TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Aphorisms 1-11: Social Dictatorship
2. Aphorisms 12-24: State Power
3. Aphorisms 25-38: Guilt and Exculpation
4. Aphorisms 39-52: Confusion and Control
5. Aphorisms 53-61: The Myth of Order
This is the fifth installment in the series.
The Myth of Order
53. Appearance of eternity. The State must appear as the natural order of things. It must appear as if it had been there from all eternity and is unchanging. Or else, it must appear as the ultimate victory of the natural order of things over the antediluvian forces of chaos. Every mythology starts with a state of chaos and void for this reason: it is the metaphysical foundation of State power. This is why the State insists on “Law and Order.” Those are the symbols of its power, its reach, its Will-to-Dominate, but above all its birthright as a Force for Good. To appear as a necessity flowing from original chaos and the void—the awful and horrific State of Nature—is a necessary tool of the State. It is a rhetorical device required to stamp out all dissenting voices, opposed opinions, proposals to think about alternative world-schemes. The State’s appearing as inevitable and a necessity—the cosmogony of the State—can be accomplished in two different ways: (i) either the State claims a distant, historical origin or significant event as moment of conception, emergence, and triumph (for instance, the founding of Rome, or the American Revolution), or (ii) it presents itself as the outcome of a deterministic historical process that necessarily leads to its conception, emergence, and triumph. The first cosmogony is an inbuilt feature of the USA; the second of Nazi Germany and the USSR.
54. Shirking of responsibility. The tactic of representing the State as a metaphysical or historical necessity removes all responsibility of rationally and morally justifying it, from those who are actually running the State. If they engage in ethnic cleansing, blackmail, torture, occupation, or other profoundly immoral policies, they simply claim that they have a privileged insight into the process of historical necessity; or they claim that they are performing “painful [i.e., for others, not for the leaders], but unfortunately necessary” actions in order to guarantee the continuation of the State. In both cases, they claim that they are simply instruments or servants of the mythical “People”. As such, they bear no moral responsibility for their actions; or at best, they bear a merely political responsibility, as functionaries of the State, which is sharply divorced from any moral responsibility.
55. Accountability. A society that does not hold its politicians morally accountable for their actions plays with fire, to say the least. It amounts to handing the power to decide over life and death, to an essentially irresponsible, arbitrarily-acting person. Routinely, political systems attempt to avoid or evade any moral accountability. This can be done by setting up lengthy procedures of investigations, with decades-long commissions staffed by other politicians, and by conducting all investigations behind closed doors; by editing, redacting, and fully re-phrasing the proceedings in reports that are thousands of pages long, that no one can ever read; and by conducting formal hearings in which the person being questioned actually does not have to answer any relevant questions at all.
56. Class consciousness–again. This is, simultaneously, Marx’s most original and yet most derivative idea. Anyone has class consciousness, whenever you identify your own interests with those of a certain social group as a whole: there is no need for a Marxist analysis of whatever kind there. When you’re not rich, you know it. When you’re rich, you know it. But the diagnosis that this consciousness could be the basis of social organization is not new either. Mobs throughout history have known it. What is original, is that Marx realized that society is fundamentally organized along the fault lines formed by economic classes. This in turn, led to class resentment as the driving force beneath much Marxist thought: we are oppressed, and they are the oppressors, so let’s get rid of them. But this is simplistic. It is a reverse image of what Marx himself actually professed. In modern states, class consciousness is the realization that the individual has identified their own interest with group-interests as a whole. In and of itself, this is not the same as being actively oppressed, but rather simply giving up attempting to control important events in one’s life. One might even enjoy comparably many freedoms—shall I buy this product or that product?—while State-backed corporate capitalist power makes all the fundamental decisions about one’s life.
57. Formal freedom and slow violence. Marx’s idea about “real” and “formal” freedoms is much more useful than his ideas about class consciousness. If the State provides (!) mere formal freedoms, then real freedom has already left the building. There is no difference in kind between the slow violence of a multinational oil corporation contaminating the waters of a river delta, thereby gradually harming an entire population, and the slow violence of the State that erodes real freedom until all that is left is a meaningless set of routines without any real choice. In both cases, the violence is done over time, and as such, it can continue unnoticed for a very long time. But that doesn’t make it less violent.
58. Conspiracy theories. No conspiracy theories are necessary to show this. Indeed, the very idea of a conspiracy theory itself is already weaponized, just as in the USSR dissidents were routinely diagnosed as “mentally unstable.” Now we say: they have “mental health issues.” States use algorithms to discuss and predict behavior, and act accordingly; they make decisions behind closed doors, and they communicate only a few of them, often after the fact; they conduct hearings and meetings outside the public eye; they can unilaterally change rules; they can declare and withdraw martial law or the state of exception at will; they determine whether an individual is a threat to State security, which is always defined in the broadest possible terms; they can conduct private meetings with industry to “ensure the availability of well-paying jobs.” But all these State-actions are well beyond the mandate that is given democratically to them. Even if the State seems to play by the rules (i.e., its own, formalized rules), the consequences of its actions can still violate those rules – if not in letter, then in spirit. But no one seems interested in that. Everything was conducted, after all, “by the book.”
59. Appearances of fairness and the metaphysical order. Show trials of Enemies of the People are necessary, because they protect all who are engaged in the maintenance of corrupt political systems. The appearance of fairness must be held up. This is, on one hand, a purely instrumental decision, designed to show “the masses” that the mythical checks-and-balances of democracy are really functioning, so as to prevent uprisings, protests, and accusations that the State is immoral. On the other hand, we should not be misled by the purely instrumental character of such public spectacles. For there is also a deep metaphysical need to stage and visually consume such spectacles. They must inform the citizens as well as the State itself that the metaphysical world order on which coercive authoritarianism is predicated, is still intact. Any form of coercive authoritarianism rests on a metaphysical picture that is as much philosophical as it is theological. It divides the world into the dualism of a transcendent Coercive Authority and the masses governed by it—for their own protection, of course. There must be an unbridgeable gap between the Coercive Authority and the masses; moreover, rituals must punctuate important moments in the dualistic relationship between the two. The King might toss coins to the masses in a gesture of formalized good will; the High Priest may ritually humiliate the King in order to show the stability and reach of the transcendent Coercive Authority; victory parades must be staged to show the triumph of Good over Evil. In the modern state, spectacles of coercive authoritarian bureaucratic efficiency must be staged; as must spectacles of State violence, explicit or implicit, such as the unleashing of wars, stringent checks to guard against terrorism of all sorts, and elaborate surveillance mechanisms to show that the eyes and ears of the State are everywhere. All these small and big gestures add up to a metaphysical picture that both absolutist, proto-capitalist States and modern fully capitalist States present to their citizens: to show them that the metaphysical world order is now as it ever will be, vigilantly watched over by Those Who Know Best.
60. Necessity as basis of authority. And this entire spectacle is in order to show, yet again, how necessary, permanent, and unchangeable the State really and truly is; it declares that it is here for all eternity, and that we cannot do without it; that even thinking about such alternatives is a futile exercise. It will gleefully point to the mistakes and failures of the past and claim that it is endlessly superior to any conceivable alternative, all the while proving to anyone whose eyes are actually open, that the exact contrary is in fact the case. In other cases, the State will theatrically point towards its current condition, and bemoan the fact that a lack of purity and patriotism has led to the current, dismal state of affairs. This performance provides then sufficient reasons for yet another round of fanaticism. The MAGA movement claimed to restore the “crumbled, degenerated” American empire to its—purely mythical—former glory. It weaponized national identity and patriotism in a display of internal and external aggression. But another version of this same trick can be observed in the emergence of the IS Caliphate in Iraq: those leading the IS militia claimed that their citizens had been “impure,” “sinful,” and, all in all, not pure enough. This excuse was then used for violence, ethnic cleansing and draconian rules, all to restore the Muslim Caliphate, of course. Again, the myth of former purity is invoked to entice entire masses into working harder, becoming more fanatical, and watching their neighbors even more closely. This trick is not new, but it is amplified by means of mass communication. In Cordoba, the walls of the old Jewish synagogue have been partially whitewashed. Its intricate stucco was covered by Christian invaders, who saw in the elaborate patterns something “Oriental” or at least “not-Christian”. As a response, they covered the walls in a plain–pure—whitewash. The new order always claims to restore purity and therewith grandeur and honesty. And without any exceptions, such projects of restoring purity are always accompanied by removing or curtailing freedoms. Freedom itself is always seen as the biggest threat.
61. Society of the Spectacle. Guy Debord took a needlessly narrow view of the very idea of commodities. All spectacles required to cement and support authority and its claims are metaphysical commodities, required by the hungry or otherwise needy masses in order to cover up what they non-conceptually already know: that they are owned by the State and kept in their subservience by the biggest protection racket ever invented. But at the same time, they are anaesthetized and soothed by the slave-owners telling them over and over again that this is not “really” the case, so that they can deceive themselves into believe that and put those nagging and unsettling voices to sleep. The State, in the meantime, is only all-too-happy to serve up its own special brand of opium to the masses. Incense, sermons, national anthems, flags that wave in the breeze, fireside chats, endless empty promises, pomp-&-circumstance galore, big parades, daily press briefings, and regular prime-time TV speeches: these are all nothing but highly effective metaphysical rituals for silencing and suppressing the critical powers of the mind.
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