Opinion Sur
Some ideas for an era that is ending and another that begins
2025 is looming. In the gloom it is not clear whether it is a beginning or an end. It will be another year of revolutions – not the traditional bottom-up, but reactionary, top-down revolutions. They are still in their destructive phase. It remains to be seen what its construction phase will be.
The tone of our time, expressed in aphorisms.
From the Bible onward, aphorisms are short texts that seem to summarize a truth, like jewels of perfect wisdom. They are concise, didactic, and give forceful definitions. The ones I’m interested in are less pretentious and a little more sarcastic.
The ones I am looking for are heirs of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg[1] rather than descendants of Hippocrates. Like that German writer and scientist in the age of Enlightenment, I like to collect observations, occurrences, reflections, anecdotes, purposes, and jokes that illuminate arguments. In the France of the Second Empire, Gustav Flaubert compiled his aphorisms in a sottissier (dictionary of stupidities).[2] Churchill’s aphorisms sustained him in the darkest moments of his career. Borges liked them too, and that is why he followed in the footsteps of Macedonio Fernández,[3] an eminent maker of aphorisms.
All of the above are teachers and authors that I admire and I am capable of loving, as Borges would say, even plagiarism. In this essay, I can think of some themes in search of appropriate aphorisms. Here they go.
1
The carnival
The carnivalesque has been presented and studied by literary critics, in particular Mikhail Bakhtin,[4] but it is also applied to the sociology of our times, in which an era difficult to characterize ends and another that is impossible to predict begins.
Carnival differs from common and everyday life in that during carnival social and hierarchical norms are suspended, allowing total freedom and the subversion of established roles. Carnival creates a second world where everyone is equal and actively participates. That temporal space allows for an inversion of the high and the low, the serious and the comical, creating a collective experience of liberation and renewal. This manifests itself in the degradation and materialization of the high and spiritual in the bodily and material. Herbert Marcuse called it “repressive de-sublimation” disguised as liberation.[5]
Every populist and charismatic moment is carnivalesque, and has a component that Bakhtin called grotesque realism. It was an important element of European popular culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Grotesque bodies and their parts play a central role. The Duce’s body snub[6], the Fuehrer’s mustache, Boris Johnson’s tousled hair, Trump’s orange toupee, Milei’s mane come to mind. The grotesque body and dung language show a connection to the agitated cosmos, allowing for a symbolic transformation that reflects the birth of a new world from the old.
The problem is that the experience is intense but false and brief (for example, it stages a supposed equality between new billionaires and old marginals, between saints and murderers, businessmen and tricksters). Soon things return to their daily rhythm, even if normality is new (but always degraded).
First Geopolitical Corollary: Of all the images and purposes that circulate on electronic social networks, 80% are false and above all, clownish.
2
Disruptive investing
It is also the dilemma of leadership, in which the charismatic sooner or later falls into routine and institutionalization, as Max Weber maintained. One example is the delicate balance that Marine Le Pen must strike in France to come to power: convincing the people that she is both a great disruptive figure and a competent future president. It is one thing to agitate, subvert, invert, and quite another to govern. Our energetic leaders have to combine the disruptive with the proactive. For now, they cover it all with marketing.
Second Geopolitical Corollary: The disguises of current politics are inversion disguises. Freedom is not free and coexists with despotism, which is no longer even enlightened but capricious and vulgar.
3
Upheaval and governance
In politics, the language is Orwellian – the one in which values and terms are inverted: aggression is disguised as pacification, lies appear to be true. The one who attacks says that he defends himself, and so on. [7]
During the French Revolution, the republican slogan was invented that became famous to this day: Liberté, égalité, fraternité. But the meaning has become outdated. It is no longer the slogan of a republican France but that of a failed state in Haiti. Freedom today is understood as doing what one wants while ignoring one’s neighbor (the opposite of what John Stuart Mill preached). Fraternity is only tribal, and the communal is huge[i]. Equality means hating every meritorious distinction in exchange for the lowest common denominator.
With all this, humanity is heading towards the world that Hobbes feared: “And the life of man is nasty, brutish, and short“. Today we prolong life with medicine, but we shorten it with violence. Don’t look at Zurich, but at Darfur or Gaza. Bullets are more accessible than pills. I offer two Roman examples of the reversal in language: Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus: “If you want peace, prepare for war.”
Tacitus: “They call the government by false names such as chopping and stealing; even more so where they create desolation, they call it peace.”
In contemporary wars, each victimizer pretends to be a victim. Russia, China, the US, Israel are the most notorious examples. Others will be added very soon.
Terrorism is often the label applied to those who defend themselves from predation. Here it is worth quoting an old French folk song:
“Cet animal est très méchant :
Quand on l’attaque, il se défend. »
“This animal is very nasty:
When he is attacked, he defends himself. »
It’s easier to demolish than to build, and it makes more noise. Go ahead with the axe and rattle, or with the chainsaw!
The carnivalesque is intimately linked to the disruptive, a general psychiatric category that encompasses the particular case of post-traumatic disorder syndrome (PTSD), but which by extension also applies to politics, in particular to the issue of agitation. In this regard, I recommend consulting the writings of the Argentine-Israeli psychiatrist Mordecai (Moty) Benyakar.[8]
Everywhere, the agitators have many followers, and thus they manage to come to power. They promise to destroy, but they do not know how to build. They are the so-called “chaos engineers.”[9]
American agitators are nothing new. They were studied with care and premonitory fear by the German exiles of the defunct Weimar Republic.[10] The novelty lies in the fact that today they have moved from the margins (lunatic fringe) to the center of politics. Nor are they new in Europe, where the phenomenon is similar and where the center has also become limited and besieged, as exemplified by the predicament of the extreme right/left to the centrist president Macron. Here I will digress.
As always in European politics, France is the epicenter of tectonic change and the weather vane that indicates the direction of the winds:
In the 19th century, Marx, a great intellectual vagabond who had left philosophy in his homeland (Germany) and was making his way to the cradle of political economy (England), stopped for a while in France where he wrote his best political analyses (in particular on the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte). Because France has always been the main European political laboratory. In this regard, Marx said that the great events and characters of universal history are repeated in that country from tragedy to farce (I would add: and vice versa). He saw French politics in a carnivalesque key. He had to witness the collapse of a democratic bourgeois regime and its replacement by a proto-fascist and pseudo-monarchical regime. He presented it in a metaphor and then proceeded to his explanation:
“It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation was surprised. Neither the nation nor the woman is spared the hour of carelessness in which any adventurer has been able to abuse them by force. With these explanations the enigma is not clarified; it is only presented in another way. It remains to be explained how three swindlers were able to surprise and reduce to captivity, without resistance, a nation of 36 million souls.”
Today, it is up to us to correct Marx’s misogyny in order to maintain the value of his presentation. Gender does not count when it comes to scammers. What Mr. Trump did to Kamala Harris today Mrs. Le Pen does to Macron.
Third Political Corollary: The new leaders who come to power are agitators. They know how to break in; they do not know how to govern well.
4
Direct action
How people like to make short-circuits of representation and action! This is how populism arrives. But be careful: On such path, death seduces more than life.
In the cultural order, the above concepts are the most significant dimensions of what Sigmund Freud, in his para-psychological speculations, called with a German term that is difficult to translate: Unbehagen (discomfort, anxiety, unease).[11] For Freud, the general uneasiness produces among some a strong desire to “end everything”, which is another expression of the death impulse. Perhaps they will seek the Second Advent. It applies to many countries and especially to Argentina. After decades of achieving underdevelopment by one’s own effort, the time has come to change everything. The Magician is a character of Cortázar in his novel Hopscotch. Today it means “Make Argentina Great Again.”
Fourth Corollary, more psychoanalytic than geopolitical: Behind reactionary populism hides the death drive.
5
The Second Advent
We can risk the idea of a second advent. It is not Christ’s. It looks more like the Second Beast of the Apocalypse (Behemoth).
Let us remember William Butler Yeats on the same subject, but in his case in a religious key. He put into unforgettable words his vision of the Second Advent.
From W.B. Yeats comes to mind not an aphorism but a poem:
“Going round and round in the crescent spiral,
the falcon can no longer hear the falconer;
everything falls apart; the center gives way;
anarchy descends upon the world,
the tide of blood is released, and everywhere
the ritual of innocence is drowned;
the best have no conviction, and the worst
are brimming with feverish intensity.
A revelation is approaching;
The Second Advent is approaching.
The Second Advent! I say so,
and already a vast image of the Spiritus Mundi
clouds my sight; there in the desert sands
a figure with the body of a lion and the head of a man,
a blank and merciless gaze like the sun,
moves its slow thighs, and around it hover
shadows of angry desert birds.
Darkness falls again, but now I know
that after twenty centuries of obstinate sleep
a nightmare rocked them in their cradle,
and what lurid beast, when its hour comes at last,
crawls to Bethlehem to be born?”
Final Corollary: Democracy survives, but battered and distorted: it proposes a leader for these times. Hail Caesar, those who are about to die salute you! And so perhaps we will go with the vote to die.
6
Choices and lessons
For this, two distinguished aphorisms come in handy.
From Winston Churchill: “Democracy is the worst system, except for all the others.”
From Jorge Luis Borges: “Democracy is an abuse of statistics.”
In war as well as in peace (and who distinguishes them today?), crowds march to death. And they do it by voting. By order, by revenge, by subversion, by desperation, by dazzle and blindness, they follow like the rats in the story, some cunning flute player.
From Jorge Luis Borges comes this other aphorism: “Two bald men fight for a comb.” He said this about the Malvinas.
Today bald fights are multiplying, and combs are superfluous. Until one day a madman on the loose presses the button that makes everything blow.
As a final touch, fill the space with your favorite country:
Let’s make our (put favorite country)_____________ big again!
Big and small, countries want to catch up, but I’m afraid that day will come the next day.
[1] Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aforismos, Bs.As. EDHASA, 2013
[2] https://www.harvard.com/book/9782322182947
[3] https://www.frasesypensamientos.com.ar/autor/macedonio-fernandez.html
4 https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262520249/rabelais-and-his-world/
[5] https://monoskop.org/images/b/b6/Herbert_Marcuse_Eros_y_civilizacion_1983.pdf
[6] See Sergio Luzzatto, El cuerpo del duce. Un ensayo sobre el desenlace del fascismo (The Duce’s body. An Essay on the Outcome of Fascism) – Spanish Edition: 13 February 2020
[7] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY2mMJxM4fQ
[8] Moty Benyakar, Lo disruptivo. Amenazas individuales y colectivas: el psiquismo ante guerras, terrorismos y catástrofes sociales (The Disruptive. Individual and Collective Threats: The Psyche in the Face of Wars, Terrorism, and Social Catastrophes) Buenos Aires, 2006.
[9] https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Los-Ingenieros-Caos-Giuliano-Empoli/dp/8441542198
[10] https://www.versobooks.com/products/936-prophets-of-deceit?srsltid=AfmBOooZbHpRxa-HmMB3O1uzCxG-ihhfiVrV5OumAGnUju9rjOO5cQNf
[11] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents and Other Writings on Mass Psychology, 1931, various editions.
[i] . T.N. Word game in Spanish between “comunal” and “descomunal” exemplifying the inversion of meanings.
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