Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.– Joseph Goebbels We would like to think that modern societies like ours have outgrown barbaric customs like human sacrifice. Sure, we still engage in scapegoating and figuratively sacrifice people on the altar of public opinion, but we don’t actually kill people in […]
Political & Social
Fascism and the Antifestival
(Part 2 of the Girard series. Part 1 here) Today, the Western world and particularly the United States appears to be in the midst of a classic Girardian sacrificial crisis. Once-reliable social institutions crumble. The public loses trust in its authorities: political, financial, legal, and medical. The new generation is poorer and sicker than the […]
The Death of the Festival
(Part 1 of a multi-part series) We live a double life, civilized in scientific and technical matters, wild and primitive in the things of the soul. That we are no longer conscious of being primitive, makes our tamed kind of wildness all the more dangerous. – Hans Von Hentig The natural order is unraveling. Plagues, […]
To Reason with a Madman
The lunacy that was the Trump Presidency was not a deviation from a trajectory toward greater and greater sanity….. It drew its power from a gathering cultural turbulence, just as a river generates increasingly violent countereddies as it approaches its plunge over the waterfall.
From QAnon’s Dark Mirror, Hope
A dark mirror shows features one would rather not see. You gaze at the repulsive visage in the picture frame, the caricature of everything despicable, only to realize with dawning horror that you are looking not at a portrait but at a mirror.
The political defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 election is a crossroads for the quasi-political movement grouped loosely around the QAnon conspiracy myth and, more broadly, around Trump himself. Because the man and the movement were a dark mirror for the whole of society, it is also a crossroads for society.
World on Fire
Brazil’s Pantanal is the world’s largest tropical wetland, covering an area nearly the size of Britain. Only today, it isn’t so wet. After a summer of drought, catastrophic fires are raging that have devastated 2.4 million hectares of land already this year. (That’s more than has burned in California, Oregon, and Washington combined.) Its precious […]