7 Slides to Meltdown

A fifth of British people think the COVID-19 lockdown is a hoax.[i] The BBC lists 7 types of folk who spread fake news about it.[ii] All the usual suspects are blamed by someone, somewhere, and to reiterate the out-groups here would be to join in; the Oxford Research Group — originally a Quaker outfit — has shown how these stories get used.[iii] Instead I have some lists of my own.

7

Ece Temelkuran gave seven steps from democracy to dictatorship last year. Don’t set up another party, but make a movement instead; subvert reasonableness; encourage shamelessness; dismantle the institutions which maintain the rule of law; bring forth the members of your movement as a new model citizenry; treat the new enemies of the people with callousness and impunity. Finally, re-order society as you will.[iv]

It sounds about right. The soviets (‘workers’ councils’) were to be the model of the new society before the Bolshevik coup: just as ‘traditionalists’ on the alt-right try to form a counter-culture; rather as identity politics makes us all into ‘communities’ each outbidding the others. Twynching and radical individualism is the order of the day and inexorable new media mean that persons are tainted with guilt simply from having been accused.

Perhaps the next three of the seven steps may follow… Is this democracy robust enough to stop at four?

6

Niall Fergusson listed six differences between the French and American revolutions. France was centralised when America was made to be federal or confederal; America’s lawyers stood out for the letter of law which Rousseau’s General Will overturned; there were so many religious sects in America that they could not have been robbed in one fell move as the Church in France was to be; America favoured practical minds whereas the French put intellectuals in charge; Americans prioritised liberty, the French made equality more important; the French revolutionary wars went on for far too long.[v]

The first five points are Tocqueville’s and the sixth is Ferguson’s own. Together they argue against letting anyone tidy societies up on any neat plan. Meltdown follows, if you do. So before that New Model Citizenry can turn up, a scepticism that is jealous of its rights could make a lot of sense in the present situation. Have people been compliant or sceptical during lockdown? How far-sighted are people being, really, in their reluctance to return to work?

5

Robert Paxton had a five-part progress for fascism. First, create the movement; second, embed yourself locally; third, get into power; fourth, exercise it. Fifthly, fascism will suffer entropy or radicalisation.[vi]

Like Jacobins, Fascists are revolutionary, but they have rejected bourgeois politics and parties with it. (The differences between Temelkuran’s and Paxton’s lists really come down to itemising bourgeois values for the longer list.) Rightist groups campaign locally and make themselves visible in matters of local need in the way that churches used to. Fascists have put their movements forward as vanguards of the nation without always admitting that this is a Leninist ‘vanguard party’ tactic, and it is nationalism which helps them get into power.

Recently a lot of effort’s been made to distinguish nationalists and authoritarians on the ‘hard right’ from the ‘genuine “far right”’ with their biologically racist views, but the point about that third stage in Paxton’s anatomy is, that getting into power only happens because at that point the boundaries get blurred. Commentary now calls it ‘mainstreaming’, and often you can’t be sure whether the verb’s transitive or intransitive. Are the fascists mainstreaming, or are they being mainstreamed? No one knows, and it’s supposed to be obscure. With the fifth stage of ‘radicalisation’ — assuming that the tussle between conservatives and fascists in the fourth stage has come out in the fascists’ favour — the ‘genuine Far Right’ is revealed again. It turns out that they were always there, like the bitumen that you get from the oil only once it’s gone beyond 500°C.

4

Good articles have a punchy number of points. Seven sets of points in series gets a bit much. Relax. This article’s a factorial tree of 28, and you’re down to the final 10. So here’s a pause for breath with just four.

I’m going to cheat a bit here. Twenty years ago there was a tremendous hour-long documentary on BBC television called ‘Five Steps to Tyranny’. I’m missing out the first step because it’s getting a section to itself in a minute. The remaining four steps to tyranny were: obey orders; obey harmful orders contrary to conscience; stand up or stand by; exterminate. (The first was ‘Us and Them’.) People would be accustomed slice by slice to the habits that made a Rwanda possible. It’s salami tactics — by which Mátyás Rákosi, the Hungarian Communist who began them in the 1950s, cut off rival groups one by one.

One of the most remarkable features of working life in the last decades has been the rise of ‘procedural legitimacy’. In fixed hierarchies with jobs for life and what was then called ‘Buggins’ turn’ — waiting for your superior to retire so that you could step into his shoes — you still had to do as expected. It’s rarely great to rock the boat.

But the fixity of the hierarchy also allowed discretion within each level. With short contracts now and the return of casual labour, you can take your skills elsewhere so long as you can show you did your specified job. Professional standards have taken the place of workplace superiors, in that respect. That actually reduces discretion at every level.

It has passed without comment, for the most part, but economic change has done much of the work towards normalising obedience which alarmists had expected might come from direct and extreme political activity. They were looking to left and to right, but the change has come up from behind.

3

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis — that’s the dialectic. In Hegel, the dominant master is dehumanised because he oppresses the slave. The slave is dehumanised when he has overcome the master because he is the oppressor then. Whichever way round you depict oppression, two people are reduced to roles. It’s nothing personal; it’s just business. But in Hegel, the struggle lets the two transcend each other, the struggle itself, and themselves. Civilisation is a synthesis and the higher stage. Life is triangulation to something better.

Not so for Marx, Hegel’s student. In Marx, things are what they are. It is how things have come to be which lies hidden, as much as what they may become. The triangle is not two things we can see and a third in the future; it is what we can see, an unknown future and a misunderstood past. The moon is its dark side, too. Things are events and processes which we simplify as objects in the mind’s eye. What you synthesise by setting thesis against antithesis is a fuller view of what is going on in the object right now, and domination, being dominated, and the dehumanising effect on everyone involved, cannot produce a higher stage of this civilisation. For Marx, they stop only when it does, and if you think society is civilised, it’s because you don’t see the dark side.

One brand of fascist agreed with Hegel more than Marx, even though they came out of the Left. The pre-war activist Georges Sorel believed in the ennobling effect of combat. On the other side of the Great War, fascism appealed to those who remembered the camaraderie of the trenches or the pilots’ mess. Like Hegel, they thought they could see the Ideal to which an historical dialectic tended, but like any idealists, they couldn’t agree with the other idealists (like Hegelians) on just what ideal it must be.

In a way, the psychotherapists agree with Marx. It is the Jungian shadow and the unacknowledged Self that would complete the picture people have of themselves and until they allow it to do so, everything that seems so clear can betray us and, in the words of St Paul, the evil we would not do: we do.

2

‘Us’ and ‘Them’: the key binary thinking on which the paranoid style in politics depends. Unless we need to protect ‘us’ from Communists (or whomever), you might not be one of them — and politically it might be very important that you or someone very like you just might possibly be ‘one of them’.

McCarthyism didn’t go away; it just became the forgotten fear behind virtue signalling. Virtue signals have several causes, assertion and vainglory being two; above all they are like the prayers by which the ancients sought to ward off the gods. As long as the pious sacrifices expected by society continue to be made, it may be that the Olympian attention moves on elsewhere and someone else will get turned into a stag or driven mad or made into an echo instead.

The blame game’s begun in the UK. Whether it is politicians or public bodies, their positioning to pass the buck is becoming clear to the public eye. Yet a churn of recrimination is a very important distraction from stepping back and looking at the whole situation. Throwing the public a scapegoat story is the modern equivalent of Roman imperial bread and circuses. The only way to stop psychological projection ballooning into full-blown paranoia is to have one starkly-drawn hate figure at a time. Yet without the ability to project the negative contents of our inner lives onto some ‘other’ party people lack the negative cohesion they require for holding sick societies or unresolved people together. Their one alternative would be authentic personal change.

But can the circus go on without cease?

1

Only one thing is really needed. As the Buddha taught, the man who is shot by the arrow can ask who fired it — the paranoid style. He can learn the story of how the ambush occurred — the lessons from history. He can study the arrow to see what it’s made of — the morals about human nature or metaphysical evil. But first and last, you have to get the arrow out. Be the change you want to see in the world, as Gandhi didn’t quite say.

OK, so that’s one of the Four Noble Truths. But you get the point. Perhaps it’s the old persona that adults need to melt down, and get rid of. Maybe, as Thomas Merton wrote in 1951 (however fatuous it may sound at first), ‘a spiritual revolution’ is what the world needs — at least if we want no other kind.[vii]

[i] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/22/coronavirus-conspiracy-theories-fifth-people-believe-virus-hoax/

[ii] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-52474347

[iii] https://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/blog/fear-filled-apocalypses-the-far-rights-use-of-conspiracy-theory

[iv] Ece Temelkuran, How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship. (Fourth Estate, 2019)

[v] Niall Ferguson, Civilisation. (Penguin, 2012)

[vi] Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism. (Penguin, 2005)

[vii] Thomas Merton, The Ascent to Truth. (Burns & Oates, 1951)