1.
- Aren't you tired of this?
- I find I am not. Remarkable isn't it?
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
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