Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed", the Fourth Turning, and nihilism
POSTED BY: SignyM
UPDATED: Friday, March 24, 2023 06:55
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[Attack of the Nihilists
Did Dostoevsky's Demons Predict Wokeism, Antifa and the Gender-Benders?
Kevin Barrett • March 8, 2021 • 2,800 Words • 110 Comments • Reply
“’Are these the Nazis, Walter?’ ‘No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there’s nothing to be afraid of.’” -The Big Lebowski
Since the so-called insurrection of January 6, big media, big government, and big corporations have been demanding the collective scalp of the Trumpian alt-right. If we don’t somehow make those 70 million Trump voters disappear, the subtext goes, American democracy is doomed.
The alt-right agrees that American democracy faces an existential threat, but disagrees vociferously about the nature of the threat. Whereas Democrats and corporate media consider Trump’s cult of personality a fascist regime in the making, and his followers deluded and none-too-bright storm troopers, the deplorables, for their part, view the corporate Democrats as TDS-addled censorship-loving election thieves bent on establishing a “woke” dictatorship.
What does all this sound and fury really signify? What we are witnessing is a clash of barely-coherent yet increasingly frenetic ideologies—something the previous generation never imagined when it famously proclaimed the end of ideology. Its seems that Francis Fukuyama never read his Dostoevsky. If he had, he would have understood that the collapse of the grand récit of modernity would not lead to universal satisfaction under neoliberalism, but instead to ideological extremism, chaos, and bloodshed.
Dostoevsky literally wrote the book on ideological extremism and its causes and consequences. That book is Demons, otherwise known in various translations as The Devils, The Demons, and The Possessed. The author’s penultimate novel, it details the process by which liberal parents and educators produce radicalized, ideology-maddened children bent on tearing down the world into which they were born. This unquenchable thirst for destruction—call it nihilism if you will—is the engine of all post-religious political ideologies, be they of the left or right. Socialism, anarchism, communism, fascism, Nazism, woke-ism: all share a barely-concealed urge to blow up the inherited social order, ostensibly to rebuild it as some sort of nebulous paradise on earth. But all those rebuilding plans are just window-dressing. It’s the destruction, only the destruction, that counts.
Dostoevsky originally envisioned Demons as political polemic, but it expanded into a polyphonic masterpiece in the writing. Horrified by news reports of nihilist leader Sergey Nechayev’s orchestration of a pointless political murder, Dostoevsky set about fictionalizing the story, hoping to shed light on how the sensitive, genteel, well-meaning liberals of the 1840s had prepared the way for the 1860s generation of nihilist lunatics. (Today, we might ask ourselves how the complacent neoliberals of a generation ago, especially their avant-garde academic fringe, managed to midwife the emergence of today’s woke generation of sanctimonious COVID-masked rioters, Antifa thugs, social media censors, gender-denialists, statue-smashers, and others bent on the nihilistic extermination of American and human tradition if not reality itself.)
Demons, published in 1871-1872, predicted the rise of even worse nihilisms—and future developments, including the emergence of Bolshevism and Nazism, seemed to fulfill its prophecy. But what Dostoevsky foresaw was not so much particular events as a recurring pattern: Liberal parents neglect the religious education of their children, who grow up to embrace radical political ideologies as a poor substitute for faith and the spiritual life. That’s why Western culture has been trapped in an oscillating dynamic between liberalism and nihilistic radicalism for roughly two centuries, with no end in sight. The only off-ramp, as Dostoevsky never stopped screaming from the rooftops, would be a decisive return to religion. That seemed a pipe dream in the 1870s. But one hundred years later, the collapse of CommunNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
I read that book, but I was in my 20's when I read a lot of Dostoevsky's works, and don't remember as much as I should. Perhaps it's time to revisit it when I have some spare time.
free to read at Project Gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8117/8117-h/8117-h.htm
As I think about it, I remember my rather undigested problem with the novel, specifically the dependence on the idea of God capital G. Because it doesn't make sense globally, or anthropologically. There are plenty of stable cultures that posit unprovable beliefs, without necessarily God.
Since then I've come across the idea that the thing that allows humans to act together in large groups that don't have direct, familial ties or even knowledge of each other, is language - specifically the language of the non-existent (beliefs, fables, religions). Then of course, and as Signy pointed out a long time ago, there's the study that shows that children will believe what's told to them about the workings of a mysterious box, even when their own direct experience and sight contradict what they're told. So humans are particularly directed by the things we are told, whether those things exist or not. And those things form us into groups - tribes, if you will.
Personally, I have an idea about what we should be teaching out children, which was a mantra that grandmothers around the western world would admonish their grandchildren with - if everybody did it, what would the world look like? As Jesus said, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. As Confucius said, What I do not wish men to do to me, I also wish not to do to men. As the Iroquois Great Law of Peace said, in every decision, be it personal, governmental or corporate, we must consider how it will affect our descendants seven generations into the future. Or as those New Orleanians would say - what goes around, comes around.
And that's a very direct, very observable moral standard that requires no God, or gods, or beliefs.
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"My friend, real truth is never true-to-life, did you know that? In order to make the truth true-to-life you really have to stir a bit of falsehood into it" – Dostoevsky
"My dear, the real truth always sounds improbable, do you know that? To make truth sound probable you must always mix in some falsehood with it." – also Dostoevsky, The Possessed or, The Devils
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Posted this not because I believe in God, or gods, or a deity of any sort but because it points out our lack of cohesion around any particular identity or ethos that holds us together, and the centrifugal forces of narcissism, individualism, and the supremacy of wish-fufillment pulling us apart.
I get that impression every time I ask "What are Americans' interests?" and the response I get is .... "AMERICA?"
If I had to substitute a word for God it might be "reality"... that there is something greater than us, stronger than us, to which we all eventually submit. But there are people who believe they can escape their bodies and even escape death.
Anyway an interesting opinion worth reading, even if not agreed with.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.
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Oh, OK.
So, I'll think about our 'society' some, and whether or not we have a cohesive set of values that'll keep us going generation to generation.
But just off the top of my head, I can think of a huge disruptor in the US about 100 years ago from previous ethea (ethoses, plural forms of ethos) which were largely agrarian and stable - and that's the intentional directive towards the primacy of personal happiness, and specifically consumerism, above all. (A Century of Self)
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Quote:Dostoevsky's answer was simple: "But what Dostoevsky foresaw was not so much particular events as a recurring pattern: Liberal parents neglect the religious education of their children, who grow up to embrace radical political ideologies as a poor substitute for faith and the spiritual life. That’s why Western culture has been trapped in an oscillating dynamic between liberalism and nihilistic radicalism for roughly two centuries, with no end in sight. The only off-ramp, as Dostoevsky never stopped screaming from the rooftops, would be a decisive return to religion. That seemed a pipe dream in the 1870s. But one hundred years later, the collapse of Communism and the Islamic Awakening would restore it as a conceivable option."
Originally posted by SignyM:
Posted this not because I believe in God, or gods, or a deity of any sort but because it points out our lack of cohesion around any particular identity or ethos that holds us together, and the centrifugal forces of narcissism, individualism, and the supremacy of wish-fufillment pulling us apart.
I get that impression every time I ask "What are Americans' interests?" and the response I get is .... "AMERICA?"
If I had to substitute a word for God it might be "reality"... that there is something greater than us, stronger than us, to which we all eventually submit. But there are people who believe they can escape their bodies and even escape death.
Anyway an interesting opinion worth reading, even if not agreed with.
Maybe Dostoevsky's answer was not simple. He didn't account for the varieties of religious experience.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/14/if-the-u-s-had-100-pe
ople-charting-americans-religious-affiliations/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:I think you're right.
Originally posted by SignyM:
... it points out our lack of cohesion around any particular identity or ethos that holds us together, and the centrifugal forces of narcissism, individualism, and the supremacy of wish-fufillment pulling us apart.
I get that impression every time I ask "What are Americans' interests?" and the response I get is .... "AMERICA?"
The concept of common futures, common troubles, common interests, and community efforts have been all but stamped out. 'America' is no more than a slogan people chant when they want to (spend money we don't have to) bomb some poor country so that 'Americans' can feel important.
But that dissolution didn't happen by accident.
And given how easily Americans can be made to pivot, I think it could actually be reversed - if tptb would - for some strange reason, want to.
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Quote:George Washington warned what would happen if Americans weren’t careful. Americans didn't heed the warning.
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
The concept of common futures, common troubles, common interests, and community efforts have been all but stamped out. 'America' is no more than a slogan people chant when they want to (spend money we don't have to) bomb some poor country so that 'Americans' can feel important.
But that dissolution didn't happen by accident.
In his farewell address, Washington, like a father chiding his bickering children, advised his countrymen, no matter what their political passions, to consider the fundamental bonds that connected them as Americans. Political parties were useful to check the worst instincts of a monarch, he wrote, but, in a democracy, a party agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.
The Founders were suspicious of “factions,” as parties were then called, fearing that powerful blocs would put their own regional or commercial interests above the common good, and endanger the fragile union of the new nation. That is exactly what happened. Americans weren’t careful to avoid the worst possibilities of political parties.
George Washington Warned Against Political Infighting in His Farewell Address
https://www.history.com/news/george-washington-farewell-address-warnin
gs
As he stepped down from the presidency, Washington urged Americans to always place the interests of the nation over their political and regional affiliations.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Russia Bans Public Discussions of Army Strategy, Troop Morale, Mobilization
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/12/01/russia-bans-public-discussio
ns-of-army-strategy-troop-morale-mobilization-a79555
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I find old posts more interesting than today's poverty of partisan thought.
But what foes this Russian order have to do with thr original topic? Tacking posts on the ends of random threads just makes it difficult to maintain a conversation with gou.
AFA the order, there is a distinct lack of specificity in M$M reporting, ans Mosdow Times is a vehemently anti-Russian establishment site.
Most often I find western reports "about" Russia to be either misquoted, taken completely out of context (For example, when SECOND supposedly quoted Putin about a "purge", it wasn't a purge of people, as you might think, a full quote makes it clear that it is a purge of west-leaning policies) or simply made up.
So, this order: It was published by the FSB suoosedly, but not the Duma.
Who does it apply to? The military? The FSB? Everyone?
What are the penalties? Bc it doesn't seem to have the force of law, how do you enforce it?
It is much different than "Lose lips sink ships"?
More detail is required. If you find out more, thanks.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake
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