Radio Free Beszel

"Treat them like the plague-spreading lepers that they are. You want to be put in isolation camps? That's where this is headed, you will have deserved it, and I'm all for it."
— highly up-voted comment on Reddit, September, 2021

There is an epidemic of hate against the unvaccinated. Our leaders call them dangers to society, encouraging widespread hate. They are being fired from their jobs and ostracized. People wish death on them. Gluboco Lietuva, for example, explains the impact of the policies and the hate on himself and his family.

The formation of mass hate follows the pattern of totalitarianism. Dutch psychologist Mattias Desmet, echoing  René Girard's description of the scapegoat ritual, calls this mass formation: a form of collective hypnosis. A minority of the population, suffering from social isolation, anxiety, meaninglessness and anger are effectively hypnotized. Their fears and frustrations focus on a target. The possibility of violence rises. Most of us are not hypnotized: but history shows that if we go along with the spirit of hate, the probability of atrocities rises.

Though I chose to be vaccinated, fear where this will lead.

"Fanaticism without faith, discipline without loyalty, excommunication without communion." Augustin Cochin.

Sound familiar? The Internet is not the first time a new forum for communication turned society upside down. The French Revolution did not come from nowhere in 1789, Cochin says: the ideas and the fanaticism had already been worked out in members-only philosophical societies, where men united around dreams of remaking society.

These societies were supposed to be places of free thought. In fact, they were manipulated by inner circles and insulated from the realities of life. They tended towards conformity and extremes. They built imaginary cities in the clouds: but when the Revolution came, they tried to build those cities in reality, and ultimately in blood.

The story Cochin tells is strikingly familiar. The radical dogmatism emerging from the Internet today echoes his depiction of revolution at the beginning of the modern era. It explains how a few people can secretly manufacture public opinion, gain power, create the illusion that they are simply representing the will of the people and defending human rights.

See Augustin Cochin, Organizing the Revolution.

"Equality facilitates the exercise of power." - Mirabeau to Louis XVI, during the French Revolution

There is no escape from organization and structure. We may try to create groups without structure, in which everyone is equal: but the result is the opposite. Structure arises spontaneously as a few within the group accumulate influence and power - only without formal organizational structures, their power can be hard to see and harder to challenge. The feminist Jo Freeman ("Joreen") explains this in her famous essay, The Tyranny of Structurelessness.

We often have the idea that eliminating hierarchy frees us. This is a useful story for those who dismantle hierarchy, whether they be tech companies or activist groups. But it is often not the case. In reality, hierarchies diffuse power, delegating it to branches and closer to the people at the bottom. That may be helpful, as when one has access to a local elected representative, or it can be tyrannical, as in Southern states in the U.S. during the Civil Rights struggle. But as Mirabeau told the King, eliminating hierarchy increases the power of the centre over everyone. Equality may not be what it seems.

This episode lays the groundwork for next week's episode, Fanaticism Without Faith: The Internet and the French Revolution, when I talk about how a few men were able to take control of France while appearing to do the will of the people.

"You must pick up the gun to defend civilization against barbarism. Those who pick up the gun are barbarians." — Kenneth Hite

Justice is not only about punishing the perpetrator: it's about ourselves, and who we become. We are what we do, and though what we do may be just, we may not like who we become.

Spoilers for Seven Samurai, The Godfather, Dune, The Empire Strikes Back.

Humans respond to plagues and social disorder with collective murder. Since antiquity, communities have chosen victims who are marginal or different. The perpetrators truly believe that the victim is guilty - a belief confirmed when the murder restores order.

René Girard argues that such murders are the foundation of social stability in cultures around the world, but that actual historical violence has been disguised as myth. He argues too that out of control mimetic contagion - rivalry arising from desire - is the reason for disorder in the first place.

These two contagions - disease and out-of-control rivalry - coincide in times of plague or pandemic. They are reinforced by empathy, by a belief in our own virtue, and by technologies that encourage imitation. The situation we are in now, with the COVID-19 pandemic and social media, is likely to lead to scapegoating of innocent victims. But we, like the ancients, will believe that we are bringing justice to the guilty.

Draws on René Girard's books, I See Satan Fall Like Lighting, The Scapegoat, and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.

Does desire come from within? René Girard argues no: we imitate the desires of others. We pursue the fantasy that if only we could uncover and achieve our own, authentic desires, we would be happy. In fact, our desires are copies; when we achieve them, we are left unsatisfied. Advertising, for example, shows us others to imitate in order to "be ourselves." The fruitless pursuit of authenticity leaves us feeling that there is something wrong with who we are. The result can be unstable identities beset by dissatisfied and envy. The imitation of desire, Girard says, leads to competition, conflict, and crisis.

See René Girard's Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.

When there are too many elites, chaos follows. In essence, this is historian Peter Turchin's theory of elite overproduction. Tracing the history of civilizations around the world, he finds that an oversupply of elites is one of the strongest predictors of social unrest.

As Götz Aly explains in his book, Why the Germans? Why the Jews?, this is a key part of the what happened in Germany between the wars. In the 1920s, the liberal Weimar government opened up access to universities. Many families sent their sons to study for the first time. By 1931, a third of graduates could not find jobs in their fields. Frustrated Christian students turned on their Jewish counterparts, whose representation in white-collar jobs was out of all proportion to their tiny share of the population.  The Nazis promised affirmative action for Christians and against Jews. Students were among Hitler's first and most fervent supporters.

Turchin argues that the situation is similar in the United States today. There are too many university graduates for too few professional jobs. Disappointed ambition and intense competition appears to be driving unrest today. This explosive combination of anger among young elites explains political upheaval from Occupy Wallstreet to identity politics and the social justice movement.

"My job was to be in charge of the intellectual property policy of the United States . . . if you go to a shopping mall in this country you cannot buy anything made in the United States anymore. It all comes from China or some other place like that. Well, the reason for that is we've completely opened up our markets. It was a conscious decision to basically abandon low-wage manufacturing jobs, and the idea is that we would compensate for that with higher wage high tech information more intangible based jobs." - Bruce Lehman.

 Making copyrights and patents, not things, produced a few winners and many losers. Inequality skyrocketed. Politics polarized. Small towns hollowed out, while in major cities house prices went through the roof. It was not China's fault. China was made an offer they couldn't refuse: making and breaking the deal was the only rational choice for the Chinese people. In America's new winner-take-all economy, a few Americans won - but America lost. It was a deliberate choice by the winners.

See the documentary, RiP: A Remix Manifesto. Next week: Hitler's Students
See the documentary, RiP: A Remix Manifesto.

Totalitarianism begins as dream. It ends in nightmare, the destruction of the individual. Hannah Arendt, a Jew who fled Hitler, analyzed the commonalities of communism and Naziism in her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. 

Life doesn't make a very good story. It's inconsistent, irrational, unfair. We can end up feeling alienated alone, as though we don't matter. The totalitarian Big Lie provides an explanation, naming villains and identifying a narrative for pursuing justice. It seems to make sense of a senseless world. Through its actions, its continuous movement, it proves its lies true. 

Alone and insulated from the real world, it's easy to fall for the lie, to follow chains of logic that lead somewhere terrible. And one need not be alone. You may hear that the movement is violent and extreme, but the people you actually encounter are sympathizers or allies: normal, decent people who share some of its ideals and goals. They are the gateway to the movement. Once your are inside, they serve as insulation: even as the you get closer to the extreme core of the totalitarian ideology, you are always surrounded by people who make you feel less extreme than you are. it's an echo chamber. It is easy to believe that everyone (except for very bad people) agrees with you when the only people you encounter share your views. 

The ideology is total, because it claims that everything is political. It erases the distinction between public and private. Everyone is first and foremost an agent in pursuing the inevitable, just course of history. Even when the movement turns on them, believers often submit: a life given for the cause is better than a life (or death) without meaning.

A concise argument for the contemporary social justice movement and why it considers language fundamental. I explain the faith, but I am not a believer.