Going Postal

 

Going Postal

Peter Schultz

 

                  The following is from the book, Going Postal, from its chapter entitled “The Banality of Slavery.” The book ‘s author is Mark Ames, and the book is well worth a read.

 

                  “…why is it that in the roughly twenty years of Soviet gulags we know of only one serious uprising … in spite of the millions who perished? Why did so many Russians ‘willingly’ go the camps and ‘let themselves’ be brutalized without a fight? Varlan Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales is perhaps the greatest, most wrenching account of how men adapt to the most degrading conditions. It describes how they adjust to the new ‘normal’ life as brutalized slaves, how the word ‘normal’ has no fixed meaning, and how every one of us is hard wired to be a slave, given the right conditions. It is not something we want to think about too much, which is why Solzhenitsyn’s version of the gulags, with its focus on evil Communist oppressors and the few heroes who resisted, is infinitely more popular in America than Shalamov’s version, which avoids facile divisions between good guys and bad guys, heroes and oppressors, and digs into our inner slave.

 

                  “We don’t hear much about this inner slave … though it is far more common, and manifests itself far more regularly, than the allegedly dangerous ‘heart of darkness’ of which are warned. The slave psychology is too familiar. It appears in the most banal settings: in the workplace, in relationships, at home or at school. Alternatively, the primitive aspect is fantastic, alien, and exciting. While Joseph Conrad is to be applauded … his Heart of Darkness pitch, compared to Shalamov, is an exotic getaway vacation designed to make the reader feel a more profound sense of self. No one wants to travel up the other African river, the one that reveals man’s heart of submissiveness.” [p. 34]

 

                  It strikes me that Ames’s argument might help illuminate Aristotle’s concept of “regime,” whereby he argued that all political orders, democratic, polity, oligarchic, aristocratic, monarchic, and tyrannic, are regimes or “ways of life.” That is, that political life is composed of regimes as ways of life points to man’s “inner slave” or his submissiveness. In other words, the regime indicates that when Aristotle argued that humans are political animals, he meant that humanity’s default setting, so to speak, is submissiveness. And it also illuminates why Aristotle argued the slavery is a permanent feature of political life and why it is almost never true that the good citizen is also a good person.  At the very least, this is something worth thinking about.

Beware the Best and the Brightest

 

Beware the Best and the Brightest

Peter Schultz

 

                  “Affirming the political” is the way of making one’s narcissism socially acceptable or legitimate. Affirming the political cloaks narcissism, the conviction of superiority, as a political choice, as the best political choice. Hence, to acknowledge that your politics, your political choices aren’t choice worthy or are failures means acknowledging your “superiority” is unreal, means acknowledging your inferiority, as it were. As a result, those convinced of their superiority, those convinced that they are elite refuse to acknowledge that their political choices are failures and refuse to abandon them.

 

                  They are in fact trapped, as if in a vicious circle with no way out. To preserve their “credibility,” their legitimacy, their power and positions, they must “go forward,” e.g., by doubling down on their chosen but failing policies. If bombing isn’t working, then increase its level. If violence isn’t working, then increase the violence. For only in that way can elites maintain their power and positions, their “superiority.” Hence, failure must be denied and disguised, covered up. Failure may even be unthinkable; it is definitely unacceptable.

Understanding America's Politics of Failure

 

Understanding America’s Politics of Failure

Peter Schultz

 

                  The following is from David Halberstam’s book, The Best and the Brightest, his account of America’s failure in Vietnam.

 

                  “[McGeorge Bundy] was a man with a great instinct for power, and he loved it, he responded to where power was moving, trying at the same time to get people to do intelligent, restrained things in an intelligent, restrained manner.

 

                  “Besides, the idea and the meaning of failure to him and many of the men around him was an almost alien thing. He was so confident in himself, in his tradition and what he represented, that he had no concept about what failure might really mean, the full extent of it. It never entered the calculations. He and others had, in fact, achieved success; they had won awards, climbed in business and academe, each position had brought them higher. They had of course paid the price along the way. Fragmentation had again and again confronted morality, and morality had from time to time been sliced, but it had always been for the greater good of the career. It was the American way, ever upward; success justified the price, longer and longer hours invested, the long day became a badge of honor, and the long day brought the greater title. Success was worth it, and after all, success in the American way was to do well. But the price was ultimately quite terrible. Washington was a company town in the company country where success mattered, and in the end they could not give up those positions and those titles, not for anything. These were the only things they had left that set them apart; they had no other values, no other identity than their success and their titles. The new American modern man was no longer a whole man; it was John McNaughton able to argue against his interior beliefs on Vietnam in order to hold power, McNamara able to escalate in Vietnam knowing that he was holding the JCS back on nuclear weapons, men able to excise Vietnam from their moral framework. So they could not resign; no one decision, not even a war, could make them give up their positions.” [526]

 

                  Or as I will put it: Their positions and titles offered them social approval for their narcissism and so, of course, they could not, they would not give them up even in the face of abysmal failures. Without their positions and their titles, their lives would be meaningless. And, so, they, the best and the brightest, were trapped in their failures.