Phaethon was, according to Greek religious narratives, the son of Apollo; as the offspring of a one-night stand, he led a mundane existence, reared by a single mother. Finally, carried away by his ambition, he resolved to contact his absent father at his home on Mt. Parnassus. There, Apollo, carried away with delight, promised to give his son whatever he asked. Phaethon's wish was to take his father's place at the reins of the sun-chariot and ride across the sky... just once. Apollo, quite understandably, was horrified but honor-bound. After he instructed his son the best he could, he sent him off with the sun-chariot, which of course Phaethon could not handle. He did not survive the experience.

As an explicit narrative, the myth has obvious flaws. Why would the god of prophesy, of all people, make the implausible mistake of granting a rash boon to a teenaged boy? Having made this error, how could Apollo have failed to utilize the many loopholes ("Yes, my son...after you have learned how to handle the sun-chariot, you may"). Knowing the outcome, and given the cavalier attitude the Olympian gods harbored towards all mortals, regardless of personal relations, he could have covertly arranged Phaethon's death before humiliating himself. This, however, has nothing to do with the Apollo of reverence or devotion; "Apollo" was sheer poetic metonymy. Phaethon stood for any human arrogation of godlike powers. When the myth was coined, I am inclined to suspect these godlike powers consisted chiefly of the ability to replace subsistance farming with huge farms worked by gangs of slaves (although a Mr. Bob Kobres argues for an astronomical origin of the legend), a form of early ecological imperialism that doubtless caused massive human suffering in early experimentation.

It's a grandiose conceit: endless expansion, requiring ultimately the mastery of continents, disposing of the entire landscape, deliberating the fate of entire races of humans... thereby making oneself into a god. The chariot that the bourgeoisie had to drive, was the mob.

The mob explains a lot. In my many years of trying to undertand why calamities such as the Nazi Movement took entire possession of nations, I toyed with plausible-sounding ideas like "economic rationalism." Economic rationalism has its place, especially in explaining the economic disasters that befell Germany in the 1920's; but as to the conquest of the German nation by the Nazis, it has nothing to say. Marxist analysts have struggled mightily to supply economically deterministic explanations. Dr. Arendt argues that two tendecies united capitalism, imperialism, and fascism under a singe thrust of history: one was the original conception of markets for finance capital that allowed money to beget money¹, something only possible in conquered territories; and the other was the alliance between "capital" and the mob.

This photo, of two klansmen painting a visit to the Tupelo Police Department (1978), was furnished by the excellent website of Public Eye. The KKK is the purest manifestation of a mob that, I think, has existed in American history. In European history, it was the SA ("Storm Troopers"), a paramilitary unit of the Nazi Party eventually superceded by its own former division, the SS.

The rise of the mob out of the capitalist organization was observed early, and its growth carefully and anxiously noted by all great historians of the nineteenth century. ...What the historians... failed to grasp was that the mob could not be identified with the growing industrial working class, and certainly not with the people as a whole, but that it was composed actually of the refuse of all classes. This composition made it seem that the mob and its representatives had abolished class differences, that those standing outside the class-divided nation were the people itself ...rather than its distortion and caricature. The historical pessimists ...correctly foresaw the possibility of converting democracy into a despotism whose tyrants would rise from the mob and lean on it for support. What they failed to understand was that the mob is not only the refuse but also the by-product of bourgeois society, directly produced by it and therefore never quite separable from it. They failed for this reason to notice high society's constantly growing admiration for the underworld, which runs like a red thread through the nineteenth century, its continuous step-by-step retreat on all questions of morality, and its growing taste for the anarchical cynicism of its offspring.

[...]

The very fact that the "original sin" of "original accumulation of capital" would need additional sins to keep the system going was far more effective in persuading the bourgeoisie to shake off the restraints of Western tradition than either its philosopher or its underworld. It finally induced the German bourgeoisie to throw off the mask of hypocrisy and openly confess its relationship to the mob, calling on it expressly to champion its property interests.
[The Origins of Totalitarianism, V.iii]

This is a very compelling argument: the mob represents the element of society open to violence to achieve social ends; it requires a unifying narrative, and enemy, and a potential plan of action. Anyone who has inquired into the origins of lynch mobs can understand this: the accumulated frustration, schadenfreude, inverted morality, and economic dread of many classes can be channelled against people outside of the national life, such as Africans, Chinese (in San Francisco and in Indonesia), or Jews. As ubiquitous as European judeaphobia is, it required mobs to turn ordinary Europeans into murders of their Jewish neighbors; as fundamental to White identity as anti-African bigotry is, it required lynch mobs and conspiracies with corrupt sheriffs to turn it into mass murder (e.g.). As trucculent as the pribumi's hatred of the Chinese subaltern caste was, it required extensive organization on the part of lay Muslim groups, the US CIA, and a cohort of bureaucratic militarists to turn this hatred into a massive genocide.

The mob enabled genocide by accusing opponents of genocide of race treason, or objective treason, or being class enemies. They trumped democratic institutions by replacing the law with themselves, ruining the careers of oppositionist politicians, and ultimately using mass terror in the defense of property rights. Or rather, not ultimately: penultimately, because their ultimate goal was the destruction of the society in toto:

Like a foreign conqueror, the totalitarian dictator regards the natural and industrial riches of each country, including his own, as a source of loot and a means of preparing the next step of aggressive expansion. Since this economy of systematic spoliation is carried out for the sake of the movement and not of the nation, no people and no territory, as the potential beneficiary, can possibly set a saturation point to the process. The totalitarian dictator is like a foreign conqueror who comes from nowhere, and his looting is likely to benefit nobody. Distribution of the spoils is calculated not to strengthen the economy of the home country but only as a temporal tactical maneuver. For economic purposes, the totalitarian regimes are as much at home in their countries as the proverbial swarms of locusts. The fact that the totalitarian dictator rules his own country like a foreign conqueror makes matters worse because it adds to ruthlessness an efficiency which is conspicuously lacking in tyrannies in alien surroundings...

The trouble with totalitarian regimes is not that they play power politic in an especially ruthless way, but that behind their politics is hidden an entirely new and unprecedented concept of power, just as behind their Realpolitik lies an entirely new and unprecedented concept of reality. Supreme disregard for immediate consequences rather than ruthlessness; rootlessness and neglect of national interests rather than nationalism; contempt for utilitarian motives rather than unconsidered pursuit of self-interest; "idealism," i.e., their unwavering faith in an ideological fictitious world, rather than lust for power-these have all introduced into international politics a new and more disturbing factor than mere aggressiveness would have been able to do.
[Ibid., XII.ii, p.417]

(Part 5)