to be done? It usually requires some thinking, though it may rest on principles that are "known," assumed, or given.
The right likes to enforce truths already known; the left prefers to question them. We need "intellectual" culture, which they can use but don't need. They want war, to defend their own interests. Those interests may or may not be greatly endangered, but they need you to think they are, and you are. That is motivating. It is called rhetoric.
The right prefers religion to philosophy and the arts. They prefer nationalism to culture. If they set up a national state to protect their culture, they will do much to destroy it. This has happened.
Moralism does not think, it "knows." It always knows the Other must be guilty.
For why are you so bad that I must hate you so?
Well, you’re here, aren’t you? It’s you I’m looking at, asshole.
When I feel nervous, some Other must be the rotten cause. Then I’ll feel empowered.
Liberation just means empowerment, for “us.” We were “oppressed" (just look what they did to us, they were always at it, until, finally…), but no more! No one will fuck with me/us any more! We’ll see to it! We will expel every stranger in order to celebrate Absolute Self!
Moralism is the aesthetics and desire of the police.
The subject of moralism is a slave, the one who pronounces its truths a slave master.
Masters are oppressed by the domination they are part of, and so are slaves.
The belief that some one in particular is the special one because targeted is just a useful distraction.
Most people who think they are not slaves are trying to prove that they are masters. They will likely treat you brutally if you don't show you respect them as such.
Women and men do not rebel differently. Both rebel against authority. That more often means figures of a father than a mother, but it does not matter if the representative person in authority is male or female. Nor does any other identity matter.
What matters in power relationships is never "who," but always "what" and "how." It is also not "why," because explanations only justify, and all justification is apology for power. And for the way things are, which is the way they are according to those in power. That the way things are must be followed means that there can be no change. What matters is "what" and "how," because it matters what is done. That some social subjectivity or group is special is just a mystification. It is ideology. Most "political" discussion is ideology. Often its intended function is to justify a course of action. That course of action is usually already determined. You are being told that you must give you consent. You had better, or else.
Feminism attacked a normatively masculine culture and succeeded because the rise of tertiary occupations involving office work did not favor men over women as factory work had tended to do. Feminism also succeeded as a middle-class movement and not as a feature of working-class socialist and anarchist radicalism, which it once was. Attacking normatively masculine culture, it criminalized it as virtual or imaginary violence, a strategy of ruling classes in long use. And it replaced it with a normative femininity. That did not entirely work. Some men resented it. Who can blame them for that?
Another strain of feminism attacked patriarchy. This is a form of social domination. There are other actual and possible forms. No social subject could possibly be intrinsic inclined necessarily or intrinsically to wield or be subject to social domination in the way that identity political ideologies have demanded. Those ideologies intrinsically lead to fascism. Fascist ideology typically opposes forms of oppression but only in order for some social subject to assert the will to it on its own behalf, which means victimizing others at least be implication if not also by intent. (Zionism is explicit about this; black nationalism and feminism more implicit). Women are not the only victims of patriarchy; men can be too. The difference is only that a structure of power that privileges a particular social subject will tend to favor them, not that it necessarily does. A feminism that opposed the domination of women or violence against them would be a creative social force. That feminism exists, but only on the left. The left is historically, and remains, anti-authoritarian in essence and for equal liberty, opposed to social inequality and opposed in the modern period to capitalism. A radical politics that does not oppose capitalism is not a radical politics. Socialism is a form of capitalism in which the state controls capital and rules over workers in their name; it may be more democratic, or may not be. The project of the left is radically democratic. If everyone is equally empowered, policing is harder to do effectively because it requires that some people have authority over others, which means they are not equal. A leftist ideology that is not anti-authoritarian or that favors one social group against others is an apology for fascism. It is probably little more than that, perhaps nothing more than that. The radical left has often articulated memes that are taken up by the right.
Identity politics is dead. Liberals can't stand this. The left should accept it and move on to wanting other things.
We want an alternative to capitalism. (The liberal Democrats want desperately to save it. That's why the Davos crowd is worried about global warming. Thus, they will try to limit the destruction of rain forests, etc., though with limited and slow success since the short-term interests of businesses often win out over their long-term interests as a class. They will also try, with very limited success, to limit the inbuilt trend towards war and the destruction of the livelihoods of the world's poor and marginalized, while that destruction will continue as part of the solution to crises. They will debate among themselves over policies that protect their interests, and what they say is ours, along with our said to be fragile identities, with the incidence of war and quantity of, if possible only foreign, deaths, a question of detail. They practice murderous domination in moderation, with killing supplemented by humanitarian operations that keep the displaced displaced, migrations controlled, keeping precarious, surveilled, and controlled, those whose role in the economy is not capital and management but the supply of the power to do work including the work of talking out loud on behalf of AI systems designed only to supply people with the profitable outfitting of their identity kits and performative personae). We don't have such an alternative, none is visible anywhere today. That means only that we have to construct it.
We on the left want a more democratic society. We also want liberty from capitalism, not through it. The right wants liberty for masters. It will promise its dividends to those who identify with the masters.
Liberty and authority are not opposites, and libertarianism and authoritarianism are not opposites; they are complements. Anti-authoritarianism works in this context as a libertarianism - that needs authority, for others. Absolute liberty is the fantasy of those subjected to (or wielding) absolute authority.
Victims are not that different from perpetrators. They have similar mentalities. People involved in oppressive of violent social relationships are damaged by them. Their reactions usually further entrench the damage.
Trying to love those who hate you is not the answer. Neither is speaking truth to power, which never works. Power always rigs the scene, because it sets the scene, in its favor. An oppressor able to control you will not stop until he gets your willing submission, with a compliant and contented attitude, or your destruction. There is no way with them that will work. The only way to think or talk about this is to speak "truly" about the violence, and not to the ones involving you in it.
Every true friend is someone you can fight with. Most such fights do not turn bloody. Every true enemy is someone you cannot fight with, as far as they are concerned, and so who must insist you regard them as a friend. Someone you must regard as friendly is a pure enemy. Hatred is pure, not ambiguous. Honest relationships include ambiguities. "The concession of politeness is always a political concession" (Pierre Bourdieu). A regime of total peace is an empire of absolute mastery and at least implicit and latent permanent war. A ruler who insists you must be peaceful is one who considers you a slave.
"Violence" to such rulers only means disobedience. A ruler or master who is a warrior is not concerned with his or her safety or well-being in any way but only with their power, and that means that the violence they fear is harm to their rule, ideology, interests, or empire.
Rage in contemporary society is largely produced by the alienating character of social relations mediated by the authoritarianism of bosses and fellows who demand compliance, and who typically have freedom to effectuate (enforce) their will because they are masters; and by the frustration people will feel when things they want or seem to need are thwarted by people whose wealth gives them power to walk away. And by social conditions that result from the systematic impoverishment of the environment many people live in.
Americans just elected as president a candidate who channeled rage against a candidate who promised joy and was obviously enough wedded to the status quo of bureaucratic capitalism. The right claimed that the left-leaning (not actually leftist, but "progressive") educated elites had no alternative to a system lots of people hate but were trying to work within it. That is true. The right has no alternative to the system and doesn't want one, but it had an alternative to idealism: cynicism.
But cynicism is always the other face of idealism. The liberal Democrats are good cops; they will fuck you gently and it will be nasty in fact but it will be said to be beautiful. It will be done in the name of holy and happy ideals. The now far-right Republicans are bad cops; they will fuck people, maybe not you but someone else (that is their promise), and it will be absolutely violent, but what of that, because if you can just identify with the bastard fuckers, then who cares? Idealism gives way to cynicism; just look what happened in socialist countries.
Enforcing collective identities tends to make their participants and members more stupid. Personalities are not definable as identities are.
Some will call me a "hater." What that really means is that I am guilty of having strong opinions. The best way to be liked is to express none.
In America, if you say anything, to anyone, about anything, you take your life into your hands. It's very dangerous. The best way to live a long life if you want to be left in peace is to not care much about anything.
A crazy person is someone whose expressed thoughts are not ordered in the way that officious people expect.
But in an oligarchy virtue and vice cease to matter. "Post-truth" means the rule of pure authority in a state of exception. This means something like government by mafia organizations. But that is normal in capitalism. It has been that way for centuries, and nowhere more than in America.
Americans are egalitarians because they hate intellectual elites. They do not hate but admire bandits, including bandit barons. The richer the better. Obscenity makes them more attractive. Intellectuals are probably commies so to hell with them. Did they think they important, the assholes?
Some intellectuals are Jewish, especially on the left, but they are not today persecuted, when they are, for being Jewish but only for being left. And that is what is significant socially about what they do. Everything also about Jewish vulnerability in America today is a weaponized form of its (true enough) historical commemoration. Jews used to be pariahs. In America they are only a sometimes vulnerable elite. Today pariahs are found among the poor, especially people whose possession solely of labor power renders them vulnerable. And among artists. Many of whom are spoiled brats who bite the hand that feeds them, which is one of the best things a person can do.
Face it, we're all vulnerable, and anyone can be hated and targeted as such. No social group is ethically privileged in this respect as some kind of exceptional people. God knows we are all special, as I suppose most of us were to our moms. And that is very nice, it really is. If people say publicly that they are nervous about being hated or some kind of violence, two things we may suppose are that the fears are justified by the facts, and being exaggerated to serve as calls for more police or some great new war.
Identity politics is about such vulnerability precarity and so ultimately calls to war. Judaism is an interesting religion. Its contemporary uses are overwhelmingly modern. Sure they be retrofitted with ancient origins; they are exaggerated, often wildly. The traditional religious obligation in Judaism was to study, and before the rise of the modern world--printing, modern science and research universities, secular culture, philosophy not bound to religion, the pursuit of work in the arts and study of them as a professional endeavor displacing the early modern centrality of law, medicine, and business along with the religious life as professions--and the modern revolutionary movements, above all in America and more so in France, which declared that people are equal, and (in France) that particular social groups do not matter so much but individually members of them are equally entitled to participate in the common public sphere; all of which meant that anyone can learn and study anything--this obligation (and passion) for learning had to be about interpreting the classical texts that served as instruction manuals for living, playing the role that in late antiquity before the rise of Christianity philosophy provided, which was to facilitate the good life, a role now played by the self-help industry because today everyone is supposed to want therapy, something late antiquity pioneered, life then being sadder so that people were resigned to the sadness, seeking a soul cure. The Jewish right today does not protect secular intellectuals, who tend to be on the left, except for the people in their own group. That's nice. It's also neo-feudal.
If you say something at all provocative most people will attack you psychologically through the apparently subtle tactic of insisting that you supply some of the details. The purpose of this is to show you are a fool because the details of the situation refute the rhetorical extreme character of your claim. Though if you say it in a highly monetized public sphere where no one cares about ideas to start with, then people will think it's cute because enjoyable in its irrelevant stupidity. If what you then say is not profitable, then you will be targeted as crazy, which means they want to take you out. They figure it isn't working anymore.
If someone in authority or claiming it takes you out, they will say it is to "help" you. They will not want to help you pursue any autonomous artistic project. They will try to, coercively and with lots of unpleasantness, refashion you as a docile worker. They have drugs to make people docile, and therapeutic treatments that involve efforts at persuasion. Some of them may be pleasant. They will try to appeal, in a way that in other countries but not here is called rhetoric, to your ability to find some truth in what they are saying to you. If you don't, they will really not like you. A crazy person is placed outside society through official violence, and then said that he has placed himself outside society through moral hubris. State psychology today is Christian moralism secularly updated; you are guilty of being an individual. These people "helping" you may seek details about your life and thinking. So did the Spanish inquisitors.
The Spanish Inquisition valued "blood," the inherited character of nobility and its supposed ethical superiority. Fascists including Nazis would later speak of "blood and soil." Ethnic nationalism at its most fascist does this today, like with Zionism. Do the Jews have a superior or unique blood? The historically and theologically correct answer is of course: no. The Nazis declared, performing this declaration (and succeeding much less than fully), that the European and Jewish people were separate and must be kept so. The Zionists complied. Indeed, Hitler and Theodor Herzl were both Austrians who were responding to a modern crisis with the nationalism that led to the breakup of that empire and did much to drive World War I. After the war, the victorious allies led by President Wilson chose to promote ethnic nationalists states based on exclusionary identities, partly as a bulwark against internationalist socialism. The nationalist movements were sometimes socialist, sometimes fascist, and in the end the rule of capital was sustained with local turf wars. That's where we are today.
The person in power always is right, speaks the truth, the essence of which is performative. A person not in power who speaks is always out of place, therefore wrong it what he says. If it is said "that is your opinion," this means it doesn't count, by someone whose opinions do. Might makes right: the sociology of knowledge works oppositely to its epistemology.
Trump's Republicans did not defeat the left. Where was the left? It wasn't involved in the election, except in so far as the Democratic Party needs its left-leaning faction. That faction failed. Trump's Republican Party defeated the pseudo-left. Rest in peace, pseudo-leftists, left-liberals, and progressives.
We on the left will not win a major national election, but we can be a force. We weren't much of one this time. That is our loss, and that of many people. Will the Democratic Party now move to the right or the left? I think what matters is the pressure its leaders and politicians feel from people well to its left. I remember going to university with progressives and am not sad they lost.
But I am not “political,” and that’s how what I do is political. “Political” people worry about how we should all be managed. But the only really useful way of being political is to fuck with everything starting with the identities.
It doesn’t end with acts of rage; it started with sentiments of rage so deep we laugh at the spectacular performers of it. Why be afraid? “Life begins on the far side of despair.”
A teacher once asked him, “How long have you been ‘rebelling against your parents’?” Uh, since I learned to speak and they told me who I am? See, when you are done with your phase of rebelling you can just be a good citizen with a family. At least you can do the right thing. Find a good set of rules to follow. Since you must play the game, find your game, the one that’s really you. Perform authentically. That’s an order.
To all those suburban (and uptown) conservatives, I would like to say only, “We forget you better still.” Better yet just ignore them. Just look the other way. Turn the other check not so that they can hit you (again) but to look away from their ugliness. Maybe there’s things worth looking at or to or for.
His classmates went to the revolution and all he got was a guillotine. Others went west in search of sun, sea, and sex and found happiness at last, whatever that means. It probably means a nice house and yard and kids and vacations and a nice life to be had for all. But most of them only wanted to get a good enough job. They had good enough mothers and fathers, now they want a good enough life. We thought we were living a good life. Maybe we were.
If you have a special identity where you tell me what it is so that I can insult it and then you can cry police? Which mafia do you pray to the symbol of?