Hitler – GV Loewen

Let us not Praise Famous Men

Let us not Praise Famous Men (a celibate celebrity?)

The composer William Schuman, before his death, was asked in interview whether or not he would have preferred to be more famous than he was, given his munificent talent and accomplishments, known more fully only within cultured circles. His response remains instructive: ‘Given the many factors and their quality that go into the construction of fame in our time, I would not have preferred that.’ He later suggests that these factors distract from one’s work, appeal to the baser emotions, and exist as well as temptations to the artist to lend to his intent an outside influence which takes away from the work itself. This rejection of fame can be seen as a secularized version of that Augustinian, the first detailed statement we possess about both temptation and the perils of persona over against personhood. Sirach’s ecclesiastical text, from which the phrase, itself famous, originally comes, speaks to us through much of the Gospels, providing not merely a sense that some of Hebrew ethics are ported quite bodily into the nascent Christian outlook but as well, that, barring any overzealous sense of messianic property, prodigality, and perhaps yet propriety, from the period between c. 170 BCE and c. 80 CE, a quarter of a millennium which seems so telescoped from our vantage point as to be a single moment as well as a singular one, the popularity and use of Sirach was such that Jesus’ sensibilities could only be translated by way of these older and more established rhetorical remarks.

However this may be, it is clear that the many moments, especially in Matthew, wherein Jesus is quoted as expressing almost exact advice and counsel as does Sirach, tells us of a consistency in the Hebrew outlook under Roman rule. It is the view of a people conquered and striving to make the best community possible in harsh times. Agee and Walker’s Roosevelt-era document bearing the same title tells indeed the same story; of the courage and even nobility of the most marginal persons in Depression America, working to make as generous a community as possible under severe hardship. In a word, such persons are to be celebrated not because of their fame, which none in life possess, but rather are to be recalled and exalted because of their lot and their response to it; Sirach can be thus seen as the original hagiographic accounting. It is an unfortunate coincidence that the Hitler Youth leader and sometimes poet had a similar name as the Hebrew ecclesiast, but for Balder von Schirach, fame was something with which one got drunk. He reminds us, also in interview, that ‘Hitler’s genius made him a man without measure’, but does add that this can cut both ways, as it were. Fame accrued during a life of missionizing – on the side of the marginal themselves, Jesus, on the side of the margin itself, Hitler – makes it more difficult to distinguish its ‘use and abuse’, if you will. For the ability to convince others of one’s mission is of the utmost to its continuation.

Jesus was executed on a personal vendetta, Schirach served a full twenty-year sentence handed down at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity, of which he maintained until his death he had no knowledge. One wonders at the fate of the famous, but not at the destiny of fame itself. Our entire relationship to the former is disingenuous in the extreme. We vault this or that person into a persona and hope to see them topple from their aerie perch. Celebrity in our society is a function of ressentiment alone. We love the idea of fame whilst hating those who have it. As long as they do remain persona, we provide for them our modernist worship; adulation, fandom, wealth and other privileges of both exclusivity and even outright exclusion. But when their actual humanity shows them to be as we are, then the pressing question collapses the card-castle; why them and not us? ‘How is it that I am not rich and famous’?, is an extrapolation of the less outlandish but still resentment-fueled ‘what does she see in him?’ type of query. In it, there is a promotion not so much of self-doubt, that which our very existence can authentically challenge us and indeed needs do so, but rather a self-denigration, which can only add to our resentment. What transmutes mere resentment into malicious existential envy is just this conundrum; what is it about me that is of less merit than her?

It thus very much matters how a culture defines merit. For the ancient Hebrews, insofar as we can judge through their writings, the meritorious is a combination of pious and ritualistic adherence to taboos and mores, and a willingness to speak of ideals otherwise in their face. For the Reich, ritual too is certainly present, but in this ‘new religion’ that Hitler, at a dinner with English aristocracy of all things, announced he would create, and more or less to himself seated at a long table overburdened with silver and glass, it is rather the expression of cultural will itself that is the most noble thing. It remains a stunning logistical and economic accomplishment that, in spite of the overwhelming demands made of Germany under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, in a scant few years the nation transmuted itself from the very margins to the very center. The Reich is, historically speaking, writ large the personal transfiguration of the converted Jew. This ‘new religion’, godless and yet just as mythical as any antique belief, in its extermination of European ‘Jewry’, found for itself the ultimate conversion experience. And its model had been present specifically in German Romanticism; the overcoming of the person, the death of the self by its self-transcendence through art.

The Reich’s non-rational ideal was to create a society based solely upon art. Those whose livelihood was gained by attaching themselves, like parasites, to either art itself or the life of the artist – presumably, artists of Jewish descent were deliberate frauds, mocking the superior works with their doggerel dogma, hence the preponderance of their works displayed as ‘Entarteite Kunst’; though it is important to recall that a number of ‘Aryan’ artists’ works, notably those of Otto Dix for instance, were also included in these ‘showings’ – were to be removed, not only from the discourse but also from society as a whole. Such is fame, one might say at this juncture, for its fickle flame is fanned now here now there, by this one and then by that, one work adored and the next disdained – Richard Strauss, himself the Reich’s Arts Director for some years before he resigned due to his support for Jewish artists, knew these ups and downs of celebrity very well – that Schuman must be understood as being quite correct in his estimation thereof. And just as no God survives an absence of belief in Him, so no celebrity is left standing who, through her own shared humanity, exhibits in any way the mortal coils of an equally human life.

The radical conception of a God on earth is the origin of celebrity. Jesus himself shunned it, which was presumably part of the whole point of working as the neighbor figure alone, even within the confines of ‘embodiment’, but since then we have bodily embraced it. Mass media is ever on the look-out for the next messiah, whether it be in politics, popular music, sport, or self-help, amongst others. Those whose mission stands the test, not of time, but rather of taste, endure as part of a pop-culture pantheon, to be repeated, with self-serving irony, in the afterlife. We regularly hear musicians and critics extoll ‘heaven’s band’, which by now would have to be the ultimate super-group. The unutterable nonsense of celebrity must needs extend itself into what has been ‘shown to us as a mystery’ only; even the apparent dotards of antiquity understood that much. That we continue to praise the persona framed round an otherwise human life and ignore the person within such frames only speaks to the loss of Godhead historically, and the corresponding loss of community socially. Coupled with the desperation exhibited in cursing an immortal conception with a merely human life, fame does a double disservice to both forms of being; it at once commits God to an ill-fitting grave while destining Humanity to resent its own existence.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, religion, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Fiddler on the Hot Tin Roof

Fiddler on the Hot Tin Roof (The Media Minstrels)

The fact that persons of Jewish descent dominate the culture-producing industries, both high and low, is the result of historical happenstance alone. Any other inference is not merely Anti-Semitic, it is suggestive of the very ressentiment that is once again building its political franchise. This ‘undergrowth’, as the narrator to the mostly excellent documentary The Architecture of Doom refers to it in its closing moments, is no longer simply underfoot, to the side, or creeping along unseen beneath a cultured canopy. That Jesus was himself Jewish, or at the least, was perceived as such whatever his paternal pedigree, should not have provided the Anti-Semite with an apical ancestor. But Jewish colleagues have told me that they still overhear, or are even told to their faces, that ‘The Jews killed Jesus’ and so on. Doubtless a personal retribution on the part of a few well-placed priests, the crucifixion hangs itself up on another kind of cross; one that is political through and through. The sandal has been on the other foot ever since. For ideally, being well-placed in a culture means having culture in the first place.

Due to European property laws, as Marx and Engels pointed out in On the Jewish Question, the diaspora was funneled into service sector trades, including all those associated with accoutrement and requiring consistent and trans-national trade networks, such as jewelry, precious metals, and financing. It should be recalled that the first significant loan in history occurred when the Black Prince borrowed heavily in order to back a war, with the agreement that this debt would be repaid with interest. Needless to say, it was not. What were a group of Italian Jews with not even a militia in their employ going to do about it? By the nineteenth century, people of Jewish descent had become the leading indicators of a globalizing culture that would move from Mendelssohn to Mahler and from Marx to Freud. But at the very moment that ‘the Jews’ seemed to populate the corridors of culture, since, once again, they were barred from politics – mimicking the earlier division of labor between landed luxury and mere luxury items – there arose against this presence, both artistic and intellectual which appeared from above, a vicious counterpoint from below.

In the Reich’s propaganda, the culture critic is singled out. This was easiest road, the lane of least resistance, for the critic produces in the criticized nothing other than a resentment. Shaw expressed it most famously, and most concisely, showing the critic to be nothing more than a eunuch beside the lovers’ bed. Akin to those who teach, those who can’t do, criticize. Indeed, I have encountered such criticism, resentful in itself, and have found myself saying, ‘write your own book, my friend,’ knowing full well that they were incapable of even that. The priests in the temple, driven from it by some neo-Hebrew and seemingly self-appointed messiah, are the truer apex of this jilted genealogy. Certainly, they got their revenge, but just as certainly, the history of Anti-Semitism, in its Euro-American context at least, begins there. And thus, and thence it is the culture critic who is the one who ‘passes his arrogant judgments’, and represents a wider ethnic group or ‘race’ who is devoid of ‘the very organ of culture’. Yet this could be said, and was said, of anyone who was a critic, Jew or non-Jew alike. The Reich focused nothing more, and nothing other, than an already present resentment, lensing it into an authentic ressentiment. Ironically, it was the artist who was first to heed this new politics, the intrusion of which into his absolutely apolitical, or even anti-political, realm, supposedly transcendent of anything petty at all, was uncommonly resented and rejected heretofore.

The artist and the intellectual, the scientist and the lawyer, and above all others, so to speak, the physician, flocked to the NSDAP. Doctors as a profession boasted the highest party-member rates, partly due to the new regime’s promotion of eugenics, but also due to the clear-cutting of all Jewish medical professionals. The fact that many prominent members of the culture-producing sectors were of Jewish descent was simply an outcome of their heritage being prevented from pursuing other vocations was somehow lost. Of course, if any specific social group is targeted as being fit only for this or that, they will, over time, excel at it. They will, over time, develop networks internal which favor their in-group participation in a more longitudinal manner. The Nazis were adept at rewriting Germanic history into myth, but Hitler himself had more personal reasons for doing the same with his own biography. Perhaps it was so, that when he took in a performance of Rienzi in 1904, this was the ‘beginning of it all’, but surely it was three years later, with the rejection letter from the Vienna School of Art that set his resentment in motion. How many other art schools were there in Europe at the time? If one was 21^st on the list of the very best, where only the top 20 are invited, one would think one would with some clearance actually get into a number of others. This fact too, was lost.

Even so, it is not entirely fair to say that once those of Jewish descent were purged from cultural production only the mediocre remained. Otto Dix, an anti-Nazi expressionist, is a shining counter-example, one of the great artists of the interwar period and as ‘Aryan’ as they came. And even Hitler himself was a competent limner and a well-studied architect. But his real genius lay in graphic design. To this day, no symbology widens the eyes as does the suite of media bearing the half-twisted swastika; banners, flags, uniforms, standards, letterhead and many others. A whole-souled acolyte of Wagner, whose own anti-Semitism is well-known if potentially equivocal – in its singling out of Jewishness as an instance of the wider problem of ethnicity as a regression, for instance – Hitler became his own impresario. For the German of culture, it was clear that while those who were Jewish had indeed contributed mightily to European dominance, it was equally transparent that Gentiles could carry the torch without their help. Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Bruckner, Goethe, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger; well, yes, we’ve got some game after all.

And thus today? The same fomenting fulminations are afoot as were present in the 1920s, this time in the United States and not so much in Germany. The same resentment building itself into a movement of political ressentiment, the same mistrust of government and its minions, the same disdain and mockery of those who create in the arts, the same ignorance of literature and of philosophy – ‘only God knows the truth of things’, that is, their God – and this reiterative refrain begins in the 1980s. Yet we must ask, and at this very moment, is not the same blithe and sometimes even blatant sense of the blasé evident in how those of Jewish descent who do dominate the modern mass media in all of its lower cultural forms, as well as the now much-less targeted high culture, as well a reprise of the same attitude and self-perception present in the bygone Berlin and Vienna sets? Seinfeld defending Israel at Duke? Convocation from an elite culture-producing space, its design and entire look mindful of nothing other than a smallish party rally, with not the king but rather the court jester presiding, cuts a rather febrile figure to my mind. A mimicry and a mockery at once, such events result in some Lovecraftian hybrid, a ‘thing that should not be’.

Beyond the specific spaces, behind the publisher’s closed doors, within the select circles of Kultur if not the heated tin roof of society itself, the coming victims of Holocaust II await their less chosen fates. And yet this is the happenstance of history repeating itself, without grace and outside of a wider Zeitgeist. People of Jewish descent know, more than any of the rest of us, that there is no Zionist conspiracy. It would then seem prudent if they did not continue to give the impression that there were.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, religion, aesthetics, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

La Crème de la Crematoria

La Crème de la Crematoria (The Shoah must not go on)

“Follies seem these thoughts to others, and to philosophy, in truth, they are so.” Said Rienzi; “but all my life long, omen and type and shadow have linked themselves to action and event: and the atmosphere of other men hath not been mine. Life itself is a riddle, why should riddles amaze us?” (Bulwer Lytton, 1840:364).

In the darker humors of a post-Pythonesque imagination, Malibu Barbie is supplanted by Klaus. One can envisage a MAD-TV sketch, with a Margot Robbie lookalike donning Hugo Boss’s menacing red and black, belting out ‘Under the Double Eagle’ with Ken as they pop-top tour the streets of Lyons. Now Robbie is herself no Nazi, of course, but a good actor should be able to play almost any role. And Mattel’s ubiquitous doll is, after all, ‘very Aryan’, to borrow from Chaplin. She’s a tall lanky blue-eyed blond who epitomizes the ideal whiteness of commercially defined glamor. That the somewhat sartorial film ambushes various clichés which abound in the toy itself is a rather different attempt at a demythology than say, Bruno Ganz’s stellar portrayal of the great dictator in ‘Downfall’. There, we must agree with Ganz’s own assessment, which shocked and dismayed his Jewish friends and colleagues, which can be summed as: ‘I feel I now more truly understand Hitler; I know why he did the things he did, and indeed, my overwhelming reaction to him is one of pity, sympathy and a sense of the tragic.’. But ‘Barbie’ rests its case on popular fiction, and that directed to children to boot. ‘Downfall’ is a dramatization of historical events, as related intimately by Hitler’s personal secretary. It is a memoir writ large, and thus accesses an aspect of the authentically historical. ‘Barbie’ is also a memoir of sorts, but one recessing anything historical into the timeless space of childhood play.

If only Hitler’s own imagination had remained in that same space. If only he had viewed Rienzi at the tender age of fifteen, and shrugged it off as a reasonable allegory of the political confrontation between the people and the elites, discarding any sense that Wagner – or Lytton for that matter – were somehow in the know about what actually occurred during the republican period of the Roman Empire. Instead, he himself relates that ‘this is where it all began’. Much later, he declares, with his usual rhetorical unction, that, ‘our state is that which rests upon the people’s deep sense of the irrational, and thus it is art which must lead society, and to which we must bend our collective will.’ I am both translating and paraphrasing here, but you get the idea. What he meant was, of course, not the ‘irrational’, but rather the non-rational, as in those feelings and beliefs associated with a religion. He was aware that people were moved more by their hearts than their minds, and as well, that those same non-rational hearts suffered in a way that the rational mind cannot. The Reich arose from such misery, and then trebled its misery by projecting it around the globe, where it resonates to this day.

In its propaganda, in its diaries, and in its policies, one encounters the leitmotif of ressentiment above all others. This is the same emotion – malicious existential envy – that is the source of the neo-conservative movement and its evangelical vanguard. This is the emotion which Trump has tapped into and channeled, though he as an individual likely feels little of it. Yes, he has been consistently mocked, by none other than Jewish entertainers for the most part, such as David Letterman. Hitler felt himself to be cheated out of a position at the Vienna school of art by the majority Jewish entrance committee, and the fact that the painter Oskar Kokoschka was the 20^th and final successful applicant of 1908 and Hitler came in 21^st could not have helped. Kokoschka much later suggested in interview that if their positions had been reversed, ‘he would have gone on to become a mediocre painter and I a benign dictator.’ Perhaps not quite benign, as he once created a life-size BDSM doll of Alma Mahler after she had dumped him. But my point is simply this: ressentiment is widespread in any society that markets heavily unattainable ideals, and then also appears to limit certain people’s access to the very resources that would foster gaining such ideals. The phenomenologist Max Scheler is owed the greatest debt in analyzing this dangerous condition, first understood more fully by Nietzsche. The neo-conservatives are those who, in general, have been marginalized by modernity and by modernism, and have, since about 1980, reacted to this growing erosion of their beliefs and individual rights by adopting a chopped-down version of personhood set into a mockery of Christian ethics. In this simplistic sensibility, they have attained a strength of numbers which is politically formidable. If all of the nuances of both Burkean conservatism and authentic Christianity had been maintained, such numbers and their apparent agreement would not have been possible.

What this means for the rest of us is that we must make a choice between a regression into the same kind of social motion that animated the NSDAP and got them elected, and the usual gang of idiots, to make a second nod to MAD, who populate the corridors of power in so-called liberal democracies. These latter may be incompetent and irresponsible but they are not generally dangerous, so the choice seems clear enough. All the while, those who are most at risk, arguably people of Jewish descent and Black Americans, must together continue their uneasy partnership purveying low-culture (over the) counter-propaganda. If there is even a hint that the entertainment industry has an ethnic-enclave gatekeeping mechanism about it, then it is surely one of utter desperation, even outright fear. The Goyim must be kept distracted, made to laugh, to swoon, to sentimentalize their otherwise barbaric and cruel passions, and in spite of a Black leader’s epithet regarding New York and the case of Bernhard Goetz, amongst many other tensions, these two social groups, through sports and fiction, feel compelled to continue to concoct what is essentially a minstrel’s dire duet.

It is not a stretch to imagine another Shoah. Hamas and Hezbollah have neither the firepower nor the allies to construct it, but the American neo-conservatives very much do. And for the same reasons that Hitler was enormously popular, seen as a savior, not unlike the recently fetishized Trump, all those who suffer from the ignominy of ressentiment are capable of any act. Scheler makes it clear by distinguishing resentment, which gives way to simple envy, from its more extreme sibling. Resentment tells me I should be like her, have what she has, youth, beauty, admiration, wealth, or what-have-you. But ressentiment tells me that I should be her, which implies that she herself should be dead and I have replaced her with myself. In all those breasts which have been sidelined by science, by art, by education, and by the economy, malicious existential envy rages, and rages on. And it is the arrogance of cultural – though not necessarily actually cultured – elites which performs the final straw on such a social stage. A common plaintiff of Goebbels’s films is that ‘the Jews’ have ‘passed their arrogant judgments’ upon art and life alike. Art history itself is not at issue. Even the long-suffering Red Army shrugged it off, sending some 200 Hitler Youth fighters back home to their surviving parents and their leader, a professor of art history, back to his academic position, after their ludicrous attempt at defending the Olympic stadium in Berlin. But the neo-conservatives, unlike the Nazis, have interest in neither art nor culture. Imagine then, in a yet darker humor, a sheer simple madness this time and not the great Al Jaffee’s crew, a Reich in which there is no art, no culture, and no thought. For after all, no less than Heidegger himself, arguably the world’s greatest living thinker, was invited to become state philosopher, a posting he toyed with for several months before wisely turning it down. Richard Strauss, one of the world’s two greatest living composers, became the Reich’s arts director. For all of their ressentiment, the Nazis still knew who was good.

Not so this reprise movement. There is not the faintest sign or signage that culture of any sort is present in its minions. Michelangelo’s ‘David’ is naked, my blushes. Judy Blume talks teen sex, how disgusting. And uh, no Margaret, I’m actually dead, remember? Quit your bitching and leave me in peace. Give me the Nazis any day of the year, one is tempted to say. They not only celebrated the naked form – well, if you looked like Margot Robbie at least – they avidly listened to Bruckner. They disdained swing music, as do I. Of course, their ‘taste’ in such things was incorrectly sourced in the idea of authorship. The big bands were often helmed by Jewish musicians, and after all, Mahler himself was born a Jew. Speaking of Gustav this time and not his wife, Mahler gave the Nazis conniptions, with many listening to him discreetly, since they loved his art but publicly had to hate his person. And while I wouldn’t have turned the Tchaikovsky Museum into a motorcycle repair shop, as the SS did whilst temporarily in the neighborhood, I do think Bruckner is the superior composer, as did they. It is sage to recall Putin’s recent comment about there being ‘no gays in Russia’. Maybe not now, but then there was Peter Ilyich. To extend our satire, the SS may have been taken aback to know that Tchaikovsky might well have admired men on motorbikes.

All of this would be anathema to the neo-cons, and thus none, including any sense of humor, would be present in the Fourth Reich. Let’s not fool ourselves into hoping that such desires shall pass, and without a fight. Ressentiment is present in all of us. Our hearts feel its minor fuel each time we are denied something we had been promised, that we knew we had earned, that we are owed by another, by a social institution, by government, or perhaps even by life itself. And though it may be true that ‘deserves got nothing to do with it’, our basic will to that very life can conflate chance and destiny, belief and opinion, even fact and fiction. When it does, go look in the mirror and tell yourself that you would never, ever, be a death camp guard.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 58 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Dreams of the Perpetrators

The Dreams of the Perpetrators (A deathless Arcadia in Ego)

“We do not know the dreams of the enthusiasts, the victors…” Koselleck intones in his Holocaust study ‘Terror and Dream’. And we are immediately reminded of the deepest of connections; that all humans, no matter their worldly merits or deficits, sleep and dream, as Whitman declaimed. The content of such dreams must differ, pending the dreamer, we might assuage ourselves. But it is not so much the character which is at stake but rather the conditions in which I might find myself, now sleeping peacefully, now fitfully, now lethargic and thence insomniacal. “…they dreamed as well, but hardly anyone knows how the content of their dreams related to the visions of those that were crushed by the temporary victors.” Koselleck finishes. If the murderer sleeps and dreams as well as does his victim, what then characterizes the difference which we feel must be present?

In the dreamscape, I am not free to master the otherhood of the self. How often have I seen the looks of reproach, even revulsion, on the faces of the young women I encounter in this dream or that. As often those willing, lustful, playful. Why does the lover turn to the one who hates? Mostly, we do not ask such questions, preferring to dwell on the ‘how’ of it all, which in such cases might be able to be explicated by an advanced neuroscience. And what drives the compunction of my dreaming self, along with its compulsions, so that dreaming content is so often conflicted, even if the act of dreaming and its attendant Traumdeutung occur precisely so I can ‘process’ the real-time conflicts of the day to day? I once hauled a girl in full Blytonesque school kit into a specific room to beat her. I equally foreswore having sex with a young woman who, after we kissed somewhat diffidently, told me she ‘could not do this’. I ‘decided’ to assault another in an office but her look of absolute disgust stopped me cold. I was myself accosted by many, but since I am male, I took it in my supposedly so-masculine stride and allowed ‘nature’ to take its burlesque course. All these were but dreams, at once the playing out of suppressed desires, so we are told, but at the same time, themselves hermeneutic commentaries on those same desires. And why are there scenes which we know so well that are never replicated in the dreamscape? I have never been a death camp guard, that I recall. I have never been the pope. I have only once or twice been emplaced as another gender. I seem to be stuck on myself, in myself.

It is commonplace to acknowledge a kind of gatekeeping mechanism between one’s desires and one’s sociality. This ‘superego’ style of boundary maintenance keeps the extremities of the ‘id’ from becoming too real in the world of both the ego and its fellows. Koselleck notes that “It is a characteristic common to all camp dreams that the actual terror could no longer be dreamed. Phantasy of horror was here surpassed by actuality.” When indeed the extremes of human intent turn to action in the world, as they do all too often, it appears, we no longer have the ability to separate the unreal from reality. The very unreality of human horror is suggestive that those who perpetrate it have themselves lost the means of dreaming it. What can no longer be processed by the unconscious aspect of my mind breaks forth into the open space of other minds. Is it a mere case of bad manners, wherein we can no longer keep our hands to ourselves, as it were? A case of being a child in an adult’s body, having a childish mind but the capabilities and resources of a mature being? Certainly, cognitively disabled persons who are violent manifest this kind of admixture, attacking their caregivers with willing wantonness and yet somehow also knowing that they are, for whatever rationale, exempt from any serious consequence, unlike the rest of us. There are, however, darker disabilities than those which prevent maturational growth. Such a list would include the lack of compassion, absence of empathy, ignorance of otherness, and the like, which we observe as being regularly present in much politics of our time. There seem to be few enough public figures who do not express such disabilities, at least in their rhetoric. Anyone who stakes their own claim to existence through annulling the other’s equal claim seems the willing vehicle for a desire so vain as to be bereft of self-recognition. There is a certain solipsism in political life which strides bodily over the claims of others to exist at all.

Are these then some of the monstrous forms that the ‘dream of reason’ has produced for us moderns? Have we been regressed to the inferior forms of pre-modernity, recreating a world in which the other is automatically an enemy, and at best, a passingly dormant threat? Is youth the assassin of adulthood, or is it the other way round? In my vain desire to be ever youthful, my dreams speak to me not so much of desire alone, but of slaying the process of aging before it can itself do me in. I no longer want to possess the young female; I want to be her. To live again from the point of optimal departure, to have not a care for health and fitness, to be the envy of all who are called to witness my outward beauty, to have the market pander to my every whim. Surely there is a link between the industry-contrived charisma of a Taylor Swift and the very much self-constructed charisma of an Adolf Hitler. Practicing endlessly in front of the mirror, the latter, cast into an autonomic obloquy by his social anxiety, could not rely on himself to stand and deliver in any spontaneous manner. This contraption, so calculated yet never cool with itself, unlike Swift’s, is mimicked in the death camps. The rationalized precision of mass murder makes the desireful sprees of splayed-open recent nightmares look amateurish. The terrorist of today can only ever dream of being the Fourth Reich. As well the politician?

Yet the chief character of human reason is that it does not dream. Reason is the tool of the waking mind alone, conscious of itself without becoming self-conscious. This may be a key: that we are capable of compassion only in forgetting the self. When we proffer our desires unto others with the expectancy they will comply, we are lost. The parent who demands obedient children is the living archetype of this fascist fantasy. The lawmaker who expresses only his own druthers is their child, along with the barking coach, the banal teacher, the masturbating school administrator, the self-serving civil servant, the insolent official. Even the best of reason, held within its mortal coil, does not necessarily escape its own monsters. Aristotle’s exclusion of the female, his xenophobic hatred of barbarians, Russell’s disdain of women, Foucault’s reckless abandon. And then what of my own dreams? We know that violent sexual imagery, a leitmotif of Wagnerian proportions in the libidinal world, is so commonplace within the dreamscape as to not excite comment. Yes, analytically, perhaps. The psychoanalyst’s guild, a new priesthood born at the height of modernity but actually practicing a postmodern art, one which we have of late suppressed, perhaps inevitably but certainly ironically, allots our confessional and thence allows our confession. If unreason is demonic, then reason has become the new religion, its ‘spirit’, if you will, the ghost in our shared mechanization; what we might have called ‘conscience’ if it weren’t for our collective disenchantment.

Mostly, we are jaded with ourselves. How can it be that my mere dreams are more exciting, and assuredly also more immoral, than my waking life? Would I trade the one for the other? It has been done before: “The compulsion to de-realize oneself in order to become paralyzed at the final stage of existence led also to an inversion of temporal experience. Past, present, and future cased to be a framework for orienting behavior.” Koselleck is aware that both memory and anticipation, dual phenomenological forces that act as a bulwark against absolute desire, have no place in the camp, just as dreams are themselves taken outside of human and historical time, instituting their own vapid irreality in its stead. Oddly, there are living spaces which seek to mimic such primordial experiences, including the casino and the church service, the vacation and the spectacle. It is as if we remain possessed, not by the collective unconscious and its memory of the visionary, the creation of all things and their destruction as well, but rather the pressing absence of vision in our current and very much conscious condition. Is it also then the case, that along with compassion, we must bid final farewell to futurity itself?

In dreaming desire, there are no real consequences. In order to make such fantasies real, we must disarm and thence dismiss no less than history along with biography. The perpetrators dream awake. This is how they can commit the impassioned acts of horror upon the others who now appear to them as mere projections, in their way or submissive, it matters not. It is not a case of decorum managing desire, or even compassion trumping the passions. It is rather that the vision of primordial Man has been reconstructed, and at cost, in the picayune and rationalized manner which modernity requires of it. No less costly than the first murder, the most recent one is yet less authentic since it is so seldom necessary. I am no longer an endangered species. In my fullest presence, I have become the one who endangers, and mine ownmost death can only be owned in life by the killing of others. This is the unreasoned monstrosity of a faux-phenomenological phantasy: that there are no unwilling victims, that I no longer dream alone.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 57 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.