Until now, I’ve struggled to name the psychosocial process undergirding the movement that is MAGA. However, I think I’ve found a term that succinctly identifies the problem: Narcissistic Stupefaction. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor killed by Nazis in a concentration camp, noted that fascists were, in the dictionary definition of the term, stupid saying:
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed—in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical—and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. We discover this to our surprise in particular situations. The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them.
We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.
The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.
Bonhoeffer correctly, I think, notes those of the MAGA persuasion are made stupid. The powerful sets the social condition of stupefaction because they require stupidity to perpetrate the material horrors that are now befalling all Americans, MAGA rubes included.
When combined with the observations Jean-Paul Sartre made about anti-Semites during WWII, I think the psychosocial condition that the world is being consumed by, to the material benefit of oligarchs alone, comes more fully into focus.
The foundation of every fascist movement is oligarchic power structures extending permission to the mundane to have their banality made special. For white supremacists, the mere accident of their birth confers to them an elevated status:
Consider the psychosocial derangement so proudly displayed by the above white supremacist woman and then consider Sartre’s observation regarding the motivation supporting such derangement:
Besides this, many anti-Semites-the majority, perhaps-belong to the lower middle class of the towns; they are functionaries, office workers, small business- men, who possess nothing. It is in opposing themselves to the Jew that they suddenly become conscious of being proprietors: in representing the Jew as a robber, they put themselves in the enviable position of people who could be robbed.
Thus I would call anti-Semitism a poor man’s snobbery. And in fact it would appear that the rich for the most part exploit this passion for their own uses rather than abandon themselves to it-they have better things to do. It is propagated mainly among the middle classes, because they possess neither land nor house nor castle, having only some ready cash and a few securities in the bank. It was not by chance that the petty bourgeoisie of Germany was anti-Semitic in 1925. The principal concern of this “white-collar proletariat” was to distinguish itself from the real proletariat. Ruined by big industry, bamboozled by the Junkers [oligarchs], it was nonetheless to the Junkers and the great industrialists that its whole heart went out. It went in for anti-Semitism with the same enthusiasm that it went in for wearing bourgeois dress: because the workers were internationalists, because the Junkers possessed Germany and it wished to possess it also. Anti-Semitism is not merely the joy of hating; it brings positive pleasures too. By treating the Jew as an inferior and pernicious being, I affirm at the same time that I belong to the elite. This elite, in contrast to those of modern times which are based on merit or labor, closely resembles an aristocracy of birth. There is nothing I have to do to merit my superiority, and neither can I lose it. It is given once and for all. It is a thing. We must not confuse this precedence the anti-Semite enjoys by virtue of his principles with individual merit. The anti-Semite is not too anxious to possess individual merit. Merit has to be sought, just like truth; it is discovered with difficulty; one must deserve it. Once acquired, it is perpetually in question: a false step, an error, and it flies away. Without respite, from the beginning of our lives to the end, we are responsible for what merit we enjoy. Now the anti-Semite flees responsibility as he flees his own consciousness, and choosing for his personality the permanence of rock, he chooses for his morality a scale of petrified values. Whatever he does, he knows that he will remain at the top of the ladder; whatever the Jew does, he will never get any higher than the first rung. We begin to perceive the meaning of the anti-Semite’s choice of himself. He chooses the irremediable out of fear of being free; he chooses mediocrity out of fear of being alone, and out of pride he makes of this irremediable mediocrity a rigid aristocracy.
TERFs find a sort of liberation in treating trans women the way the cis men in their lives treated them; moreover, in denying that trans women are women, they enjoy the elevated status of Real or True woman and it is why, I think, fascists seem to always leverage this particular kind of puerile supremacy as a gateway to other forms of supreme mediocrity.
MAGA is not anything if it is not representative of the Real/True sex, race, religion, and American. Any and all accidents of birth become virtues that, oligarchs tell them, are under threat.
It’s not the neoliberal system that’s the problem perpetuating the material conditions making life difficult for MAGA voters. Instead, it’s diversity that’s the problem. Immigrants (in a country of immigrants) are taking your jobs; it’s certain racial groups (not insurance profiteers) making life hard; and, its trans existence (not oligarchs) that’s the problem. It’s not the alienation you experience by investing enormous portions of your life into making oligarchs richer. Its those people, over there, that’s the problem, you see.
It is a push-pull of being bombarded by oligarch messaging and the seduction of making meritorious the mundanity that produces the self-sustaining cycle of stupefaction and narcissism.
ANTI-GENDER IDEOLOGY IS ONE OF THE MOST DOMINANT STRAINS OF FASCISM IN OUR TIMES! So TERFS will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism, one that requires a coalition guided by the struggles against racism, nationalism, xenophobia, and carceral violence, one that is mindful of the high rates of femicide throughout the world, which includes high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people. The anti-gender movement circulates a specter of “gender” as a force of destruction, but they never actually read any works in gender studies. Quick and fearful conclusions take the place of considered judgments” – Judith Butler
There exists no MAGA, TERF, racist, or bigot who is not a victim of stupefaction, but is, at the same time, far too narcissistic to generate the critical spark of psychological liberation necessary to escape the gravity of their derangement.
Returning to Bonhoeffer:
The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.
And this, then, recalls for me the criticism of the radical feminist Monique Wittig, who herself cites the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, who both take on the poison chalice Sartre identified:
Lesbians should always remember and acknowledge how “unnatural,” compelling, totally oppressive, and destructive being “woman” was for us in the old days before the women’s liberation movement. It was a political constraint, and those who resisted it were accused of not being “real” women. But then we were proud of it, since in the accusation there was already something like a shadow of victory: the avowal by the oppressor that “woman” is not something that goes without saying, since to be one, one has to be a “real” one.
However, most of the feminists and lesbian-feminists in America and elsewhere still believe that the basis of women’s oppression is biological as well as historical. Some of them even claim to find their sources in Simone de Beauvoir.
Colette Guillaumin has shown that before the socioeconomic reality of black slavery, the concept of race did not exist, at least not in its modern meaning, since it was applied to the lineage of families. However, now, race, exactly like sex, is taken as an “immediate given,” a “sensible given,” “physical features,” belonging to a natural order. But what we believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an “imaginary formation,” which reinterprets physical features (in themselves as neutral as any others but marked by the social system) through the network of relationships in which they are perceived. (They are seen as black, therefore they are black; they are seen as women, therefore, they are women. But before being seen that way, they first had to be made that way.) Lesbians should always remember and acknowledge how “unnatural,” compelling, totally oppressive, and destructive being “woman” was for us in the old days before the women’s liberation movement. It was a political constraint, and those who resisted it were accused of not being “real” women. But then we were proud of it, since in the accusation there was already something like a shadow of victory: the avowal by the oppressor that “woman” is not something that goes without saying, since to be one, one has to be a “real” one.
However, as Andrea Dworkin emphasizes, many lesbians recently “have increasingly tried to transform the very ideology that has enslaved us into a dynamic, religious, psychologically compelling celebration of female biological potential.” Thus, some avenues of the feminist and lesbian movement lead us back to the myth of woman which was created by men especially for us, and with it we sink back into a natural group. Having stood up to fight for a sexless society,” we now find ourselves entrapped in the familiar deadlock of “woman is wonderful.” Simone de Beauvoir underlined particularly the false consciousness which consists of selecting among the features of the myth (that women are different from men) those which look good and using them as a definition for women. What the concept “woman is wonderful” accomplishes is that it retains for defining women the best features (best according to whom?) which oppression has granted us, and it does not radically question the categories “man” and “woman,” which are political categories and not natural givens. It puts us in a position of fighting within the class “women” not as the other classes do, for the disappearance of our class, but for the defense of “woman” and its reinforcement.
Returning to the poison chalice of TERFism, consider this, the underlying conceit underpinning all aspects of fascism: making meritorious mere accidents of birth. How appealing must it be to the insipid that a white cishet woman –who is oppressed as a woman– elevates herself above all Black people for that which she possesses by accident of her birth: whiteness. And what evil might she be willing to perpetrate against her fellow human beings to protect that singular jewel of esteem in the banality that is her existence?
How meritorious an object have the above TERFs constructed out of their accident of birth? Having experienced oppression as “woman” in our culture, how must she relate to that accident of birth now that it is, according to the story she has told herself about trans existence, so coveted by the constructed objects of her ire? And what might she be willing to do, what rights, and what humanity might she be willing to trade to protect that which is now made meritorious through her denigration of an entire portion of her material class?
This, then, is the evil seed that gives rise to all forms of fascism; it is
the fuel which turns the engines of oligarchy, convincing material classes to
fight for the preservation of their class while simultaneously fighting against
aspects of their material class in a never-ending desire to preserve its purity
because it –not effort, experience, or growth– has become the core merit
through which all existence itself is given meaning.
Such is that which fuels the entirety of the MAGA movement,
TERFism included:
Narcissistic Stupefaction.
Tags: Hate RadFem Republicans TERF Transgender Transphobia