jannotes

Lets hope Newt does so much damage to the party between now and the nomination, that any victory for whoever wins will be Pyrrhic only. Otherwise our cook is goosed. Unfortunately, what normal people call damage, the deranged call health and wholeness. My problem is trying not to let my cognitive/emotional biases (read Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman – you’ll never trust your thinking again) overwhelm my more objective thinking about these things. I read too much Hannah Arendt and her analyses of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia these days – it gives me plenty of fuel for fear, since what she is writing about actually happened. The parallels are stunning. Understanding the relationship between plutocratic oligarchs and populist politics (cf. The Shock Doctrine) also lubricates the shudder machine to the point that I am often in a state of constant convulsion. The most important and frightening insight I get from Arendt is that we are mistaken in equating Totalitarianism with the government – it is the ideology and the ability to manipulate opinion and impose the ideology into the very being of all citizens that is the heart of Totalitarianism. What we fail to understand here is that in principle, it is quite possible to have a Totalitarianism with democratic institutions. The onslaught of Big Capital (Koch Bros et al.) on the very fiber of the nation is the great national crisis here, and the stakes are as profound as those of 1860. And the all-out war being waged now is as concrete as Fort Sumter. Thus South Carolina is an ironic symbol. Big Brother need not be anything more than Big Buffoon, i.e., Newt, the Lizard of Ooze. On the Hope side of the ledger, however, Wisconsin is the paradigm, and there is much discontent and political pull-back against similar plutocratic political meddling in government over the disaster that so many manipulated people allowed to happen to themselves in 2010. My pessimistic view goes to the heart of human nature itself: most of us, for biological adaptive reasons, are slaves; I mean this in the most essentialist way; we will fight and die for our masters long before we will fight and die for ourselves. The old Enlightenment sense of individual “state-of-nature” adaptation is nonsense but deeply embedded in your cultural collective psyche. So we the few, who bask in our glorious need for freedom don’t understand that for the multitudes, Freedom is Bondage (cf. Orwell, Dostoevsky – “the Grand Inquisitor”, Aristotle, Nietzsche – the idea is out there and has been for a long time). If you made it this far, my sincere apologies. Go out and enjoy your Sunday. I will spend the afternoon listening to Mahler: Kindertotenleider then the Ninth Symphony.