Post #148: Nightmare Fantasies

6 Oct. 2024

“A general sense of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me. It was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares.”

—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

     Yesterday, on the way down in the elevator and walking to the food stalls beside my apartment building, a fellow resident, newly arrived from the US, revealed to me that he was a fervent Trump supporter because his man was the last, best hope for averting a nefarious plot by the world’s billionaires to establish global communism. Four years of Harris-Walz and it will be Mao suits for everyone, apparently.

     Not that it’s the first time I’ve heard such extraordinary tales told with a straight face. At my neighborhood sauna, patronized on the foreigners’ side mostly by young men with little formal educations to speak of, a bit of college at most, these kinds of stories are the rule not the exception. They all seem to agree, though with varying emphases and accents, that the world is run by a shadowy cabal, centering, in most versions of the theory, on high finance. Whether the strings ultimately run together in the hands of the Elders of Zion or in those of alien lizards in human shape who have no known ethnic or religious affinities is a disputed point.*

     What all these contrived accounts (some with very long beards indeed: let no one accuse these rummagers of not going through the attic enough) have in common is the triumph of elaborate construction over simpler but less exciting explanations (a point I shall return to in the context of Ockham), and a common foundation upon the premise that except for a chosen few initiates—the awakened of the new millennium—everyone else is duped, including practically all the “elite” establishment. The stories are also of a paranoid texture that not so long ago might have been cause for referral to a doctor or an institution, but that are now so commonplace that we could not possibly supply treatment spots enough. (It’s not paranoia if they are really out to get you, as Woody Allen quipped.) Whatever the therapeutic implications, one is surprised to hear, these days, a dissenting voice rather than more of the same from the vast male population with uncompleted or unattempted educations beyond the high-school level.

     The internet is a major driving force behind these developments, obviously, but why are these men so terrifyingly susceptible to stories that not so long ago would have been laughed out of court as the stuff of disordered minds? It is not, I must insist, that the guys are stupid, though the standards of evidence that they will accept are invariably less than sophisticated. The faintest exposure to the professional study of politics, in any introductory course on conspiracies, would have inured them against such explanatory tendencies with two formidable counter-arguments. The first is that conspiracies are far too difficult to sustain, even with small numbers of participants, to make the imagined grand schemes feasible; the second is Ockham’s razor, the reminder that while Byzantine explanation can be given for anything (and made cogent with enough elaboration, like the Ptolemaic system of astronomy), the simpler and more straightforward an account is, given equal explanatory power, the more likely it is true.

     The patent nonsense in imagining billionaires as the advance guard of long-deferred communist dreams is so glaring that it would, I still hope, even in our fallen condition, restrain anyone with a university-exposed mind. The even more far-fetched idea that a new red dystopia might, after so many failed attempts, be at last established on a global basis by a bunch of digital geeks is evidently the stuff of nightmares, not waking life—The Revenge of the Nerds recast as theater of the absurd. If it proved nearly impossible to pull off even on the local and national levels, resorting to extremes of coercion, then how could it ever be done worldwide? And why, given that the initiated all seem to admire Trump and Musk, considering them saviors even, would they take just the opposite view of billionaires as a class? On account of Soros, Bezos, and Zuckerberg, as if they were bound to be closet Marxist-Leninists just because they are Jewish and over-clever? Give me a break.

     The psychological dynamic here seems to run parallel to what governs the big lie, though the fellows in question are indubitably sincere, not lying at all (#147). Fantasies devised on a colossal scale are harder to rebut than smaller ones. Only make the fabrication big and crazy enough, and it is hard to know where even to begin. One finds oneself at a loss for words, as I did with my neighbor. It was clear that nothing I could say would make the slightest difference. I have tried a few times at the sauna, when my ears were ringing so intolerably from the nonsense I was hearing that I could not help myself—to no avail whatsoever, of course. At best there was an embarrassed silence; at worst I would be set right by YouTube graduates unencumbered by the slightest hint of self-doubt on things that have been perplexing me for thirty years (as I’ve grumbled before, #68). “Analysis paralysis” passes for a brilliant diagnosis in their circles. Whatever goes beyond the self-appointed doctors' horizons can be dismissed as “overthinking.” Very convenient, though not equally helpful. All hail the headless stickmen (#83)!

     How to explain the immense emotional appeal of all this balderdash to such a substantial portion of male humanity these days? In putting things thus, we may discover a clue: they are by no means mentally defective, these peculiar cynics-cum-believers, but they are almost all of them men, taken from the middling or lower, almost never the upper part of the cognitive-educational bell curve. This is significant not because it leaves them dumb, but because it means that they have been losing ground on the conventional avenues to social prestige, and that they therefore have a corresponding incentive to redefine the game. We all do what we can to position ourselves favorably in relation to others. For the highly credentialed that exercise is relatively easy, so they can sneer at others who have to travel by more circuitous roads to more or less the same psychological destinations.

     Universities have gone, in just a few decades, from what was once a clear majority of male students to just the reverse—over sixty percent female undergraduates these days, sometimes as high as two-to-one, all the way through the hierarchy, including the most elite institutions. At the top end, men have been holding their ground, more or less, for reasons that differences in the male and female bell curves can easily explain (it is the same at the lower end: look at the composition of prison populations or remedial classes all around the world). At the same time that the loss of ground around the middle has been quite dramatic, all young men, wherever they may be situated, have been lectured in increasingly shrill tones (by an ever greater majority of female high school teachers and feminized professors of both sexes at the universities, if they get that far) about how the males of the species—white men especially—are supposedly to blame for all the world’s ills. Is it any wonder that being judged summarily guilty of oppression while actually facing stiff head-winds and falling behind will produce, on the backlash, counter-narratives that are just as fraught and far-fetched?

     Conspiratorial fantasies offer the perfect way out. At school I could not keep up with the girls (at least not in the eyes of female teachers); so school must not be very important. Then I could not get into a creditable university, or perhaps I couldn’t afford to go, or I had reason to fear that I would, once again, not be able to keep up with a game increasingly loaded against my type; so higher education must not be good for much either. The internet, on the other hand, leaves me what hope remains of striking it big, so how could it not look a much more attractive and legitimate environment to me? Naturally I will find my heroes there, not in libraries or bookstores. Most gratifying of all, unlike the self-appointed sophisticates of the day, who are all dupes in fact, I and a few other awakened fellow travelers can pride ourselves on seeing through the charade. It is we who have the knowledge and understanding that counts; the establishment types with their fancy degrees and posh jobs are just cogs in the machine.

     The choice between Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris offers an almost perfect mirror of this tragicomic dynamic, even before we have said a word about race or policies. On the one side we have a bad-boy billionaire who disdains all education (because he never did well at it) and the more polished “elites” (who in turn despise his vulgarity)—a playground bully who made it big (by the bottom line at least) in all the ways that more polite and polished players wouldn’t touch: the notoriously dodgy world of New York real estate, gambling, reality TV, ceaseless bombast, crass populism, and unlimited self-aggrandizement. On the other side we have the good-girl A-student, perhaps not brilliant but definitely capable, hard-working, and presentable, who rises steadily and surely through the establishment ranks. Trump could not pass for a believable Tory if he were dressed in a top-hat past midnight on Halloween; but turn to Harris, with her Commonwealth extraction and her prosecutor’s background, and you would need to have a very crude political nose not to smell the latent conservative on her. Sure, she would have to be a pretty red Tory; but red or not, she looks like the Queen herself beside a man more at home in a New Jersey casino or a Moscow brothel** than at a university, among senior civil servants, or around high-ranking military men who dare to have a mind of their own. (There’s a type of libertine that tends Tory, I pointed out in my last post; but membership in that club requires a passing ability to read Homer in the original, or at least Ovid, between amorous jousts.)

     So I can see well enough why our anti-establishment crowd, nursed on internet niches, would be teetering on the edge of revolt, given the intolerable combination of their eroding social position with a mainstream propaganda machine that insists on casting them as oppressors of the world. (It’s not a question of absolute decline, but of losing ground relative to women—and not only women either—and not so much about money as about loss of status and diminishing mating prospects.) I can also see, with more of an effort, why Trump may look like a remedy to so many, when to me he represents just the opposite, cultural erosion itself, not an antidote to it. That he is rich as Croesus impresses far too many far too much. Wealth is a fine thing to have, if one puts it to the right uses; but it does not suffice for making a public man respectable if he cannot string together two correct and coherent sentences, let alone form a full paragraph, without some egregious lapse in logic or a hair-raising misrepresentation. What does the logos matter to someone who prides himself on never reading? What matters philosophy to someone who cares not a fig for reflecting or examining himself, what meditation to a champion of monkey mind if ever there was one (#26)? The guy does not scruple to put his own name on the Bible and sell it at a hefty markup. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?

     As heartily as I reject what he stands for, so he would disdain what I do, were he to notice, which of course he never would. Very well; the feeling is bound to be mutual given our radically incompatible trajectories in life, quite irrespective of political orientation. I repeat: my point is not that he is too right-wing for me; that’s neither here nor there, because I remain unconvinced that he is consistently anything except a thoroughly unsound character, so far as I can tell, even if he is celebrated as a heroic figure by so many. I like my heroes to have a record of service, not boasting. (I still haven’t said a word about race, and I am not going to.)

     It does not please me at all to find myself in such a predicament, and I am still on a desperate lookout for straws to grasp at, something, anything to like—something redeeming, something to console me in my despair. The long coat for which he has been mocked, for example; it looks quite nice to me. Let it be said too that his inimitable one-liners have a certain undeniable punch (and Judy): “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT.” Brilliant. “There’s nothing worse a man can do than to lose his hair.” Inspired. “Grab ‘em by the pussy!” Much food for thought there. What is more, they can be assembled without undue effort into a kind of postmodern haiku that makes the walls tremble:

Does torture work?

Listen you motherfuckers

Not everything is nice

Waterboarding

Sleep deprivation

Me singing “Call Me Maybe”

I’m not saying it’s pleasant but believe me, it works***

A free-speech stalwart for postmodern plebeians of the mind: disconnected, rambling, uninformed by evidence, unargued-for, and unburdened by any trace of self-doubt or skeptical reflection—held together only by a distinctive personal style. Whether this is any worse than its high-brow cousin, the postmodern censorious mode seeping like poisonous vapors out of the academy these past thirty-something years, is open to debate. I suspect that they belong together, these evil twins, in some kind of bizarre dialectic of cultural unraveling. Whoever is winning the race to the bottom, one can only marvel that this, this is supposed to be the last, best hope of American conservatives in the Year of Our Grace 2024. Pinch me, someone, for mercy’s sake.

     Mr. Trump was not ashamed, in his debate with Ms. Harris, to use the caricature of the father against the daughter. Can he really want us to do the same to him—by inquiring a little more closely into how the sins of the father may have affected the son? Presumably he would proclaim in his familiar reality-bending manner that his old man was the best dad in the world. Righty-ho, that’s usually what’s behind teenage sons getting dispatched to military schools, isn’t it? This is the stuff of long-term psychotherapy with hints of tragedy and farce, not material fit for public discourse. Ms. Harris is too much of a lady to engage her opposite at this level. Whether the gentleman manqué was trying to lay a trap or just being his usual obnoxious self is hard to say; the lady, at any rate, smiled her most willing smile and refused, wisely, to take the bait.

     As a last resort, perhaps I could cling to the hope that I may have the man completely wrong, despite everything, and that behind the public persona that he has been so relentlessly foisting upon the public these past forty years there is a more likable and admirable human being hiding from a hostile world. His supporters seem to think so; no one would be more relieved than I if it were true. Alas, what I’ve seen by way of reports from the inside circle has not been heartening, quite the contrary, and all attempts that I have made to see my nemesis in softer colors have perished the same way: by being mercilessly rebuffed. It does not matter how sympathetic the interviewer, how friendly the tone, or how soft the questions (as pitched by Elon Musk, for example)—the fellow still cannot get through two sentences straight without saying something that makes my hair stand on edge. Even when a position he takes may be legitimate enough, taken by itself, his manner of arguing for it (if what he does can be called argument at all) makes a mockery of the most elementary rules of human reasoning every time. It just won’t do, not unless you want to turn the life of the mind upside down and leave it out with the garbage. Trump would have no problem with that; nor would many of his admirers. I cannot stop them; I can only shout as loudly at them as I do at the other side when their doings, at the level of intellectual hygiene, stink to high heaven.

     It’s not, I hasten to add, that I begrudge red America their love-fests; I just wish the carnival were organized around a worthier center. These are unsettling, often chilling times, and good things get said about Trumpista gatherings, at the human level, even by visitors who find the politics bewildering. I don’t dismiss that good news, for what it’s worth, only on my part I am far too deeply died in European blue to partake of these delights. Since I do not find the baby-blue hues that have come to predominate on the Democrat side soothing at all, but rather creepy—something of Chuckie about these eerie pastels†—I suppose I shall have to keep my own company, sticking to the old navy and midnight shades (#32). It’s not the late hour that makes for nightmares, but the events of the preceding day.

     However repulsed I may be by the wretched turn things have taken on the liberal left this past decade (call it woke, by whatever definition you please, the atrocious grammar alone would decide me against it), I just don’t see how four more years of Donald the Great will calm the raging storm, rather than pushing the swirling tornado of craziness the other way again, and likely stirring up to furies’ pitch once more the witches’ brew that has finally been dying down a little. If Ms. Harris were the red Tory she might have been in another life, perhaps she could be expected to put the lid, at last, back on the Pandora’s box of politically correct plagues that have been haunting the past decade in particular. But no, that too is just not going to happen, not given the state of “liberal” opinion in 2020’s America. Either way, then, the slide into madness will almost certainly continue, if not in one direction, then in the other. “Ah! but it is something to have at least a choice of nightmares,” Marlow declares in Heart of Darkness. Perhaps so; but it is not a lot.

     It may well be that I too am entangling myself in dark fantasies; very possibly I too am getting overwhelmed by the great vertiginous maelstrom of our times. If so, it would only alarm me further. The madness of crowds holds no threat for those who are truly immune, or who stand fully above the fray. I am under no such illusions about myself; my head is spinning along with everyone else’s, and I fear for my own sanity as much as anyone’s.

*The corresponding dark fantasies that play best on the other side of the aisle may look very different to their adherents, but they operate on the same principle of forcibly suspended disbelief. The grand corporate conspiracy theory, for example, according to which countless thousands of major enterprises, led by inflated egos of completely different temperaments and organized for utterly different purposes, are somehow united in the common goal of victimizing consumers and degrading the environment, as if their CEOs favored endangered species for breakfast rather than hiking in Patagonia or nursing penguin nestlings on Antarctica. (The only thing that unites them is the universal human need to feel special, hence Antarctica.)

     Or the wild idea that subterranean segments of the US government had a part in the assassination of JFK, which was a connoisseur’s fringe fantasy until Oliver Stone made it respectable—ironic insofar as covert operations of every kind and color were indeed the characteristic feature of the Kennedy regime, only from within, including the most methodical misrepresentation on record of the man behind the office and the smiles. A fascinating episode, this touch of the Renaissance popes brought to sleepy Eisenhower Washington, but also a leading example of the disconnect between image and reality that so besets our age. (Such was the reputation for ruthlessness that even young “Bobby” acquired among Nixon’s men that they—hardly wallflowers themselves—had a less boyish nickname for him: the Black Prince.) Whatever the moralist may have to say, all this was no small feat of political artistry, topped off by getting the assembled cognoscenti of the day to intone solemn hymns to Camelot as if they were knights around the round table, not in fact extras in “The Godfather Does D.C.”

     Who blinks anymore at the extraordinary belief that every ill in the world is somehow an emanation of the West’s supposed original sin, slavery, even though it had been practiced nearly everywhere in the world until it was systematically suppressed for the first time by the Royal Navy, and abolished at exorbitant cost in America by fighting a civil war without precedent? That sin should have entered the world by the curiosity of Eve invites only derision these days. We know better: obviously it came because men are bad apples, all Cains now, as if there had never been any Abels whose sacrifices could find favor on high. And as for the utter nefariousness of the other side, is it not obvious that their demonic front-man must have organized the attempts on his own life, last-second turn of the head included?

**Of Trump’s dalliances with sundry strippers, hookers, and porn queens, I decline to speak with contempt. Not that I would posit anything positively redeeming in them, which would be going a little far given their Vegas-and-Jersey flavor; but they offer a refreshing contrast to the dour puritanism once prevailing on the American scene, a kind of Lewinsky-plus dimension—in questionable taste, but with a hint, at least, of that breadth of experience which the man claims so readily for himself in other fields without delivering.

     Alas, even on such favorable ground (for a purveyor of low tastes I mean), The Donald is not the superstar that he takes himself to be, but places a distant second to someone he is not often associated with, though they share the same cult standing among their followers, and same similar inversions of fact and fiction: the venerated 35th president once more. No furtive gropings in the elevator for the Kennedys, but a touch of Rome itself, as I have said, brought to the staid corridors of D.C. power, complete with hourly changes of dishes and rules of engagement that were graphically described, by someone who knew first-hand, as “up against the wall, Signora.”

     Look no further for a master class in the Machiavellian dictum (codified in the infamous eighteenth chapter of The Prince) that a ruler should take great care to appear merciful, faithful, humane, honest, and religious at all times, yet, away from the public gaze, be ever-ready to shed all such constraints without a second thought, as occasions and opportunities might require. Thus nothing could be more true to the memory of the Kennedy legend, in its way, than the tightly choreographed dignity of gray granite at Arlington, with the requisite lofty quotation and an eternal flame, commemorating someone who had operated for twenty years strictly on the Zippo principle.

     Anyone inclined to accuse me of exaggerating is referred to Thomas C. Reeves’ unswerving but scrupulously fair-minded biography—more in sadness than in anger—A Question of Character (Arrow Books 1992), p. 95 for the Signora. I cannot say that it made me sad or angry to find my illusions about Kennedy dismantled—the reader may recall that I went to a Kennedy school in Berlin, established just after the assassination, and thus devoted to the sacred memory if ever a place was. Nevertheless I was not put off so much as fascinated by what must be one of the most impressive political stage shows ever, with nothing being quite what it was made to appear.

***Courtesy of Robert Sears, The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump (Cannongate 2017), with line-by-line documentation of these remarkable statements. Coming from anyone else in public life, they would strain credulity, but not so much in this case. That alone should give us pause.

†No, I am not accusing anyone of murder—another horror on our political scene that I can only repudiate with the greatest vehemence, as the very height of irresponsibility. I could not believe my ears when the usual suspect had the nerve to allege—in a presidential debate!—that infanticide is not only widely practiced but legally sanctioned in blue America. What a nightmare. So I am not intimating that the Democrats are serial killers in the Chuckie-mold, or accessories to crime, only that the colors in which they have been painting the world, meant to be congenial and demonstrably so to many, are anything but comforting to me.