Freud Converts the Masses

This BBC video, "The Century of the Self," explores how Freud's theories influenced propaganda efforts, especially through his nephew Edward Bernays. I believe that Bernays was a type used by Dos Passos in his USA trilogy.

One fact I did not know is that Bernays' spearheaded the translation of Freud's works into English. Does this mean that Freud's works would have remained a blip in the history of the history of ideas? Though I had an inkling that Walter Lippmann was influenced by Freud, this documentary makes that plain.

In part 2, I discovered the role that Freudians played in working with the Army during and after WWII. Compare this fact with recent stories of psychologists working with the CIA and others to develop forms of torture. (See this Salon article on one man's experiences at a CIA black site Also see this translation by Juan Cole of a US soldier's eyewitness account of torture at Bagram.)

I accept the notion that political reality is manipulated via emotions, aka the will, and not reason. The challenge, then, is to identify a way to bring to bear on the will the desire for justice over the destructive and selfish wants and desires. I also believe that the reason why many Leftists simply don't get this, some like Zizek are important because they understand--through Lacan--that the reality underlying political and ethical behavior is inherently irrational.

This statement does not mean that I am a Lacanian or Zizekian, yet I do think that the latter understands things that others simply disregard because it does not fit their Enlightenment models.

This documentary can also be put into a wider historical perspective. As JGA Pocock notes in several of his books on English history, the beginnings of capitalism included an awareness that it opened up a vast reservoir of anxieties and dark passions. Economic theorists of the day spent numerous pages on trying to figure out how to stem the tide of these passions from overwhelming the economic stability of the country.

I was reminded of these remarks the other night when I saw a TV ad for an online stock trading program, TDAMERITRADE (the video loads very slowly, even on DSL). It quite overtly assures the prospective customer that the software would allow them to make stock-buying decisions rationally as opposed to emotionally. Read more!

"He was A Policeman; I thought I was Doing What Was Right"

This seems to contain information that does not appear in the segment that is available at ABCNews. What's interesting about this segment is the report of the McDonald's case. That is very odd.



NOTE: Whoever recorded this and uploaded it to the web left in the commercials. The experiment segment starts at 2:26.

part 3 of 3 of the series

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The Politics of Rampage: Virginia Tech

As I write this, very little is known about the mass school killings at Virginia Tech University. The media, of course, are playing the numbers game and calling it the worst rampage on a campus in history.

One fact that might be germane is that the killings fall within a few days of the anniversary for the Columbine School massacre. Few news commentators are yet making that connection, and maybe it will not hold up and be simply coincidental.

In something of a conspiratorial manner, I'll reiterate my own suspicions that the events are connected and point you, dear reader, to several postings I made after Columbine and killings on the Red Lake Indian Reservation.

I hold by my contention that these incidents have a political dimension to them that few if any have ever taken seriously. This political aspect is eminently nihilistic and as such its core is the idea that there is no message, there is little intelligible sign that one can follow back to a recognizable "political" message.

This anti-politics itself will grow and spread in the future. While it feeds on adolescent angst and catastrophes, the empty heart of its message is a way to transcribe a sign of pain and rebellion on the iron walls of infinite nothingness.

I could go on to discuss a Habermasian analysis of adolescent socialization and the diremption of lifeworld and system. Some of that comes out in my analysis in "We Can Be Heroes." Yet, I am loathe to proclaim such an easily convertible explanation whose tidiness and neatness misses much of the terror.

There are, perhaps, better readings of these incidents than the one I have provided. One avenue of analysis is along the lines of nihilism, whose essence Heidegger has said, we cannot yet think. Perhaps he's right, perhaps wrong.

As you might guess, I think a Kierkegaardian analysis is apt. In this framework, though, we have to begin to understand original sin in the way he formulated it (contra the traditional theology) as well as his discussion of the nothing and despair.

What makes these discussions political is that they are religious tracts aimed at the political, meant to undermine a political regime wherein the state and the ruling religion support each other in falsifying existence.

Related Postings

• Virginia Tech: Is the Scene of the Crime the Cause of the Crime?
  
• The malignant resentments that erupted into mass murder in Virginia
  
• Virginia Killer's Violent Writings: Play told of pedophilic stepfather, murder of 13-year-old boy
  
• Centreville Student Was Va. Tech Shooter
  
• Gunman's writings were disturbing
  
• What Made Him Do It?

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My Views on the Apocalypse

The previous post may have left some of you scratching your heads. My thoughts about the Apocalypse--or an apocalypse--are might seem out of character. As I have written before, there are many ways to understand that wonderfully surreal book called Revelation. Without rehashing old statements, I want to add that my thoughts have turned to apocalyptic in response to articles that jodi dean is posting at her blog. In response ...

I have added the following in comments at her blog:

Without getting too bogged down in terminology, eschatology relates to anything dealing with ultimate things, such as life after death and so on. Apocalyptic is related to end times and history and the role that the divine or transcendent plays in bringing that about.

Your separation of political and religious seems unwarranted. Many of the intertestamental apocalypses have politico-religious ramifications. Seeing that the Xtian Zionists use a political message is nothing new, therefore. As I remarked to Jodi earlier, there have been politico-relious movements of apocalypsticists from those times and throughout Xtian, Jewish, and Islamic history.

Pocock, for example, notes the political ramifications of Savonarola's apocalypticism, as well as this dimension in English and American revolutionary periods. Pocock makes some interesting comments on how apcalyptic changes one's relationship to time and sees time.

For Pocock, what happened in Savonarolan Florence, for example, was that the apocalyptic message brought time down to earth--so to speak--giving the believers that they had a direct role in the outcome of history. This opposed the Augustinian conception of time and the two kingdoms, since in that framework the two worlds did not intersect except at the end of time, which God was in control of and which humans had no role to play.

I also noted there that: What is unique about the Bush Xtians is that they are using the mythology of apocalypse to support a conservative/reactionary ideology.

As many biblical scholars will tell you this has not been true in the past--apocalyptic movements and the genre itself have referred to and emanated from the socially marginalized and dispossessed.

In my recent reading projects, I have also come across this idea within British politics and American colonial politics. That is, as JGA Pocock has shown, millenarian groups were those who were at the forefront of secularization, as well as the egalitarian-oriented movement of republicanism.

The Busybody blog is doing some interesting things around questions of this sort. You might also wish to check out Mark Goodacre's blog and this posting on Paul and apocalyptic. There's also this interesting page with many good links at the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean blog. Read more!