On Sunday [fittingly - BH], Jan 24, 2021 at 1:32 PM Joseph Rabie < [email protected]> wrote:
Perhaps, in terms of fascism, fundamentalist religion is what is being > substituted for the state. > Contradiction doesn't bother these people. They are anti-state nationalists. Traditional fascism gets folded in as part of nationalism. For them, being against the state means getting rid of those aspects of government that don't fit their world picture. Ideally, a Christian state would solve all their problems, but in the meantime, the White nation is good enough. If you try to find coherency here, there is none. Fundamentalist religion already requires the rejection of reality in favor of myths and miracles. The pathological narcissism of social media works perfectly for them: it provides a frame of reference for their communalist imaginary. They look for secret knowledge (gnosis) and find it in the palm of their hand. They commune with God through their cell phone, while fulfilling some politician's plan. After the war, the Allies set about de-Nazifying Germany. To do this they had to consider the Germans, not only as entirely deluded, but also as a kind of social material that could be reworked, reshaped like putty in their hands. To be sure - and this is crucially important - their goal was not to produce robots or ideologized slaves. Their goal was to restore, or perhaps create, the kind of individual autonomy and the kind of citizenship that prevails in capitalist democracies. No one will say it explicitly, but it is now urgent to "de-Nazify" the USA. As in post-WWII Germany this must be done with new laws, new institutions, and also with new cultural contents (words, images, figures). But there is obviously a big difference. This time our own capitalist democracy has been at the origin of the problem. What do the ideal citizens of the twenty-first century look like? How can they be produced? By whom? The question is serious, and answering it demands a new philosophical account of what a human is and can be, along with new forms of society-shaping agency. We should not be ashamed of trying these new accounts out in public debate. After all, Twitter and Facebook have already built out a new account of what a human is and can be, and they have done so at global scale. Surely we can find a better way. Brian
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