Two Minutes Hate
The deceptively simple five-minute focus article America Is Now A Zombie State provides one perspective on our body politic as the country eyes some sort of a finish line in this presidential election. In essence: the evocation of the bottom-up grassroots energy that Tocqueville had so admired in America’s politics has all but dried up. We’ve become anesthetized through a kind of cultural exhaustion. Politics has become reflex over reflection such that support for one candidate is principally due to said candidate not being the hated other.
Discuss: is the above a fair assessment, have our elections devolved into some loathsome theatrical farce and, if so, why is this the case? We might skip over the references to bad education and corruption and focus on the “We are immuring ourselves within our own private caves, watching flickering images in darkness.” That assessment brings to mind one of our previous philosophical examinations i.e. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
In the allegory, Plato describes a group of people whose entire existence is one of being chained to the wall of a cave, facing an opposite blank wall, such that their entire worldly perception consists of shadows cast by the light of a fire against moving objects behind them. The shadows are the prisoners’ reality. The allegory continues as Socrates explains how one prisoner, the metaphorical philosopher, is freed from the cave whereupon he discovers the higher reality which he then seeks to describe to the remaining prisoners as encouragement for them to take a similar journey.
You may choose to follow the allegory and what it says about people who are unable or unwilling to seek truth and wisdom but, for our purposes, the reference in the article to “flickering images in the darkness” might be equated to those false-reality shadows. Democracy threatens to fall apart in the face of this shadow world without the constructive energy of a grounded bottom-up electorate that passes on a kind of tribal wisdom.
The Tocqueville lament, you see, arises from a distorted top-down “technocratic managerialism,” mainlined by, among other things, an unrooted and unaccountable technological delivery system. In essence, we’re all being brainwashed.
The hypothesis has totalitarian implications. An anesthetized state is vulnerable to the black bats of an Orwellian dystopia. Ask yourself what is the number one emotion that applies to this election cycle and your likely answer is anger. Team Tucker and team Rachel might as well be the political equivalent to mutually assured destruction. Just notice how certain discussions of current affairs seem to raise the antennae, directed not so much toward the substance of the topic but rather to detect the tell-tale signs of “team” allegiance. Filters applied, the interaction might then devolve: I vent; therefore I am.
As we approach the last six months of this election cycle, perhaps think in terms of the signature event found in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four i.e. the so-called Two Minutes Hate, allowing citizens of Oceania to vent their existential anguish and personal hatred toward politically expedient enemies . . . and their love for Big Brother. Replace Big brother with party affiliation and notice how vulnerable we are to seduction.
Check your weapons at the door lest we fall prey to the bleak warning, “Every nation gets the government it deserves.”