This post is about Martin Heidegger. Unusually earnest, Carles declares that "in this blog post, Carles will controversially suggest that bullying is natural selection," but longtime readers of his should immediately comprehend in his third-person self-reference his favorite distanciation strategy -- of all the characters rhetorically adopted in his philosophical investigations, none is more of a fictional device than "Carles." His intention here is to show how an otherwise sensible thinker might be drawn into endorsing a baldly fascistic ideological position championing violence as a means for purging society of weakness and striating society into castes.
Purporting to draw inferences from nature, "Carles" proclaims that since "animals in the wild are ‘bullies,’" it is a matter of adherence to natural law to "find a way to intimidate the weak, kill them off early and eat them 2 stay alive." Species survival is thereby conflated with sadistic cannibalism, but Carles does not suggest anything so radical, though it would be the logical end of the assumptions he is testing. Instead he offers a strategy similar to that which guided the interment of the Jews in 1930s Germany: "It seems like we might need to keep the bullied alive so that they can perform ‘menial jobs’." But unlike the Nazis, who pursued a program of racial extermination under the auspices of species "purification," Carles maintains a more utilitarian line, picturing a Brave New World style system where different castes are prepared for different unpleasant but necessary fields of social work. "They learn how to ‘take shit’ so that they can prepare for being at the bottom of society when they are older/are trapped in their lives’." The view Carles espouses here is in some ways worse than the Nazis' murderous program in that it presents violence as serving somehow for the victim's own good. Though he is not afraid of adopting Nazi propaganda techniques, demonizing those singled out for abuse with loaded epithets that are somehow proved by the unwarranted attacks directed at them: "It seems like it is reasonable to conclude that all of these kids are ‘fucking pussies’ or possibly ‘fucking fggts."
But despite the obvious Nazi overtones, Carles demonstrates that peer violence flows not from a wellspring of inner fascism so much as it comes from anti-egalitarianism, a tribalistic fear of cosmopolitanism: "If every1 had money/the same colour skin, the world would not be a better place–there would be way 2 many issues 2 deal with."
In other words, the same fears of urbanism and modernism that led Heidegger to Nazism threaten to make anyone who thinks seriously about identity issues in contemporary capitalist societies, with their mandated but inequitably distributed division of labor, become a bit of a fascist, endorsing violence as expedient and usual as the ultimate form of branding. "Seems like sometimes u need to ’step on other people’ to make sure ur brand is strong + authentic." This helps explain the enduring appeal of the swastika as insignia, carrying with it the inherent power relationships embedded in branding within a stratified society. It also presents bullying as convenient: "Is it really cost/time effective to ‘worry about EVERY1’s feelings’?" Bullying works to streamline our emotional economy.
Carles then sees the argument through to its ultimate conclusion, bullying should be branded, since it is a profitable and necessary social service proffered by private firms: "I feel like my internet website might be some sort of bully. Perhaps a ‘cyber bully.’ Maybe I should ‘trademark’ that term since the internet is about to get really popular so that I can ‘make mad money’ in case it becomes a catchy buzzword." What Carles is concerned with is the ease with which he can make plausible arguments in favor of fascism and its modern consumer-capitalist equivalents. He sense defects in his own philosophical practice that greases the propagandistic sleds. He asks a serious of questions at the end of the post, but these only intimate the question he doesn't ask but which is everywhere posed, as it were, in the shadows of his discourse: Can he continue to speak? Can he ever speak in his own voice? Or is it too dangerous?
What about the dangers--as Nietzche amongst others understood--of the rising to power of the weak through 'technique,' anti-nature/science (moreover the cult/religion of scientific technique). The egalitarianism of the remediation of suffering--"the perfect crime"--through the Nirvana Principle: could the will to nothingness overwhelm the will to power? The preventability of negative events could be much more calamitous than the event itself i.e. the protection of the 'bullied' (bullied by others, by death, by nature etc.) leaves the world with a disaster scenerio: the toleration of the 'bullied' creating a 'bully-proof' world, or rather destroying 'the world' in the process. I've been looking over Ray Kurzweil's rhetoric, such statements as: "I view disease and death at any age as a calamity, as problems to be overcome" and "the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our own creations." I'm not sure how 'fascist' I am (which I might as well consider my thinking as 'counter-terroristic for the preservation of the world') but I find people fueled by resentiment (i.e. modern scientists who apparently view Man as a 'piece of shit' who 'isn't evolved enough') to be more absurd, feverish 'dolts' than any despot. Nothingness is strength--perhaps envious? Do we want the 'bullied' (who resent Life/the World) playing with genes to create 'their' ideal human? Should we bully them?
ReplyDeleteThe question devolves to the necessity of demonstrating one's will in and of itself with no regard for what is being willed -- an elevation of the Hobbesean pronouncement on human society to a moral tenet. Only those who crave power for its own sake shall be ordained, those who temper their quest for power with defensible social aims will only expose their own weakness and ultimate vulnerability to the more ruthless among them. I believe Carles's philosophy involves channeling the will-to-power away from self-fashioning and toward a more general end which he has yet to entirely theorize. But it would reject both a paternalism for the weak and dictatorship of the unscrupulous. The side show charlatans who would presume to defeat death seek only to obviate the pleasures of living.
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