By Richard Seymour
Disasters are supposed to pull us together. They are supposed to produce a wave of euphoria among survivors once the worst has passed, forging in the ruins a ‘city of comrades’. Rebecca Solnit shows us how disasters can spawn ‘disaster communities’ and even, by disrupting the ordinary misery and alienation of daily life, inflame utopian desires.
It isn’t necessarily so. A ‘city of comrades’ is only likely to appear in special circumstances, where the disaster doesn’t disperse the community, where the community was not already split along multiple faultlines (class, race, religion), where there were already traditions of self-help, mutualism and solidarity, and – in some instances – where the disaster is not inflicted by other human beings. What happens when the misery is ‘anthropogenic’, the resources for self-help are negligible, social trust is in the gutter, and the expected reflexes of decency and charity fail to materialise?
In his work on disasters over several decades, the sociologist Kai Erikson notes, he has never once found the fabled euphoria or ‘democracy of distress’. To the contrary, survivors have presented as bewildered, resigned, furious, muted – above all, traumatised. Rather than discovering community, they have divided into factions of mutual recrimination and retreated into personal survivalist enclaves.
It is worse when, in Erikson’s terms, acute disaster piles on top of chronic disaster. A chronic disaster would include the anomic forces of poverty, regional decline, long-term unemployment and depression which give rise to ‘deaths of despair’. Such a disaster
gathers force slowly and insidiously, creeping around one’s defenses rather than smashing through them. The person is unable to mobilize his normal defenses against the threat, sometimes because he has elected consciously or unconsciously to ignore it, sometimes because he has been misinformed about it, and sometimes because he cannot do anything to avoid it in any case.
Millions of people regularly have their lives wrecked by disasters large and small, social and personal, acute and chronic, without being radicalised to the right. Yet from another point of view catastrophilia could be a cure for depression. For some of those whose ontological security has been painfully ruptured, it might offer a therapeutic torsion of angst into desire. The Catholic theologian Thomas Merton warned, decades ago, about what could happen to the dim forebodings of humans masquerading as apocalyptic knowledge: ‘The pathological fear of the violent end … when sufficiently aroused, actually becomes a thinly disguised hope for the violent end'.
To whom would this appeal? Perhaps none other than the ‘little man’ of whom Wilhelm Reich wrote in his psychosexual study of prewar fascism. Insofar as he is possessed by ‘an amalgam between rebellious emotions and reactionary social ideas’ and is ‘enslaved and craves authority and is at the same rebellious’, he needs a rebellion that protects the social order.
The social psychologist Michael Billig, in his study of fascist ideology, found that his subjects were in most ways not psychologically aberrant: they were neither floridly psychotic nor necessarily in the grip of an ‘authoritarian personality’. What distinguished them was that, faced with abrupt and unwelcome changes, they tended to personalise the affliction. Our misfortunes are not the result of systems or situations: someone evil did this to us. Or, as Michael Barkun put it: ‘Nothing happens by accident. Conspiracy implies a world based on intentionality.’ Like the paranoiac described by psychoanalyst Darian Leader, they aim to ‘denounce or strike the bad libido in the Other’.
Conspiracism explains the problem in a way that may require bloody revenge, may even entail a radical revision of the fabric of reality, but it still averts the need for radical social change. What needs to be destroyed is not the system, but personnel.
In the words of Clara Zetkin, fascism ‘rouses and sweeps along broad social masses who have lost the earlier security of their existence and with it, often, their belief in social order’. It promises that communal trust and security can be rebuilt, with great bloodshed but at minimal cost to the social order, within the sacred space of a cleansed nation.
Belief is not an isolated act. We all believe in thousands of facts, though we are ignorant of the evidence for them. In believing, we give credit to someone in confidence that it will be repaid. And part of our reason for doing so is that we know others believe the same thing. There is always what Michel de Certeau called a ‘secret network’ of believers sustaining any belief, whether it is in God, the media, science or the national currency. Given the collapse of belief in ‘mainstream media’ and the breakdown of the social alliances that sustain belief, trust can widely be reposed in ‘alternative sources’ if a sufficient threshold of support is spontaneously given to their lay theories: this is the logic of social contagion. The sense that, suddenly, ‘everyone is saying the same thing’ is another dimension of apocalyptic experience.
In United States history, successful rumours centring on plots have almost always been about race. Terry Ann Knopf describes ‘reports that slaves planned to burn down the city of New York; alleged meetings to encourage slaves to cut their masters’ throats; predictions of more runaway slaves, John Brown–type raids and slave insurrections’. But the wildfire rumours didn’t identify black insurgency as the main threat, even if they were haunted by the spectral ‘white genocide’ prophesied by the far right. Rather, in common with a long tradition of American conspiracist thought, they saw an elite hand behind events. It was the ‘Democrat Party’, the lying ‘mainstream media’ and ‘the system’ which ‘protects antifa and BLM terrorists’.
It wouldn’t be enough, then, to shoot Antifa activists even if any could be found, any more than it would be enough for right-wing activists to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters or ram them with their vehicles (there were at least fifty recorded instances of this during the BLM protests). By implication, to stop the catastrophic onslaught of ruling-class terrorism against conservative whites, the entire basis of liberal power would have to be destroyed.
Hannah Arendt pointed out that mass propaganda could always assume a willingness on the part of its audience to believe the worst. And if a lie was exposed, they would ‘protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness’. On the internet, we are both producers and consumers, and no one is innocent.
“Conspiracy theory is, from one angle, rumour metastasised. And rumour is not just lay theory. A rumour is a dream, and a dream is a wish-fulfilment. Or, to put it another way, the rumour stages the fulfilment of an unacceptable wish, a wish that one doesn’t wish for. Rumours express, and resolve in their dreamlike idiom, a profound emotional conflict… 'We want to be converted’, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes, ‘by those people who can apparently resolve our most unbearable conflicts'.”
“Belief is never innocent. As the theologian (and aforementioned psychoanalyst) Tad DeLay suggests, ‘belief is fantasy’ which rationalises behaviour rooted in more opaque impulses. This is not necessarily a criticism, for it is impossible to sustain any kind of social or political life without shared fantasy. It is through fantasy that we organise and sustain our shared desires, and the collapse of collective fantasies is not unrelated to the detumescence of desire and the pervasive depression. Conspiracy theory, to that extent, is responsive to the depression and boredom of late capitalist life, suggesting hidden or unexhausted possibilities in an exhausted age. It models desire and makes life exciting again.
For example, “The antisemitic nationalism bursting out of the decrepit integument of Stalinism’s formally rationalist but arbitrary tyranny was catapulted into the stratosphere by the catastrophic ‘shock doctrine’ policies imposed on the hitherto state-managed economies at the behest of the International Monetary Fund. This enriched a new nomenklatura, but it also caused hundreds of thousands of excess deaths and a spike in anomic crimes like homicide.
In Hungary, Soros’s birthplace, the consequences were far from the worst, but real wages nonetheless fell by 14 per cent between 1990 and 1992, while homicides increased by 43 per cent between 1989 and 1991. Soros had launched his Open Society Fund in 1979, aiming to promote Karl Popper’s concept of the ‘open society’ based on capitalism and liberal democracy, and he had worked with Hungary’s JĆ”nos KĆ”dĆ”r regime and General Wojciech Jaruzelski in Poland to promote market-based reform. Ironically, one of his beneficiaries was his future malefactor Viktor OrbĆ”n, who received an Open Society grant to study at Pembroke College, Oxford.
In Russia, as Putin allied with the far right to defeat his opponents on the left, Soros was blamed for anti-government movements. In Hungary, as OrbĆ”n imposed a constitutional rupture that stuffed the courts, took control of the media and rolled back parliamentary consultation, Soros was blamed for trying to bring ‘one million Muslims’ into Europe ‘every year’. Since then, his influence everywhere has been blamed for everything that the right loathes. Trump blamed him for orchestrating protests against the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court judge. Benjamin Netanyahu accuses him of spreading anti-Likud propaganda in Israel, and his son Yair Netanyahu alleges that he is ‘destroying Israel from the inside’. Romania’s Sorin Grindeanu administration blames him for anti-corruption protests. Vladimir Putin blames Russia’s civil society protests on Soros-funded NGOs. In Hungary, where Soros was born, Viktor OrbĆ”n and his Fidesz party portray Soros as the ‘puppet master’ of Muslim migration to Eastern Europe. Every 12 August, on George Soros’s birthday, the international far right now celebrates ‘International Day Against George Soros’. Soros is a useful foil for the far right because he is demonstrably rich, powerful and willing to use that power to support liberal causes. Yet the rumours could never have taken root if multiple economic and social crises, not to mention the unpunished ruling-class crime wave preceding the financial crash, hadn’t established the orectic conditions for their uptake. In other words, believers weren’t mere dupes: they had to want it.
The most potent modern political myths, however, are about power and revolution.
Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism, Verso, October 2024
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