Opinion Sur
Inversion, neglect, and agitation
Among the various tricks of ideology, there are three that should be considered: Inversion, willful neglect, and the use of both as a tactic of agitation.
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Inversion
The camera obscura is a precursor of the photographic camera. Its mechanism is very simple. When light rays pass through a small hole, they cross and project an inverted image on the opposite wall, both vertically and horizontally, due to the rectilinear trajectory of the light. Even before the advent of photography, the camera obscura was used by artists such as Leonardo Da Vinci and Vermeer to project scenes and facilitate drawing and perspective.
Much earlier still, Plato referred to the errors of human knowledge not as entire ignorance but as a projection of shadows of reality on a wall opposed to the light of truth. The theme was always the contrast between light and shadow, and the “realistic” appearance of inverted worlds. In the 18th century, the “illuminist” project was an attempt at correction. That is why it was called the century of lights or enlightenment. The 19th century (industrial, materialistic, and pragmatic) gave a new name to that phantasmagoria: it called it ideology and sought its causes.[1]
In the origins of the sociology of knowledge, several social critics argued that ideologies project visions of the world in a way like the images projected by a camera obscura. These images do not ignore social reality and its problems, but see them backwards: effects are seen as causes (e.g., “if you don’t eat you will go hungry” makes the cause fall on a personal decision, when the logical cause is lack of food, for example, in a refugee), domination as something benevolent (e.g., “vigilance is the price of freedom”), victims as guilty (e.g.: whoever resists the occupation of his territory is a “terrorist”), subjection as freedom (e.g.: both rich and poor have the same right to live in a tent), and inequality appears disguised as equality (e.g.: a perfect labor contract between an owner and a worker).
Willful Neglect[2]
But there is something worse than seeing badly, or seeing only the shadows of reality, or its inverted image, or hearing the voice of half-truths among noise and nonsense. It is not seeing and not hearing. It is not denial, which is forced to present first what it says does not exist. It is silent but willful neglect. It is a social practice of disqualification that consists of deliberately ignoring a person, a group, or a situation, pretending it does not exist. Nobody, nothing, never.[3] In the critical analysis of ideology we must not forget this powerful weapon of the void.
Earlier in year IX of the Trump era[4], a lone voice in the US Senate presented a catalog of what was not said in the president’s inaugural address. Senator Bernie Sanders is an avowed socialist. (In the US today, it is easier for a politician or official to come out as openly gay than to present himself as a socialist.) Despite his left-wing outspokenness, his compatriots in the conservative state of Vermont elect him time and again, because they consider him a sincere man, not a braggart like so many politicians. He uses plain language – the kind George Orwell liked as an antidote to the Newspeak of the demagogues. I quote him, “The simple truth is that Trump ignored almost every major issue facing working families in this country in his first speech.” Sanders went on with his list, which I summarize like this:
- The healthcare system is broken, dysfunctional and tremendously expensive.
- There is a major housing crisis in the United States.
- There is more income and wealth inequality than ever before.
- Not a word about how we are going to address the planetary crisis of climate change.
In the face of these challenges, Sanders proposed common sense solutions:
- We must join with all other major countries to ensure healthcare for all people.
- We must substantially reduce the cost of prescription drugs in this country.
- We must build millions of affordable and low-income housing units.
- We must make public universities free of charge.
- We must work with the global community to combat climate change.
- We must pass laws to raise the minimum wage.
- We must make it easier for workers to join unions.
- We must demand that the wealthiest start paying their fair share of taxes.
- We must put an end to a corrupt system of campaign financing.
This program is not very “socialist”, but it is sensible and feasible.[5]
Under the Trump regime, only policies opposed to such a breviary will be initiated, one after the other. The latter can be found proclaimed in any official or sympathetic media, from domestic to international politics. They constitute what Gustave Flaubert called a sottisier, or dictionary of received ideas, of nonsense (or lies) in circulation. Sanders’ catalog, on the other hand, is a list of simple, sensible, but indispensable ideas – all of them ignored in the populist carnival that the world celebrates today.
Agitation
There is something else in the universal history of ideological perversion. It is a sleight-of-hand maneuver[6] used by populist leaders to gain followers. It is about convincing a social group that it has been neglected and promising them a fair compensation. Such rhetoric is intended to produce direct emotional adhesion, through agitation and without any institutional mediation. It is highly effective in the field of politics because it mobilizes a state of mind typical of turbulent times, namely resentment.[7]
In sociological perspective, resentment is especially prevalent in groups suffering or fearing the effects of downward social mobility and is therefore exploited by right-wing extremist agitators.[8] In Germany, the phenomenon was studied by researchers of the Frankfurt School in the 1920s and 1930s. With the rise of National Socialism to power, many of them took refuge in the United States, where they continued their studies on the authoritarian personality and its effects on politics. Within the United States, social resentment and agitation on the part of some extreme right-wing demagogues were in those years a marginal phenomenon, but one that did not escape the insight of the German exiles. One of them – Eric Fromm – became famous with the publication of his book The Fear of Freedom. Hannah Arendt, only tangentially linked to the Frankfurt critics, had a great influence in American intellectual circles.
Much less known than their compatriots of that school, two of its members, Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman, published a prophetic book on American agitators in 1948, titled Prophets of Deceit. A study of the techniques of the American agitator, which is worth reading today.[9] There they point out the inability of individuals to understand social structure, institutions and the organization of social reproduction as a condition of their own autonomy. This is not the personal defect of the followers of a demagogue but the result of a pathological organization of society. It is the manipulation of the malaise that this pathology provokes: first, pointing to the feeling of being on the margins of society, of being despised; and second, targeting an “enemy” supposedly responsible for the misery. Today the supposed “enemies” have changed (they are no longer the Jews, but immigrants, sexual minorities, young woke people, and women, among others). But the techniques are the same. What in the 1930s through the 1950s was an extremist fringe of a powerful and prosperous, but now decadent, country has returned with a vengeance in the era of Trump and his accomplices in Europe and Latin America. Only those who can carry forward a rational and popular resistance will be able to avert a collective disaster. But…
Worse-case scenarios:
What if?
Imagine that once in power, the agitator promotes policies that are confounding and contradictory, that fail or backfire, and popular resistance grows to the point in which he feels threatened. The way out of the impasse would be for him or her to either provoke or manufacture a casus belli and plunge the country into a war. Like all wars, this risks getting out of control. That is the right moment to stage a self-coup, suspend the Constitution, and declare an open dictatorship. That is how democracy really ends: resistance is quelled, and hardships are suffered by the populace with patriotic resignation.
What then?
If history is any guide, dictatorships like that are very difficult to dislodge from inside. But, as proven several times (Napoleon III after the battle of Sedan in 1870, the Greek colonels after the invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the Argentine junta after the battle of the Falklands in 1982), their intimidation of opponents and their mass support vanish rapidly in defeat. Thus the defeat of dictators in a war brings democracy back, perhaps by default. The price is high.
[1] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_ideolog%C3%ADa_alemana
[2] In Spanish ninguneo, a popular neologism in Latin America.
[3] It is the title of the Argentine novel by Juan José Saer, published in 1980.
[4] I use a calendar similar to the one used by Mussolini. The Era Fascista calendar was inspired by the French Republican calendar. Era Fascista dates often consisted of the Gregorian date followed by the corresponding Era Fascista year in Roman numerals, as part of Fascist propaganda’s appropriation of ancient Roman iconography. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendario_fascista
[5] In any case, Sanders expresses a certain nostalgia for the American industrial capitalism of the 1950s.
[6] Conjurers use 3 basic techniques: manipulation, distraction, and subtle control of an audience’s decisions. The theme was masterfully developed by Thomas Mann in his short novel Mario and the Magician (1930), with reference to fascism in the 1920s and 1930s.
[7] Max Scheler considered resentment as a psychic self-intoxication arising from the systematic repression of normal emotions such as revenge or envy, due to a sense of impotence. Max Scheler, Resentment. Marquette University Press, 1994, with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser. In Spanish El resentimiento en la moral, Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1927.
[8] See Gino Germani’s contribution on this subject: https://backend.educ.ar/refactor_resource/get-attachment/24016
[9] First published by the American Jewish Committee in 1949, and republished by Verso, London, 2021. There is a Spanish edition published in Madrid in 1973 and another in Buenos Aires years later https://www.libreriasudestada.com.ar/productos/profetas-del-engano-leo-lowenthal-y-norbert-guterman/
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