Reading the propaganda nonsense in ‘news’ and ‘social’ media today is disappointing for confirming that fascism and Stalinism are back (if they ever really went away), even among young people thinking of themselves as ‘progressive’, or as not political at all. And critical thinking is in general decline, but particularly in terms of philosophical guidance on how to distinguish between rationalized imbecility and genuine rationality.
Imagine being back in the 1930s, and trying to persuade a young fascist she’s just wrong to support this ideology, or a young communist that his support for Stalinism is no different to the fascism he abhors.
It’s a heart-breaking thought.
Both might be totally sincere about their beliefs. Both may believe only their own zealous pursuit of those ideas can save the world from sinking into chaos and despair. And, in a way, they were not careful enough about what they wished for: the opposition between the two secular faiths did in fact create chaos and despair from which we are granted a reprieve only when remembering the lesson that led us to secular societies. That Catholicism and Protestantism can survive only if the state is neutral, but restrains them both from the monstrous inhumanity committed against each other in the name of their faiths. Anyone who has any doubts about this reality ought to closely study the 30 Years War (c 1618-1648).
Unlike the Catholics and Protestants prior to the 20th century, communists and fascists in the 1930s had available to them the philosophical ideas necessary to recognize the grave errors in their thinking, which is actually exactly the same thinking for fascists and Stalinists: totalitarianism by whatever name.
Those philosophical ideas belong to Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.
Nietzsche offered a wide-ranging condemnation of totalitarianism across many works, but perhaps his pithiest observation comes from his Beyond Good and Evil (originally published in 1886):
Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself. And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you.
—Judith Norman’s translation for the 2002 Cambridge University Press edition, p 69.
Writing well before the totalitarianisms of the 1930s, he predicted them; the subtitle of his book is ‘Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future’. He accurately describes how both fascism and Stalinism constructed real or imaginary evils that needed to be fought with unflinching zealousness.
In his terms, both fascists and Stalinists conceived of themselves as monster hunters, and in becoming that, turned them into unimaginably cruel and relentless monsters themselves. It is the inevitable outcome of zealous acolytes in either belief system staring so hard at the empty spaces of their doctrines where they should have found ethics and humanity that they found in them, instead, the motivation to blank out those human qualities. Finding instead the inhumanity to throw the entire world into the bottomless abyss of barbarism they found in their own souls.
Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (originally published in 1927) is a complex and difficult treatise which defies easy summary and offers few pithy quotes. In it, Heidegger distinguishes between two different modes of existence—authentic and inauthentic—with inauthenticity being a state of adopting, as one’s own, the ideas and life-styles of the ‘they’ that is other people.
The self of everyday Da-sein is the they-self which we distinguish from the authentic self … this also means that the they prescribes the nearest interpretation of the world and of being-in-the-world. … Initially, Da-sein is the they and for the most part it remains so. If Da-sein explicitly discovers the world and brings it near, if it discloses its authentic being to itself, this discovering of “world” and disclosing of Da-sein always comes about by clearing away coverings and obscurities, by breaking up the disguises with which Da-sein cuts itself off from itself.
—Joan Stambaugh’s translation for the 1996 State University of New York Press edition, p 121.
Applied to our 1930s communists and fascists, or our Catholics and Protestants before (and after) them, this concept describes what happens when people do not critically analyse their chosen ideas for themselves. Instead adopting other people’s interpretations as their own. And becoming in that process inauthentic beings, slipping quite readily into unthinking, obedient zealotry.
These failings are growing cancerously once more in the world. The false dualism of democracy that motivates party political zealots not only to propose the ludicrous notion that there is a vast difference between the policies of only two or three mainstream political parties, but to forsake policy altogether for the sole motivation of winning. Demonizing ‘the other side’ as monsters, and then pursuing its adherents as the monster hunters that have actually turned into monsters themselves. Staring into their mania long enough to devise inhuman tactics of which they then accuse their real and imagined opponents. Descending into the inauthenticity of never critically examining issues and policies rather than adopting ideology that reinforces their own mania. Driving them into an ultimately corrupt, nihilistic ethical and political void.
Nor is this solely a party political phenomenon. You can see it in the internecine battles on social media between people who describe themselves as ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’. Who pretend they stand for this or that value, while really only pursuing one ultimate goal: terrorizing everyone they judge not to agree with them. Blindly, savagely, unthinkingly, forcing all comers to be either ‘us’ or ‘them’. Acting like crazed animals, hacking and slashing at each other. Legitimizing present-day bourgeois fascism and neo-Stalinism.
Just look at what passes as political debate. What goes on in social media. The most prominent examples today include renewed slaughter in the Middle East, or the ‘woke’ vs ‘anti-woke’ armchair wars. Good luck finding tolerance for viewpoints that aren’t confined to absolute binary oppositions in either one.
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There’s a postscript to this line of reasoning. Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s ideas lived on in the extrapolations of later thinkers. Especially among thinkers who might be artificially conflated as post-modernists.
The trouble has been that Nietzsche and Heidegger were difficult to understand in the first place, with their successors being no easier to decipher for building on already complex ideas.
To make matters worse, the technocratic bias of our societies have skewed our entire educational apparatus towards scientism: the ideological imposition of the idea that all things can and should be explained according to scientific principles, even when and where they don’t apply. A rush to metricate and ‘methodize’ the arts and social sciences. And a concomitant assumption that all things must be interpreted literally, the way religious fundamentalists often do with liturgy.
So, when educated, abstract thinkers have speculated on politics and society, generations of students have been fooled into interpreting what they had to say as quite literal prescriptions rather than the more literary contemplations, full of allusion and metaphor, that require flexible interpretation and critical thinking. Evaluation, not jumping to absolutist conclusions.
Literalism is the fuel of Heidegger’s inauthenticity and the zealous totalitarianism that makes Nietzschean monsters of monster hunters. It is the negation of humanity, and the insane demand we all dehumanize ourselves for inhuman ends.
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