issue: 0017
This essay is a salute and expression of love for Gen Z. I have seen the future in you and it is great. If you have anti-woke issues and you want to read this then you’ll just have to swallow them!
The Fear of Fear Itself
"Suspicion kissed you when I did; I never knew how I should say my love.
It were a cold house I kept!" - John Proctor
The Crucible, Arthur Miller
Today as we have voted in the UK with our choice between kissing the devil and drinking the salty brine of the deep blue sea, we should remember that our world, ordered as it is, is fairly recent.
Ernst Junger the German thinker, writer and soldier, began WWI as a cavalry officer and ended it as an officer in a tank regiment. He remembers being threatened with school as a child and not believing that such a torture could be true. He remembered seeing children in school uniforms and feeling a sense of oppression. Junger was part of the coup against Hitler but was pardoned and not executed. Below is a rare interview with himself whilst aged over 100 years old. The video is age restricted, his experience and reflections upon the 20th century are invaluable.
The world of the 20th and 21st century with its incredible pace of change is a recent phenomenon and it began with the fear that the Capitalist Order would not survive the interrogation of the Communist Order. The ruling elite began the 20th Century with dread, for the inherent injustices of the Capitalist Order and its socio-political consequences had no winning arguments against the rigour of the Socialist and Communist critiques.
It replied with two weapons:
The first was at the hands of Lord Maynard Keynes, who after the Great Depression brought all parties to the table and insisted that any solution would have to be a negotiated compromise between, Unions, Governments, Corporations, Banks, an insistence that all stakeholders must be represented in the solution under the aegis of the Government and combined this with the blunt instrument of monetarist economic policies, as Western Empire emerged, the banks and corporations resented this. With the crisis they caused they had no choice, but as soon as stability and wealth began to recover the resentful progressively set about destroying this order which had been built upon visionary statesmanship and they progressively returned to the unchecked greed, stupidity and shortsightedness of laissez-faire economics, and have now recreated the circumstances that had caused the Great Depression. The inflation, shortsighted politics and threat of economic collapse is the inevitable result of Neo-Liberal stupidity. According to their animistic theories, the market is a quasi living thing with both hyper-intelligence and sentience as long as they don’t need the state to bail them out of their latest Quixotic disaster. And to describe them and their conjoined twin far right conservatism as stupid, elevates the stupid to the rank of geniuses.
The second was to ensure that they bought the allegiance of their populations with socialist policies masquerading as Capitalism. The American expansion of their red lined cities and the suburbs, driven by retail banking, insurance and corporate builders drunk on tax breaks, subsidies and incentives, created a mortgage industry and housing boom, to house White American workers and contain Black American workers in ghettoes. This was to buy the allegiance of workers with unproductive wealth, which would allow them to borrow from the equity in their properties creating bound intergenerational wealth. Mortgage in French means, mort – death and gage – pledge, they rewarded their population with a death pledge for like the Apprenticeship of Emancipation in the transition from slavery, both the mortgage and the apprenticeship bound the worker to a contract which secured the value of the best years of their working labour. The increase in White Americas’ wealth by the mortgage bound them in a bind, with Hollywood shaping the dramatic psychological landscape of what life was. For in Freudian terms state policy cannot leave the libido of the population to find its own way, for that could be chaos and it was likely that the Communist Order would win. By the 1950’s this fear would reach fever pitch and the McArthy witch hunts trials for Communists, followed by J Edgar Hoover’s FBI COINTELPRO which focused upon violently preventing the rise of a Black Messiah. Eventually it was Karl Popper’s discourse of the Open Society which would deliver them from Plato’s rigorous critique of democracy.
Fear would be the weapon of policy throughout this period: The Fear of the Red Russian Peril; The Fear of rapid social change which drove conservatism; The fear of nuclear war; The fear of diseases. The fear of those Black thugs; The Fear of Immigrants; Fear of fear itself. Until the Soviet Union collapsed and the politics of fear ended, until The War on Terror began.
"The Devil is alive in Salem, and we dare not quail to follow wherever the accusing finger points!" - Reverend Parris
The Crucible, Arthur Miller
This ensured a society which was easier to police, with deep fears it drove extreme reactionary polarisation, which was easier to manage than well thought out political positions. Using Hollywood, sport, music and fashion all overwhelmingly driven by exploited Black ingenuity the American Century was given its soul. Within the wide ranging structure of Engineered Freedoms, the population consented. To lie outside of the suburban meadows of those freedoms was to enter the zone of the State of Exception at which point the state dealt with the citizen as an existential threat. Thanatos ruled and displaced Eros and we called it Freedom. And that is the pattern for now you stand against a genocide and you’re in the state of exception as an imagined terrorist. By the 21st century the chief American export was the professional lobbying and think tank industry to shape the politics and psychology of Europe in its image, with Dark Corporate Money.
This is how we found ourselves kissing the devil and drinking the salty brine of the deep blue sea. And when your eyes open to the sheer insanity of it all and you collapse into depression and anxiety, well we’ve got pharmaceuticals and counselling to sell, for that and some more for the side effects.
The Politics of Eros and Thanatos
In the dynamics of Freudian Psychoanalytics our most fundamental instinctive, impulse and constitutional nature is called the Id, which is at the pure energetic substratum of our psychological being. In our psychosocial development or in other words our relationships and social life, our Ego is constructed as the impulses and instincts or Libido of the Id are mapped as our behaviour and sense and image of ourselves. We are moving from Narcissistic Libido to Object Libido, meaning that the Libido of the Id begins to move from transacting only with energetic reference to itself – Narcissistic – to transacting with energetic reference to Objects outside of itself, to Narcissistic Libido as you reflect and dynamically change yourself, in a cyclical feedback loop. In this interaction of psychic energy with itself and that which is not itself. The temper of this Libidinal dance is characterised by two tempers Eros – Life Drive – or life affirming, growth orienting, promoting social connection and harmony or Thanatos – Death Drive – or aggressive, disrupting relationships and ultimately self destructive behaviour. Without a sense of safety and belonging the Libidinal Drives of the Id are forced to seek the narcissistism and self protection of Thanatos. I would like you to stop and reflect upon the dangers and consequences of building a society based upon fear and the dominance of Thanatos, and to use this prism as a means to assess the health of our civilisational culture. Think of Hollywood and its presentation of American high school cultures, American cities and genres such as war movies and look at the messaging using Eros and Thanatos and see what conclusions you come to about the determining nature of this for the health of our society and civilisation. What does this mean for our social cohesion? Now are you surprised that narcissism is such a problem in our societies?
Now look at Gen Z and their opponents, with whom do you see a prevalence of Eros or Thanatos? In which groups do you see clearly that Eros dominates and with whom does Thanatos dominate?
What is interesting is that the Anti Vietnam War protests and the Hippy movement of the 1960’s was also dominated by Eros and in this way of thinking the entire movement accused of ‘Woke’ politics, seeks to correct the unhealthy dominance of Thanatos in our civilisational discourse.
Now our politicians and the integral state are happy with the dominance of Thanatos as the driver of the Gaza Genocide and our politics. It leaves us programmable, fearful and socially stunted. It affects the temper of all of our relationships. It leaves us all less safe, with an emotional substrate of terror which can be regularly invoked to predictably engineer consent.
"I'll tell you what's walking Salem—vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!" - John Proctor
The Crucible, Arthur Miller
No but it isn’t the crazy children jangling the keys of the kingdom that are the problem. Gen Z is not the problem. It’s the lawmakers writing the laws with vengeance, complicit in a genocide and using violent brutal policing and violent racist Pro-Zionist groups and TikTok bans to batter Gen Z into submission. They’ve been quietly jangling the keys to the asylum, hic .. I meant the kingdom, and now we’ve let ourselves out and they are throwing a tantrum. Gen Z with your beautiful Eros, sense of justice and compassion we love you! Ceasefire Now! And we saw this Eros before with Palestinians in Palestine and I’d like you to take some time to examine what dominates the Israeli discourse.
Ah and lest we forget. It was the retail banks drunk on their mortgage markets, who sold mortgages to Black American and Latino customers, systematically excluded from the mortgage market, at rates of interest they knew they could not afford that caused the collapse of the sub-prime debt trading market, which brought the international financial system to the brink of collapse under Obama. You see Thanatos keeps giving its bloody minded gifts.
Please leave your Thanatos at the Gates!
Bibliography:
Manjapra, K. (2022) Black Ghost of Empire.
Plato. (2007). The Republic (Trans. H.D.P. Lee, Trans.). Penguin Classics.
Churchill, W. and VanderWall, J. (1990) The COINTELPRO papers: documents from the FBI’s secret wars against domestic dissent. Boston, Mass: South End Press.
Freud, S. (2010) Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex (Trans. A.A. Brill, Trans.) Lits.
Freud, S. (1995) New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Trans. J. Strachey, Trans.) W. W. Norton & Company
Freud, S. (2019) Collected Works (Trans. A.A. Brill, Trans.) Pacific Publishing Studio
Miller, A. (2015) The crucible: a play in four acts. London: Penguin Books.
Spodak, A.V. (2021). More than 50 years before George Floyd’s death, lawmakers predicted a growing racial divide. [online] CNN. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/25/us/kerner-commission-report-predicted-racial-divide/index.html [Accessed 4 May 2024].
Gross, T. (2017). A ‘Forgotten History’ Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America. [online] NPR. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america.
Rothstein, R. (2017). The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Very impressed with the psychoanalysis in relation to the current situation. In particular, thanatos as a death drive is manifested by Israel today. It has been suggested that Zionism will implode and this violent phase of its existence is hastening its inevitable collapse. This is also true using freud's nomenclature as thanatos is self destructive as you mentioned. You've presented a great commentary of what's happening.