Alfons López Tena: When paranoia meets jingoism

Human brains have limited cognitive skills, and can easily be overloaded to became unable to distinguish fact from fiction, truth from lie. A falsehood becomes true if they have been exposed to it previously, if it confirms strongly-held convictions, if they are emotionally whipped up by it, receive it from multiple sources, and hear it continuously spread. The “illusory truth effect” bias sprouts from being exposed to a lie repeatedly, even from those who debunk it. When hunting the Snark the Bellman knew, “What I tell you three times is true.” Zia Haider Rahman explains it deftly: “Their kind of self-belief seems essential to survive what would otherwise assail them as wave after wave of cognitive dissonance, statements of one thing while knowing the opposite. Surely the dissonance would drive them mad so that the only way through it all is for them actually to believe what they say.”

The cult-like devotion which their leaders are surrounded by ensures there is no such thing as a bad decision, because “for the true believer the pain caused by even the worst policy is merely proof of certain gains just around the corner,” as Sadanand Dhume writes about Narendra Modi, echoing Hannah Arendt’s “Instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” They trust blindly anything which comes from their side, and just as blindly refuse everything which comes from the other side as biased, false, evil. No regrets when things go awry, as they surely will, they always find an explanation founded on blaming scapegoats whilst they continue to refuse thinking and learning. Knowledge and belonging have always been at odds because both trade in the same commodity humans badly strive for: Meaning.

The next stage, to silence, blackmail, coopt, and convince the unbelievers, is even easier: How many people are willing to risk their career, economy, family and friends, their social standing to think for themselves, to endure opprobrium by breaking with groupthink, to stand alone if necessary? How many are strong enough to suffer being treated as traitors, moral wrecks, swivel enemies of the people on the receiving end of obloquy? To be ostracized and become a scapegoat has never been a career prospect nor a rallying cry for the many, and never will. There are some individuals who do not embrace lies even if they help the larger truth they uphold, whose adherence to truth and dignity overcomes their reluctance before the likely outcome their values lead them to. But not so many.

Countries so hopelessly lost in themselves enter a loop where powerlessness feeds delusions which empower impotence-boosting fantasies, with no end in sight while slowly fading into oblivion. Expect nothing thereafter from those nations. They are doomed to depend on the kindness of strangers.

It is therefore no surprise that Catalonia’s independence aim has stalled in a quagmire of wishful thinking, a Marxian “sigh of the oppressed creature” that is both heart-warming and ineffectual: a substantial part of the Catalan people and their mainstream politicians and Brahmins do not want independence, they just desire it as a gift that will be bestowed upon them by a warm-hearted international community which  will force Spain to allow a legally-binding referendum on independence — a sheer nonsense that can only be explained  by sophisticated theoretical constructs such as Lévi-Strauss’ floating signifier, “in itself void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning”, and Lacan’s objet-petit-a: “the recoil imposed on everyone, in so far as it involves terrible promises, by the approach of jouissance as such.” Those Catalans wish independence but don’t want it, they actually want the moral supremacy provided by victimhood, the oxytocin-fuelled dream of their repression, to lose themselves in an endless scopophilic drive to the captivity of the function of desire itself, which perseveres for its mere sake “through which will be revealed the gamut of the object in its – pregenital – relation to the demand of the – post-genital – Other.”

All those peoples and groups that modernity and globalization have left behind crave to be victims and relish that feeling: the ultimate proof that they are right and good, to attain Giglioli’s mysterium iniquitatis, the elevated status of those who have been aggressed (or would like to be, or pretend to have been.) Assuming a real or fake narrative of victimhood and martyrdom, thinking about themselves as a besieged, beleaguered people, is the beginning of a slippery slope toward retribution and revenge against an enemy who victimizes them; which in the right scenario, led by rulers who spread and inflame passions and who wield  the unbridled powers that only a mighty State may provide, becomes the best means to justify themselves to abolish moral boundaries, in order, Fintan O’Toole points out, to “inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group. This allows the members of that group to be dehumanised. Once that has been achieved, you can gradually up the ante, working through the stages from breaking windows to extermination.” When paranoia meets jingoism, a pervasive shadow of looming harm threatens anyone of being drawn before the court of death: “Many people are excited by this kind of exercise of power, its unchecked quality, and they want in their own lives to free up their aggressive speech and action without any checks: no shame, no legal repercussions,” is Judith Butler’s reminder about the populist leaders as the embodiment of their followers’ projections, of their uninhibited will of destruction that intensifies and accelerates the freedom of sadism after constraints are lifted — when people submit to the sheer, spectacular effrontery of their leaders and deceit, malice, recklessness work as an attracting allure: the attributes of power itself.