"ISIS aims to create a Caliphate, but, like American regime-changers, it cannot organize a political space, as distinct from privatizing violence. Motivated by a selfie individualism, the adepts of ISIS are better at destroying Valhalla than building it. Ultimately, a passion for grand politics, manifest in ISIS's Wagnerian-style annihilation, is what drives the Caliphate, as much as it did [Gabriele] D'Annunzio's utopia. The will to power and craving for violence as existential experience reconciles, as [philosopher and social theorist Georges] Sorel prophesized, the varying religious and ideological commitments of its adherents. The attempts to place them in a long Islamic tradition miss how much these militants, feverishly stylizing their murders and rapes on Instagram, reflect an ultimate stage in the radicalization of the modern principle of individual autonomy and equality: a form of strenuous self-assertion that acknowledges no limits, and requires descent into a moral abyss."
Philosopher George Santayana foresaw that America's obsessive individualistic culture of competition and mimicry would eventually incite "a lava-wave of primitive blindness and violence." The inability to be self-critical and self-aware, coupled with the cult of the self, would lead to a collective suicide. Cultural historian Carl Schorske in "Fin-de-Sià �cle Vienna: Politics and Culture" wrote that Europe's descent into fascism was inevitable once it cut the "cord of consciousness." And, with the rise of Trump, it is clear the "cord of consciousness" has also been severed in the twilight days of the American empire. Once we no longer acknowledge or understand our own capacity for evil, once we no longer know ourselves, we become monsters who devour others and finally devour ourselves.
"Totalitarianism with its tens of millions of victims was identified as a malevolent reaction to the benevolent Enlightenment tradition of rationalism, humanism, universalism and liberal democracy -- a tradition seen as an unproblematic norm," Mishra writes. "It was clearly too disconcerting to acknowledge that totalitarian politics crystallized the ideological currents (scientific racism, jingoistic nationalism, imperialism, technicism, aestheticized politics, utopianism, social engineering and the violent struggle for existence) flowing through all of Europe in the late nineteenth century."
Mishra knows what happens when people are discarded onto the dung heap of history. He knows what endless wars, waged in the name of democracy and Western civilization, engender among their victims. He knows what drives people, whether they are at a Trump rally or a radical mosque in Pakistan, to lust after violence. History informs the present. We are afflicted by what writer Albert Camus called "autointoxication, the malignant secretion of one's preconceived impotence inside the enclosure of the self." And until this "autointoxication" is addressed, the rage and violence, at home and abroad, will expand as we stumble toward a global apocalypse. The self-alienation of humankind, Walter Benjamin warned, "has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order."
The conflicts in Egypt, Libya, Mali, Syria and many other places, Mishra notes, are fueled by "extreme weather events, the emptying of rivers and seas of their fish stocks, or the desertification of entire regions on the planet." The refugees being driven by their homelands' chaos into Europe are creating political instability there. And as we sleepwalk into the future, the steady deterioration of the ecosystem will ultimately lead to total systems collapse. Mishra warns that "the two ways in which humankind can self-destruct -- civil war on a global scale, or destruction of the natural environment -- are rapidly converging." Our elites, oblivious to the dangers ahead, blinded by their own hubris and greed, are ferrying us, like Charon, to the land of the dead.
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