Raymond Chandler ‘s masterpiece, The Long Goodbye, reminds us that fiction is the best, perhaps only, place to find truth. And if we grant that truth is stranger than fiction, then we should go one step further and stipulate that fiction feels less strange than real life to us because it has the ring of truth to it. On page four Phillip Marlowe, Chandler’s protagonist and literature’s most sublime first person voice, having just happened upon a drunk named Terry Lennox, delivers the truth: “I guess it’s always a mistake to interfere with a drunk. Even if he knows and likes you he is always liable to haul off and poke you in the teeth.” Marlowe being Marlowe, he proceeds to interfere with the drunk, befriending Lennox and, on page six, he gives us the whole truth: “Terry Lennox made me plenty of trouble. But after all that’s my line of work.” Then, on page eighty-six, having just received a letter from Lennox explaining how he (Lennox) is about to kill himself to avoid being murdered in a mountain town in Mexico, Marlowe tells us nothing but the truth: “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”
Chandler’s equation:
Truth=Truth
The Whole Truth= Ignoring the Truth
Nothing but the Truth= Ignoring a problem, i.e. the truth, doesn’t make it go away.
Reading Marlowe, it is impossible not to think about the many traps we’ve set for ourselves, the truths ignored. And, rather ironically, we’ve set our biggest traps by pretending to the throne of true knowledge. In other words, the pithy diagnosis is that we are “often wrong, but never uncertain.” Speaking specifically about climate change while at the same time generalizing his observation, Raymond T. Pierrehumbert restates the diagnosis when he says “In the United States, can we actually have a reality-based, serious deliberative process about anything anymore?” (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/02/nrc_geoengineering_report_climate_hacking_is_dangerous_and_barking_mad.2.html)
One of the things that has often worried me about the idea of an omniscient God is that if God knows everything why would God need to listen to me? This worry might be indigenous to the United States, where everyone knows everything and no one is listening. Or, as Marlowe puts it:
“It was the same old cocktail party, everybody talking too loud, nobody listening, everybody hanging on for dear life…”
What, exactly, are we hanging on to? At the same old cocktail party in 1953 it’s “a mug of the juice.” Today we’re hanging on to something equally intoxicating, and you can still call it juice if you are willing to dig back into pop culture circa 1992, when the movie Juice, starring the late Tupak Shakur, told the story of “4 inner-city teens who get caught up in the pursuit of power and happiness, which they refer to as ‘the juice.’” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104573/mediaindex) So, to mash up Raymond Chandler with Juice auteur Ernest R. Dickerson, Everybody is hanging on for dear life to power and happiness, to a mug of the juice.
It is this desperate clinging to power and happiness that makes a collective “reality-based, serious deliberative process,” a process you might simply call being adults, well nigh impossible. To understand exactly how this all happens we could do much worse than to turn to Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the subject supposed to know. According to Lacan, transference, that fundamental exchange between analysand and analyst, has nothing at all to do with the analyst’s actual fund of knowledge. Instead:
“It is the analysand's supposition of a subject who knows that initiates the analytic process rather than the knowledge actually possessed by the analyst… the analyst is often thought to know the secret meaning of the analysand's words, the significations of speech of which even the speaker is unaware.” (http://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Subject_supposed_to_know)
All of which leads to the analyst being “credited at some point with a certain infallibility.” (ibid) Infallibility. What could possibly lead to more power and happiness than that? But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Because, to do justice to psychoanalysis, we must note that “the analyst is aware” (at least in theory) “that there is a split between him and the knowledge attributed to him…. The analyst must realise that, of the knowledge attributed to him by the analysand, he knows nothing.” (ibid)
My gambit is that we walk around supposing that there are subjects who know all the time in everyday interpersonal relations, but without ever acknowledging the split between the subjects and the knowledge attributed to them. We know well and truly that we know nothing, but we keep that dirty little secret locked up tight because no one else seems to be owning up to this, which further leads us to suppose that quite possibly we are the only ones who know nothing. Everyone else, then, is supposed to know everything that I manifestly don’t. Making it all too easy to fall under the subject supposed to know’s spell, e.g. at Jiffy Lube when they inevitably tell me I need a new air filter yet again.
But what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and we’ve locked our dirty little secret up so tightly that we too can be supposed to know that, e.g., Philip Marlowe is “literature’s most sublime first person voice.” (Full disclosure: I was inspired to read Raymond Chandler by the praise heaped upon him by one of my own personal subjects supposed to know, Slavoj Zizek. Zizek is, famously, a Lacanian, so I guess I obviously haven’t yet achieved the end of my “analysis” with Zizek by recognizing that he, too, knows nothing, i.e. “The end of analysis comes when the analysand de-supposes the analyst of knowledge.” (ibid))
To be clear, I am not suggesting that there is anything wrong with the pursuit of knowledge, in and of itself. When I take my car in to Jiffy Lube it is important that they do know how to change my car’s oil, just as it is important that I know that air filters do not actually need to be changed every 3,000 miles. Our civilization’s pathology is not to be found in the pursuit of knowledge, but in the trumping up of provisional knowledge as absolute certainty in the service of power and happiness. We are all like bad Lacanian analysts, who occupy the position of the subject supposed to know without ever acknowledging that, in fact, we know nothing. And when I say that we know nothing, I am interpreting Socrates’ famous “I know that I know nothing” to mean I know that I know nothing for certain. If there’s one thing that we human beings aren’t allowed it’s certainty. The second we had certainty all science and prayer would end. (The fact that science and prayer are both linked to uncertainty perhaps provides at least a glimmer of hope that the war between science and religion is, at bottom, unnecessary.)
More equations:
Knowledge= I know nothing
Knowledge= power
I know nothing= power
Edward Brown, in Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings, quotes his teacher Suzuki Roshi explaining that “Zen is to feel your way along in the dark, not knowing what you will meet, not already knowing what to do.” Strangest thing in the world: we are at our most powerful when we are feeling our way along in the dark, together.
Showing posts with label Power. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Power. Show all posts
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Saturday, January 18, 2014
Lady Miss Kier's Wager
A few years ago I was manning the grill in our backyard on the day of the Preakness Stakes, run quite literally across the street at Pimlico. As I tended to the burgers, frankfurters and BBQ chicken I was buffeted by a blast of noise from the sky that was immediately distinct from the single engine props tugging their advertisements for surprisingly affordable auto insurance and no recovery-no fee legal representation. I looked up in time to see a trio of warcraft in formation, including a vintage WWII fighter and, ominously, a B-2 Stealth Bomber. Given my pedigree as the son of two peace activists, as well as the pro-peace positions I had clearly staked out in high stakes debates with the Republican wing of my personal coterie, one might have expected me to react, if not with the bout of actual (i.e. not existential ) nausea that my father succumbed to on the night of Ronald Reagan’s decisive 1980 election, then at least with a pause to consider the fates of all those on the receiving end of the Stealth Bomber’s payload in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. (Just how many have been killed by the Stealth’s delivery of over 1.5 million pounds of munitions, we may never know, though the dead do include several staff from the Chinese embassy mistakenly targeted in the Kosovo operations in 1999. Other “mistaken” targets lack the clout to merit inclusion on Wikipedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_B-2_Spirit ) Instead, I ran around the backyard, in the presence of my wife, her cousin Jason, and my three daughters whooping and hollering as if UNC hoops had just beaten Duke at the buzzer. I was, for the brief duration of the flyover and its immediate sonic aftermath, alive.
Power’s hook is all in the feeling. As the shadow of the Stealth Bomber touched my kith and kin I exalted in the visceral sense that since this was America’s plane it was also my plane, one that might drop bombs on homes far, far away, but never on mine. The strangest thing about the American empire is that we are a really existing democracy, making all of us voting taxpayers into little emperors. My “Yee-Haww!” as the planes flew over may have sounded like Bo and Luke Duke jumping over yet another creek in their politically incorrect Dodge Charger, but was actually a direct translation of Leonardo DiCaprio’s “I’m the king of the world!”
Power seduces. Much more importantly, it is all that seduces. This was Nietzsche’s great insight:
“--do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?--This world is the will to power--and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power--and nothing besides!”
At first blush, Nietzsche’s diagnosis is cause for nothing but despair, at least for the believers among us, seemingly aligning with his more famous but much less consequential proclamation that “God is dead.” Inconsequential because, as I will hope to demonstrate in a moment, these two concepts, the will to power and the death of God, are mutually exclusive. (Strange, the jokes one remembers. I can remember approximately three, one of which was delivered by a long forgotten stand-up comic on cable TV in the early nineties, when, upon moving to New Jersey, my parents finally got cable, enabling me to spend my first summer home from boarding school, when I was still too young to work at McDonald’s, watching Yo! MTV Raps and, apparently, stand-up comics. The joke went: “Jews for Jesus. That’s like vegetarians for meat.” Funny, though not remarkably so. Nevertheless, I will carry “vegetarians for meat” with me to the grave. It is my archetype for the mutually exclusive. Because few things give me greater pleasure than apologizing, I almost tacked on a “with apologies to any actual Jews for Jesus” after that sentence, although I must say it would make extending such an apology a lot easier if everyone connected to Jesus, “Jewish” or otherwise, would just leave the Jews alone…awkward pause…except when marrying them… and agreeing to raise the kids Jewish….)
But before turning to fun with metaphysics, a few thoughts on how the left is constantly shooting itself in the foot in its distaste for the realities of Nietzsche’s will to power. The first way, of course, is in the cloying insistence on alternative, non-hierarchical social structures. The best way to find a really hierarchical left-leaning non-profit is to find one that touts itself as non-hierarchical, as anyone knows who’s ever worked in one. I would note that the givenness of will to power and the inevitability of hierarchy make my job as a democratic socialist harder, but not impossible. Hierarchical democratic socialists are not vegetarians for meat. Instead, to describe hierarchical democratic socialists I would borrow Tina Fey’s line that “Bitches get stuff done,” except that in the case of hierarchical democratic socialism, “Bitches get stuff done for everyone.”
Secondly, the left is constantly digging its own political grave by making people feel less powerful, rather than more. The perfect example is the left’s response to the insane rate at which Americans are offing one another with guns. Just today, while watching the 12:00 news in the office cafeteria I learned of yet another school shooting, this one in a middle school in New Mexico, as well as the case of a retired cop who shot and killed someone for a violation of movie theater etiquette (texting during the previews). The left’s response, of course, is to take away all of the guns, which makes sense if the people have genuine fealty to you as a benevolent despot, but in a democracy whose very life blood is fear only makes Americans feel more threatened, i.e. less powerful, and actually ends up contributing to the vicious cycle of a) isolated mass shooting incident, b)mass media circus, c) leftist calls for gun control , d) citizens who fear their countrymen (who might kill them) and their government (which might take away the only means of protection they believe in) in equal measure, and e) increased gun sales.
If the left ever hopes to achieve its vision of peace and justice it needs to take its cue from unexpected quarters. My very first compact disc was Deee Lite’s World Clique, which included their breakout hit “Groove is in the Heart.” But my favorite Deee Lite number was always “Power of Love” (not to be confused with Huey Lewis and the News’ “The Power of Love,” which easily slots into the top ten all time movie soundtrack songs somewhere behind Bill Conti’s “Gonna Fly Now (Theme from Rocky,)” which is a unanimous #1). Lady Miss Kier opens “Power of Love” by stating and restating her belief in the power of love six times, six, perhaps not incoincidentally, being the Kabbalistic number for love. (www.voxxthepsychic.com/kabb-numerologyynbr6.html ) Having established her power of love bona fides, her very next line, “Feel the power,” may well prove the three most insightful words uttered about love since Shakespeare’s “Love is blind.”
Just as Friedrich Nietzsche was the first properly Darwinian philosopher, Lady Miss Kier is the first truly Nietzschean lover. Her enjoinder to feel the power of love is the light at the end of the tunnel we’ve been crawling through since natural selection begat the will to power. Lady Miss Kier’s great gamble is that feeling the power of love is the most powerful feeling of all. It is the inverse of Pascal’s Wager re: belief in the existence of God, where “if you gain, you gain all; if you lose you lose nothing.” With Lady Miss Kier’s Wager we may still gain all, but if we lose we lose the world to a will to power forever unredeemed; we lose the world to the Stealth Bomber.
If the wager is won, Lady Miss Kier is proven right, and Nietzsche is proven both right and wrong. Right in that the will to power is with us forevermore. In which case “Come on Feel,” to borrow a line from the vastly underrated Lemonheads (“It’s a Shame About Ray” is the shiznitt, if you will), becomes the left’s trump card in its new project to make people feel more powerful, rather than less. Wrong in that reports of God’s death turn out to have been greatly exaggerated. Because if the wager is won, Nietzsche can’t have it both ways. If the wager is won, “This world is the will to power--and nothing besides!,” is nothing other than “A Love Supreme.”
Of course, one can’t tout universal love in a discussion of Nietzsche without reckoning with his theory of master-slave morality. While never explicitly endorsing “master moraility,” Nietzsche reserved his fiercest criticisms for “slave morality,” the Judeo-Christian moral calculus he understood to be the weapon of the weak in the struggle against their powerful overlords, or masters:
“As master morality originates in the strong, slave morality originates in the weak. Because slave morality is a reaction to oppression, it villainizes its oppressors. Slave morality is the inverse of master morality. As such, it is characterized by pessimism and cynicism. Slave morality is created in opposition to what master morality values as 'good'. Slave morality does not aim at exerting one's will by strength but by careful subversion. It does not seek to transcend the masters, but to make them slaves as well. The essence of slave morality is utility: the good is what is most useful for the whole community, not the strong.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master–slave_morality )
What if Nietzsche is correct, and we turn to love not out of love but simply in order to beat back our oppressors? Might we still not find, like Alexander Fleming mistakenly leaving out a petri dish of Staphylococcus and, voila, discovering penicillin, that we had, with our “slave morality,” won not merely a round in the never ending war of all against all, but instead, and quite miraculously, uncovered the singular instrument that could win the peace once and for all, for “slave” and “master” alike?
But if feeling the power of love is so potent, to the point where as one approaches pure love one comes equally close to omnipotence, then why are Americans using handguns to shoot each other in movie theatres and drones to kill brown people in what can no longer justly be called the theatre of war (just as the Global War on Terror cannot justly be called a war unless we recognize it as what French philosopher Alain Badiou has termed “The war against nothing.”)? The answer has everything to do with fear and its management.
It says here that love is omnipotent precisely because true love is fearless; if God is love, then the presence of God is simply the absence of fear. It gets confusing because aggression, in both the threat and the use of force, feels powerful. The seeming paradox is that the aggressor doesn’t feel afraid at all (I certainly didn’t feel an ounce of fear as the Stealth Bomber flexed its muscles on my behalf), even as the use or threat of force is rooted deeply in fear. To explain the pseudo-fearlessness of aggression it will help to define a relatively obscure Kleinian psychoanalytic term, projective identification:
“Projective identification is a term introduced by Melanie Klein to describe the process whereby - in a close relationship, as between mother/child, lovers, therapist/patient - parts of the self may in unconscious phantasy be thought of as being forced into the other person.
While based on Freud's concept of psychological projection, projective identification represents a step beyond it: in Laing's words, ‘The one person does not use the other merely as a hook to hang projections on. He strives to find in the other, or to induce the other to become, the very embodiment of projection.’ Feelings which cannot be consciously accessed by the one person are defensively projected in such a way as to evoke in the recipient precisely the thoughts or feelings projected.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projective_identification )
An “example can be seen in a person who doubts his/her own intelligence level and attempts to manipulate others’ perceptions/opinions by discourse with ‘elevated airs’ or by referring to themselves as having a high IQ or implied superior knowledge /expertise. They attempt to lead others to feel unintelligent by their complicated intellectual-sounding verbiage, due to their own doubts about their own intelligence,” ( http://guiltedgirls.tripod.com/id9.html ) (… second awkward pause… this example has nothing to do with this blog, which is clearly just a vehicle for my artistic self expression… we now return to the regularly scheduled complicated intellectual-sounding verbiage…)
What does projective identification have to do with handguns, drones, and Stealth Bombers? At the risk of engaging in what my favorite British public intellectual Terry Eagleton likes to call New Age claptrap (a risk which is admittedly immaterial given that Blogspot.com lists but one follower for this blog, who is much more likely my mother than Terry Eagleton), I am going to suggest that projective identification isn’t confined to interpersonal relations between homo sapiens. In fact, I am going to suggest that it isn’t even confined to relations between what we typically think of as sentient beings, e.g. between a man and his dog, as in the case of my yelling at Sy the Dog for once again pooping in the house, which is really my attempt to make Sy the Dog carry around the shame I feel for some relatively prolonged bed wetting and once pooping my pants at choir practice in 4th grade (might have been 5th, but 4th feels just slightly less shameful).
The New Age claptrap I am suggesting is that human beings can engage in projective identification with inanimate objects. In the grand tradition of New Age speculations, I am going to utilize both the word “energy” and reference advanced physics without really understanding the physics involved. Here goes: According to Wikipedia, it is a true fact that matter and energy are one and the same, mass simply being a highly concentrated form of energy. See E=MCsquared. (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence )And, as anyone who has spent 5 minutes in the New Age section at Barnes and Noble can attest, consciousness is energy. (What the hell, here’s a link to a New Age site explaining exactly how to recognize energy as consciousness: http://m.wikihow.com/Recognize-Energy-as-Consciousness ) The upshot of all this, none of which, all joking aside, seems stranger to me than the materialist notion that consciousness is a chance byproduct of matter, is that projective identification between people and material objects is a process occurring between two energy systems, just as it is when it occurs between two human beings. In fact, there is an entire tradition within western philosophy, panpsychism, which holds that all entities in the universe, from the soup of the animate to the nuts of the inanimate, have some kind of mental life. Being a panpsychist, which I am, (which makes me a panpsychist hierarchical democratic socialist, which I think has great potential as a conversation starter at parties) makes this whole projective-identification-with-weapons thing easier to swallow.
Because the fear at the heart of aggression gets projected right into all the varieties of ordnance: guns, bombs, ammo, bazookas, Stealth Bombers, etc. This, advanced physics notwithstanding, is how all weapons work; they are nothing other than projections of fear, each explosion a detonation of disowned terror. The historic advance in weaponry, right up to The Bomb itself, is representative of the fact that we have a) become technical savants, and b) cultivated enough fear to blow up the world five times over. ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/do-we-really-need-to-blow_b_491367.html ) Not feeling it? Neither am I, which is the whole point. We’ve projected our fears into our warheads and their magnificently expensive delivery systems (weaponry is an expensive anesthetic- one Stealth Bomber costs 2.1 billion dollars) so that we don’t have to feel a thing.
“I believe in the power of love (I believe), I believe in the power of love (I believe), I believe in the power of love, Let them call me naïve, But I still believe”
Power’s hook is all in the feeling. As the shadow of the Stealth Bomber touched my kith and kin I exalted in the visceral sense that since this was America’s plane it was also my plane, one that might drop bombs on homes far, far away, but never on mine. The strangest thing about the American empire is that we are a really existing democracy, making all of us voting taxpayers into little emperors. My “Yee-Haww!” as the planes flew over may have sounded like Bo and Luke Duke jumping over yet another creek in their politically incorrect Dodge Charger, but was actually a direct translation of Leonardo DiCaprio’s “I’m the king of the world!”
Power seduces. Much more importantly, it is all that seduces. This was Nietzsche’s great insight:
“--do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?--This world is the will to power--and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power--and nothing besides!”
At first blush, Nietzsche’s diagnosis is cause for nothing but despair, at least for the believers among us, seemingly aligning with his more famous but much less consequential proclamation that “God is dead.” Inconsequential because, as I will hope to demonstrate in a moment, these two concepts, the will to power and the death of God, are mutually exclusive. (Strange, the jokes one remembers. I can remember approximately three, one of which was delivered by a long forgotten stand-up comic on cable TV in the early nineties, when, upon moving to New Jersey, my parents finally got cable, enabling me to spend my first summer home from boarding school, when I was still too young to work at McDonald’s, watching Yo! MTV Raps and, apparently, stand-up comics. The joke went: “Jews for Jesus. That’s like vegetarians for meat.” Funny, though not remarkably so. Nevertheless, I will carry “vegetarians for meat” with me to the grave. It is my archetype for the mutually exclusive. Because few things give me greater pleasure than apologizing, I almost tacked on a “with apologies to any actual Jews for Jesus” after that sentence, although I must say it would make extending such an apology a lot easier if everyone connected to Jesus, “Jewish” or otherwise, would just leave the Jews alone…awkward pause…except when marrying them… and agreeing to raise the kids Jewish….)
But before turning to fun with metaphysics, a few thoughts on how the left is constantly shooting itself in the foot in its distaste for the realities of Nietzsche’s will to power. The first way, of course, is in the cloying insistence on alternative, non-hierarchical social structures. The best way to find a really hierarchical left-leaning non-profit is to find one that touts itself as non-hierarchical, as anyone knows who’s ever worked in one. I would note that the givenness of will to power and the inevitability of hierarchy make my job as a democratic socialist harder, but not impossible. Hierarchical democratic socialists are not vegetarians for meat. Instead, to describe hierarchical democratic socialists I would borrow Tina Fey’s line that “Bitches get stuff done,” except that in the case of hierarchical democratic socialism, “Bitches get stuff done for everyone.”
Secondly, the left is constantly digging its own political grave by making people feel less powerful, rather than more. The perfect example is the left’s response to the insane rate at which Americans are offing one another with guns. Just today, while watching the 12:00 news in the office cafeteria I learned of yet another school shooting, this one in a middle school in New Mexico, as well as the case of a retired cop who shot and killed someone for a violation of movie theater etiquette (texting during the previews). The left’s response, of course, is to take away all of the guns, which makes sense if the people have genuine fealty to you as a benevolent despot, but in a democracy whose very life blood is fear only makes Americans feel more threatened, i.e. less powerful, and actually ends up contributing to the vicious cycle of a) isolated mass shooting incident, b)mass media circus, c) leftist calls for gun control , d) citizens who fear their countrymen (who might kill them) and their government (which might take away the only means of protection they believe in) in equal measure, and e) increased gun sales.
If the left ever hopes to achieve its vision of peace and justice it needs to take its cue from unexpected quarters. My very first compact disc was Deee Lite’s World Clique, which included their breakout hit “Groove is in the Heart.” But my favorite Deee Lite number was always “Power of Love” (not to be confused with Huey Lewis and the News’ “The Power of Love,” which easily slots into the top ten all time movie soundtrack songs somewhere behind Bill Conti’s “Gonna Fly Now (Theme from Rocky,)” which is a unanimous #1). Lady Miss Kier opens “Power of Love” by stating and restating her belief in the power of love six times, six, perhaps not incoincidentally, being the Kabbalistic number for love. (www.voxxthepsychic.com/kabb-numerologyynbr6.html ) Having established her power of love bona fides, her very next line, “Feel the power,” may well prove the three most insightful words uttered about love since Shakespeare’s “Love is blind.”
Just as Friedrich Nietzsche was the first properly Darwinian philosopher, Lady Miss Kier is the first truly Nietzschean lover. Her enjoinder to feel the power of love is the light at the end of the tunnel we’ve been crawling through since natural selection begat the will to power. Lady Miss Kier’s great gamble is that feeling the power of love is the most powerful feeling of all. It is the inverse of Pascal’s Wager re: belief in the existence of God, where “if you gain, you gain all; if you lose you lose nothing.” With Lady Miss Kier’s Wager we may still gain all, but if we lose we lose the world to a will to power forever unredeemed; we lose the world to the Stealth Bomber.
If the wager is won, Lady Miss Kier is proven right, and Nietzsche is proven both right and wrong. Right in that the will to power is with us forevermore. In which case “Come on Feel,” to borrow a line from the vastly underrated Lemonheads (“It’s a Shame About Ray” is the shiznitt, if you will), becomes the left’s trump card in its new project to make people feel more powerful, rather than less. Wrong in that reports of God’s death turn out to have been greatly exaggerated. Because if the wager is won, Nietzsche can’t have it both ways. If the wager is won, “This world is the will to power--and nothing besides!,” is nothing other than “A Love Supreme.”
Of course, one can’t tout universal love in a discussion of Nietzsche without reckoning with his theory of master-slave morality. While never explicitly endorsing “master moraility,” Nietzsche reserved his fiercest criticisms for “slave morality,” the Judeo-Christian moral calculus he understood to be the weapon of the weak in the struggle against their powerful overlords, or masters:
“As master morality originates in the strong, slave morality originates in the weak. Because slave morality is a reaction to oppression, it villainizes its oppressors. Slave morality is the inverse of master morality. As such, it is characterized by pessimism and cynicism. Slave morality is created in opposition to what master morality values as 'good'. Slave morality does not aim at exerting one's will by strength but by careful subversion. It does not seek to transcend the masters, but to make them slaves as well. The essence of slave morality is utility: the good is what is most useful for the whole community, not the strong.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master–slave_morality )
What if Nietzsche is correct, and we turn to love not out of love but simply in order to beat back our oppressors? Might we still not find, like Alexander Fleming mistakenly leaving out a petri dish of Staphylococcus and, voila, discovering penicillin, that we had, with our “slave morality,” won not merely a round in the never ending war of all against all, but instead, and quite miraculously, uncovered the singular instrument that could win the peace once and for all, for “slave” and “master” alike?
But if feeling the power of love is so potent, to the point where as one approaches pure love one comes equally close to omnipotence, then why are Americans using handguns to shoot each other in movie theatres and drones to kill brown people in what can no longer justly be called the theatre of war (just as the Global War on Terror cannot justly be called a war unless we recognize it as what French philosopher Alain Badiou has termed “The war against nothing.”)? The answer has everything to do with fear and its management.
It says here that love is omnipotent precisely because true love is fearless; if God is love, then the presence of God is simply the absence of fear. It gets confusing because aggression, in both the threat and the use of force, feels powerful. The seeming paradox is that the aggressor doesn’t feel afraid at all (I certainly didn’t feel an ounce of fear as the Stealth Bomber flexed its muscles on my behalf), even as the use or threat of force is rooted deeply in fear. To explain the pseudo-fearlessness of aggression it will help to define a relatively obscure Kleinian psychoanalytic term, projective identification:
“Projective identification is a term introduced by Melanie Klein to describe the process whereby - in a close relationship, as between mother/child, lovers, therapist/patient - parts of the self may in unconscious phantasy be thought of as being forced into the other person.
While based on Freud's concept of psychological projection, projective identification represents a step beyond it: in Laing's words, ‘The one person does not use the other merely as a hook to hang projections on. He strives to find in the other, or to induce the other to become, the very embodiment of projection.’ Feelings which cannot be consciously accessed by the one person are defensively projected in such a way as to evoke in the recipient precisely the thoughts or feelings projected.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projective_identification )
An “example can be seen in a person who doubts his/her own intelligence level and attempts to manipulate others’ perceptions/opinions by discourse with ‘elevated airs’ or by referring to themselves as having a high IQ or implied superior knowledge /expertise. They attempt to lead others to feel unintelligent by their complicated intellectual-sounding verbiage, due to their own doubts about their own intelligence,” ( http://guiltedgirls.tripod.com/id9.html ) (… second awkward pause… this example has nothing to do with this blog, which is clearly just a vehicle for my artistic self expression… we now return to the regularly scheduled complicated intellectual-sounding verbiage…)
What does projective identification have to do with handguns, drones, and Stealth Bombers? At the risk of engaging in what my favorite British public intellectual Terry Eagleton likes to call New Age claptrap (a risk which is admittedly immaterial given that Blogspot.com lists but one follower for this blog, who is much more likely my mother than Terry Eagleton), I am going to suggest that projective identification isn’t confined to interpersonal relations between homo sapiens. In fact, I am going to suggest that it isn’t even confined to relations between what we typically think of as sentient beings, e.g. between a man and his dog, as in the case of my yelling at Sy the Dog for once again pooping in the house, which is really my attempt to make Sy the Dog carry around the shame I feel for some relatively prolonged bed wetting and once pooping my pants at choir practice in 4th grade (might have been 5th, but 4th feels just slightly less shameful).
The New Age claptrap I am suggesting is that human beings can engage in projective identification with inanimate objects. In the grand tradition of New Age speculations, I am going to utilize both the word “energy” and reference advanced physics without really understanding the physics involved. Here goes: According to Wikipedia, it is a true fact that matter and energy are one and the same, mass simply being a highly concentrated form of energy. See E=MCsquared. (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalence )And, as anyone who has spent 5 minutes in the New Age section at Barnes and Noble can attest, consciousness is energy. (What the hell, here’s a link to a New Age site explaining exactly how to recognize energy as consciousness: http://m.wikihow.com/Recognize-Energy-as-Consciousness ) The upshot of all this, none of which, all joking aside, seems stranger to me than the materialist notion that consciousness is a chance byproduct of matter, is that projective identification between people and material objects is a process occurring between two energy systems, just as it is when it occurs between two human beings. In fact, there is an entire tradition within western philosophy, panpsychism, which holds that all entities in the universe, from the soup of the animate to the nuts of the inanimate, have some kind of mental life. Being a panpsychist, which I am, (which makes me a panpsychist hierarchical democratic socialist, which I think has great potential as a conversation starter at parties) makes this whole projective-identification-with-weapons thing easier to swallow.
Because the fear at the heart of aggression gets projected right into all the varieties of ordnance: guns, bombs, ammo, bazookas, Stealth Bombers, etc. This, advanced physics notwithstanding, is how all weapons work; they are nothing other than projections of fear, each explosion a detonation of disowned terror. The historic advance in weaponry, right up to The Bomb itself, is representative of the fact that we have a) become technical savants, and b) cultivated enough fear to blow up the world five times over. ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-margolis/do-we-really-need-to-blow_b_491367.html ) Not feeling it? Neither am I, which is the whole point. We’ve projected our fears into our warheads and their magnificently expensive delivery systems (weaponry is an expensive anesthetic- one Stealth Bomber costs 2.1 billion dollars) so that we don’t have to feel a thing.
“I believe in the power of love (I believe), I believe in the power of love (I believe), I believe in the power of love, Let them call me naïve, But I still believe”
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