New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 145
Carl Schmitt captured the essence of totalitarian politics in his book The Concept of the Political (1932). It is the distinction between friend and enemy. The poison of this kind of thinking is in the ugly fact that the declared enemy must be treated as the declared enemy once a political faction has declared one, and anyone who doesn’t go along with that declaration declares himself one of the enemy. That is, it’s not just the us-versus-them nature of the declaration of friend and enemy that poisons politics and societies; it’s the logic of the friend-enemy political program entirely. Host James Lindsay explains this dangerous logic in this new episode of New Discourses Bullets. Join him to understand.
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1 comment
There’s an aspect of this I equate with psychology and personality pathology, in particular ‘splitting’. If you have ever lived with someone prone to this (I have), the behaviour pattern is unmistakable. What ever the external dogma or motivation might be, in order for it to manipulate people it has to act on human emotions. It can come out as splitting, in this mode people can turn on blinkered rage and rationalise all kinds of violence and cruelty and take refuge in their dogma to rationalise away any responsibility. Have you noticed how callous the Left are when something terrible happens to someone they dislike, think the Kirk respones. Thing is, everybody has this capacity in them, it was probably necessary for survival of the species originally. The best manipulators figure out how to tap into it.