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OBSERVATIONS FROM UMAIR HAQUE Umair Haque: The Age of the Scapegoat (and the Fascist) ... Why We’re Clutching at Straws For a Future — While the World Is Stuck Going Nowhere 
Image Credit: BrainyQuote Original article: https://eand.co/the-age-of-the-scapegoat-and-the-fascist-289d90664be4 Peter Burgess COMMENTARY I do not consider myself a student of history, but I got a reasonably good education that included more history than most students seem to be getting today. I became very interested in the history of engineering and technology at a quite young age. My most favorite book was about 'How Things Work' which taught me the basics of everything mechanical from steam engines and IC engines to jet engines. As a child I had access to a collection of my grandfather's Strand Magazines (leather bound volumes) and Harmsworth's Popular Science (also leather bound volumes) from the late 19th century and early 20th century. I marvel at the progress that humankind has made in the past 150 to 200 years in the area of science and technology while at the same time it disturbs me that in important matters relating to the way we enjoy life ... or don't ... we seem to be stuck in the dark ages. As a former 'manager' in the corporate world, it seems that when it comes to tbe bigger socio-enviro-economic system that is the world as a whole, we are managing in the most primitive way imaginable. Given the power that mankind can now bring to bear for good or ill, this is one of my biggest concerns. While the amount of 'knowledge' has increased exponentially over the last 200 years, our capacity to use this knowledge in a positive and constructive way has not kept pace. This is dangerous, anbd not fully appreciated by most of those with power and influence. Worse, it is being aggravated by a considerable number of greedy individuals and their followers who are gaming the system for their own benefit without much of an understanding of how dangerous this will be. The modern world has huge potential ... it is not being run to take advantage of this. I enjoy reading Umair Haque who seems to have a decent understanding of what is actually going on. Peter Burgess | ||
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The Age of the Scapegoat (and the Fascist)
Why We’re Clutching at Straws For a Future — While the World Is Stuck Going Nowhere Written by Umair Haque January 23rd 2023 So…what kind of a start is your 2023 off to? If you’re like a lot of people I know, it’s not terrible, it’s not great, it’s just…there. Kind of grinding away in the background. It’s like we’re all enduring a visit to the dentist that lasts forever these days. There’s the drill, whirring away, and we’ve done our best to numb our nerve endings to the pain, but really, we’re wondering: “when the hell is this going to be over?” This, of course, meaning this period in history. This weird, strange, and bad one. If I had to put a word to it, I’d say: everything feels stuck. And there’s a good reason for that. It is. From the world, which is making little to no progress on its big challenges, to our civilization, which is making no progress at all, but regress, to your life and mine, because, well, we’re like swimmers trying to stay afloat in stormy seas. And hoping, maybe, that the rescue party’s on the way. But…is it? So what is it? What’s making everything…stuck? I think an answer goes like this. This is the Age of the Scapegoat. Everywhere you look, people have become obsessed, ruinously, maniacally, with scapegoats — not you and me, but the kind of people who seem to have lost their minds, and plunged down a deep, dark rabbit hole of lunacy. In the middle of all that is left a void of chaos, because, of course, such people still wield very real political power in our societies…but when half of a society has gone off the deep end, as in literally fallen into a rabbit hole of lunacy, and the rest of us are hitched to them, what is there left to do but pull for dear life, and hope your muscles don’t give way? Maybe you see the point of my little metaphor a bit. Let me put all that a little more formally. Inequality and downward mobility are causing a widespread loss of confidence, trust, and faith in institutions, as people who give up on them get radicalized by disinformation, misinformation, and Big Lies. And that, in turn, destabilizes democracy. At the center of this vicious cycle lies the figure of the…scapegoat. And scapegoats, in this day and age, come so fast and furious that this week, you might have forgotten last week’s. Was it just a handful of days ago that the Creepy Billionaire Who Bought Twitter was scapegoating…Fauci? Nor are scapegoats just people, as that example itself illustrates: now, in a sinister turn, scapegoats are becoming institutions, systems, ideas, things-in-themselves. Vaccines. Being gay. Books. Classes, as in, the kind taught at school. Right down to words. Scapegoats have always been symbolic, but this day and age is that of the scapegoat because they are crossing red lines, bright ones — going from “just” being people, which is bad enough, to being abstractions themselves, like, say, vaccines, or theories, and when that line is crossed, my friend, well, bad things, like Inquisitions, tend to happen. I’m not saying there’s about to be an Inquisition. Far from it. I’m saying that lunatics already sit on the…Homeland Security Committee. Or run entire states, like Florida. Or have driven entire societies out of their minds, like… Let’s start with today’s most shocking story of a rich, developed nation that…threw it all away: Britain. If you needed a perfect example of this being the Age of the Scapegoat, you could do little better than Britain. Britain’s conservatives — fanatical ones, lunatics — have been in power for twelve years. How did they manage that? Through a kind of political sleight of hand: they managed to convince and persuade Brits that the biggest threat to their society was…immigrants. But not “immigrants,” really, in that sense of the word: “foreigners,” “aliens,” dirty uncouth things who were poisoning society, the economy, culture, all of it. The unwanted, the sinister, the dangerous. Immigrants? They weren’t doctors and lawyers and surgeons and nurses — they were human traffickers and job-stealers and benefits scroungers and so forth. Amazingly enough, Brits fell for it. Now, a well-read person might observe that Britain’s a society particularly vulnerable to this Big Lie — I mean, go back a thousand years, and you’ve got King Ethelred exterminating the Danes on the St Brice’s Day Massacre. There’s a weird and long history here, of cultural fragility, of paranoia, of prejudice — even as Britain, in many ways, for example with the creation of the NHS, or the invention of modern public parks and museums and so forth, helped spearhead modernity, too. At either rate, Brits fell for the Big Lie, and the rest is history. You know that part, because I’ve talked about how shocking and unreal Britain’s decline is — the statistics just imploding off the charts. What’s worth discussing here, though, is just how perfect an example of the vicious cycle above all this is. What made Brits so vulnerable to the Big Lie of Scapegoating? Well, they lost faith in the future. Inequality and downward mobility began to drive them out of their minds. As they lost confidence and trust in the future, in the social contract, in institutions, in everything, really — democracy began to wobble, then stopped spinning entirely. It destabilized — to the point that lunatics and fanatics now govern a country which used to be the paragon and envy of the rich world, with total impunity. Every day, there’s a new scandal, and every day, it doesn’t matter, register, because the Big Lie is all that’s left. Quick, everyone — don’t look at that, fear the scapegoats!! Why, they’re “invading” us! Hence, there’s Britain’s government, attacking Holocaust survivors…in public…to applause. See the vicious cycle at work? At its heart was inequality. And inequality proceeded to destabilize British democracy to the point that, right about now, LOL, everyone’s left baffled, wondering…what democracy? But how can democracy even begin to work when people believe obviously fatuous Big Lies, the way that…Brits do? After all, they don’t have ambulances and doctors because there aren’t enough of those dirty foreigners…the very ones they hate and despise and fear…and demonize…enough…to run straight into the all-powerful arms of fanatics and lunatics telling that very Big Lie. See how tangled this web of explosive insanity is? Then there’s America. In some ways, America’s doing better than Britain — Biden has a plan and vision to revitalize the American economy, meaning it’s imploding middle and working class, for the first time since the last World War. Big Deal. Great stuff. But in another way, America’s doing even worse. That’s because the line from simply demonizing hated figureheads, to abstractions and ideas, is being crossed. Scapegoating is metastasizing into a harder, even more violent and dangerous form. Who are America’s scapegoats? Wrong question, now. The right one is: what are America’s scapegoats? And when you ask it that way, a troubling set of answers begin to emerge. Words are America’s latest scapegoats, as are classes in schools, like the ones just banned in Florida. Imagine banning teaching…history…to kids. Specifically, Black history. Feels ominous, doesn’t it? That’s because it goes even beyond scapegoating Black people, which is bad enough — it makes a scapegoat of knowledge, history, truth, equality, justice, all at once. All of this is why Orwell tried to make the point in 1984, as best he could, that the scapegoat was at the heart of the human tragedy. Especially when scapegoats ceased to be people — and became ideas. What else are America’s scapegoats? Being gay is now — it’s not just about hating gay people anymore, now it’s about kids who might be gay. It’s about kids learning that being gay is a real thing, not a choice, not a perversion, but a way of existing as the person you are. The idea of being gay — for all of us, especially young people — has become the scapegoat itself. You can see that, too, happening with all kinds of things in America — ideas are becoming scapegoats. What’s the deal with the anti-vaxxers? Well, on one level, they believe Big Lies about vaccines — but on another, deeper level, they have been persuaded that science and reason themselves are to be scapegoats, demonized, derided, mocked, hated…destroyed. See how…gruesome that is? To see anti-vaxxers and simply say, those are people who don’t believe in vaccines, is to miss the point. They’re people to whom science itself is an enemy, something to extinguish, hence, they hate, say, Fauci, or whomever is the most public-facing scientist tomorrow. But science is one of the most crucial pillars of modernity there is. And such people don’t “not just believe in” it — they scapegoat it, for their own woes. That is a frightening development indeed. Let’s take another example, in case it’s not yet clear. Think about the way that regularly, now, the far right, well, massacres people. In gay nightclubs, in public places, at schools, and what have you. What’s that about? It’s not just about hating the people, though of course that’s a crucial part of it. Rather, it’s about hating what happens between the people. There are gay people, kissing. There are women, dancing and drinking and laughing. There are kids, learning. This can’t be allowed. See how the ideas themselves become the scapegoat? In the previous case, the idea was science, which was scapegoated for the woes of the fanatics, whether in the form of vaccines or the “adrenochrome,” aka the blood of kids, that “elites” (read: Jews and women) drink, as a youth potion. In these examples, the scapegoat has become the central ideas of modernity: that people can coexist, happily, even if they differ fundamentally, in terms of say, sexual orientation (gay people), gender (women, trans people), and that between all people, relationships exist, because there is freedom to associate and express yourself and be intimate however you like, which is what being modern is. Let’s go even further. In the kids’ example — my God, those kids are learning it’s OK to be gay, they’re reading banned books, why, someone must stop this!! — what’s the scapegoat? It’s not just the kids, though of course it’s also them — it’s ideas. Many of them. Like the one that young minds should inculcate what the rest of us have learned from history, which, for example, is basic stuff like “hating people is foolish and pointless and immoral.” Or that learning itself is something to cherish and treasure, because it’s how societies mature and grow. Or, in an even deeper way, the scapegoat is the egalitarian ideal of a modern society — to be shattered and replaced by atavistic notions of hierarchy. Kid, you’re a man. You have to be learn to be violent and build some muscles. You? You’re just a woman. You don’t need to learn about “science,” which isn’t anything but dangerous anyways — and neither of you have any reason whatsoever to learn about even darker heresies like being gay, or that minorities have their own histories to tell, or that the world wasn’t always stuck in the Dark Ages. See how ideas have become scapegoats in America? That’s a truly dangerous development, because of course, when ideas become scapegoats, it’s that much easier to do violence in their name. Now, you see people who “believe” in those ideas as not really human to begin with. The idea is what’s destroying you, your kind, your master race, your gender, your social class, your community of the true of blood and pure of faith or so forth — and so anyone on its side, well, now, they’re your enemy. Let me do one final example, because I want to make this really, really clear, since it’s a little abstract. Think of the way that incels go from sad lonely guys…to radicalized woman-haters…to men who commit massacres. How does that happen? It’s not just about hating women, on some trivial, high-school level — it’s much, much deeper than that. It has to be, to motivate them to kill in large numbers. They’ve developed this whole alternate thought-world, an ideology all their own. You know it a bit by now — some men are “Chads,” who are genetically superior (note how already fascist this is), and they sexually monopolize all the women, especially the “Stacys,” who are “10/10” babymakers. Note how completely at odds with reality this. Just walk down a street — any street — and you’ll literally see that, no, actually, it’s not just Brad Pitt with a million wives, wow, look, right there there are totally average guys with girlfriends and wives and kids and the rest of it. Literally…everywhere…on the planet. And yet this ideology persists. They really believe in it. Why? Because it’s a form of scapegoating that’s about the idea. What’s being scapegoated here? Free will itself. In this ideology, people aren’t things of free will at all — they’re just biologically determined robots. Just genes and sex drives, with no, say, reason, morality, thought. Nobody, in this worldview, has ever sat down at a bar, had a conversation with a perfect stranger, and began to fall in love, because no such institution, feeling, idea — love — exists. And so having denied themselves a world in which the possibility of love can ever even exist, of course, they go right out and kill, because, well, that’d drive anyone mad with despair and rage. That’s not a justification. It’s an explanation. Here, you see women being scapegoats, but along the way, too, these poor fools have also made scapegoats of themselves. The Incel forums are full of young sad guys who literally smash up their own facial bones because they believe in biodeterminism, that genetics equals “looks” which are destiny. They don’t seem to grasp that all this is — literally — hurting them, too. That is because the larger scapegoat is ideas: freedom, love, will, selfhood. All the things that are modernity, on a very, very deep level. To this ideology, none of those should, can, ought to, can be allowed to, exist — they must be destroyed wherever they’re found, which is why these radlcalized fools go out and shoot up gay clubs or churches or women or so forth. Now. That’s a lot, and it’s getting very abstract. Let me tie up the point I want to make with that last example, because it makes them best, I think. Inequality. Downward mobility. The loss of opportunity. They drive a loss of trust and faith in institutions, as scapegoating reaches newer and higher levels. Sure, Brits scapegoat dirty foreigners, even while, LOL, they can’t get ambulances, because, well, there aren’t people left to drive them. But that’s not even a deep form of scapegoating. A deep form of it? That’s incels and far-right foot soldiers going out there and massacring innocent people they hate — precisely because those people, doing things normal people do in modern societies, loving, learning, knowing, associating, relating…those very things, and the ideas they represent, have now become the scapegoat. From science to knowledge, from truth to justice, from free will to love itself, right down to the modern notion of selfhood. That, by the way, is that we’re all here, each and every one of us, to fulfill our potential. A phrase that’s made fun of a lot, but that’s wrong. It is still the idea of modernity, and that idea still matters. When we make fun of it, we’re just aligning ourselves with the far right, only we don’t know it. Yes, we all have potential, and no, it’s not my job to limit or inhibit or suffocate yours. Nor do I have the right to. When I begin to do that? That’s when I scapegoat. That’s when I go blind. The Brits are so blind it’s almost painful to watch them not understand that the very people they’re scapegoating are the ones they need to drive ambulances and be nurses and doctors and everyday workers and so forth, or else their economy just keeps crashing forever. But this pandemic of blindness is sweeping the world. What do the incels see when they look at a woman? Not a person, with potential of her own. Just an opportunity for sexual gratification, denied. They do that precisely because they are sublimating the rage and despair of downward mobility into the forms of women, catastrophizing a winner-take-all economy into that form of sexual relation, too, in other words, scapegoating. What do the far right’s foot soldiers see, when they look at women, immigrants, minorities? Not people with potential of their own, beginning with free will. Just things. Subhumans, and if they’re eliminated, well, so what? What does the average newly radicalized soccer mom see, when she looks at…letters? She doesn’t even see books or words anymore — now, she sees bizarre caricatures of existential threats. My God, that’s not a class — that’s indoctrination by the “elites” into kids being sexually trafficked! That’s not a word — that’s perversion and impurity. That’s not a book — that’s a thing that’s out to get my kid, and turn him into one of them! One of who, exactly? One of the moderns. The people who believe in this thing called potential, which begins with the seed of free will, planted in the soil of liberty, from which the shoots of fulfillment grow. I choose. I choose. What kind of person I will be. How I will contribute to this big, scary world. Whom I’ll love and how. On what ground I will stand, and towards what destiny I’ll reach — and whose arms will link with mine, along the way. In the end, this project? It’s about scapegoating all that. All of us who believe in all that. So that the world, and its societies, go backwards in time, impossibly fast, far, far more rapidly than, yet, many believe. So look around. How far backward has Britain gone, in a few years? To before the last World War. How far backward are America’s Red States going? How far backward are nations like Russia and India heading? You can see the trend, my friends. Our job, those of us who are still sane and humane, is to fight all this. But we don’t fight for modernity with guns and bullets. No. We fight for modernity by loving and living in ways that are truly our own, yet just as selfless, choosing every day, these noble and timeless values, of freedom and justice and truth and equality over their opposites, repression, hierarchy, Big Lies, hate. We enact those with every choice we make. And we never give an inch. To the scapegoating, because that is the project that lies at the heart of collapse — to make everything a scapegoat, until, at last, there’s nothing left but hate and violence, which requires strong, ruthless ubermen to put everyone else in their — obedient, subservient — places. Enacting it. This is the way modernity is won, my friends. But it’s also the way it’s lost. When we neglect that greatest of lessons. This year? I know it’s tough out there. Take my hand, because we’re walking this road together. Let us yet remember it, a little better. January 2023
| The text being discussed is available at | https://eand.co/the-age-of-the-scapegoat-and-the-fascist-289d90664be4 and |