I had planned on a slightly different priority list for the posts I was going to roll out, but here we are just passing election day and on somewhat of a precipice, so it seemed timely to get this one out instead, which will nibble around the edges of some of the issues at stake currently. I'm not necessarily going to comment on the immediate results of the election, in favor of a more gut-level read on a basic mood and zeitgeist. I'm not going to trot out the tired lamentation that Trump's victory spells the end of democracy - whatever that is - either. I guess we could just jump right into this.
I don't think I need to get into too much background to establish that there has been a whole lot of apprehension surrounding the 2024 US election here and around the world - even more than the usual dread and lamentations for "democracy" that have come around every 4 years here - and there are so many fascinating and terrifying analyses on the subject floating around at the moment. And when you have this much apprehension and consternation, it is usually a sign that things are very tenuous and fragile, and had to become that way somehow, which could be traced back decades at this point, or centuries if you wanted to get ambitious. In particular, I wanted to get at the subjective dimensions to this moment that I want to explore briefly as we cross this particular threshold.
To first point to a historical analogue, in the first half of the 20th century - amidst the destruction of the World Wars and the breakneck social change accompanying it - when the era of mass propaganda and advertising really went into full swing, there was an obsession among the ruling elite of gaining control of what was often described as the "unruly mob." And even though this was an ugly thing that lead to all sorts of deeper pathologies, it was also kind of understandable. There was a deep fear and distrust of peoples as masses in general, further instilled by spectacular outbursts of political instability, nationalist fervor and rising demagogues, mass runaway slaughter in the wars, and so on. Nevermind that generation after generation of elite activities and machinations produced much of this hated "mass" that they were insisting was quite dangerous and needed to be managed carefully.
So why was this the case and what did this look like, and what does it have to do with our predicament today? We could tie in and explore all kinds of historical threads to account for this state of affairs, and a lot of really great work has been done on countless related subjects. We've done some of this surveying here over the years. At the moment though I just wanted to get at the subjective experience with the usual help of some colorful imagery.
I've absorbed an endless amount of excellent analyses of the structural, political, and economic forces driving the imperial era and then the run-up to the World Wars, as well as the explosive unwinding of these forces in the prosecution of the wars themselves, and one can readily put together a convincing intellectual account of all of this which can be quite useful, but what continually re-emerges in my mind are the really vivid and colorful first-hand accounts, such as Hannah Arendt's subjective observations of a society full of bitter despair and resignation, and caustic hatred for everything that exists, and then of course the resonance in one's own heart that those observations evoke. There were powerful collective emotional and spiritual undercurrents that were leading up to the wars that could be really felt and apprehended, a feeling quite unmistakable and striking which is growing ever-thicker in the air today.
Those feelings imply a kind of violent movement to be experienced, which was an experience of being a part of something that was happening and going to happen as history unfolded in the present. In the media space we've had a constant flood of navel-gazing and intellectualizing of that history, in which we've wondered how it was that people could behave in such ways, and how such terrible things could be done, and now we're experiencing in real time a sort of increasing and accelerating sense of chaos and dynamism. The deep apprehension and tension itself could be seen to be the subjective experience of a high amount of potential energy, because after all, one holds one's breath when one senses the possibility for sudden violent change or transformation, which carries effects that are difficult to predict in terms of their beneficial or detrimental (or both) downstream consequences.
This stuff can take a long time to build up. To track some of this, it might be helpful to trace out some of the popular cultural production that uses this subjectivity as raw material for its storytelling. For instance, for decades there has been a cultural fascination with zombies as a mythological construct, which as imagery has evolved over time as it is revisited and reimagined through contemporary lenses as they progressively iterate. One of the major underlying anxieties in the zombie mythos is of a mass of humanity suddenly changed, and then set into motion as killer automata which trundle across the landscape, devouring any surviving "decent" and "unturned" individual caught in their wake. Though of course with recent popular re-imaginings like The Walking Dead, the surviving hold-outs are often some of the worst and most dangerous threats as they fight to survive in spite of themselves amidst the altered landscape.
One of my personal favorite zombie motifs is the "hoard" and all of the associated dynamics and anxieties that accompany that concept. The presence of the hoard (basically a large mass of zombies) tends to change the story calculus from particulars and individuals and all of those associated dramas - which themselves are good and interesting no doubt - to a structural calculus of environmental forces that need to be navigated.
The hoard, due in large part to its sheer size and momentum as the accumulation of numerous single zombies - which each on their own carries a potential danger of its own but which can be managed on an individual basis - carries with it so much destructive force as a sum that merely being caught in its general direction implies certain ruin. It is a problem of the destructive force of overwhelming number and movement. And so the solution to coping with it is not so much gaining mastery over it as it is learning what direction it is moving and at what velocity, and then managing to stay out of its way.
The particulars of the zombie mythos are many, and so can be creatively applied in many other ways, but to repeat one common theme, it can be seen to express that old early modern fear of the crowd, echoed long after the World Wars, when masses of violent and chaotic runaway human energy were unleashed on an industrial scale with industrialized implements of destruction.
To bring it back to our subjective analysis, what are the experiential underpinnings which build up such destructive forces and then set them into motion? As we've detailed in discussions previously, that growing instability and dynamism accompanying a mass loss of temper is coming back into full swing, which you can see and feel. Troublingly, a lot of what I've seen in people - and then heard about in various accounts - is that your average person is just not ready or equipped for such things, which is part of the point being made here. I don't want to put people down as "sheeple," it is just that most people don't have the time or resources to build up the spiritual and intellectual structures needed to individually absorb the incoming mass trauma that we're going to see, without of course producing additional cascades of reaction and trauma in turn.
Part of this is capacity and then part of this is time and energy. For example, if you are slighted by someone but you are not immediately threatened, you might chew over what was said and done for a while. There are many ways to do this: with tools of communication, by meditating on the other person's subjective experience, by situating the slight within your own consciousness and making room for it, and so on, and you may be able to resolve the slight within yourself or even with the other person without continuously amplifying it and making it worse.
However if you have less time, underdeveloped coping skills and resources, or the stakes are higher, or a combination of these things, you have to react to that slight or even threat with what you have at the moment. And even reactions are conditioned by training and knowledge previously built up. The man coming at you with a knife has to be reacted to whether you can sympathize with his history and motivations or not, but someone trained in self-defense is going to handle it differently than someone who is not.
I think of the difference between water passing over concrete on the one hand and then settling into a wetlands on the other. Water needs all of those little recesses and passages and living systems to trickle into and then become absorbed in and made use of. With something like concrete, it only passes over it, accumulating in mass and speed. When you witness and absorb world events, all of that needs to percolate through all of the various knowledge structures that you've built up. Sitting with it, you can absorb it and situate it within ongoing world events. People who have not had the time to build up these structures however are hit with it all at once, and have to react with what they have, oftentimes with crude tools passed to them by those looking to gain something by the crudity and nature of those tools.
Yasha Levine and Evgenia Kovda for example have talked about Jewish friends suddenly discovering Zionism after October 7. I've seen this too. I'm working off of memory of an insightful podcast they put on a while ago, but as Levine and Kovda put it, it tended to be people without previously built up political ideologies, skills, and experiences, who were suddenly confronted with an extremely traumatic event without the means to situate that event historically or politically, and who reacted to it in kind. What do you do with news of an act of directed violence? You situate that direction within ready-made - and cynically circulated - crude explanations such as a mainstream conception of antisemitism and the nature of Israel.
The act of violence witnessed on October 7 - as a dialectical act connected to many other acts of violence over a long span of time - becomes amputated from that greater reality and focused upon as a singular event, and then grafted onto a simplified narrative of antisemitic violence, deployed as a shaped charge to provoke reactive violence in a specific direction, which in the end can be used to justify something like genocide.
Domestically, you see this in the polarization surrounding the US dual party system and the media apparatus that amplifies and reproduces that system. You see people en masse latching onto the political squabbles of the legacy parties and then polarizing with them, snapping into that simple binary schema and eating up the simplistic political narratives that come down the pipe, narratives that are produced both to grease the wheels of an antiquated and dysfunctional political system and to turn a profit.
The nature of both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump reflect how the greater political and cultural apparatus work, and how they produce people and for what purpose those people are produced. What they do and say in the course of their campaigns, and then in office, reflects a professional functionality and totality that is rapidly breaking down, and there are plenty of people who have commented on these things and/or who have voted anyway with this full knowledge. But there are plenty more who are latching onto these candidates as true believers, fully taking up their rhetoric and their communicated aspirations as a standalone reality, and will be set in motion in the direction prescribed by these things, which in a polarized dual party system means in direct and violent opposition to each other.
How things are built is a contributing factor to how they become unbuilt. A falling high-rise is a terrible thing, and for that matter one that is bombed is an even more terrible thing. What goes up must come down, and what goes way up must come way down and with much force, and where there is concentrated energy, there is the potential for its concentrated dispersal as well.
What I'm getting at here in general is that our industrial societies are built to go ever higher and ever faster, and to become ever more top-heavy, instrumentalizing the whole of creation to do so. People are produced and cyclically reproduced to administrate this system, and so it is no wonder that so many of them, atomized and strung out, their backs to the wall, latch on to the simple schema and manipulations at hand when increasingly unstable and concentrated forces begin peppering them from all sides, those forces increasingly set free by the ungainliness of the very system that their increasing chaotic velocity is degrading.
It is difficult to say how significant the election will prove to be after we are afforded some hindsight, but it is certainly an important cyclical milestone and break-point which can be pointed at, making more visual and apparent a whole array of affairs connected to it, and which implies a certain flow of changes cascading from it in turn. All of which is to say: good luck to all of us!
This was another difficult piece to produce, and I'm going to have to assume that it might be a bit difficult to read as well. But as usual, we're going to keep exploring many of these themes and continue to clarify them in time, especially as I get these rusty joints moving again.
