- 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 see 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 giving 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.
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