Ben Debney || The redoubtable wisdom of Mark Twain has only tended to magnify in force in the years since his passing. Arguably one of his most adroit insights, quoted above, points to the perils of groupthink—again, arguably. What, after all, is the difference between being in a state of ignorance with an open mind, and being in a state of ignorance with a closed one?
Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Cohesiveness, or the desire for cohesiveness, in a group may produce a tendency among its members to agree at all costs.[1] This causes the group to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation.[2][3]
Might it be the difference between being able to do something about being a state of ignorance, versus becoming hostage to a state of ignorance, and in so doing being condemned to act out on being hostage to a state of ignorance? This seems the classic conundrum of the bounded rationalities of ideologies, of closed systems of instrumentalist, power-driven thinking and their authoritarian psychologies; the ability of the group to defend consensus against causality. Its groupthink claims: the truth of an idea is determined by the number of people who believe it, not by any demonstrable foundation in casual reality.
Or, in other words, what I know for sure to be true is more important than my capacity to asesss and know truth where it fails to conform with my preconceived assumptions about what actually constitutes reality.
On this count, a great deal of European ideological history back to Ancient Greece reflects what Hofstadter called a “Paranoid Style” in reference to North American politics. That this was a statement of the utter banal in no sense diminished its power; the parallels between Washington and Rome have only ever become harder to ignore from the days the United States declared itself an Empire with the Monroe Doctrine.
a style of mind, not always right wing in its affiliations … [characterised by] heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy’. 8 This made the persecution complex a key facet of political discourse, Hofstadter argued, systematising grandiose conspiracy theories after the style of the ‘clinical paranoiac’, who exhibits a ‘chronic mental disorder characterized by systematic delusions of persecution and of one’s own greatness’. 9 While both he and the demagogue are ‘overheated, over-suspicious, overaggressive, grandiose and apocalyptic in expression’, however, only the clinical paranoiac feels the ‘hostile and conspiratorial’ world to be ‘directed specifically against him’. 10 The spokesman for the paranoid style, on the other hand, finds it directed ‘against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not him alone, but millions of others’. 11
https://classautonomy.info/the-oldest-trick-in-the-book-panic-driven-scapegoating-in-history-and-recurring-patterns-of-persecution/
This is a significant difference, in that Insofar as he does not usually see himself singled out as the individual victim of a personal conspiracy, he is somewhat more rational and much more disinterested. His sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic, in fact, goes far [as] to intensify his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation. 12
He can appeal not to self-interest but the national ingroup and its national security blankets; using the two interchangably, the national ingroup and his privilege become one and the same. Selfishness is recast as virtue, predation as tough love, fear as strength of the pack. “The paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time,” Hofstadter wrote; “it is an international phenomenon.”
Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering—a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies . . . systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”
“The megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph” turns up not least in the invention of the Barbarian in the self-pity party tragedies the Ancient Greeks threw themselves after losing a war they started.
From this, Norman Cohn drew the link, for his part, between the “Paranoid Style” and the ideological history of Europe by outlining what he called an “Ancient Fantasy.’ I have argued elsewhere that this is ‘what we might all a trope or archetype in the Jungian sense.’ The Paranoid Style of the Ancient Fantasy alleged that
there existed, somewhere in the midst of the great society, another society, small and clandestine, which not only threatened the existence of the great society but was also addicted to practices which were felt to be wholly abominable, in the literal sense of anti-human . . .
This was as characteristic a feature of the Paranoid Style of the Ancient Greeks as it is of the Paranoid Style of Zionist ethnofascism today. Cohn goes on to note that
The fantasy changed, became more complex, down through the centuries. It played an important part in some major persecutions; and the way in which it did also varied. Sometimes it was used merely to legitimate persecutions that would have occurred anyway; sometimes it served to widen persecutions that would otherwise have remained far more limited. In the case of the great [European] witch-hunt it generated massive persecution, which would have been inconceivable without it. In pursuing its history, one is led far beyond the confines of the history of ideas and deep into the sociology and social psychology of persecution.
Here Twain’s pointing to the role of subjective intellectual prejudices of the authoritarian variety starts to make itself felt. We have seen that the groupthink-driven mentality behind, for example, the European Witch Hunts, appears as what I know for sure to be true is more important than my capacity to assess and know truth where it fails to conform with my preconceived assumptions about what actually constitutes reality. Arthur Koestler has noted how pervasively this mentality appears historically:
I think most historians would agree that the part played by impulses of selfish, individual aggression in the holocausts of history was small; first and foremost, the slaughter was meant as an offering to the gods, to king and country, or the future happiness of mankind. The crimes of a Caligula shrink to insignificance compared to the havoc wrought by Torquemada. The number of victims of robbers, highwaymen, rapists, gangsters and other criminals at any period of history is negligible compared to the massive numbers of those cheerfully slain in the name of the true religion, just policy or correct ideology. Heretics were tortured and burnt not in anger but in sorrow, for the good of their immortal souls. Tribal warfare was waged in the purported interest of the tribe, not of the individual. Wars of religion were fought to decide some fine point in theology or semantics. Wars of succession dynastic wars, national wars, civil wars, were fought to decide issues equally remote from the personal self-interest of the combatants . . . Let me repeat: the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to a flag, a leader, a religious faith or a political conviction. Man has always been prepared not only to kill but also to die for good, bad or completely futile causes. And what can be a more valid proof of the reality of the self-transcending urge than this readiness to die for an ideal?”
― Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine
Or to sacrifice the intellect to one. As the credo quia absurdum of St Ignatius de Loyola tells, the preconceived assumptions of witchcraft conspiracism and tall tales of Brides of Lucifer sold to sensual permissiveness became more important than causality insofar as they were necessary to the terror required to instil,
besides entire outward submission to command, also the complete identification of the inferior’s will with that of the superior. [Loyola] lays down that the superior is to be obeyed simply as such and as standing in the place of God, without reference to his personal wisdom, piety or discretion; that any obedience which falls short of making the superior’s will one’s own, in inward affection as well as in outward effect, is lax and imperfect; that going beyond the letter of command, even in things abstractly good and praise-worthy, is disobedience, and that the “sacrifice of the intellect” is the third and highest grade of obedience, well pleasing to God, when the inferior not only wills what the superior wills, but thinks what he thinks, submitting his judgment, so far as it is possible for the will to influence and lead the judgment [of the individual].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrifice_of_the_intellect
This is a desirable feature of workers and creators of value under world capitalism also, where the Almighty Dollar substitutes for God and Might Makes Right in the economy as well as imperial politics. It is most certainly a desirable trait of the intellectual classes in a world-system rooted in the profit motive, and in need of infinite planet to expand into to maintain a modality based on endless-growth.
This is some ways is the rub. The capitalist mode of production is not only based on endless-growth, needing endless planet to exploit in a one-way system of resource extraction. It is also entirely dependent on lands and peoples it enslaves and exploits—a dependency it dare not name, lest it know itself as a comprehensive set of lies.
Perhaps, dare it be said, this has something to do with all that wacky conspiracism that comes to be flying thick and fast in increasingly regular cycles; if you think for yourself, the terrorists win. If you think for yourself, the communists win. If you think for yourself. the enemies of communism win. If you think for yourself, you give comfort to the sensual permissiveness of the Deceiver. The Ancient Fantasy lives in the sterile (and fragile) void of the Paranoid Style; if you challenge the consensus, you’re hurting us.
What we know for sure to be true (the consensus) thus becomes more important than objective reality (say, for example, that our maladaptive attitude is creating conflict, and that we are avoiding fixing our attitude by trying to reconstruct ourselves as solutions to problems of our own making by playing the victim, and exploiting the conspiracist paranoid style of the Ancient Fantasy to explain why.
In light of their inadmissable dependency on the subjugated mass of humanity, who do all the work, the imperial capitalist class need everyone to know that anyone other than them is a parasite bleeding good people to wreck and ruin (we can still join elitist cults run by elites and have scraps from the elite banquet table though, just put your brain in a jar and join the collective fascist tantrum over the wheels falling off the bandwagon of endless upward mobility I mean heathens not respecting God).
Consensus rooted in paranoia and moral panic directed against outsiders and Others is critical to controlling the thoughts of the mass—upon whom, the big knobs running the imperial asylum are, as we have seen, characteristically dependent. For this apparent reason, we know for sure that the Ancient Fantasy remains a clear and present threat to Western Civilisation; for sure there is a tyranny of woke that isn’t the mentality that saying bad things about crimes against humanity means you hate Jews.
Understanding the process of othering can help better prepare us on how to take action against discrimination. In education, shedding light on the mechanisms behind the construction of “Other” will provide a deeper understanding of the context and necessary conditions which occur at the onset of genocide. It also helps us to develop a preventive response when faced with statements or practices which appear to promote discriminatory actions.
https://museeholocauste.ca/en/resources-training/the-process-of-othering/
We are no doubting faced with existential threats to civilisation, though a radical slogan says, “the only minority we need to worry about: the rich,” or something to that effect. Quite possibly a terminal phase in human history, the present moment also features a consensus that we can have endless growth on a finite planet. We all know this for sure; we can just alchemy altrustic outcomes from selfish means thanks to the magic of the Chicago School. They for sure know their magic.
And behind all that, we know for sure we can have endless upward class mobility on a dead planet, because we know for sure we can have endless growth in finite space. What we know for sure matters more to the groupthink and bounded rationality of hegemonic neoliberal world capitalism than what our own senses tell us is a patent absurdity.
Maybe someone wants to go a round inciting suspicion of Muslims Who Hate What Western Civilisation Has Given Us and Want to Fuck Us By Sabotaging Physics So We Can’t Have AI Slop and Collective Paranoia Forever. Even if they don’t, it’s still clear that affective reasoning built around conformity to consensus of the national ingroup is what creates problems for empire-builders when consensus clashes with causality.
On the one hand, “The megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph.” On the other, the universe. Who would win?
The answer in fact appears to be Mark Twain, reminding us to keep our minds open amidst our own ignorance, and spare ourselves the hubris and arrogance of a world that depends on them being closed. The state of the dominant social order, and its inability to even save itself so it can continue to operate on its own terms, tells us all we need to know about the only place the world capitalist status quo and its hotline to God can take us.
