"But I don't want a lover/ I just wanted to be tied to the back of your car" - The Smiths, "You've Got Everything Now"
Ever since the Madwoman posted about political chickens coming home to roost, I have been wondering about what it is in the Kenyan/human psyche that makes our apathy possible. I've since come to the conclusion that the only way to explain this phenomenon is to realise that we allow it to happen: we want to have tyrants, incompetents, brutes lording it over us.
We want the very things we complain so loudly, and at such great length about.
This conclusion is by no means new, I must nod to Antonio Gramsci, Italian Communist, and long-term guest at Mussolini's Hospitality Inn, who wrote in his prison diaries that the only way to explain fascist regimes like the one in Italy, was that the people had been seduced/persuaded/convinced to support a regime that was extremely bad for them - nay, thrived on stomping on "the people" with hobnailed boots (what's a hobnail?).
A recent book I read called Nietzsche Corps/e would like to lay the blame squarely at the mustachioed German's errrr straitjacket. As part of his larger strategy of recovering Marxist critique from the perceived end of Marxism and Communism after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he posits that Nietzsche's theories are quite frankly the enemy of everything that the revolution is working for.
Rather than the democratic, egalitarian society that would succeed the capitalist state, Nietzsche seeks to install a masculinist autarchy of overmen, who would replace the slavish, herdish masses of all too human humans. Indeed, the appearance of the overman signals the end of humanity in it's snivelling, whining, distracted, life hating, heaven loving state. Nietzsche's fantasy man, is in a word, fascist.
Coded in his works, is his esoteric agenda of bringing about the appearance of the overman, and Waite makes much of the distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric, but only in the breathless tone of the spotty teenage who uncovers his father's stash of Playboy/girl in cupboard. Waite takes any usage of esoteric/coded speech or writing to be proof positive of sinister intention.
There are two points I would like to take exception to; 1) the characterisation of the esoteric as sinister - thinking of Satanic cults and human sacrifice perhaps? 2) self mastery as inimical to the leftist project and humanity as a whole.
Waite clearly has little exposure to the esoteric outside of Western thought. Even a cursory glance at Buddhist texts would reveal new depths (pun intended) to the concept of esotericism. The first being that the esoteric, rather than being mysterious, hidden, secret and veiled, is instead what is the most plain, obvious and available to the eye! The best place to hid something is in plain view, and the esoteric is similarly available and public, as long as one knows what they are looking at/for. A cogent case in point is the recent hit The Da Vinci Code, whose central thesis is that clues to Jesus's marriage, etc., have been placed in the most public, studied, scrutinised artworks in recent history - all in plain view.
A quick review of the writings of Kukai would reveal that the esoteric Buddhist teachings (subject of my soon-to-be-completed thesis) are actually being revealed to us all the time, by the world around us - the universe is speaking the "secret" in us, through us, next to us, around us, all the time, and we know it, even if we don't know that we know it. The esoteric teachings/rituals/ books, etc, are not to uncover, or display what is hidden, but rather to bring out what we already know, see, hear, touch, taste...
The "bringing forth" of what we already know, through esoteric practice and meditation, etc, is also a transformation of being. A transvaluation if you will, that reorients the self to itself and the world, that now speaks in a different register, because the self now has knowledge of itself and other that was not apparent and immediate beforehand. In essence, the self masters itself. As Dogen puts it, "The entire world of the ten directions is nothing but the true human body", meaning (among other things) that in mastering oneself, one has mastered everything. Indeed, the "goal" of Zen practice (if I may make such a crass statement as "goal") is to realise the self in all senses of the word.
I think that a large part of the critique of Nietzsche's proleptic goal of self mastery is fuelled by an inadequate understanding of mastery that equates it with narcissism and power. There are other models of self mastery in Buddhism that have opposite effects, and in fact suggest that once one has truly mastered the self, the narcissism, desire for domination, brutality, etc that are associated with self mastery in the West do not and cannot arise.
I do not have the space (or indeed the energy) to develop this thought properly, but in brief, self mastery closes off all the nasty bits....
I will also state the Waite inadequately treats the subject of Nietzsche's homosexuality, which has much to do with the masculinist imagery in Thus Spake Zarathustra for example, and may indeed change much of the perception of his work. In the end, all Nietzsche may have wanted was for one of the nubile Italian fishermen to tie him to the bed :-)
In the end, I think that fascism is not natural to the human species, following Deleuze and Guattari, I think it's the excess of capitalist schizophrenia, the ghost that haunts the edges of our supposedly democratic society. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are supposed to be somehow part of human nature, but what if the forces that make such a supposition possible also induce fascistic tendencies in us as well?
posted by WM @ 09:24
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