If ever there was a demonstration of the curious, but grim and inescapable fact that the majority of mankind can easily be duped by the most absurd and fantastistical of illusions then it came in a conversation I had with a friend....
But the General was, despite all that can be said against him, a profoundly religious and humble man. Why, don't you know that he used to pray five times a day?
And as if to reconfirm my gravest fears he went on:
The Taleban have been misunderstood by the westren media and "farangis" like you; they represent "pure" Islam, a return to simplicity and a shunning of all "innovation,"of all that is friviolous and extraneous to a good life. There is, finally, tranquility and order in that war-torn country. Surely not even you can deny this? There is no fear of theft and soon, as is the case in Saudi Arabia, people will be able to leave their doors open again without any worries. People in your country are riddled with uncertainties and doubt, a meaningless existence and a scepticism towards other people; here, everyone-and especially the womenfolk- knows their place in the scheme of things.
It seemed pointless to continue. But what exactly was the allure of order, authority, tyranny, finding one's "place"- in him and in all of us? Was there something to be said for the old, closed world of narrow assurances, a charm that would partly explain our fascination with authoritative voices (Susan Sontag). Perhaps the re-emergence of conservatism and tribalism, or at least its appeal, was that in a chaotic and globalising world made up of the ceaseless flux of events and the emergence of an ever-new formless reality one could close the gates on a rapidly changing world, withdraw into one's private shell. Conformity and the creature-warmth of the crowd...perfect anonymity. We live in a shape-shifter's reality, where the stage-set is continuously being changed. Last orders, gentlemen.
Should we distinguish on the one hand the desire for authority, stability, and order-as well as the leaders who can both represent and deliver these things-and the sympathy and blind allegiance that some people can show for a tyrannical leader (Mao, Stalin, Kim Jong)? Are we talking about a difference in degree or kind here?
The strongman , the authoritative voice that knows how to make decisive decisions, whose will is the force of law, outside the bounds of reason. A pillar of strength, standing resolutely against economic dissolution, social fragmentation, moral decadence and the chaos that run amok in the cities, brought on by the cosmopolitan intellectuals, the cultural litterati and the avant garde. Amidst the collapse of, the draining away of meaning from life, the Great Leader unites us all again in these end of days: he is the body politic: l'etat, c'est moi.
But from where does he derive his strength? For some, he is a veritable force of Nature, a shaman priest-king born under an auspicious star, the representation of a mighty Will, an elemental power that is thrown up by the vortex of History...he is, in short, nothing less than the manifestation of a people's Destiny. A millenarian king, a messianic saviour who comes to redeem time, to rid the earth of corruption and impurity, whose very presence signals the beginning of a new age, a utopian moment. In the tradition of those authoritarian sages, holy saviours he commands obedience because of his ability to embody the future of his people and the land.
The Leader offers hope of a great leap forward, a dazzling and glorious existence and not the mundane, bourgeois idea of piecemeal improvement and reform that underlies democratic politics. But these are sociological explanations. Is there something in our psychological make-up that pre-disposes us to the reneging of our independence and autonomy. Do people actually desire to be slaves, to fall back into nothingness or child-like dependency?
This is a thought that is too disturbing to contemplate and must be banished. The same applies to Miligram's Stanford experiments. But the questions simply won't go away. The return of the repressed.
The Narcissist as the Great Leader: the independent self who needs no other. A shining, glamourous, luminous tyrant who is beyond all need. If we love him that can only be for our own good. The singular focus of all devotion and praise, a whole and perfect being in this world of fragmentary, incomplete and marginal selves.
It seems that the tyrant, then, is associated with a complex of ideas that one could subsume under the heading of arcadia: he is the re-incarnation of the ancestor, the giant who walked alongside the foosteps of men, a Father of the Nation. He brings us back to the mythical age, a time when the purity of the tribe was unblemished by contact with foreigners and strangers and politics was still the politics of blood, the hearth, and ancient lineages. This ability to re-establish a pattern in people's lives -social harmony-is taken to be a quasi-divine function. But he does so by turning the tables, by rebeling against the anarchy of all that precedes him; he is a Revolutionary hero, a visionary who can 'read' the spirit of the times.
But why should so many ordinary, law-abiding, fundamentally moral and decent people be drawn to such a character? How does he mesmerize the masses, what explains the unquestioning devotion that he commands? With his death people often reflect and come to the conclusion that they had been living in a dream, a trance-like state, their senses lulled by his brilliant oratorical skills, or charisma. Compared to the prosaic, middling lives obsessed with 'getting and spending' the tyrant shows up the pettiness of all such aspirations. Once again the world can be perceived in black and white, and enemies can be recognised for what they are. His popularity is energized by our love of unity, seamless order, homogeneity, and purity. To transfer all of one's responsibilities on to someone 'higher', some cause greater than oneself, the desire to be nothing exists side by side with the tyrant's desire to dominate, to project himself in countless megalomaniacal ways. And we go along with this, content that the light is shone on the Great Leader and not on us, ignoring the massacres and the purges; long-standing friendships are torn apart in amatter of days as suspicion and recrimination and simmering tensions are allowed to come to the surface. Allegiance and loyalty cannot be divided.
The emergence of the Great Leader is greeted with great fanfare. A return to the boundedness of pre-lapsarian times is heralded as a triumph. Fence in existence, the builder of walls, the distributer of power. Nomos and Polis.
He inaugurates a politics of the heroic future now, establishing heaven-on-earth. Redemption in an all or nothing world. The politics of the theatre comes to replace one of pragmatic and rational concerns; it is based on anger, fear, suspicion, cruelty, and instinct rather than reason, compromise and scepticism. It can only succeed by infantilizing large sections of the population. But, ultimately, such a possibility depends on the 'sacralization' of categories in the 19th century: race, class, nation usurp the palce of the divine. Nazism, with its neo-barbarism, has one foot in Teutionic myth.
From Kadare's ' The Successor' :
Modern tyrannical power is constructed backwards and is deliberately ambiguous (as in a dream, one has to interpret it starting from the end). Power is nothing but the signature to events. The Great Leader's strength is not determined by his ability to stand opposed to the individual as a semi-divine, superhuman 'other'. Power is not hierarchial but total and ubiquitous. The individual is enclosed in a reality from which he cannot escape, paralysed by indecision, never sure which of the myriad doors is the real way out since each one looks equally enticing. It is a world of cul-de-sacs and bridges and paths that lead nowhere. He has the snaeaking suspicion that each one, like his howls of protest are actually part of the system orf ruse and deception. The more he struggles, the more deeply embroiled he becomes in the nexus of power relations. The ultimate symbol of this type of power is the labyrinth, Piranesi's prison, sybilline and oracular, complex warren-like corridors peopled by bureaucrats, functionaries, and pen-pushers. The banality of evil.
It is not the case that knowledge is power. The hold of the Great Leader on us is predicated on our inability to say or know anything about his power; he is shrouded in a veil of mystery, his power is everywhere and nowhere. The most insignificant detail comes to be invested with the most wonderous meaning. The steel of his power lies in his ability to generate and calculate dissonance, ambiguity. We are caught in his web, bewitched by the spell he casts.
But ultimately, the true basis of his power rests in his ability to convince us , to 'fake it'. Our allegiance to a false god is what sustains the illusionist...it is our desire to believe in the spectacle before our eyes. As in Oz we are taken in by the brilliant mechanism of power itself, the dazzling display of magical thinking. But it is always because we wanted to be seduced by the splendour of the fictions of our soul that we could be so entranced.
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