How Does It Feel To Feel Fascist?

Nothing make us believe more than fear, the certainty of being threatened. When we feel like victims, all our actions and beliefs are legitimized, however questionable they may be. Our opponents, or simply our neighbors, stop sharing common ground with us and become our enemies. We stop being aggressors and become defenders. The envy, greed, or resentment that motivates us becomes sanctified, because we tell ourselves were acting in self-defense. Evil, menace - those are always the preserve of the other. The first step for believing passionately is fear. Fear of losing our identity, our life, our status, or our beliefs. Fear is the gunpowder and hatred is the fuse. Dogma, the final ingredient, is only a lighted match.*

 1. In The Days Before Trump's 2025 Inauguration

- What are you watching? The fire up in the Palisades? Of which Trump has typically and outrageously lied, 'We are watching fires still tragically burn from weeks ago without even a token of defense.' 

- Yes, the fires, and I heard. Do you want to hear something spooky? Before riding my bike here last night I saw, for the second time, a group of children, faces obscured by hoods, sitting cross-legged before a campfire in a Westwood store doorway, the flames shooting up more than a yard.

- Do you think they started the fires?

- Could be. Do you want to hear something else spooky? My usual viewing at this time of night is the wars, in Israel and Ukraine, and Donald Trump. Last night the three interests lined themselves up together at the 24 hour MacDonald's in Century City. Fascist Russia had just sent missiles to destroy the first MacDonald's restaurant in Ukraine, in Kiev, no one hurt, and I saw a young man, foreign accent, possibly French, reading a oversize book with a padded fake leather binding, dozens of pages marked with colored paper tabs, which turned out to be Adolph Hitler's 'Mein Kampf'.

- Interesting. Why was he reading Hitler at Macdonald's?
- He was living on the street and admired what he called genius level intelligence of Hitler that enabled him from going from also living on the street when he was an unappreciated painter to dictator of Germany and close to being of the entire world.
- And Trump? What is the connection?
- He is according to himself a genius too, and a very stable one.
- And a spiritual one: god saved him from assassination, as he claimed today, so he could go on to his destined presidential rule of the United States.
- I told the reader of deluxe-bound literature that destruction is easy and commonplace, that ability to destroy was not a sign of intelligence but lack of intelligence.
- How do you figure that?
- Wishing to destroy is a consequence of organizing in the wrong way the spiritual, the non-material, the infinite.
- What is the wrong way?
- Abraham is order to kill his son, Job has his life ruined himself being without guilt, Cain's sacrifice being rejected by god -- these stories are warnings against self-characterization, otherwise know as vanity. Following rules of action, for example growing grain, raising a family, not aware of self until a time of  recovery in which we see ourselves with powers to repeat the actions we have successfully accomplished. You'll remember in our combinatorials** the vain person in action is unaware of self but aware of the world as it changes, at rest the vain person sees reborn out of an uncertain world of change his own power, not the world. Now what is fascism?
- Wait a second. The spiritual I take it is in the sense of lack of limit both in action, when the self is not seen, and rest, where the world is not seen, and it is possible to tell a story of movement between act and rest.
- Yes.
- And what is fascism?
- A tool used by the rich to convert democracy to dictatorship. Practiced at times even in the ancient Athenian democracy. 
- The strength of the nation is reborn out of weakness of suffering attack by enemies within or without. Take a look at what Anthropic's AI produces when I ask, How does it feel to feel fascist?

1. The intoxicating sense of merger with a powerful collective whole - the experience of transcending individual limitations through fusion with a mythologized national/racial community and its destiny
2. A peculiar combination of victimhood and supremacy - the simultaneous conviction that "we" are both uniquely persecuted and destined for dominance/greatness
3. The ecstatic destruction of complexity - the emotional relief and excitement of reducing a confusing world to simple friend/enemy distinctions and embracing violent "solutions"
4. The eroticization of dominance and submission - finding pleasure in both dominating perceived enemies and submitting to the Leader/movement
5. The "palingenetic" mindset - an obsession with national rebirth/renewal through apocalyptic violence and the destruction of perceived sources of decay

6. The "achievement of degradation" - taking pride in embracing what others would consider shameful or transgressive, making brutality a mark of superior strength

Do you see how all the phases of rebirth are expressed in fascism?

1. Merger with the whole? A resting phase: Completion of ritual of regained strength.
2. The two resting phases described, on at the beginning, the other at the end of the ritual.
3. Simplicity of vain sense of power that in fact is an illusion that the security of one's own ceremonies is identical to the movements of the world entire.
4. Movement phase, entering ritual submitting but ending movement dominant
5. Movement phase, violence allowing forgetting of self weakness and therefore leading to rebirth.
6. Resting phase, readiness to at any time do what it takes to rebuild the nation.

You get the idea.
- Yes.
- Here is Trump, in a speech he gave during the 2025 campaign:

Look, having nuclear - my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, okay, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart - you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, okay, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world - it’s true! - but when you’re a conservative Republican they try - oh, do they do a number - that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune - you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged - but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me - it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right - who would have thought?), but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners - now it used to be three, now it’s four - but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years - but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.

Trump's audience apparently can understand him even in his linguistic decline. How? His isolated phrases find their continuance in the movement of his vanity or in the national vanity of fascism. The broken language has the advantage of giving his supporters, filling in the blanks, a sense of participating in the leadership of the national ritual.
- Mass killing, you said to reader of Hitler's autobiography, is not a sign of intelligence. Why not?
- As we said a minute ago: Simplicity of vain sense of power in fact is an illusion that the security of one's own limited ceremonies is identical to the regular movements of the world entire. Vanity brings blindness to the world and consequent stumbling to a fall.
- Isn't blindness at the beginning as well, of both the individual's vanity and the nation's fascism? The Jews were not really in an international conspiracy to drink the blood of Christian children; and in the bible stories you mentioned we are warned as individuals not be be sure what we are and what we are owed by the world.
- At the beginning of habit of vanity is a recognition that another type of behavior interferes with new vain ritual of recovery.
- And there is nation of people, a danger to the incipient fascist nation?
- The Jews. Because while the fascist acts to remake the world according to rule while blind to self, while self is undefined, the Jew is waiting on the world to reveal itself in revised knowledge while one imitative, false, role playing, disguised self follows another self:

 
In the Bible: Jacob masquerading as his twin, Esau, in order to receive the blessing of his father, Isaac, Tamar disguising herself to entice her father-in-law, Judah; Joseph concealing himself from his brothers; David feigning insanity to gain entry to the Philistine camp.

And historically: there were the Marranos, Jews of the Iberian Peninsula who outwardly converted to Christianity, but who maintained their Judaism in secret.

To the vain and the incipient fascist the Jew is the enemy at the same time most apparent and most difficult to oppose: they aren't what they seem to be in action, and in rest, they see the world, claim to arrive at knowledge while themselves maintaining invisibility. Do you see here how Jews inevitably become linked with conspiracy?
- Now that you mention it. The fascists stumble, their ignorance of the world forcing a return to self-blind violence, where instead the Jew learns, reinterprets, rests in knowledge.

2. Eden Was No Paradise

- Explain that last statement: The fascists stumble, their ignorance of the world forcing a return to self-blind violence, whereas instead the Jew learns, reinterprets, rests in knowledge.

- This is from the Talmud: 

Rabbi Yoḥanan bar Ḥanina says: Daytime is twelve hours long, and the day Adam the first man was created was divided as follows: In the first hour of the day, his dust was gathered. In the second, an undefined figure was fashioned. In the third, his limbs were extended. In the fourth, a soul was cast into him. In the fifth, he stood on his legs. In the sixth, he called the creatures by the names he gave them. In the seventh, Eve was paired with him. In the eighth, they arose to the bed two, and descended four, i.e., Cain and Abel were immediately born. In the ninth, he was commanded not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. In the tenth, he sinned. In the eleventh, he was judged. In the twelfth, he was expelled and left the Garden of Eden, as it is stated: “But man abides not in honor; he is like the beasts that perish” (Psalms 49:13). Adam did not abide, i.e., sleep, in a place of honor for even one night.***

- Our fascist president's trick Make America Great Again is typical backward looking ritual, a story of individual and nation recovering lost greatness after a battle with menacing enemies within and without. No such recoveries are possible to the man described in that Talmud passage. Man doesn't get through an hour in the same form. For him in Eden there is no ideal time of rest to return to. Throughout the six days of creation god speaks, an aspect of the world comes to exist, he sees it is good. He rests in perception of what is there. But what of man? The day on which he is created, the sixth day ends, and the seventh arrives: god gets to rest on the sabbath, but is there anything man has done that he can look back on as good, anything said earned the right to be called true, anything seen of the world received as beautiful? The answer is no. 

- Why no? Having eaten the forbidden fruit hasn't he knowledge of good and evil?

- Self-responsible action is required. In order to know it is necessary to watch what we are doing while looking out for the changing world to fall into a regular pattern.

- The world taking on a form beautiful, true, or good. 

- Yes. For man, according to the Jews, there never was a paradise to return to. If we are to rest, have our own sabbath, we have to gain knowledge.

_____________________

* The Angel's Game, Carlos Ruiz Zafon 

** Noam Chomsky And Mental Things

David Graeber & Combinatorials

*** Sanhedrin 38-39

Jews & Anti-Jews

- If in Nazism the individual is the agent of the group, in Jewish life the group is the agent of the individual. The group is the storehouse of the rules, is the tool the individual uses to remember. But the individual makes his deal directly with god, not with the group. The Holocaust isn't special as a mass killing, mass killing is the characteristic of human beings. But it is special as a model, a paradigm of evil.
- Why?
- Because the Jews, acting as Jews, are logically incapable of evil. In Jewish life the group is the tool of the individual. Evil requires the reverse, the individual lowering himself to being the tool of the group, forgetting what he knows is good, getting in exchange rewards of group conformity.*

- We were talking then about group violence, group evil, the holocaust, what was special about it if anything. What about hatred of Jews in relations between individuals? Do you experience it?
- Lately, yes. Two people I know just from Ralphs Supermarket late night shopping: One, a stock speculator, has taken to shouting "Zionist!" when he sees me ride by on my bike. Another, a down and out real estate agent, made a point of telling me that Jews were parasites and deserved to be eradicated.
- He wasn't serious. You like to joke with people. He was joking back, probably.
- Whatever. The point is, the answer to your question, is that previously experiencing anti-Jewish sentiment was rare to non-existent in my life.
- And this novelty is due to Trump.
- Certainly.
- You don't think, do you, the relation between you and these people is a relation between groups?
- No.
- So what is going on?
- What if we talk about instead of relation to group, relation to self? Self relation in the sense of continuity of meaning or not. What if, and this is what I propose, the Jews' relation to their group allows continuity, and genociders relation to their group is discontinuous.
- Go on.
- If one has a passive relation to the world, one forgets oneself in fear or hatred while in the grips of passionate emotion one acts, in reality or imagination, to recover lost state of security. Contrast this with creative action, in which one's relation to the world is in question and is experimented with, looking for explanation, for the rule of the relation, from which creative activity one rests in contemplation, of the beauty of the world, of the truth of ideas, of love of people.
- You argue then that this relation too is a paradigm, that the reliance on fear and hatred to recover a sense of security, confronted with the creative relation to the world, feels a provocation to attack because like in the relation between groups there is a natural antipathy?
- Yes.
- Since we are all creative at some moments, if only in the use of language, we know intimately that these two relations to the self, self continuity, are opposed to one another. The Trump supporter wants to imagine his resentments assuaged in the ascension of Trump, instead of which he is presented with someone who is a wrench thrown in the works, who brings to mind experiment instead of passion, truth, beauty, and goodness in place of the security of a vain sense of power in one's re-established place in the world.
- In conclusion: Jew-hatred starts as a kind of self-hatred, in which one fundamental sort of behavior is an obstacle to and substitutes for another, and therefore it can exist without any contact with a person other than oneself. I don't see how this is particularly anti-Jewish, since any creative person can be an obstacle to continued practice of uncreative, vain behavior.

- But not ever creative person has a relation to his group that urges him to keep all of life a continuity of experiment and beauty.
- Perhaps the conspiracy theories about the Jews grow out of the sense the vain person has that his repetitively fragmented life of rebirth, weakness returned to power, could just as well have been one of continuity, and the lost possibility of continuity, a sense inborn and instinctual, gets projected outwards as a disturbing possibility.

Further Reading:

Compassion & The Story

You Have To Have A Story

_______________

* Beverly Hills Jews

You Have To Have A Story

- What changed in the past few years?
- Not me, not the way I lived. The world changed. Everyone tells me I have to meet the world half way, I have to expect good and it will come.
- You don't think they're right?
- I tell them I expected good would come, and it came. For a long time I had good luck. And then I expected good and it didn't come. How do they explain that?
- What do they say?
- They laugh.
- Sorry, I'm laughing too.
- Go right ahead. A story began the moment the rule stopped working, and I love stories.
- What's the story?
- My story? I made an attempt to figure out what had happened and what to do about it.
- And? What did you figure out?
- I told a story of how developing technological society had expanded into all the unoccupied corners I had worked my life into, and I got squeezed out. And I'd had such a low opinion of that organization I was taken by surprise. I thought that if I wanted I could, once I got tired of being out, slip back in unnoticed. That turned out not to be true: I was spotted from a distance and blocked before I took more than a step. Do you know what I think? How I was identified so easily?
- No. How?
- By my stories.
- Is there something special about your stories?
- No. But having a story at all has become special and undesirable.
- Why? And I don't agree. People still have stories and still like telling them.
- What is opposite to having a story?
- Monotony?
- No, far from it. The opposite to having a story is excitement and ecstasy. Pornographic and mystical excitement and ecstasy.
- Are you saying there is nothing remarkable or moving in ecstasy and sex?
- I'm saying that there should be a personal, non quantifiable story leading up to the remarkable and moving experience.
- Should be for what?
- For you not be be caught up in the technological myth.
- Tell me again: what is the technological myth?
- To be always doing. Doing more, better, faster, more often. All that happens when we are still - perception of beauty, truth, good - is left out.
- But pornography and mysticism are not actions, are they?
- No. They are a special kind of perception.
- What kind?
- The kind that is quantifiable, measurable. That we can learn to do better, more often, and quicker.
- I don't follow.
- I mean something straightforward: pornographic objects are meant to arouse quickly, and accomplish this by extremes of quantity in measurements of immediately visible, repeatedly seen shapes. Access to mystical experience can be practiced so it can be more lasting, reached quicker and more often.
- There is a technology to having these experiences, pornographic and mystical.
- Exactly.
- People looking for pornographic and mystical experiences have a kind of story that ties them to the technological world. So?
- So pornography and mystical exercise increase the influence and pervasiveness of technology in society. When people are tied closer into the technological emphasis on doing they more easily forget what they are not doing, forget the possibility of good feeling in the world not tied to quantity and speed and efficiency. Forget the experience of beauty.
- That's why you called the worship of speed and quantity and efficiency in the technological myth a "place holder" for the infinite? Because it was without beauty?
- Yes. Someone caught up in an organized world gets out of practice learning how to see individuals, reflect on one's own private experience. It is easier to step from the lack of individual practice in technological society to the lack of individual practice of pornography and mystical exercises. That ease or efficiency is part of the technological myth authorizes such a move.
- Having a real story is not easy.
- In both respects: not easy to have a story at all, and any story worth having is not going to be easy.

Compassion & The Story

- The Millennials: they have no compassion.
- Remember when we were the younger generation and what the older and wiser said about us?- You think there are no differences?
- Sure there are. Those who came of age in the year 2000 and after are more social, cooperative out of self interest, are less political except in protection of their freedom and demand for tolerance.
- They are ambitious.
- In a word. But do you know why they lack compassion?
- Why?
- They have no stories.
- Everyone has a story.
- Are you sure? There are only a few kinds of stories: those that end in death, those that are of wandering and returning home, those that are of falling in love and making a home. Do you see anything in common?
- What do they have in common?
- A story is an account of movement from place to place. A story ends when movement ends, when there is no longer any reason or possibility of movement. When we were kids the talk was all peace, love, understanding, beauty, truth...
- I remember.
- These words refer to states of inaction: they are reflections, bring to mind awareness of a good relation to the world.
- They tell us we are at home. I get it.
- To feel at home requires character, requires that we have a certain character that the place we find ourselves in suits perfectly, suits so perfectly we don't have to do anything. These feelings are the end of a story.
- But what is character?
- Habit. Habits are strengthened by repetition. Habits give us capacity to do things, but also take from us capacity to do other things. A body builder does well lifting weights but not at ballet. Ambitious people aim at achieving freedom from the restraints of character. To be able to do whatever is required to succeed, whatever is asked of them by others without shame or hesitation. They have no character, and consequently have no home.
- But they do have homes. They are about the only people these days who have their own place to live.
- Millennials seek freedom. They'll do what's required to get rich. There isn't a special place or person for them, because being changeable themselves, so are the places and people appropriate to their different selves changeable. What kind of stories can they have if there can be no end?
- They can still die.
- But the significance of death in those stories was in the failure to get home. Dying without trying to go home is not a story.
- Then what happens?
- Why do people want freedom? To have the power to do things. What do they want to do? Presumably not satisfy desires, that's not the Millennial type. Millennials are ambitious. They want to acquire things, not for the pleasure of use, though that comes along with it. Possessions, and especially money, are sought as symbols of power.
- They want political freedom to exercise power to acquire symbols of freedom to exercise power...
- A circle. They distract themselves from sight of this meaninglessness with entertainments, games, intoxications. For them homes are geographic places with walls that protect these activities. They go from activity outside the home to activities inside the home. They don't stop, and they don't notice they don't have a story because they keep recycling activity with others outside the home to recovery activities within the home. Ambition however can have a kind of story.
- What's that?
- Deliberately acquiring more and more symbols of power and freedom.
- If we don't have any reason to acquire power to be free for its own sake what reason can we have to acquire more power to be free for its own sake?
- None. But you see, there is a kind of character to the ambitious, despite their claim to be entirely flexible in their pursuit of more and more symbols of power. They get good at the politics of acquisition, but get very bad at everything else, finally reaching the point that the words describing what we feel when we are at home have no meaning.
- Love, peace, truth.
- On the other hand when you feel yourself struggle on your way home you don't want to be free of the demand to go home. Taking such freedom upon yourself means a loss, means literally the loss of home. Once you know what it means to be unfree and struggling you can share what people feel who are in similar circumstances. You don't blame or dismiss them as losers in the game of acquiring freedom and power, don't pretend they are practicing an arcane form of freedom unfamiliar to you. You certainly don't blame anyone for not having the character of acquiring more and more symbols of the power to acquire, which is a deviant, deformed character that can never find a home.
- The only people who have compassion for others, who can see them in their stories, are those who have stories themselves.

The Hamas Supreme Court

- This abomination, this Hamas Supreme Court.

- You've got my attention. What does the Supreme Court decision in TRUMP v. UNITED STATES on presidential Immunity have in common with the terrorist group Hamas?
- The court's decision ignores the text and spirit of the U.S. Constitution and is therefore literally unlawful.
- Or as one legal scholar put it, declares the Constitution unconstitutional.
- The decision forbids the use of evidence as to the president's motivation in consideration of whether action is done by the president as part of the declared express duties of the president.
- Just as Hamas has declared their intention to fight the Jews 'by all means necessary'. In the atrocities Hamas committed on October 7, 2023 personal motivations are stated to be out of bounds of criticism.
- While the core functions of the U.S. President are declared totally immune* from prosecution by the U.S. Supreme Court - for example the power to pardon and to direct the military - the core function of Hamas, as expressed by them in their founding document, is to kill all Jews. The motives behind that function, the human character as expressed in the atrocities gleefully committed last October, are not allowed to be investigated.
- Both the U.S. Supreme Court and Hamas have hit on the same technique to draw attention away from obviously terrible, unjustifiable conduct: the elevation of functionality, instrumentality, of means-to-an-end, to the end itself. Human interests, purposes, desires, character are judged to be out of bounds.
- Presidents cannot be allowed to have their actions, whatever their morality, hindered by fear of criminal prosecution. Jews must be killed by all means necessary. 

Further Reading:

Normalizing Massacre

Curated, Decontextualized, Manipulated

___________________________

* From TRUMP v. UNITED STATES: 'Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.'

Normalizing Massacre

-1.

- Well?
- Well what?
- You said you were looking for an explanation for thousands of students on college campuses demonstrating condoning mass torture, mutilation, rape, killing of children...
- Holding up signs reading "by any means necessary".
- By means of rape, torture, child killing...
- Yes. The consensus among stunned observers is that we are seeing in operation the belief that all ideas are are used by those in power to oppress those without power.
- With the only idea that is not a means of strong to oppress the weak is the idea that all ideas are used by the strong to oppress the weak.
- All ideas then except one are illegitimate.
- All except theirs.
- Yes.
- If you challenge them you are using ideas to take power over them and therefore are immediately dismissed as illegitimate.
- But - this is what I asked you to provide an explanation of - child torture, gang rape are not mere ideas. Or do somehow the protesters believe they are mere ideas? It's not like they are denying their factual truth: witness their signs declaring they will fight 'by any means necessary' which started appearing less than 24 hours after the October 7 massacre, while in fact the massacre was still going on and Israel hadn't yet taken the fight into Gaza.
- I have been trying out an explanation.
- Let's hear it.
- The condoned, celebrated mass murder, rape, torture were not received and dismissed as mere ideas, but had been as it were internalized.
- How so?
- The problem is the status of the claim that all ideas are used to take power except their own idea that all ideas are used to take power which uniquely cannot be questioned.
- Are you saying they do question, suspect their own claim to be a means to take power too?
- I think they might be susceptible to doubt despite themselves. Consider. The 19th century brought us Marx telling us that the employer class was using ideas to control the slave-worker class, and Nietzsche telling us the Christians were weak people who used their ideas to take power from the strong; the Christians were practicing 'slave morality'. The 20th century saw Foucault adding to religious group and economic class struggles the struggle between types of people, between different human natures. The excessively reasonable called those less reasonable mad and excluded them from participation in public life. Have you broken the law? You are a criminal and have to be subject to a process of rehabilitation. Troubled by your sexuality? Your sexuality had to be monitored and regulated both by yourself and others.
- A power struggle of one kind of person against others.
- Yes. Foucault being a very smart guy couldn't help, if not knowing exactly, being aware of the special status he was giving his own idea of types of people using ideas to take power over other types.
- Hoping in his work to enable the type of person he was - freedom loving - to escape from its many oppressors.
- Yes. Now this is what I've come up with, do with it what you will. Foucault famously was involved in deviant sexual activities that involved acted-out violence.
- Sadomasochism.
- Among other things. De Sade claimed that human relations were fundamentally doubtful and dishonest; the only way you could be sure you had any effect on someone was through inflicting pain, same goes for your understanding of yourself. You've heard the demonstrators' slogan 'Normalize Massacre'? I think holding and imposing on others incoherent, relativistic, nihilistic views is a form of self torture and cruelty towards others; that the demonstrators were long used to feeling tortured before they were given the opportunity to publicly condone the torture of others. What do you think?
- I think they have succeeded in confusing me. Are you saying that they know there is something wrong in their exemption of their own ideas from the universal use of ideas to take power? Maybe they haven't read Foucault. Maybe they have no trouble believing that the world is so constructed that their ideas are the only ones not arrived at to take power.
- And maybe they do doubt their own ideas. Perhaps only in chanting in a crowd and in similar mass behaviors they have no problem avoiding the sense of isolation that comes from such extreme doubt, doubt of self and others, the isolation that comes from discounting all claims other than their own (and perhaps those too). Think about De Sade, then think about the behavior of the demonstrators openly celebrating torture, rape, mutilation.
- The way to normalize massacre is to first massacre your own nature.

2.

- That has to be one of the most unconvincing arguments you have ever made. At best you have given an explanation of the behavior of those who committed the atrocities, not of the demonstrators openly celebrating the atrocities.  And you have strangely left out Foucault's extremely relevant support for the Iranian Islamist Revolution against the West in which violence against the Western enemy both destroyed the enemy and purified those opposing it of its pernicious influence on their minds and bodies. He seems to have exactly exampled your argument of the third stage of the single monotheist ritual: the world seen fixed in definition as struggle of the Muslims against the rest of the world, action required defined as violence to obtain the victory foreordained. 

- I wanted to spare you from my yet again going over the matrix of self / world / act / thought / defined / undefined* that would allow me to explain Foucault's purifying violence as a group excitement. 

- As opposed to individual excitement?

- Yes. Then we should we go over the argument now?

- How could we not?

- We know that ritual works with a consciousness of weakness, a regaining of sense of strength by telling the story of our weakness in our group. When we act in ritual we are aware of the threatening world, not aware of ourselves in the process of changing and being reborn, in sight of our reborn selves we rest in once achieved. The ritual move can be done as an individual alone through repeated acts on the world to make it reflect an image of our recoved power. We call this vanity. Ethical action is the reverse: when we act we keep our sight on ourselves, watching as we act how the world changes, looking for regularities. The world is not defined, our selves are as we experiment with one repeated action after another. When something lawful is discovered about the we world the world is defined to us, our selves not visible. You remember all this?

- Of course.

- The Jewish and Christian phases of the single monotheistic ritual leave open the possibility of stories that are either vain or ethical. At any moment either world or self is defined. Not so the Muslim termination of the one ritual: in action both world and self are undefined, whereas in rest both self and world are defined. There is abysse between act and thought where there is nothing to be described. Self and world both vanish, time and space of explanation itself impossible, missing altogether.

- Thus the sense of purification of all ideas, ideas that are enemy to truth, are vehicles of powers hostile to us.

- Yes. Is this more like what we see in the behavior of demonstrators condoning atrocities?

- I'm not sure.

- And if having sympathy for our fellow living being requires that we ourselves have stories? Living through in imagination what another lives through? If to be without story, jumping from group violence to unquestioned group hierarchy, means to be without possibility of sympathy?

3.

- I think we're almost there.
- What is missing?
- The distinction between sympathy for family and sympathy for strangers. Sympathy for family comes naturally, sympathy for strangers comes....
- Politically.
- Yes. Sympathy arises when each individual gives up his demand for revenge and sees his own interest in his injury being dealt with by law that applies to all equally. This distinction is at the beginning of Western Civilization, may be considered as its defining factor. The Jewish religion has god giving the laws to the Jewish people, each Jew individually accepting laws from their god, each feeling himself benefited in the beauty and holiness of the divine gift. Roughly at the same time in history Aeschylus wrote his Orestes Trilogy, which concludes with the goddess Athena arriving on the scene to settle a generations long family feud by trial and thereby establishing law in political life.
- Sympathy comes out of this ascension from revenge to law. Sympathy is what each individual feels for every other who makes the same ascension.
- Yes. The strange phenomenon we witness on college campuses of rank and file protesters refusing to speak to strangers except to refer to so-called media specialists indicates that we no longer are in the world of Western Civilization politics. Civilization requires individual choice to make the ascension from revenge to justice. And, to come back to where we began, what did the protest media specialists say when asked how they could condone mass rape, burning children alive, abduction of at least one infant six months old, all of which raise in the minds of Westerners the ultmost revulsion?
- That these action were reasonable acts of revenge.
- Yes, we Westerners make the mistake of letting ourselves get caught up in a debate in what is reasonable and what not reasonable in revenge, what is "proportional" to use the prefered nomenclature.
- So then what? Since they are not civilized, since they are barbarians, by definition they will not, can not understand what we're saying here.
- Correct. We are attempting to clarify the situation for ourselves.

Further Reading:

Prostitution & Torture

Curated, Decontextualized, Manipulated

__________________________

* See: David Graeber & Combinatorials, and Noam Chomsky And Mental Things

Curated, Decontextualized, Manipulated

It is dark on Gelson's supermarket terrace as closing time approaches. A small disco light from the bar counter inside swirls dots of changing colors on the hammock like cloths that lower the terrace ceiling. The electric heaters are still on, contributing their own warm red glow. Store music has been turned off. Mexican music is playing softly from the telephone of one of the two men sitting down in the back, a couple of six packs of beer on the table before them. On my way to unlock my bike - this terrace is my bike parking space by special permission of the management - I say to them:

- Just got off work? 

- Yes.

- Where do you work?
- (We'll leave that out.) 

- Upstairs in the food court, the Middle Eastern place?
- Yes. Lebanese food.
- And are you Lebanese?
- I'm Armenian.
- Christian then? But still, you are on the side of the Palestinians in the latest Israel-Gaza war?
- You stereotype me?
- Yes. Am I right?
- Yes. Would you like a beer? 

He reaches out to me a bottle. Beer and argument. I am a happy man. A smile is spreading across my face and he doesn't like it. (He'll in a later conversation admit to not liking Jews.) If we talk, I warn him, you'll end up jumping to your feet and running away. 'You won't mind?' I ask. 'We'll see,' he answers. I expect he is going to jump metaphorically from one false claim to the next as I discredit each one after another, as always in these discussions, but this time around I want to see if can catch an old theory of mine in action.

- Do I know this theory?
- You do. Give me a minute and I'll come back to it. At a guess, this man is the restaurant manager; beside him, a Mexican worker, silent with limited English. I say to the putative manager: 'So you approve of terrorists who burn babies alive in ovens, rape, mutilate, murder?'
- Freedom fighters, whose calculated action is justified by the Jews colonizing and occupying Palestinians land.
- You are not uncomfortable, to use an amazing phrase I heard yesterday one Palestinian activist express, normalizing massacre? You feel good about the mental state behind the acting out of sexual fantasies of extreme sadistic violence?
- It's the Israelis who are committing genocide, who are massacring civilians, killing babies, engaging in the war crime of collective punishment.
- Israel is fighting a war, having been brought out of peace by attack but aiming to return to peace, responding to an invasion and to open threats of more invasions by terrorists openly committed to perpetual war until all Jews are dead. The fact that civilians are supporters of their Jew eliminationist government has bearing on what needs to be done for their reeducation once the war is won.

- As a Jew you'd say that. 

- As a Jew I'll say this. Rabbi Sacks, the late chief rabbi, distinguished between the priestly and prophesy. Priestly was seeing god in nature, in an ordered world, prophecy was seeing god in history, in our own individual history. The sabbath day was priestly, the six days leading up to it prophetic, time making a shift from history to nature, from action to contemplation of the results of the action. The ritual weekly affirmed the aim of life towards knowledge. In fact, we can see monotheism itself as the replacement of ritual, which aims not a knowledge but power, by making all of history a single ritual in progress. 

- Ritual: an individual feeling weak, together with others in his group also feeling weak, acting out together a story of an old god embattled with an enemy, resulting in a new god reborn, with each individual participant reborn individually in strength and success. 
- Correct. Monotheism, by making all of history one single ritual, has allowed in our single history of the world of one god three different phases of focus: on the act in the midst of history, that will if successful lead to the rest, sabbath, of knowledge; of the thought of love, openness, at the end of time and history, calling upon us to give up our fantasies of power ritual provides us with and simply love each other. And then the last phase, where we in our single ritual of history, have decided for us both act and thought of god's direction. 

- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
- Correct. The Jews used the weekly sabbath as a model of incremental knowledge.
- But the Christian, could you say, made of each moment a reckoning, an act-judging rest, a sabbath? 

- Correct.

- And a Muslim, at every moment, a judgement of submission to acts that are required and an imagination of the world that will be granted by correct submission. Don't say correct. 

- You are right. For the Muslim, each situation has its specified action required by god and god's specified heavenly reward. 

- (1) Incomplete history, the Jews. (2) The end is near, the Christians. (3) The end is here, everything decided, determined, submitted to, the Muslims.

- Correct. So what we need explained is how in this quiet corner of this opulent shopping center this fellow displays a cretin's lack of emotional intelligence and lack of critical thinking. 

- Instead of there being a Jew's sabbath that serves to link act to knowledge of the world, hypothesis to test, results, or a Christian's continuously running attack of the vanity of power, there is the Muslim's closure of history which makes of every act and thought a complete unit. Not here will you find uncertainty of individual endeavor in straining towards love. Each act an individual takes is isolated from what was done before and after. Every act is constructed to its own known specified purpose. I saw something on Rodeo Drive, the famous designer clothing shopping street, late last night. One of our city's hundred thousand who live on the streets was in one shop doorway, bedded down, worldly possessions of apparent high quality neatly packed and arranged filling the entire space A plain-clothed guard takes out his phone and a woman, or a man putting on the appearance of a woman, jumps out from under the covers, gets out of the picture, says: can I go back now? The guard nods and she/he slips back under the blanket. 

- And your point in telling this story? 

- Decontextualization: there is according to the photo taken, no one sleeping in the doorway. Jews are massacring civilians out of genocidal intent if you ignore that previously Israel had been invaded, its people murdered, tortured, mutilated, raped. 

- A falsely concocted statement, like the falsely concocted photo, which has no connection with the situation before and after. 

- Curated, decontextualized, manipulated, as an Israel official government spokesman put it.

- Yes. 

- So follow with me. I say to the restaurant manager: Israel is waging war in response to an invasion, with comparatively speaking low ratio of civilian to soldiers deaths. The Palestinians have repeatedly stated they want to kill all Jews. Their war doesn't end until all are dead. The Israelis' war ends when the security it seeks is obtained. One side seeks peace, the other only war. There is no equivalence between sides, like in a feud cycle each act is justified in compensating for a previous act of compensation.

- The Jews, he says, are the ones who are sadistic, perverse, keeping the Palestinians in an open air prison. 

- Egypt has a border with Gaza not controlled by Israel. What kind of prison has an open door? 

- Israel is an apartheid state. 

- Israeli Arabs have complete civil rights. They have positions in the government. 

- Token positions.
- Not at all. Israeli Arabs are on the supreme court, in the legislature, in the universities, in medicine. 

- They don't control their air space, water, electricity. 

- You mean, not in Israel, but in Gaza, because Gaza, under Hamas government is in a declared state of war against Israel shooting tens of thousands of rockets into Israel every year. Civil rights don't exist in war. War is about killing people, breaking the rules of civilization.

- Israelis are colonists who occupy stolen Palestinian land.

- There have been no Jews in Gaza since 2005. And in Israel proper the Jews bought their land, not stole it. If you mean by occupation the lands of Judea and Sumeria, these were taken in war, and held by Israel for security. And the Jews are the indigenous people people of this land, and if colonizers what would be the Jews' metropole, or motherland that is supposed to have sent out the Jewish settlers if not the land of Israel itself? 

- The argument you are making with the restaurant manager is that the astonishing act of "normalized massacre", these couplets of action and situation: apartheid, open air prison, genocide, occupation, are like the photo of the empty doorway on Rodeo Drive, decontextualized.

- They are as it were mechanical acts of accretion, one religiously necessary act piled upon another, with no knowledge of the world or human nature to connect them. Perverse, sadistic, acted-out sexual fantasies? No, their mass murder is not about them, they feel certain, is not about ethical conduct or its lack, because every act taken is god's will not theirs as a single individual. It is god's will they kill all Jews. In this third monotheism, at the announced end of the single ritual of history, in pursuance of the intention of killing all Jews an appearance of genocide, occupation, imprisoning, apartheid state is created in language. Each end-times priestly/prophetic act/thought unit of the world as it is and must be is curated, manipulated without connection with the real world, fabricated in ritual's memory destroying passion of weakness therefore without connection with human nature of seeking knowledge and love. 

- And what happened with the guy at the shopping center? 

- As expected, he fled. 'Just to be sure,' I said to him, 'again, you don't feel bad, feel dirty sitting there endorsing, approving of rape, torture, mutilation?' He said, 'I've had enough, personal attacks aren't arguments,' and he got up and left together with his silent friend.

Torture

- What do you have there?
- One of our old conversations, six, seven years ago. I'll read it to you.

- Anti-sex trafficking organizations say prostitution is torture. What do you think?
- Obviously they are not identical. We might look at how they are the same and how they are different.
- How are they the same?
- Both the seller of sex and the tortured have force applied to their bodies.
- You mean forced sex? Don't sellers agree to trade sex for money?
- Assuming they feel no desire to be with those they have to be paid to be with, their bodies are being forced to act against desire.
- How is acting against desire torture?
- Buying sex like torture works to disable normal functioning of the bought or bound subject's body.
- Torture and buying sex are both about disabling the subject's body. How else are torture and buying sex similar?
- Both aim to force particular thoughts into the minds of their bound or bought subjects, or to imagine this happening. The torturer wants a confession, the sex buyer wants the bought to pretend to like the buyer.
- So we have two elements: disabling the body's functioning, and forcing into existence shows of certain thoughts. We know people torture for reasons other than gaining information, that in most cases torture is not done to achieve practical results. Do you think people buy sex also for no practical reason? That it is not about sex?
- I think it is about what we've said: sex buying constructs a social relation in which the body of the bought is disabled and the seller imagines he is desired by someone whose body is socially considered desirable.
- A matter of power and status.
- Yes.
- Ok. How are sex buying and torture different?
- Instead of being physically bound, the sex seller is subject to severe economic and social pressure. Because selling sex disables the body and necessitates lying no one voluntarily chooses to sell sex.
- Then why do some say they enjoy what they do?
- The same reason slaves say they accept slavery: they find security in the only way of life they know that provides some predictability. We've talked before* about how feeling at home comes from habit, and habit comes from the body. We want to be at home because that is the place where we know from experience we are safe and can move on to get what else we want. The tortured and bought body cannot easily feel anywhere at home. We also talked** about how in our societies we do things for the sake of doing them: another way of saying, we are a society of people without home. We are a people without home because we force each other to do what the bound for torture and bought for sex are forced to do: against our bodies, under threat of economic and social death to produce representations of our liking of each other, to constantly adjust our relations to each other.
-  Your point being that violence and sex are extremes of relation between bodies, but in our everyday life where our bodies keep more distance we see the same relations we see in torture and prostitution.
- Yes, but because of the physical distance maintained the effect is much weakened. Torture is still torture.
- And prostitution is still torture.

- Does this get us anywhere in trying to understand the murder and torture rampage of Hamas against the Israelis?
- In the torture there was no attempt to extract information, and obviously no imagined show of attraction. The mind to be adjusted to a new social relation of power was of the audiences to the torture: the live streamed families of the torturers and the families of their victims.
- Do you think this torture rampage was in some way a logical extension of prostitution, selling bodies and selling minds?
- I think the idea of forced show-making in torture helps us understand the glee, pride, exhilaration of the demonstrators in our cities and college campuses celebrating the torture-murder rampage.
- Torture as a public act has a history, public executions. Is this a fundamental difference between us and them, between people who mostly make a public show of torture and those who would hide it away?
- A forced relation of bodies, of physical powerlessness, creates in the mind of performers a social relation of power. The Hamas killer-torturers and the celebrating students seem to have forgotten their capacity as human beings to be unforced in body and mind. They are not ashamed of their moments of living in shows of social relation created at the price of destroying bodies. Rousseau wrote in 1750:

 Sincere friendship, real esteem and perfect confidence are banished from among men. Jealousy, suspicion, fear, coldness, reserve, hate, and fraud lie constantly concealed.

- Concealed no longer.

Further Reading:

Proportionality

Proportionality

- I can't understand how you can be here, a University, a place of civilization, demonstrating in favor of barbarians, celebrating people who proudly, joyfully torture and kill children.
- We're demonstrating in favor of peace.
- Then you condemn the Hamas' torture and killing of children?
- Israel is committing genocide against Palestinian people. Occupying their land.
- How can there be a genocide when the population is increasing every year? There isn't a single Jew in Gaza or the PA, how can they be occupiers?
- The Palestinians are oppressed by Israel, an apartheid state that denies them human rights.
- Arabs in Israel have the same rights as Jews.
- One side uses violence, the other side uses violence. We're calling for a cease fire.
- To end attacks on its people Israel needs to win the war with Hamas.
- Israel's killing is disproportionate. It has to be stopped.
- A proportionate response is what is required by the rules of a feud. There's a difference between act of violence in response to act of violence - a feud, cycle of violence - and one state's defending itself from the violent intentions of another state in a war: wars end with the enemy entirely dead or disarmed.
- Are you Jewish?
- Yes.
- I have to go. Best of luck in dealing with your confusion.

This conversation took place this afternoon up at UCLA at the pro-Palestinian rally. Chants of "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" could be heard, which is a coded way of saying, as Israel is located between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the eradication of the State of Israel. For most of my short conversation with the student he had a self-satisfied smirk on his face. He obviously had had this conversation many times before and had the terms of his answers laid out in advance: apartheid, occupation, genocide, proportionality. He was bored, we can picture him asking himself, what's so special about tortured and killed children? What is required to become bored with the subject of child torture and murder (abduction too, we've failed to mention)? First, most obviously, failure to make a distinction between those who can and cannot leave a state whose violence they don't agree with; the elderly, disabled, and children cannot. But children are a special case within this class of those who cannot agree to participate in group violence. In addition to not having the power to leave they also cannot want to participate in group violence. Their characteristic act of play requires there be behind it a reality of security and love which real violence undermines. To find child torture and killing and abduction something to smile about requires not being able to remember what play is, what it is to be outside the responsibility of social participation, the removal which creates room to play in for the child. Without play, to be constantly subject to social demands, leaves our UCLA terrorist approving student without imagination, individuality, and any respect for the truth; truth, imagination, individuality having no value for someone who never must question the claims and demands of the group that forms his identity. Torture, kill, abduct babies? Why not, these actions, done according to group demands, disconnected with self, are reduced to the security of obedience and mere words, the terms of instruction.

Watch:

Hillel Neuer

Further Reading:

Torture

How Ralphs Tackles Homelessness

1.

- Thirty-three student groups at Harvard put out a statement that mass murder, rape, torture, abduction of hundreds of children, the elderly, women are all justified by Israel being a settler colonial nation. Two days later the President of Harvard, a black woman (I don't mean to make really a racist/sexist identification, you'll see) released a statement that Harvard University is not responsible for the behavior of its students.
- Harvard is not in the business of educating its students.

- Apparently not. The Democratic Socialist Party, which has a handful of representatives in the U.S. Congress, with gleeful smiles and dancing in the streets in New York City declared that any action any atrocities done by Palestinians is justified. The founder of Europe's Diem Party Yanis Varoufakis has said he will not condemn the action of the terrorists, because that would imply he was on board with Palestinians going back to their 'open-air prison.' It was out of the question for him, apparently, that the Palestinians make peace with Israel. One of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement issued a statement, from one might guess one the mansions these leaders bought themselves from donations, that Israel was an experiment now shown to be a failure and should therefore be ended immediately.

- Wow.

- The first story I want to tell begins with the Black Lives Matter riots and protest in Los Angeles in 2020. A few months afterwards the new district attorney in Los Angeles issued a memo stating that his office would no longer prosecute misdemeanors, with misdemeanors expanded to include property crime less than $950. He said that these crimes were committed by people for the most part were drug addicts and insane and should get treatment, not jail time. That there were no facilities with any ability to deal with the city's mentally ill and addicted was not mentioned. The resulting massive crime wave was predicted by everyone but him. I personally have had 2 bicycles, 3 bookbags, one rare book, and five computers, and more stolen since then. The latest computer theft is what I want to tell you about. Does this interest you?

- A bit on the sordid side, but ok. Tell your story.

- On the outskirts of Westwood village is Denny's Coffee Shop. Westwood has become the place to go if you are among the insane and drug addicted issued a get out of jail free card by our district attorney. They buy and sell each other drugs and rob each other when exhausted by their demented shouting they lay themselves down to sleep in the middle of the sidewalk, enjoying the slight breeze created by pedestrians walking over their bare foot bodies. (They particularly like to steal each other's shoes.) It was no surprise then, as I sat one night a few days ago on Denny's terrace drinking coffee and reading on my computer that I hear a man shouting Secret Service? Are you Secret Service? He is going from person to person with this same question, which he follows up with the charge, Illegal Surveillance! He comes over to stand on the other side of the railing separating the terrace from the sidewalk. He orders me: Get out of Westwood! I live here! You don't! I'm in charge of Westwood! Get out, Get out! He doesn't leave, keeps shouting at me, Get out! You're Secret Service. Finally, I break my silence, ask him, What makes you think I am Secret Service? He responds by reaching down and taking hold of my computer's screen and lifting the computer from the table. I was quick enough to grab the keyboard but after a struggle he was able to pull the computer from my hands. You said you were Secret Service, he explains. He gives me a broad smile and takes off across the street. After a few moments of shocked immobility, I followed him, going home I guess, keeping a safe distance: Westwood's drug addicts and crazies warn me when they try to sell me drugs that they all carry knives. 

- You didn't try to take your computer back?

- You mean like the Ralphs supermarket down the street? You don't know what's happening there? After years of an all day and all-night stream of shoplifters Ralphs hired new teams of Balaclava masked guards armed with pistols, stun guns, night stick, pepper spray, bullet proof vests and combat boots. They follow the obviously homeless, crazy and addicted through the store and when they leave block their way, shout at them to empty their bags. They refuse, knowing they can't be charged, and have always previously been left untouched. Not anymore. The guard using a wrestling move will tackle the shoplifter to the ground, pull the bags from their shoulders and hands and empty the bags contents on the pavement, taking back all that was being stolen. Resistance is met with shoves, and if that doesn't work, pepper spray to the eyes. 

- You've seen all this yourself?

- Many times. Do you understand? Ralphs realized that if the addicts and crazy couldn't be prosecuted, neither would their guards be prosecuted, even if technically the violence they were using would not be a misdemeanor, they knew the police would not be eager to be involved in defense of people given free pass at criminality.

- Is this still going on?

- As far as I know. Anyway, if I tried, without combat boots and bulletproof vests and guns and sprays to take back my computer, it was likely, not backed by the clout of one of the biggest supermarket chains in the world, I would be charged with felony assault, which is prosecuted in LA, and arrested!

- Arrested for trying to take back your computer from someone who can't be arrested for stealing it from you.

- Yes. I see the robber turn the corner on Wilshire Blvd. and walk into the first residential building offering luxury apartments. I followed him in, ask the valet parking attendant if he man who just came in lives there. Yes. I ask the concierge at the reception desk the same question. Yes. I ask the guard standing in the corner. Yes, again. I explain the situation. Security boss is called. I call the police. Security boss arrives, he calls the police too. We wait an hour and a half. Two police officers arrive. Then two more. Then a sergeant. We all watch the playback video of the robber arriving home with my computer in his arms. They all keep asking me was I scared, was violence used taking the computer? Use of violence and causing fear are what raises the severity of the crime from misdemeanor to the category the felony robbery, which is still prosecuted. They obviously want me say no, I was not afraid, I didn't try to hold onto my computer. Finally, they ask me what I want them to do. Go up to his apartment and get my computer. They, now a crowd of what looks like 7 or 8 police and two building guards with keys, take the elevator up. They are down in a few minutes. The robber didn't answer his door. That's it. To enter they need a search warrant. Call the detective tomorrow and ask him to get one. 

- That's it?

- I call the detective. He wants me to come down to the station to identify the robber. At the station I'm taken in to a little room and shown a "six pack", an array of six photos from which I'm to identify the culprit. His smirking face is immediately identifiable. The detective tells me he'll take the suspect into custody that day or the next. 

- And?

- Nothing happens. I visit the building manager, who explains this new tenant of theirs has been arrested five times in the month since his arrival from his home in New Zealand. First arrest, for gauging out the paint of Rolls Royces and Astin Martins and Ferraris in the residence's garage, the damage adding up to tens of thousands of dollars.

- Then he was charged and prosecuted since the damage was over $950.

- The prosecutors reduced to charge to a misdemeanor.

- Why?

- Humanitarian reasons. Next the building's now favorite resident went up to the UCLA campus and was caught spraying graffiti.

- Charged and released?

- Yes. Next, he checked out one of those ride-share electric bikes and launched in into a Santa Monica bar owner's - high-priced cars again - Lamborghini.

- Charged and released?

- After spending the weekend in jail. Bar owner is supposed to have some political influence in the city.

- Next?

- Arrested in Santa Monica for graffiti.

- Next?

- The building's assistant manager told me all around Santa Monica and Brentwood someone was spraying swastikas on walls and trash receptacles. She thought it was their boy, but he wasn't caught.

- And then came you, number five.

- Yes. The detective called it a crime spree. 

- A get out of jail free spree.

- Yes. More than two weeks have passed. The detective told me Friday when he asked the DA's office for an arrest warrant he was told more information was required.

- Taking the computer from your hands, video of the robber carrying your computer into the building, identifying him from array of photos, was not enough?

- No. My computer has found its new home upstairs in the luxury residence. Minimum rent, $6,000 a month, proof of income three times rent amount required for leasing consideration.

- An income of $18,000 a month. The guy is rich.

- Yes. He is stealing for its own sake like our ex-President Donald Trump has lived a lifetime of criminality, steadily losing with his failed and criminal activities the huge fortune inherited from his father. The robber's smirking confidence reminded me of Trump's confidence he could kill someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose the loyalty of his supporters. 

- You've told your stories. What's it all about? This crazy condoning of crime, this open, gloating approval of what until now was considered unsupportable by anyone civilized: mass murder, torture, abduction of women, children, elderly?

- The failure of democracy.

- What's the connection?

- A particular path democracy can take in failing. Before the American war of independence there was an ongoing debate among the religious leaders of the colonies whether mere tolerance of difference of opinion was enough, or an attempt must be made to find some foundational principles that could be agreed upon. 

- The question was whether democracy could be practiced by people who disagreed so completely.

- In the absence of the belief that agreement could be reached democracy is, in Plato's definition, that form of government where there was no agreement on what was good or true, with the result that it was liable to descend into anarchy.

- You think that is what has happened?

- No, it's not that simple. A shift has occurred, a move from there is no agreement on what is true to there is no truth at all.

- And what difference does that make?

- If there is no truth, and there is a government with power over the people, then all government policies and laws, and all justifications of them, are unjust attempts to enslave the people. Plato's mockingly stated description of Thia form of government is one in which justice is the advantage of the stronger.

- In other words, there is no justice at all.

- None. And what happens then?

- What?

- One faction among the people takes power and control of the government and uses government justification to enslave the other factions. Everything said and done by the government is an act of disguised power.

- White supremacists oppress the blacks. Men oppress women. The rich and law abiding and rational oppress the poor and criminal and the crazy. The Jews oppress the Arabs.

- But making the claim that mass murder of Jews is justified because the Jews, by definition of their being in power, are victimizing the Palestinians, aren't they - the Palestinians - too attempting to extort some power from the world's governments by means of telling that story? A story which as an expression of power must be a lie?

- Of course. Republican politicians often make that accusation of democratic district attorneys like ours in LA. (Our city is not alone in criminals being assigned victim status.)

- And being called out for hypocrisy doesn't change anything?

- No, what it does is add an ironic relish to the self-righteousness of their attacks on their supposed attackers, add a play-like self-consciousness of what they are doing, a joy of performance, theatricality, spectacle implicit to their actions.

- Thus the smiles and smirks often observed on their faces, dancing in the street celebrating tortured babies, beheadings....

- Yes. 

- To summarize, you see a sequence, a movement through ideas that goes from democracy of debate and agreement to democracy of tolerance, which leads to a democratic government that is believed to tyrannize over the people to a government captured by one faction and enslaving all other factions, to self-conscious taking power in the name of righteousness of the people of the victimized faction. Is that correct?

- Yes. Think about it. What good is the truth when the world lived in is said to be nothing but lies told to gain power. Lies like: The Palestinian's claim Israel is a settler colonial nation. But where then is the mother country- the metropole - from which emigration occurs? Israel? The Palestinians claim to be the sole indigenous people on the land, but they never have had a government there, and the Jews have had several, the government in Gaza puts in their founding document their intention to kill all Jews in the state of Israel together with Jews every place else in the world. They say Israel kills civilians so they can kill civilians too. But they use civilians as human shields by launching missiles at Israel from hospitals and schools and residential neighborhoods and their terrorists deliberately seek out civilians to murder, while Israel warns civilians to get out of the way of imminent attacks. The Palestinians make no serious attempt to make peace, Israel does. All this is as nothing, is outside the process of reasoning the leads to the belief that truth can be nothing other than a statement  of victimization and power only to be had in the victimized's justified taking on the position of victimizer, victimizing the world with lying claims of innocence.

2.

- Are you finished with your...victimology?

- Should there be more? Being on the subject of the Middle East, shouldn't we have a savior maybe?

- Do you have one?

- You tell me. The day before the robber showed up at Denny's and took home my computer something strange happened, at the same time and the same place, strange even for Westwood. It was about 11 PM when I looked up from reading the news of the war in Ukraine and see a man, naked except for a luxurious, heavy white terrycloth bathrobe and nothing else walking across the street away from me. He was shouting about something I couldn't make out and really, in this place of literally hundreds of the addicted and insane there was nothing very remarkable here except I had the impression of good grooming and cleanliness. I went back to my reading but look up again hearing the shouting return. I see the man in the bathrobe crossing the street coming back my way. Over the next few minutes he repeats this coming and going several times. A light is out at this already dark corner of the intersection so I can't make out his face. The bathrobe appears to be completely clean, not yet recruited to double as bedding. That is what I was thinking when the man in the clean, heavy white bathrobe does just that, he lies down literally on the street, right in the middle of the street, with cars any moment now sure to be coming this way taking the short cut from Wilshire to Sunset. 

- What did you do?

- Was I his savior?

- Were you?

- I really didn't want to be. Wasn't he one of those who were constantly stealing from me?

- So?

- I asked myself if I could just sit there reading the war news while he got run over. I saw at the end of the street cars were now approaching. I got up from the table, picking up my computer - another of the addicted or insane would be sure to appear and grab it in seconds if I left it - I run into the street, stretch out my hand palm out signing Stop! to the oncoming cars that have now appeared, and shout out to the man in the white bathrobe fast asleep on the pavement: Wake Up! Wake Up! Nothing happens. He doesn't move. More cars are coming. Get out of the street! I shout, louder this time, you can't sleep here! Suddenly he jumps up and takes to his heels in the opposite direction, and I get out of the street myself. 

- Was it him, the man who the next day stole your computer?

- I never saw his face.

Evil

Starbucks Coffee, Beverly Hills

- Look at that: the whole bench along the wall is occupied with them.

- By 'them' you mean?

- Those in Beverly Hills who sleep nearby on the streets, or rather on the side walks. I almost ran over one this morning riding my bike here.

- Which one?

- Buried under layers of filthy blankets how do I know?

- This Starbucks is incredible. Across the street in the Peninsula hotel, just behind the cafe building is the Waldorf Astoria, two of the most expensive hotels in the city. Look at those guys getting out of their Maclaren super car, hundreds of thousands of dollars. This place stinks. But that won't stop this country's intrepid rich from stepping right into the miasma for their coffee.

- The indifference! I can't help the word evil from coming to mind. What about you?

- Does calling the rich evil explain anything?

- Good! Just what I wanted to talk to you about. If we want an explanation of the orbits of planets, we find one in a law of gravity. But if we want an explanation of how an object moves from one place to another, we rely on what we call energy, force, momentum, sorts of things which we have no explanation of.

- Explanation meaning we can tell a story in the form of general rule relating one thing to another at one place or another.

- Yes. So if I offer an explanation of the indifference of the rich to the massive misery around them, we place them in a certain orbit where they are subject to certain 'forces' of indocrination which convnices them that it's their own fault the misearable are miserable, it's good they are punished for their error so they are motivated to make corrections. And there, we have explained away their indifference. Or not?

- Don't you still want to call them evil?

- Absolutely! I do!

- So again: does calling the rich evil explain anything, anything more? more than suffering from the disease of pleonexia: Excessive or insatiable covetousness. From the Greek pleonektein (to be greedy), from pleion (more) + ekhein (have).

- I think it does. But...

- Go on.

- There's a paradox here. It seems possible to make the attribution of the word evil come and go, depending on how one looks at the world. Something like when we are in the presence of beauty see it, it gives us pleasure, it is seen as warrenting the attribution beautiful. Yet we can explain away the beauty by seeing instead regular relation, geometric forms, well functioning, losing thereby both pleasure and the consideration of the objects as beautiful. What if the same happens with evil? We see it, the evil in the object, we feel pain in the act of perception. Yet we can if we like shift our way of looking and lose both the sight of evil in the object and our pain felt in having the perception.

- How does that get us anywhere, claiming that how we explain is up to us, our own doing? 

- It's rather obvious, isn't it?

- Not to me. Isn't it crazy, aren't we crazy, to be having this kind of conversation in this place, right in front of these people?

- You mean we're crazy to be pretending our ideas are important faced with the immensity of evil going on around us? 

- Yes. Are we ridiculous in our self-importance?

- Maybe not. Think about the two kinds of explanation we've talked about. One stops short of satisfaction, leaving us with unexplainable force, in the case of the indifferent rich the pleanexia of the rich, forced upon them by capitalism, the stock market, family, advertising, movies, etc., etc. The other gives us a clear sight and corresponding strong feeling.

- But, I don't understand. If explanation is telling a story, where's the story in choosing to see ugliness when we don't have to?

- When we see evil as evil we are not seeing the regularity of law, and the resulting mystification of the force doing the application to the individual, but instead see evil, experiencing the perception as complete in itself and that reminds what it is to be a human being.

- The story is that the ugly, indifferent rich have made the wrong choice and by calling them evil we remind ourselves not to follow in their path?

- We explain to ourselves why we cannot follow in their path and why they wouldn't have us even if we could.

- We see their ugliness for what it is, evil.

Trump The Jew

1.

- I was watching on YouTube our twice impeached, four times indicted ex-President (future President?) at his latest rally, doing his greatest hits, running through his slogans at a rate at about two per minute: Drain the swamp! Lock them up! Deport them all! I alone can fix it!

- Aren't you tired of this?
- I find I am not. Remarkable isn't it?

- Disgusting, rather. What do you find remarkable?
- It turns out I do have more to say about this person.
- I'm listening.
- I'll put it in the form of one of his slogans: Trump the Jew.
- An explanation is coming. 

- Yes. You know how the Jews since their expulsion from their own land a couple thousand years ago have been the object of hatred and attacks on the grounds of their being both weak - and dangerously infectious in their corrupt weakness - and at the same time strong, actually killers of god, and perpetrators of an international conspiracy to control the world?

-  Can you tell me how it is possible for them to be attacked as being both weak and strong at the same time?
- The two together suggest the sequence of ritual attack, in which a participant enters feeling weak and fearful, but in the recount of a story of rebirth in the company of others doing the same and often under the direction of a leader, at its conclusion come out feeling strong.
- The Jews, living among people different from themselves, found themselves to be in the position of suggesting to their oppressors that they put their oppression in the form of a ritual.
- Yes. Donald Trump is the super-Jew of our time and place, suggesting to his people that they practice a ritual of national rebirth.
- Thus explaining how he whines out his complaints, warns that countless persecutors are out to get him and his people, and then without a pause, he delivers one of his megalomaniac assertions that 'he alone can fix it.' What do you make of this historical anomoly, Trump the Jew? Or is it not an anomoly? Do you think Hitler also learned from the Jews how to be Hitler?
- Maybe I do. 
- Of course you do. I'm not saying I buy your argument, you've made it deliberately ridiculous, but what are we supposed to do about Trump the Jew?
- We find in our psychology an attitude towards certain people that takes us on an individual journey from weakness to strength. We find in our politics leaders using this same journey of passage in order to politically to consolidate a nation.
- And coming to this understanding of formal similarity what does it do for us other than depress us further? We have need of a better way of expressing ourselves. Doesn't it seem to you, for example, that calling someone evil feels like we are ourselves becoming evil in that act of naming? 
- It does. Because in doing so we are being anti-Semites, finding in the object of our attack's weakness and strength the weakness and strength of our own selves, thereby inadvertently setting ourselves out on the path of ritual rebirth. Why do this when we don't have to?

-Why indeed, when we can instead help ourselves to the humor and calm brought by understanding?

2.

- All kidding aside, I've got a few questions for you.

- Trump the Jew!

- Do you really think that the couple of millennia that the Jews have endured persecution is due to their situation of being in different respects weaker and stronger, to their being able to, what should we call it, attract? provoke? fascist behavior?

- It seems so.

- Ritual behavior is expressed both in one individual's aversion and hatred of another and in the class of rulers turning against a class of subjects. What about ritual of rebirth to re-establish a nation, what we usually think of as fascism? Is this something different?

- Only in that the age-old ritual-based persecution of the ruling against the ruled has adapted to democracy.

- How?

- Democratic openness allows the use of mass media to construct entirely new classes to play the roles of persecuted and persecutor and enables a change in who is in control of government.

- You mean a dictator or gang that pretends to act in the interest of the new class in charge but in fact acts solely in its own interest.

3.

- That mug shot.
- Trump posing as super-villain.
- How did he do it? Had he arranged to have a confederate behind the jail-house camera?
- Who knows.
- But what does Trump deliberately posing as a comic book character, a super-villain mean? And why do we Americans get our fascist leader in the shape of a super-villain, while Russia gets theirs as a straight-forward, dour, minimally persuasive ritual leader telling the story of Russia's greatness, the true continuation of the ancient culture, harassed and wounded by the resentful attentions of the world but which, under his guidance, soon will be reborn in its rightful splendor?
- It means that Americans, in their self-importance, unlike Russians, take individual credit and responsibility for raising up their fascist leader to power. They practice a ritual of their own personal rebirth while they participate in their nation's rebirth under the guidance of their chosen ritual leader. What is a super-villain? A fascist leader like Putin need not display any signs of vanity at all, merely tell a story of the rebirth of the nation under his guidance. A super-villain is a vain fascist.
- Vanity being?
- Belief in one's having placed oneself in a position of increased power and security as a result of one's individual choices freely made. To both the supervillain and followers whether or not the violence that is to bring on the rebirth of the nation ever achieves that result is of no consequence so long as the satisfactions of individual rebirth are obtained. 
- What you referred to as Trump's jewishness then is his super-villain super-power to suggest in his followers both personal and group forms of ritual at the same time. When Trump's followers express their gloating satisfaction in the discomfort caused their opponents by their leader's mockery of norms and institutions they are both expressing their personal vanity in obtaining that result and their self-confidence regained in contemplating their group's progress along the path of collective national rebirth.

4.

- What is a super-villain?

- A comic book character, a character in movies based on comic books.

- How would you define this kind of character?

- A person vain of his ability to do evil. 

- Yes, that is what you've said. But what makes this character attractive?

- The devil in Milton's 'Paradise Lost' is the most interesting in the book.

- Yes.

- When we use the expression "stop to think" we mean it literally: we stop moving, responding to circumstances, to think out our response. We say, oppositely, we act on reflex, on instinct, when for example we blink our eyes at a gust of wind.

- A cat using the aerodynamics of its body to twist around and land well in a fall. 

- The video-blogger 'Anna From Ukraine' calls the Russian invaders of her country 'orks', creatures from the world of fantasy. Do you know why?

- Why?

- When you act by reflex, defending your life or the lives of those close to you, you don't give a thought, literally, to the character of the people you're defending yourself against. 

- Can't or don't?

- Can't and don't. Can't, and don't want to, because seeing the evil you have to respond to would confuse and delay your response. 

- Evil defined as deliberately accepting the individual benefit of renewed sense of power resulting from engaging in group directed violence. You want to say that, when we stop to think about evil, our response is delayed and confused?

- Yes. We condemn a man as evil, thinking a decisive determination of his character will help clarify our response, but it is not so, we feel instead diverted from an action of response, caught in the contemplation of what we have named. Do you agree?

- I'm not sure. Using the word 'evil' has always made me uncomfortable. Is this how you are going to define super-villain, as a character who's destructiveness allows response, like against orks', without stopping to think?

- The super-villain puts on show both action-stopping evil and action-allowing fantasy. The vanity this character displays, its alien, fantastic nature, allows reaction without stopping to think about the evil the character is vain of performing.

- We both perceive evil and respond to it.

- Yes.

- We are fascinated by and laugh at super-villains because they allow us to see what evil is and get past it at the same time.

- Does it not seem that way to you?

- I'll think about it. What I like is how, aside from super-villains, your approach applies to the problem of perpetrators of past evil who do not seem to show at present any sign of evil, undermining our wish to respond decisively. 

- The problem that evil is not an actual material thing we can grab hold on to respond to but a potential to repeat: a habit, disposition of character, probability of action.

- We can instead, you suggest, exit the sight of the perpetrator, letting probability decide ourselves on action, leaving the perpetrator's character open, unresolved, fantastic.

Further Reading:

David Graeber & Combinatorials