In looking at conflict in history, we can only tend towards the conclusion that many political leaders, wielding great power as wholly owned subsidiaries of an even greater one, struggle with concepts taught in kindergarten. Not least of these are the perspective that two wrongs don’t make a right—the idea that we can’t use violence to solve problems, that being provoked isn’t an excuse for violence, and even that basic responsibility and maturity requires rising above the violence we problematize in the behaviour and attitudes of others.
This is a fundamental life lesson. It teaches us to think for ourselves, to develop an independent value system and, if nothing else, to pick and choose our battles, rather than having them perpetually chosen for us by provocateurs looking to get a reaction out of someone whose entirely legitimate and understandable dislike of disrespect they can misrepresent as aggression. Problematising reactions to disrespect is, after all, foundation strategy for any manipulator, at the level of the interpersonal, or at that of the ideological.
It is a poor schooling indeed that neglects foundation lessons like these. The otherwise positively archetypal lesson that two wrongs don’t a right is nevertheless one that, as political actors (and nominal adults), we quickly unlearn. We can see this in the similarities between scapegoating logics of, on the one hand, ‘if you think for yourself, the communists win,’ and, on the other, ‘if you think for yourself, the enemies of communism win.’ We can’t win, and the fact that we can’t indicates something about the pervasiveness of two-wrongs morality amongst grown adults, if not the ‘ends justifies the means’ mentality that it breeds.
The history of the political systems and empires associated with these scapegoating logics reflects the critical value of exceptional measures and emergency powers to the maintenance of grim oligarchies and corporate neo-aristocracies. The history the Victors suppress tells no other tale than of ‘ends justifies the means’ narratives, and of the tall stories they tell explaining why opponents and critics of power structures are attacking the common interest (as though class privilege and individual rights and responsibilities are the same thing), as the bread and butter of the social control of empire-builders from right to left.
The Greeks invented the concept of the barbarian in demonising their enemies culturally. In their own propaganda, the Civilising Mission of the colonizing power in Occupied Palestine tars the resistance movement with the same brush. It stirs the same exceptionalist moral panic; if you think for yourself, the terrorists win. In the end we can only ask ourselves if Osama bin Laden was Hamas too.
If the communists, the enemies of communism, and the terrorists all win when we think for ourselves and question what we’re told to believe, they do so because the ends justify the means. Enforcing conformity can be reflexively conflated with protecting civilized society from the barbarians—be they rogues and lowlifes who dare to disquiet suited gold dragons as they prawl about their vast mountains of bank, or dilettante, petit-bourgeois, counter-revolutionary terrorists who say bad things about state capitalism.
Each of these logics conflate society and the state; to this way of thinking, serving the state by becoming what we claim to oppose, with the prophesied catastrophes of communism, its enemies or terrorism as the outcome if we don’t, is permissible because two wrongs make a right. Our wrong serves a higher purpose, but their wrong is because they are positively fiendish unpersons. They make bad choices and are empty shells for embodying everything they claim to oppose in making bad choices, but we are empty shells who embody everything we claim to oppose in serving power.
This mentality appears to depend on the ingroup assumption we can determine the truth of an idea by the number of people who believe it. Truth is what the ingroup dictates, even if it means abandoning our individuality, autonomy and indeed conscience to the collectively narcissistic ingroup we privilege on whatever arbitrary basis. As members of the tribal ingroup, we can conflate license, or doing whatever we want regardless of the consequences for anyone else, with freedom, or doing what we want as long as we respect the equal freedoms of others.
We become like the child in the kindergarten sandpit who sees another kid with a spade, and coveting the spade for ourselves, hits them, and takes it. When a teacher comes running to see what all the crying and yelling is about, we fabricate a fairy tale to explain why the kid who was minding their own business and playing in the sand quietly is actually a menace to the safety and wellbeing of all the other children in the sandpit—unlike ourselves, who only want to play peacefully and get along with everyone else.
The sandpit is the archetype for every act of military aggression: our violence is different; we are forced into the harm we nominally abhor as a result of the barbarity of the Other. Their violence is that of a 4 year-old with some serious developmental issues, not least of which being an apparent inability to respect fundamental norms of civilized behaviour, like rising above the vicious cycles of violence of the ‘eye for an eye’ mentality. Our violence is that of a 4 year-old who can well appreciate the value of a state of exception built on the mentality that two wrongs make a right.
This was apparent 20 years ago, during the first global moral panic over terrorism, as it is today. In that case, the Great Civilising Mission of the exceptionalist crusader ended in a quagmire in Afghanistan; your humble writer momentarily forgets who is in power in Afghanistan at the present time, but it is a fair bet that no one asks them what they think of counterterrorist conspiracism as a formula for military success. If he hadn’t been assassinated, maybe we could ask the President of Chile, Salvador Allende, overthrown by a CIA-orchestrated coup on the now-auspicious date of 11 September, 1973.
Maybe Allende would tell us we need to pay attention in kindergarten and not let ideology and our codependent capture-bonding with positively sacred social and class hierarchies (personal boundaries not so much) entitle us to forget what we learned. Ideology says that potential profits in the hundreds of billions of dollars from exploitation of vast natural gas reserves off the coast of Gaza need to be swept under the rug. The corporate media should be permitted to affect a reality they purport to reflect with hate propaganda that invisibilises genocide by parroting the narrative of the infant with the spade who insists that being defied and being attacked are the same thing.
Historians now know that Allende was overthrown and assassinated following a long campaign of virulent fear propaganda constructing a self-fulfilling prophecy of future violence just as it demonised Allende—drawing on all of the authoritarian conditioning in the collective unconscious into which the corporatized conscience of capture-bonded right-thinkers had long been domesticated and broken. The demonising and Othering of Allende was no different in terms of its two-wrongs logic than the demonising and Othering of violence that fails to serve the interests of imperialist aggressors, such as organized resistance to aggression. The linkages between anticommunist and counterterrorist conspiracist belief systems figure in light of ideological work carried out by neoconservatives to evolve the narrative to meet new contingencies in rationalizing their own imperialist aggression (The Oldest Trick in the Book 2020).
It has been said that accusations from narcissists are typically confessions; that inadmissibly shameful about the Self must be projected onto the Other. If the Other can’t be found, they must be constructed. It might also be said that this is also true of collective narcissism—of the collective narcissism and tribalism couched in nationalist, imperialist and ethno-fascist terms. Group vanity and the arrogance, conceit and grandiose false pride of orthodoxy seem to account for positively sacred social and class hierarchies (personal boundaries not so much), and the mentality that, if we think for ourselves, the communists and the enemies of communism both win.
Qui bonos, like Iraqi oil and Gazan gas, seem to have about as much motivating power as opportunities to act out on intergenerational traumas, as opposed to acknowledging them and seeking repair as responsible social and historical actors (potential leaders of peace if not otherwise busy injecting nitrous into the race to ecocide and collective annihilation). The irony of collective narcissism acting out apparently on unresolved intergenerational trauma is that it shares the misery with the population of Occupied Palestine, daily subjected to genocide thanks to the collapse of international law under the weight of petrodollar recycling. Not only so, by their own state terrorism Zionists are persecuting and destroying people who know their own experience acutely.
If two wrongs don’t make a right, and we can rise above the logic of the sandpit, we need to recognize the commonality between the sandpit and the western-dominated world order, that constructed on major human rights atrocities like the American Holocaust after 1492. The decimation of 90% of the population of the Americas, at a minimum 60 million people, proved the lie of the European Civilising Mission in not leaving very many to ‘civilize’ (Civilising Mission of the Ones We Missed perhaps). It proved the necessity of rising above the false binaries enabling the Othering of the other children in the sandpit, and of seeing the Other in the Self as a first step to rising above the schizophrenic, binary-driven split of the collective unconscious. Val Plumwood and Norman Cohn, amongst other, evidence how such is incubated in the colonized consciousnesses of capture- and trauma-bonded hostages within tribal ingroups, the severely unhinged toxic masculinity of the European Witch Hunts being a paradigm example.
Our playground sandpit of a world system is dependent on fossil fuels. The greatest single consumer of fossil fuels in the world is the global military machine that upholds a world order it has grown decrepit and corrupt exacting tribute from. The playground has always reverted to infantile antics, prophecising doom if it didn’t get its own way, when it experienced crisis in accumulating plastic spades, or the oil to make them, and the profits. The Gazan genocide marries counterterrorist conspiracism with primitive accumulation, in so doing reflecting the historical institutionalization of colonial expansionism as imperialism—predicated on variants of the Civilising Mission, like the Monroe Doctrine.
Like the child who covets the spade in the sandpit, the counterterrorist extractivist and imperialist state terrorist manipulates their orbit by problematizing reactions to disrespect—reactions that are inevitable if accompanied by settler colonialism, land-theft, apartheid and crimes against humanity. It takes no mystical insight to know that if you colonise someone else’s country and try to genocide them so you can steal their gas, you will likely meet with opponents you’re trying to victimise who won’t lie down and die. Frankly, it seems less prophecy than causality.
We might try to explain our attempted extermination of people who’s land we’ve stolen meets with resistance because they hate Jews, but two-wrongs logic still doesn’t explain why being criticized and being opposed are the same thing. It still doesn’t explain why the modern world order is any more grown up than a fucking sandpit, why prophecies of doom from a child who has a spade that you don’t are any different to those from what happens if we stop building empires of resource extraction for corporate aristocrats and maniacs determined to dodge internal threats to their own power and class privileges by going down as great monsters of history. It doesn’t much seem like it is going to help in avoiding the consequences of the hubris and overreach inherent to the mentality that two wrongs make a right, that we can have altruistic out comes from selfish means.
If our leaders won’t leave the sandpits of history, maybe it’s time to reconsider sandpits.
