The government does not speak for you. Then why do you listen?
The divide between the state and its citizens has never been greater. Soon we will reach a breaking point.
When US President Joe Biden claims ‘the American people stand unequivocally behind Israel’ then what does that even mean?
When German chancellor Olaf Scholz says ‘Germany owes Israel a historical debt’ then who is he talking about?
Who owes the debt?
What is Germany? What is the US?
And who are these men who claim to speak for ‘their’ citizens?
Let’s talk about illusions and ‘the big Other’ that dominates our lives.
While Joe Biden hoists Israeli flags and shakes the hands of war criminals and mass murderers, hundreds of thousands of ‘his’ people are protesting in the streets and waving Palestine flags. While Olaf Scholz talks some geopolitical nonsense about ‘our’ trusted allies, blah blah blah, most people inhabiting the concept called Germany could not give a single fuck about this false, presumptuous man’s words. They do not even listen.
What does the term ‘official’ mean? Who is it that decides what is ‘official’ and what is not?
Consider the following scenario:
The US President declares, decides, makes official that the US stands behind Israel. At the same time, most of the actual people living in the United States condemn the actions of Israel and support the Palestine struggle for freedom. (While condemning Hamas terrorist attacks, of course, yadda yadda yadda.)
So… who is in the right?
What, then, is the position of the United States of America? Can one elitist man, or a couple hundred of them, speak over the hundreds of millions?
Yes.
And that is why people are losing trust in their governments and elected officials. That is why people are increasingly turning to personalities that feel at least somewhat ‘real.’ Unfortunately, those are most often right-wing, hateful nutjobs.
Why would people elect Trump over Biden?
Because, one, Trump, for all his being a stupid, greedy cunt, addresses actual worries ordinary people face, and then, of course, alleviates those fears with the most misguided (proto-) fascistic solutions. We have talked about the renewed rise of fascism and its reasons recently. No need to tread that ugly swamp again.
And, two, Trump feels like he actually possesses a personality, however horrible it may be. He feels human. He does funny stuff. He tweets with emotion. Sometimes, he doesn’t care if it actually harms his aspirations.
The likes of Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz, Emmanuel Macron, or Karl Nehammer (‘my’ chancellor) on the other hand, feel like empty husks from and into which abstraction and polished words flow. They do not appear to have any personality left. They gave it all up. Everything they do, everything they say, everything they tweet has been prepared by an army of PR professionals. Everything is polished, checked, re-checked, then polished again.
Are they even real?
Governments are an illusion. The ‘official’ is an illusion. A huge, abstract, intangible, horrible construct that somehow we have decided to let rule over us. It is ‘the big Other.’
Most politicians do not feel human because they are mere shells for the abstraction. They spout whatever the construct demands to climb the equally illusionary hierarchies and bureaucracies.
Does Joe Biden — Joe Biden the actual human, for he must exist, doesn’t he? — actually stand behind Israel? (The Israel-Palestine conflict is just an illustrating example. Insert any other political issue here, it does not matter.)
He must see the evidence, he must have some internalized sense of justice and morality. No, I do not think he believes for one second in his own words. He does not believe in the abstract, for he sees it for what it is. He just uses it. His words are not real.
Why would he even care? Most people don’t care about Ukrainians, or America’s relations with Japan, or whatever happens in some distant African lands, or trade tariffs, or whatever else. Why should he, then?
He doesn’t. He just performs his job as a shell. It’s quite lucrative and the power must feel very good.
There is a saying that ex-communists are the worst capitalists, as exemplified by the greedy pile of shit that is the Russian government or any other post-Soviet political elite. Because communists have studied the capitalist apparatus, have internalized its terrible functioning, they see its vast potential for individual accumulation.
Politicians must see the fakeness, the absurdity, the indifference most clearly. After all, they live it day in and day out. It must eat at them in some way. What does it take to dedicate your life to an illusion?
I first encountered the term ‘the big Other’ in Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? though I learned that it originates in 20th-century philosopher Jacques Lacan and, in recent years, was popularized by fellow Balkanist Slavoj Žižek. Here, I want to offer my interpretation, in no means unique or even profound.
The big Other is a mirror image, a nebulous dream. It does not truly exist, though its consequences can be considerable.
The big Other are politicians’ speeches, official statements, flags in social media bios, news articles and ‘opinion’ pieces, advertisements, corporate branding, UN conferences, debates, online bots and fake influencers, the EU, state visits, official dinners, agreements and negotiations…
No one believes in the big Other, not even those who manifest and nurture it in the first place.
What does it mean when we read that ‘the US supports Ukraine’?
Neither the US nor the Ukraine are truly real. And what is ‘the US’? — Is it the aggregate opinion and decision-making of its elected officials? Or is it its people, as diverse and wide-ranging in opinion as could possibly be?
‘The US supports Ukraine’ means nothing, in the end. And, for some reason, we have allowed it to mean everything.
To rise to prominence and comfortable status, reporters and journalists must inevitably bend to the big Other’s opinions. That is no conspiracy or anything, but just a matter of fact.
The big Other, in fact, supports an apparently wide range of opinions, from what we would call liberal to what is considered conservative or even far-right. Yet, in essence, that is the very same opinion. Both sides support the status quo and hence serve the big Other. The big Other is so adaptable that it can allow even the fascist, for the fascist still holds onto state and capital. Everything else is irrelevant.
By making the appearance of inner conflict (democrats vs. republicans, for example), the big Other is further strengthened and presented as a fought-for outcome one should be thankful for. Concessions to civil liberties are, of course, granted on occasion (and those should be celebrated, despite everything) yet can, and often will be, taken away at will or when the state inevitably encounters times of true struggle such as revolutionary movements or the coming climate breakdown.
‘The public opinion,’ i.e. the big Other, hence can be constructed on two pillars: the state and the state-affiliated media which is all relevant media. Together, these form and define ‘opinion,’ and gaslight the masses into thinking that there exists something like a public opinion in the first place. By this (necessary) aggregation process, individuals are stripped of individuality. The public, official opinion thus truly exists only in those too lazy or tired to critically think for themselves. Otherwise, it is pure, hot air.
It is an understandable fact, for example, that most people of the Arab world hate America. Why wouldn’t they?
By presenting a unified, aggregated American opinion that does not truly exist in the first place, and then converting it into actual policy (such as invading nations to strip them of resources), American politicians forcibly throw all American people into one obscure slur.
So, the Arab does not hate the American people — though it is understandable that many of them would think so — no, they hate the ‘official America’. They hate the big American Other.
The big Other, the big Official, of course, exists and is nurtured because a small class of people, the bourgeoisie, massively profits from it. All of ‘liberal democracy’ exists to prolong that rule.
Hence the big Other claims an absolute monopoly on acceptable opinion, reason, sanity, common sense, etc. All that diverts from that is branded radical and presented as danger to the comfortable status quo.
The very meanings of the words liberty, freedom, democracy, and so on have been obscured to such a degree that they become almost the opposite of what they were originally meant to represent.
Equally, the exact functioning of said ‘liberal democracies’ is obscured by an impenetrable, incomprehensible structure and explanatory legalese that makes the emergence of so-called ‘professional’ politicians, lawyers, judges, and millions of bureaucrats necessary in the first place. By this mechanics, an appearance of supposedly necessary professionalization is presented, and the rule of an ‘educated’ few justified. The opinion of the common man and woman is thus disregarded, for ‘they do not know what they’re talking about. Politics is complicated.’
It’s only complicated because they want it to be complicated.
It’s not complicated at all, in my opinion, to condemn genocides and not shake hands with mass murderers. It’s not complicated at all to not flood the world with weaponry and establish military bases all around the globe. It’s not complicated to not be a murderous fucking psychopath while your fellow human beings struggle to feed their children.
Yet in the illusionary world of the big Other everything is complicated and the most horrible of actions become necessary to protect and nurture the big Other, i.e. national interests and obscure geopolitical posturing.
Fuck the state. And fuck all politicians.
There is no lesser evil to vote for, there is only evil.
The alternative? There is none. The big Other claims monopoly and has worked tirelessly to expand its rule into every possible corner of this planet.
The alternative is to say ‘fuck it all.’ If done by enough people, the system eventually loses legitimacy. But, the nation-state will, inevitably, fall and take capitalism with it, anyway. The collapse of the big Other will be the most horrible of times, and it will be the best of times. At least we will leave the constant cognitive dissonance behind.
Cheers,
Antonio Melonio
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Well said