The Political is Personal

Preface P (prefaces to books I probably won't have time to write)

This is a book about current affairs: the recurrent election wins of our extreme right parties  in Western democracies. When I say current affairs, I talk about something recurring since at least November 24th 1991 in my own Flemish democracy, the day known here as ‘Black Sunday’. This book explains that it will be an ongoing current affair for decades to come. It is this explanation which is our only chance of avoiding that this affair will not become the very last affair ever to confront those of us - i.e. all of us¹ - traveling on this globular green and blue rocket ship of ours². The fact of the matter is, whether we like it or not (and I don’t like it one little bit but this doesn’t change the facts that matter one little bit), that the vote in Western democracies is all that matters when it comes to avoiding this rocket ship turning into yet another merely globular piece of mere matter. Justice may well be the solution, but the trouble is that justice needs to be sought (being the one thing that can’t be bought).

Let me start with the 2 explanations usually entertained for the near-certainty that Western elections end in resounding xenophobic wins. In the not-so-very-left corner, we find Hillary Clinton who believes only the stupid vote this way (and the many are stupid of course). In the not-yet-extreme-right corner, we find the crowd of self-declared center-right politicians arguing we should take these voters’ xenophobia seriously if we are to avoid all too violent break-outs of xenophobia. Maybe all this is a case of history repeating itself but, even if so, the difference now is that Nietzsche’s belief in eternal return is empirically very unlikely as, this time around, our rocket ship will become a mere rocky ship³. So it behooves us to take a closer look at these explanations, something which this book will not do. Consider this preface a fast forward to an explanation that does work. A fast forward merited by the urgency of our predicament. And a fast forward which is warranted by the notion of complementarity: in case of 2 extreme, mutually exclusive explanations, physics has it that neither the one - stupidity - nor the other - taking seriously - can be fully right (I refer to many, in fact most, other books of mine for the axiom “nature abhors reduction”, as complementarity in action might also be called).

This is, in line with the aforementioned axiom, not to dismiss the 2 explanations altogether. The closest look I can have at them is based on my personal voting behavior on that Black Sunday. Indeed, I voted extreme right on that occasion and my vote was a mix of stupidity - the typical self-applied label is ‘protest’ - and of wanting to be taken seriously - why would I have to question what we found to be typical just because they questioned it⁴. As Charles Mills has it: serious privilege is inextricably entangled with white ignorance. Self-deception is probably the hardest work one needs to put in to become part of a meritocracy. A lot like the mafia’s made men who stick to their omerta in their muddled reality of not risking to be excommunicated (stupidity) and repressing their guilt based on the good work done for the family (taking themselves seriously). Now, I am neither the person to repress anything, nor the person to ever really feel like an insider (consider me perennially unmade), so my guilt found its way out just like I finally accepted to be autistic. My first person experience of me voting that way on November 24th 1991 allows me to say that I was neither merely stupid, nor merely serious as, in fact, I was both at the very same time. And this book is about the analysis of my shame, a shame which would be all the more shameful if I did not analyze it simply because I could not bring myself to confessing (and thereby un-repressing) my guilt.

Well then, I knew unconsciously then as I know consciously now that the world is unjust in that birth does not give a right (other than the right to be loved). Which is why my privilege is a guilty pleasure. Now, everybody deserves to be able to indulge in guilty pleasures from time to time but our Western bodies have been indulging in their privilege for centuries (in fact associating it to our birth duty to only parcel out tough love to others). Our addiction to the opium of our privilege is so deep that we even constantly hallucinate we are doing the right thing! How can you live with such injustice and the nagging feeling that your addiction constantly deepens it? This book submits to you that the only thing criminals can do not to face justice is to (just?) run away from it⁵. And, given that injustice so grows to a size making escape impossible, the running away surely and quickly morphs into organizing as a weaponized gang of criminals defending their privilege (and, see footnote 5, thinking we are all criminals). The mafia, but now under the form of the properly militarized nation state that has to patriotically-patriarchally defend its sovereignty and borders (i.e. its privilege).

So this book gives a serious “simple, stupid” explanation to Western electoral success of xenophobic messages: repressed guilt. Voters are not just stupid, they know unfair well that whatever they want from their politicians can only be given to them if they continue to take it from the non-West. Voters are not just serious, they know well that unfairness thus permeates the system upheld by politicians within their own borders, resulting in their own ever growing poverty and social insecurity. Privilege mixed with poverty breeds socialism entangled with nationalism (shorter: capitalism), and with that not enough is said. Even an explosive mixture needs a spark to ignite. That spark is accumulation of wealth and personal vanity respectively funding and creating the very politicians riding the “repressed guilt”-wave as if it can never break (as if there is no tomorrow; which might, for once, be actually correct!).

“Diagnosing the illness is the first step in curing it.”, might be a hopeful message on which to end. Unfortunately, there’s every chance Western democracies are so hooked on ‘us vs. them’ that we are dealing with irreversible democratic dementia. If, indeed, the problem is a degenerative lack of the Western privileged imagination, democracy (as we know it in the property-tax-minimizing West) is, itself, the issue.

PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it is the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).

1. Yes, Elon, that includes you even if you want to escape Armageddon in your most powerful rocket ship. It includes you and those meager microbes which will have to tag along in that ship of yours if it’s to have any breathable atmosphere at all. (The irony of this will come out more clearly in the next footnote.)

2. The latter of is a non-possessive of. And the latter sentence, as you’ll come to see, is in fact a summary of (the preface of) this book. In fact, without the microbes of the previous footnote there would be neither green nor blue but just the dust of Mars or Venus’ venomous vapors. We are all in this together - locked in love so to speak - as the hippie Lynn Margulis showed in a way that even selfish Dawkins had to squarely respect. We, together with microbes and much else unmentioned in Noah’s ark, are of the world which - logically - means the world cannot be, possessively, of any of us (thus disproving the very premise of a culture that came up with the word premise in order to be able to finally unmask any self-defeating argument).

3. To conclude this astronomical series of footnotes: maybe a rocky ship studied, a lot like we study Mars, from afar by telescope first and then by the passengers of Nole’s rocket ships to find out (alas too late) that a careful excavation shows Earthians repeated Martian history by trying to escape instead of deal with the trouble of co-dependence (call this the Nietzschean astro-historic fallacy of misplaced supremacy).

4. I took it seriously because, being atypical, it cost me 23 years of uncomfortably conforming to what is considered typical. As you’ll find in this book the lure of us vs. them is specifically hard to resist for those of us who have to put in a lot of hard effort to be accepted as part of an ‘us’ built around creating ‘them’s’.

5. Call it the Categorical Imperative of The Enlightened Criminal. One cannot universalize criminality except if one accepts that everybody is continuously trying to escape justice. 

Credits image: val-suprunovich via Freepik under Creative Commons license