On Mass Stupidity in the Public Realm

A Major Element in the Rise of Fascism

March 6, 2006

In my previous post, I didn't spend very much time on the concept of "palingenisis," which is a vital component of fascist ideologies. I wanted to; the subject is extremely rich and not much explored. "Palingenisis" is the phenomenon of rebirth from one's own ashes, like the mythical phoenix; it's a fairly common attribute of totalitarian ideologies like fascism. Totalitatianism seeks to utterly transform society, sweeping everything away; under totalitarian regimes, the power of the family, for example, to bind an individual to other individuals is regarded with suspicion or open hatred. Religious organizations tend to be treated gingerly, although typically the totalitarian organization must ultimately strip them of their power to act autonomously. Finally, the totalitarian movement needs to regiment all of the resources of society for some arbitrary goal, which invariably culminates in those resources becoming understood as plunder.

During the First World War the belligerents were stunned by the inadequacy of their war materiel. They lacked the labor to operate the farms, reliable access to foreign import of raw materials, and much of the factory labor as well. In addition, the national governments of the belligerents had to cope with the logistics of mobilizing armies of unprecedented size, implementing new military technologies in record time, providing medical care to the wounded, and persuading the public victory was worth the cost. It's worth noting that, relative to available resources, national governments have not really approached this level of achievement since World War Two. In the period 1914-1918, not only was this achievement an historic peak of state agency, it was also coming after an epoch when governments were of minimal size and role.

After the war, the state had abruptly shrunk; indices of production, wages, and prices during this period show a deeper dip than that of the Great Depression, although the post-WW1 depression was very short, and punctuated by more widely noted historic events: the collapse of the German mark as a result of passive resistence to French occupation of the Rhineland, the Romanian Invasion of Hungary, the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War, the abortive Communist putsch in Germany, and the Fascist seizure of power in Italy. The upheaval of Europe, North America, and Northeast Asia led to the worst strains of the social fabric since the Reformation.

The fear and resentment aroused by this pandaemonium led to a wave of vindictive stupidity. Vast numbers of people had seen the awesome powers of the state to wage war, now looked in disappointment at their state stumbling about like a middle-aged man after smashing his nose. The conspiracy theories of the 19th century, which had been an occasional diversion, now became a mania. In the USA, the panic of the nation's first consequential war with foreign powers had led to state of protracted panic; such panic led to mutual suspicion and a renewed flourishing of long-dormant sectional hatreds. Closely related to this was the resentment of rival ethnic groups, which entered the workforce as unwitting strikebreakers. Social norms changed under wartime conditions; the mutual suspicion and constant uncertainty had weakened social constraints, but when the war ended, many of the middle class observed that social standards had evaporated, and blamed alien influences. Determined to wage a culture-war against Hollywood license and Broadway frivolity, they arbitrarily embraced stupidity in the form of creationism and Billy Sunday.

Obvious Cases of Stupidity in American Public Life

Creationism had never really had a visibly passionate following until after WW1; in the early years following the publication of Darwin's Origin of the Species, there was a sensation, to be sure, and a few divines attacked the new theory in debates. But the debates went nowhere; the theory of evolution was widely adopted, except in areas under the explicit supervision of the clergy; even then, the anti-evolution partisans included people like Samuel Wilburforce, an agitator for the abolition of slavery. Wilburforce argued mainly against what he saw as the political implications of evolution—viz., elitist and reactionary, which in fact they initially were. But Wilburforce lost, and decades later, when the State of Tennessee passed a law banning the teaching of evolution, the spectacle was the result of intentional showboating by the principles of the case. The effects were as desired: the evangelical Christians had turned the formerly uncontroversial theory into a sort of cultural armageddon, and the secularists had demonstrated to all that their enemies were ridiculous.

Billy Sunday, pioneer of the televangelist

Billy Sunday was another absurd figure, a genial baseball player who became Mister Wholesome, Mister All-American Populist Reactionary. Having read the texts of his "sermons," I can honestly say he was a pioneer of the "just do it" form of North American pietism, pietism as a substitute for self-control and judgment. The allure of Sunday was that he seemed to combine manly strength and sexual charm with devout chastity and sexlessness. But most importantly of all, he had a chillingly simple message: repudiate the freedoms you have in favor of arbitrary, single-minded reaction. Don't think; just abstain and perform. Draw a line in the sand, the more constraining the better, and refuse to cross it. Choices distract one from a life of performance and simple devotion to the pursuit of prosperity. Choices give you books to read and music to hear and mysteries to ponder, while squalor descends on your front yard. Narrow-mindedness liberates one from liberty. Freedom is a burden to flee.

To make matters worse, Billy Sunday and subsequent evangelical hucksters sought to make God out as a mascot of their notion of "Americanism." The United States, rather than being a home to many people and many private aspirations, was instead supposed to be a mystical earthly manifestation of virtue. Sunday's vision actually would not have sustained any scrutiny: what is "Americanism," if not whatever Americans actually think and do? But this would necessarily include activities like Communist activism, Roman Catholic church services, women on street corners distributing information on birth control, professors in their studies typing up English translations of Friedrich Nietzsche's aphorisms, boys in their teens poring over pornographic postcards, gay sex, oral sex, organized crime, politicians taking bribes, or bank runs. If you proclaim there is a mystical virtue in "Americanism," you must include all these things, or else have a reason for excluding them (which would supersede "Americanism"). So in reality, Sunday was peddling a mystical narcissism: the cursory list of items above was really supposed to represent anomalies out of place in America, but not, perhaps, in the United Kingdom or in Greece. That, of course, is absurd; but in order to avoid this logical crushing of Sunday's fantasy, one would have to suspend logic: to make oneself stupid.

With the onset of comparative stability and self-assurance, stupidity recedes into individual aberration. The ability of creationists or televangelists to stimulate mass hysteria, or, as I call it, stupidity in public life, relies on a sort of collective desperation: the resort to measures one would never attempt, if one had the luxury of non-desperation.

Stupidity and Palingenesis

Years ago I noticed there existed a large body of ideologies that dreamed of things getting much worse. In some cases, the ideologues expected their movement would directly cause the calamity. A case in point would be a "journalist" C., a self-described "libertarian" who believes in the total destruction of the US industrial and commercial infrastructure, in order to save the world and the local environment from the 300 million people in this country. Obviously, such a cataclysm would cause the vast majority of Americans to die agonizing, prolonged deaths—a fate he avers we richly deserve.

While the stupidity of the hard right is indeed very obvious, it has been more than matched by the absurdist fanaticism of the "hard left"; I usually notice, during tirades by these worthies, that they eagerly heap the most astounding invective and maledicta on the United States, all in the name of some compassionate agenda for people they've never met. Lest readers take offence, let me assure you that the "hard left" consists of just this category of people: those who began by dreaming of the transformation of the social relations of production (for the greater good of all), then became "radicalized" and started to dream instead of the physical obliteration of the world they had come to loathe. Their vision of a better world involves the destruction of the present one, and with it, the total humiliation of the people who spurned their ideology. Often it is cloaked in the anticipation of self-inflicted destruction (e.g., a Maoist activist I used to know was certain there was going to be a thermonuclear holocaust; this would conveniently make non-Maoist ideologies untenable). C., however, fantasizes this will be done by the true "anti-globalists," i.e., the infinitesmally small subfaction of hardline radicals who show up to break windows at Starbucks Coffee vendors, or vandalize newspaper boxes.

I want to make it clear that I do not associate, or wish for other readers to associate, people such as C. with any of the bona fide environmental activist groups. C. makes this association by extravagantly praising groups he regards as ideologically purified; some will cheerfully praise him back, unaware of or indifferent to his palingenetic ideology. To be fair to C., he mainly works at criticizing the mediocrity and mendacity of "mainstream" environmental organizations; the dream of one day obliterating the United States and most of its population is definitely not on his front burner. Organizations such as Earth First! are very harsh indeed in their attacks on the existing economic and political order, but there's a long distance between that, and calling for the annihilation of the US population though famine and civil war.

(Incidentally, has anyone besides me ever noticed how personal his attacks are? I mean, the bad guys are short; the good guys are tall, and muscular. The women are almost always evil, especially if they are small, and particularly if they head some organization or fill an elected position. The bad people have high, squeaky voices, are bald, or generally lack physical vigor. The good guys have big, broad hands, deep booming voices, and drive trucks for a living.)

C. is actually a category of "libertarian" known to political scientists as an "anarcho-primitivist." He believes that industrial capitalism and liberal democracy are rotten, and must be swept away. In order to do that, however, the products of both must be swept away, which in our case would mean the vast majority of the population who depend on modern technology to supply adequate food or medical attention. His hatred of women (or, at least, any woman whom a journalist would be compelled to notice), short people, weak people, or those who show any symptoms of smallness, femininity, or weakness, are actually emblems of fascism. Likewise, his eagerness to see the destruction of the very things most humans—American and non-Americans—have labored for millenia to achieve, is a rather absurd version of "anarchism" or "libertarianism." However, this actually the point: all of the various anarchist ideologies, aside from being so stupid as to appear to be harmless, actually call for some movement against the choices humans have actually made, in order to "liberate" them to make choices they seldom do. That's why we see so many varieties of "anarchism," when logically there can be no excuse for more than one: anarchism is really a common appeal of fascists to the stupid. Conventional "libertarianism" (anarcho-capitalism) is actually nakedly pro-corporate fascism. Anarcho-primitivism is actually the resurrected fascist worship of raw strength triumphing over morality; morality, of course, implies a social eye capable of passing a predictable judgment. If you condemn society, you are propose to deify yourself.

Self-deification, in my opinion, is the ultimate act of stupidity. It seems like a rare offense: the sin of Caligulas and Jim Joneses, not people one actually knows, and not the normal type of error to which mortals are prone. I would, however, submit that it is a stupidity endemic in our times. In the days of fascism's heydey, some humans thought that state could supersede morality and individual rights, and create a heaven on earth. The fact that it was a mob that was expected to do this where sober parliamentarians had failed, was condign stupidity. Now those days are past, and we Americans or we Europeans live in more comfortable times. Some of us have given up on particular mobs having the hope of social redemption—rescuing, or renewing, society from the ashes—and moved on to expecting our providers of luxury can do the same. The right's stupidity changes slowly and is instrumental. The left's stupidity changes quickly and is self-defeating. Both dream that the society on whose behalf they purport to act, is rotten and incapable of judgment: totally depraved, as the Calvinists would have put it. But where the Calivinists invoked the doctrine of total depravity to justify human suffering under a righteous God, the hard right and the hard left invoke the doctrine to justify their own disregard for faith and tenderness towards society.

Of all things, Dear Reader, avoid this most of all.

[Fascism] [Totalitarianism]