The Magical Appeal of Violent Ideologies

Morson distinguishes between "revolution" and revolutionism, the latter going to the addictive mental state discussed in yesterday's post. And "the twentieth century demonstrates" -- or should have demonstrated --

that revolutionism, almost irrespective of ideology, can lead people to do anything. The magic of "the Revolution" renders destruction and murder sacred. 

It seems that the line between revolution and revolutionism has been crossed when the violence is "no longer a means to an end; it becomes an object of mystical worship." 

One commonality of communism and Islamism is that both are impossible. They have nothing to do with the real world, with human nature, with practical politics. We might think of this as a bug, but ideology makes the impossible seem possible by superimposing the map onto the territory. 

Then the ideologue takes up residence in the dramatic space of the ideology, from communism, Nazism, and Islamism, to global warmism, transgenderism, and CRT. Each allows the individual to trade in his own boring life for participation in a transcendent drama of good vs. evil. 

I remember what that was like. In 1980 I supported Barry Commoner for president. Jimmy Carter was too conservative, and Ronald Reagan was, of course, a fascist. 

It's hard to recall what I was thinking at the time, or rather, the state of mind that was the larger context for the appeal of the Drama of the Impossible. It seems that the possible is no match for the intoxication of the impossible, for if something can actually occur, it's no longer magic. The Aphorist has a number of zingers along these lines:

People do not choose someone to cure them, but someone to drug them.

After conversing with some "thoroughly modern" people, we see that humanity escaped the "centuries of faith" only to get stuck in those of credulity.

Reason, truth, and justice tend not to be man's goals, but the names he gives to his goals.  

Morson writes that  "If one is looking for the usual sort of rational explanation, it may be true that Stalin's actions make no sense. But if one bears in mind the logic of revolutionism -- which demands constant intensification, shock, and the deliberate defiance of everyday thinking," then the absurdity starts to become intelligible, if that's not a contradiction of terms.

In any event, "no consequences will extinguish the youthful appeal of the thrilling, dangerous, and addictive violence of the devoted revolutionist." Media apologists keep reminding us that half the citizens of Hamastan are under age 18, which is less an appeal to mercy than a dire threat. After all, the Hitlerjugend were also children.

The next chapter of the book gets into the psychological allure of impossible theories and preposterous abstractions. Living inside of one can be more compelling than the people and conditions of everyday life, or "more real" than the reality the theory is supposed to explain. 

Ideology, "theoretism," "certaintism," whatever you call it,  

It should come as no surprise that terrorists despised doubt. How could hesitant souls, constantly reexamining their own premises, ever resolve to kill?

People who behead infants are a lot of things, but self-critical is not one of them. Similarly, for Russian terrorists, "openness to different points of view testified not to a commitment to truth but to intellectual flabbiness.... For Lenin, doubt itself was reactionary." "Dialectical materialists do not seek truth; they already possess it." 

No one in the Arab world is going to weigh the evidence and conclude that baby killers might also blow up hospitals, for, as with ideologues,

An idea is true not because it corresponds to "objective" facts, but because it produces the right results....

If facts "contradict the theory, the facts must yield" to the ideology. Even better, "Nothing limits the violence potentially flowing from" such an inversion.