Bodhisattva

"William Butler Yeat's "Second Coming" seems perfectly to render our present predicament: "The best lack all conviction, well the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." This is an excellent description of the current split between anaemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists. "The best" are no longer able fully to engage, while "the worst" engage in racist, religious, sexist fanaticism.

However, are the terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the U.S.: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers' way of life. If today's so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to truth, why should they feel threatened by non-beleivers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns him. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist's search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated by the sinful life of the non-beleivers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful Other, they are fighting their own temptation. These so-called Christian or Muslim fundamentalists are a disgrace to true fundamentalism.

It is here that Yeats's diagnosis falls short of the present predicament: the passionate intensity of a mob bears witness to a lack of true conviction. Deep in themselves terrorist fundamentalists also lack true conviction--their violent outbursts are proof of it. How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be, if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a low-circulation Danish newspaper. The fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists' conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization. The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but rather that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. This is why our condescending, politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only make them more furious and feeds their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that secretly they have already internalised our standards and measure themselves by them. (This clearly goes for the Dalai Lama, who justifies Tibetan Buddhism in Western terms of the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain.) Paradoxically, what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a dose of that true "racist" conviction of one's own superiority.

The perplexing fact about the "terrorist" attacks is that they do not fit our standard opposition of evil as egotism or disregard for the common good, and good as the spirit of and actual readiness for sacrifice in the name of some higher cause. Terrorists cannot but appear as something akin to Milton's Satan with his "Evil, be thou my Good": while they pursue what appear to us to be evil goals with evil means, the very form of their activity meets the highest standard of the good. The resolution of this enigma isn't difficult and was already known to Rousseau. Egotism, or the concern for one's well-being, is not opposed to the common good, since altruistic norms can easily be deduced from egotistic concerns. Individualism versus communitarianism, utilitarianism versus the assertion of universal norms, are false oppositions since the two opposed options amount to the same in their result. The critics who complain how, in today's hedonistic-egotistic society, true values are lacking totally miss the point. The true opposite of egotist self-love is not altruism, a concern for common good, but envy, ressentiment, which makes me act against my own interests. Freud knew it well: the death drive is opposed to the pleasure principle as well as to the reality principle. The true evil, which is the death drive, involves self-sabotage. It makes us act against our own interests.

The problem with human desire is that as Lacan put it, it is always "desire of the Other" in all the senses of that term: desire for the Other, desire to be desired by the Other, and especially desire for what the Other desires. This last makes envy, which includes resentment, constitutive components of human desire, something Augustine knew well. Recall the passage from his Confessions, often quoted by Lacan, the scene of a baby jealous of his brother suckling at the mother's breast: "I myself have seen and known an infant to be jealous though it could not speak. It became pale, and cast bitter looks on its foster-brother."

Based on this insight, Jean-Pierre Dupuy proposes a convincing critique of John Rawls's theory of justice. In the Rawlsian model of a just society, social inequalities are tolerated only insofar as they also help those at the bottom of the social ladder, and insofar as they are based not on inherited hierarchies, but on natural inequalities, which are considered contingent, not merits. Even the British Conservatives seem now to be prepared to endorse Rawls's notion of justice: in December 2005 David Cameron, the newly elected Tory leader, signaled his intention of turning the Conservative Party into a defender of the underprivileged, declaring, "I think the test of all our policies should be: what does it do for the people who have the least, the people on the bottom rung of the ladder?" But what Rawls doesn't see is how such a society would create conditions for an uncontrolled explosion of resentiment: in it, I would know that my lower status is fully "justified" and would thus be deprived of the ploy of excusing my failure as the result of social injustice.

Rawls thus proposes a terrifying model of a society in which hierarchy is directly legitimised in natural properties, thereby missing the simple lesson an anecdote about a slovene peasant makes palpably clear. The peasant is given a choice by a good witch. She will either give him one cow and his neighbour two cows, or she'll take one cow from him and two from his neighbour. The peasant immediately chooses the second option. Gore Vidal demonstrates the point succinctly: "it is not enough for me to win--the other must lose." The catch of envy/resentment is that it not only endorses the zero-sum game principal where my victory equals the other's loss. It also implies a gap between the two, which is not the positive gap (we can all win with no losers at all) but a negative one. If i had to choose between my gain and my opponents loss, I prefer the opponent's loss, even if it means also a loss to me. It is as if my eventual gain from the opponent's loss functions as a kind of pathological element that stains the purity of my victory.

Friedrich Hayek knew that it was much easier to accept inequalities if one can claim that they result from an impersonal blind force: the good thing about the "irrationality" of the market and success or failure in capitalism is that it allows me precisely to perceive my failure or success as "undeserved," contingent. Remember the old motif of the market as the modern version of an imponderable fate. The fact that capitalism is not "just" is thus a key feature of what makes it acceptable to the majority. I can live with my failure much more easily if i know that it is not due to my inferior qualities, but to chance.

What Nietzsche and Freud share is the idea that justice as equality is founded on envy--on the envy of the Other who has what we do not have, and who enjoys it. The demand for justice is thus ultimately the demand that the excessive enjoyment of the Other should be curtailed so that everyone's access to jouissance is equal. The necessary outcome of this demand, of course, is asceticism. Since it is not possible to impose equal jouissance, what is imposed instead to be equally shared is prohibition. Today, in our allegedly permissive society, however, this asceticism assumes the form of its opposite, a generalised superego injunction, the command "Enjoy!" We are all under the spell of this injunction. The outcome is that our enjoyment is more hindered than ever. Take the yuppie who combines narcissistic "self-fulfilment" with the utterly ascetic disciplines of jogging, eating health food, and so on. Perhaps this is what Nietzsche had in mind with his notion of the Last Man, though it is only today that we can really discern his contours in the guise of the hedonistic asceticism of yuppies. Nietzsche wasn't simply urging life-assertion against asceticism: he was well aware that a certain asceticism is the obverse of a decadent excessive sensuality. His criticism of Wagner's Parsifal, and more generally of late-romantic decadence which oscillates between damp sensuality and obscure spiritualism, makes the point.

So what is envy? Let's return to the Augustinian scene of a sibling envying his brother who is suckling at the mother's breast. The subject does not envy the Other's possession of the prized object as such, but rather the way the Other is able to enjoy this object, which is why it is not enough for him simply to steal and thus gain possession of the object. His true aim is to destroy the Other's ability/capacity to enjoy the object. So we see that envy needs to be placed within the triad of envy, thrift, and melancholy, the three forms of not being able to enjoy the object and, of course, reflexively enjoying that very impossibility. In contrast to the subject of envy, who envies the other's possession and/or jouissance of the object, the miser possesses the object, but cannot enjoy/consume it. His satisfaction derives from just possessing it, elevating it into a sacred, untouchable/prohibited entity which should under no conditions be consumed. The proverbial figure of the lone miser is the one we see returning home, safely locking the doors, opening up his chest, and then taking that secret peek at his prized object, observing it in awe. The very thing that prevents his consumption of the object guarantees its status as the object of desire. As for the melancholic subject, like the miser he possesses the object, but he loses the reason that made him desire it. Most tragic of all, the melancholic has free access to all he wants, but finds no satisfaction in it.

This excess of envy is the base of Rousseau's well-known, but none the less not fully exploited, distinction between egotism, amour-de-soi (that love of the self which is natural), and amour-propre, the perverted preferring of oneself to others in which a person focuses not on achieving a goal, but on destroying the obstacle to it:

The primitive passions, which all directly tend towards our happiness, make us deal only with objects which relate to them, and whose principle is only amour-de-soi, are all in their essence lovable and tender; however, when, diverted from their objects by obstacles, they are more occupied with the obstacle they try to get rid of, than with the object they try to reach, they change their nature and become irascible and hateful. This is how amour-de-soi, which is noble and absolute feeling, becomes amour-propre, that is to say, a relative feeling by means of which one compares oneself, a feeling which demands preferences, whose enjoyment is purely negative and which does not strive to find satisfaction in our own well-being, but only in the misfortune of others.

An evil person is thus not an egotist, "thinking only about his own interests." A true egotist is too busy taking care of his own good to have time to cause misfortune to others. The primary vice of a bad person is that he is more preoccupied with others than with himself. Rousseau is describing a precise libidinal mechanism: the inversion which generates the shift of the libidinal investment from the object to the obstacle itself. This could well be applied to fundamentalist violence--be it the Oklahoma bombings or the attacks on the Twin Towers. In both cases, we were dealing with hatred pure and simple: destroying the obstacle, the Oklahoma City Federal Building, the World Trade Center, was what really mattered, not achieving the noble goal of a truly Christian or Muslim society.

Here is why egalitarianism itself should never be accepted at its face value: the notion (and practice) of egalitarian justice, insofar as it is sustained by envy, relies on the inversion of the standard renunciation accomplished to benefit others: "I am ready to renounce it, /so that others will (also) NOT (be able to) have it!" Far from being opposed to the spirit of sacrifice, evil here emerges as the very spirit of sacrifice, ready to ignore one's own well-being-if, through my sacrifice, I can deprive the Other of his enjoyment..."

-Slavoj Zizek, "Violence", the thread title is the title of a section of a chapter

http://mariborchan.com/violence-six-...s-reflections/ has a .pdf

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Mercury

yeah!

SpankyMcLankey

lol wut

Bodhisattva

dont make me google image search 'hitler is amused' spanky

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