One of the United States’ great progressive thinkers, Robert Reich, posted an article the other day in which he focused on one of modern America’s most serious problems. Reich said that the infection of neo-fascism which had invaded Russia through Vladimir Putin had also come to the United States through segments of Trump and his Republican party and was threatening the very foundations of the government of the United States as we know it. This is a diagnosis of a major problem in American society with which I am completely in agreement.
Where I part ways with Reich is in his solution. He says that those people who agree with him should go out and try to rationally persuade the neo-fascists of the problems with their philosophy. The problem with this approach is that it can’t work with most of them, because they didn’t reach out and select the neo-fascist philosophy for rational reasons. They did it because they felt stuck in an experiential vacuum created by the living environment resulting from modern technology. Like all the machines that surrounded them and that acted as models for them, these people had gotten so numb in their vacuum, that they needed the kick of abrasive stimuli in order to feel alive, even if it was only temporarily.
There are few kicks on a social level that can equal the rush obtained from an enveloping absolutistic right-wing populism. One is being led by a charismatic leader who at the same time is tough and bombastic and creating a lot of anti-numbness friction. One is surrounded by a bunch of true believers like oneself, so one will never feel lonely. And one becomes a part of a collective mission to disrupt the world. And in so doing, one is able to disrupt one’s life in such a way as to be pulled out of one’s numbness and feel some vibrancy in one’s life. The mission of an authoritarian cult leader is always extremely abrasive, always shocking. Participating in this mission means that one is able to participate in making and preserving some scarring collective imprints on the field of experience of one’s country and even the whole world. And these collective imprints mean that one is participating in a shocking collective surrogate immortality. At the same time, one must remember that shocks are intermittent, so between the shocks one reverts to numbness. It’s not like a grounded organic experience full of flowing blendable continual organic stimuli. The shocks mirror the shocks of technological stimuli.
Getting involved in a right-wing authoritarian populist cult can also be thought of as getting involved in an addiction. Precisely because the shocks are intermittent, one can never get fully grounded in the cult, which means that the person getting involved in the cult, develops cravings for sustained bonding with both the leader and the cult group within which one has a membership. But one never feels fully in the group, so one has to participate very intensely in order to obtain what is at best a false sense of grounding. People who are fighting for acceptance and belonging in a group where no one can really feel fully accepted and belonging are going to have to stay focused on getting into the group and staying there. They are going to have little time, energy and state of mind to focus on reasons by progressives like Robert Reich, as to why they should get out of the cult and stay away from the lead.
So, these authoritarian cult members are beyond reason in terms of shifting their opinions about Trump. One isn’t going to convince them to change anymore than one is going to convince people to rationally break away from an opioid addiction. To change these people, one has to change not what they are thinking, but what they are experiencing. One has to find a way of weaning people off of an intense use of modern technology. This, of course, is going to be extremely difficult as modern public opinion looks so favorably on modern technology, and people today can’t seem to get enough of the new technology, both in terms of making their lives more frictionless and more mediated and in terms of developing alternate realities in movies and television programs and video games and augmented and virtual realities. The alternate realities provide the abrasive stimulation to pull people out of the extreme numbness and the experiential vacuum created by the more practical applications of modern technology.
And most people are going to think it’s crazy to make a connection between modern technology and the authoritarian populist cults we have been discussing. And yet both of these aspects of modern life deal with how to grapple with the effects of modern sensory distortion on people’s nervous systems. And until we can get sizable numbers of people to understand this connection, we are going to continue to have the infection of neo-fascism in our daily lives.
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