Suicidalism
From wombat_socho, I learned of "Suicidalism," on Armed and Dangerous (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=218 and "Gramiscian Damage" (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260), which outline some very important ideas. I'm referring here to the former essay, but I may get to the second one.
AaD says:
The most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist terror network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker. The suicide bomber is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to spread terror; the suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or journalist or politician whose mission it is to destroy the West’s will to resist not just terrorism but any ideological challenge at all.
Very true. Without those who wish us to cast aside our weapons and surrender to the foe -- though they commonly think that what they're trying to do is "promote peace," because they refuse to acknowledge to themselves the depths of the enemy's evil and the extent of the enemy's ambitions -- the Terrorists would have no chance of any but the most temporary and local victories. We are much stronger than them in terms of brute force.
But al-Qaeda didn’t create the ugly streak of nihilism and self-loathing that afflicts too many Western intellectuals.
Spot-on identification of the attitude.
See my "Why Do Leftists Like Islamic Terrorists So Much?" (June 5th, 2007, http://jordan179.livejournal.com/20826.html ), for my take on the history of this problem.
Nor, I believe, is it a natural development. It was brought to us by Department V of the KGB, which was charged during the Cold War with conducting memetic warfare that would destroy the will of the West’s intelligentsia to resist a Communist takeover. This they did with such magnificent effect that the infection outlasted the Soviet Union itself and remains a pervasive disease of contemporary Western intellectual life.
Which is a simplification of what happened, but one which AaD addresses later in the article. Basically, I think that we couldn't have fallen for the Communist disinformation campaign if we hadn't already been prepared for it by our own late 19th century eagerness to repudiate classical liberalism in favor of protectionism and welfare-statism, and our refusal to face up to the lessons of the Great War which ensued in consequence of this repudiation. AaD also thinks there were deeper philosophical and theological roots, and I mostly agree with him on this.
I would advise everyone to read the following list very carefully
Consider the following propositions:
•There is no truth, only competing agendas.
•All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority
over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and
colonialism.
•There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture
to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such
standards is an evil oppressor.
•The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of
the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be
impoverished and miserable.
•Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal.
Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to
criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
•The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only
victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals
are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying
with poor people and criminals.)
•For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It
is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself.
But “oppressed” people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are
merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
•When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner
is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of
view, and make concessions.
Almost all of these have become the common and accepted wisdom in academia, bureaucracy, the media, and by far too many ordinary Americans as well. They are taught, explicitly or implicitly, to our children in elementary public schools.
These ideas travel under many labels: postmodernism, nihilism, multiculturalism, Third-World-ism, pacifism, “political correctness” to name just a few. It is time to recognize them for what they are, and call them by their right name: suicidalism.
This is a good term for this constellation of ideas. It identifies them by their likely outcome, which is suicide: any society, organization or individual who practiced them at all consistently would lose liberty, autonomy, and eventually life itself. The only way to evade this knowledge is the assumption that one is so superior that the "victim groups" being favored by this philosophy cannot enslave one despite the fact that one is no longer fighting back. Thus, one root of this philosophy is an immense superiority complex: unfortunately for the practicioners and anyone counting on them for leadership, this huge feeling of superiority does not convey any defense in reality.
Trace any of these back far enough (e.g. to the period between 1930 and 1950 when Department V was at its most effective) and you’ll find a Stalinist at the bottom.
He then gives some examples. This statement does indeed correspond with my research: there was a large-scale and largely successful effort by the Soviet Union to acquire and operate "agents of influence" in important Western institutions.
Consider in just what Western country they were most successful during the named era. France. Consider what France did in 1939-1940, in her hour of ultimate peril. She surrendered, and the effects of that surrender have blighted her future ever since.
It could be argued that the French surrender was inevitable given her poor prewar preparation. But what helped sabotage her prewar preparation?
Al-Qaeda didn’t launch any of these memes into the noosphere, but it relies on them for political cover. They have another effect as well: when Islamists characterize the West as “decadent”, and aver that it is waiting to collapse in on itself at the touch of jihad,
they are describing quite correctly and accurately the effects of Western suicidalism.
Note the recent events around 9-11-2010, in which we worried more about Koran-burning in America than about the Islamist offensive in Afghanistan, or the fact that the Muslim Terrorists had murdered some 3000 American civilians in the first place, nine years ago. Note also that we, as a society, essentially surrendered over the Koran-burning -- every effort was made, including some in violation the First Amendment, to stop Koran-burning from occurring and punish -- not those who threatened violence over it -- but those who sought to burn their OWN Korans as a gesture of political protest. In doing so we extended Islam a courtesy we have never demanded of our own sacred symbols (the Bible and Flag) -- and in doing so, proven our own weakness to the Islamists, thus emboldening them and making future attacks far more likely.
Stalinist agitprop created Western suicidalism by successfully building on the Christian idea that self-sacrifice (and even self-loathing) are the primary indicators of virtue. In this way of thinking, when we surrender our well-being to others we store up grace in Heaven that is far more important than the momentary discomfort of submitting to criminals, predatory governments, and terrorists.
This is, incidentally, one of the most severe practical weaknesses of Christian philosophy. It is very easy to convince Christians that they will get "pie in the sky, bye and bye" if they do things which are incredibly detrimental to their self-interest, even when they have no moral obligation to do so. Yes, a sophisticated understanding of Christian philosophy would reveal that surrender to evil is anything but virtuous, but far too many Christians do not think through the implications of what they are doing.
The Communist atheists of Department V understood that Christian self-abnegation tends to inculcate a cult of self-sacrifice even among Westerners who are themselves agnostics or atheists.
(*nods*) Right, because that's how the Communists had themselves been recruited in the FIRST place. Western Marxism, and even more so Russian Marxism, drew on the strong Christian tradition of virtuous self-sacrifice, simply replacing "God" with "The Forces of History." And for that matter, this is a tradition also common to Judaism, which acknowledges the mitzvah, or unselfish good deed, as a virtuous act. It is very easy for a propagandist to cloak an act of evil or cowardly surrender in the mantle of virtuous altruism.
In fact, the experience of this in Soviet Russia may have been why Ayn Rand decided that altruism, unless rational, was inherently evil rather than good.
All the propagandists had to do was make the case value of self-abnegation applies to culture as well as individuals. By doing so, they were able to entrench the idea that suicidalists are morally superior to non-suicidalists.
There is of course a logical flaw in the propagandists' case. A culture which sacrifices to a rival culture in the name of its own ideals simply turns over resources (including, eventually, its own people) to the use of the rival culture, which will then use those resources to spread its own (hostile) cultural values while the altruistic culture shrinks in importance. But it takes an understanding both of logic and of long-term history to grasp this point oneself, because one takes one's own cultural values for granted, and one doesn't easily see how there could be a future where these values became as irrelevant as is gravitas to the modern Italians or the need to respect the Hindu gods is to the modern Pakistanis.
They did this so successfully that at least one major form of Western self-abnegation seems to have developed as a secondary phenomenon: “deep environmentalism”. I can’t find any sign that this traces back to the usual Stalinist suspects, but it is rather obviously a result of generalizing suicidalism not just to culture but to species.
... and has the major irony that those who profess this belief clearly lack an understanding of Darwinian theory -- a subject key to all modern biology, and hence to serious ecology itself.
I think it’s important to understand that, although suicidalism builds on some pre-existing pathologies of Western culture, it is not a native or natural development. It is an infection that evildoers and their dupes created and then spread as part of a war against the West; their goal was totalitarian control, and part of their method was to talk the West into slitting its own throat.
I in part disagree with this assessment. The characteristic virtue of Western Christendom is mercy, which evolves into empathy and tolerance. The vicious mutation of this is unjust mercy, which betrays the victims (as we can see as early as Medieval Christianity!!!), which evolves into fawning favoritism toward the outsider at the expense of one's compatriots and co-religionists (as we can clearly see in the modern European Union). The tendency of Christians to take mercy too far long predates Marxism, let alone Stalinism.
Al-Qaeda’s goal is the restoration of the Caliphate and the imposition of shari’a law on the West so that the Dar al-Harb is abolished and absorbed into the Dar al-Islam. In other words, totalitarian theocracy. Western suicidalists have transferred their allegience from Communism to Islamofascism without a hitch. They’re doing their best to see that we lose - and their best is rather more effective than any bombing campaign.
Dead on target. And it shows why "suicidalism" is a good term for this attitude, for of course if the enemy actually won, and the West was absorbed into Islam, the very people who are now doing their best to see that we lose would suffer the worst at the hands of the new rulers. Christians and Jews, as fellow People of the Book, would suffer dhimmitude -- but atheists and pagans would suffer annihilation.
AaD says:
The most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist terror network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker. The suicide bomber is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to spread terror; the suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or journalist or politician whose mission it is to destroy the West’s will to resist not just terrorism but any ideological challenge at all.
Very true. Without those who wish us to cast aside our weapons and surrender to the foe -- though they commonly think that what they're trying to do is "promote peace," because they refuse to acknowledge to themselves the depths of the enemy's evil and the extent of the enemy's ambitions -- the Terrorists would have no chance of any but the most temporary and local victories. We are much stronger than them in terms of brute force.
But al-Qaeda didn’t create the ugly streak of nihilism and self-loathing that afflicts too many Western intellectuals.
Spot-on identification of the attitude.
See my "Why Do Leftists Like Islamic Terrorists So Much?" (June 5th, 2007, http://jordan179.livejournal.com/20826.html ), for my take on the history of this problem.
Nor, I believe, is it a natural development. It was brought to us by Department V of the KGB, which was charged during the Cold War with conducting memetic warfare that would destroy the will of the West’s intelligentsia to resist a Communist takeover. This they did with such magnificent effect that the infection outlasted the Soviet Union itself and remains a pervasive disease of contemporary Western intellectual life.
Which is a simplification of what happened, but one which AaD addresses later in the article. Basically, I think that we couldn't have fallen for the Communist disinformation campaign if we hadn't already been prepared for it by our own late 19th century eagerness to repudiate classical liberalism in favor of protectionism and welfare-statism, and our refusal to face up to the lessons of the Great War which ensued in consequence of this repudiation. AaD also thinks there were deeper philosophical and theological roots, and I mostly agree with him on this.
I would advise everyone to read the following list very carefully
Consider the following propositions:
•There is no truth, only competing agendas.
•All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority
over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and
colonialism.
•There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture
to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such
standards is an evil oppressor.
•The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of
the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be
impoverished and miserable.
•Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal.
Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to
criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
•The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only
victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals
are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying
with poor people and criminals.)
•For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It
is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself.
But “oppressed” people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are
merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
•When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner
is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of
view, and make concessions.
Almost all of these have become the common and accepted wisdom in academia, bureaucracy, the media, and by far too many ordinary Americans as well. They are taught, explicitly or implicitly, to our children in elementary public schools.
These ideas travel under many labels: postmodernism, nihilism, multiculturalism, Third-World-ism, pacifism, “political correctness” to name just a few. It is time to recognize them for what they are, and call them by their right name: suicidalism.
This is a good term for this constellation of ideas. It identifies them by their likely outcome, which is suicide: any society, organization or individual who practiced them at all consistently would lose liberty, autonomy, and eventually life itself. The only way to evade this knowledge is the assumption that one is so superior that the "victim groups" being favored by this philosophy cannot enslave one despite the fact that one is no longer fighting back. Thus, one root of this philosophy is an immense superiority complex: unfortunately for the practicioners and anyone counting on them for leadership, this huge feeling of superiority does not convey any defense in reality.
Trace any of these back far enough (e.g. to the period between 1930 and 1950 when Department V was at its most effective) and you’ll find a Stalinist at the bottom.
He then gives some examples. This statement does indeed correspond with my research: there was a large-scale and largely successful effort by the Soviet Union to acquire and operate "agents of influence" in important Western institutions.
Consider in just what Western country they were most successful during the named era. France. Consider what France did in 1939-1940, in her hour of ultimate peril. She surrendered, and the effects of that surrender have blighted her future ever since.
It could be argued that the French surrender was inevitable given her poor prewar preparation. But what helped sabotage her prewar preparation?
Al-Qaeda didn’t launch any of these memes into the noosphere, but it relies on them for political cover. They have another effect as well: when Islamists characterize the West as “decadent”, and aver that it is waiting to collapse in on itself at the touch of jihad,
they are describing quite correctly and accurately the effects of Western suicidalism.
Note the recent events around 9-11-2010, in which we worried more about Koran-burning in America than about the Islamist offensive in Afghanistan, or the fact that the Muslim Terrorists had murdered some 3000 American civilians in the first place, nine years ago. Note also that we, as a society, essentially surrendered over the Koran-burning -- every effort was made, including some in violation the First Amendment, to stop Koran-burning from occurring and punish -- not those who threatened violence over it -- but those who sought to burn their OWN Korans as a gesture of political protest. In doing so we extended Islam a courtesy we have never demanded of our own sacred symbols (the Bible and Flag) -- and in doing so, proven our own weakness to the Islamists, thus emboldening them and making future attacks far more likely.
Stalinist agitprop created Western suicidalism by successfully building on the Christian idea that self-sacrifice (and even self-loathing) are the primary indicators of virtue. In this way of thinking, when we surrender our well-being to others we store up grace in Heaven that is far more important than the momentary discomfort of submitting to criminals, predatory governments, and terrorists.
This is, incidentally, one of the most severe practical weaknesses of Christian philosophy. It is very easy to convince Christians that they will get "pie in the sky, bye and bye" if they do things which are incredibly detrimental to their self-interest, even when they have no moral obligation to do so. Yes, a sophisticated understanding of Christian philosophy would reveal that surrender to evil is anything but virtuous, but far too many Christians do not think through the implications of what they are doing.
The Communist atheists of Department V understood that Christian self-abnegation tends to inculcate a cult of self-sacrifice even among Westerners who are themselves agnostics or atheists.
(*nods*) Right, because that's how the Communists had themselves been recruited in the FIRST place. Western Marxism, and even more so Russian Marxism, drew on the strong Christian tradition of virtuous self-sacrifice, simply replacing "God" with "The Forces of History." And for that matter, this is a tradition also common to Judaism, which acknowledges the mitzvah, or unselfish good deed, as a virtuous act. It is very easy for a propagandist to cloak an act of evil or cowardly surrender in the mantle of virtuous altruism.
In fact, the experience of this in Soviet Russia may have been why Ayn Rand decided that altruism, unless rational, was inherently evil rather than good.
All the propagandists had to do was make the case value of self-abnegation applies to culture as well as individuals. By doing so, they were able to entrench the idea that suicidalists are morally superior to non-suicidalists.
There is of course a logical flaw in the propagandists' case. A culture which sacrifices to a rival culture in the name of its own ideals simply turns over resources (including, eventually, its own people) to the use of the rival culture, which will then use those resources to spread its own (hostile) cultural values while the altruistic culture shrinks in importance. But it takes an understanding both of logic and of long-term history to grasp this point oneself, because one takes one's own cultural values for granted, and one doesn't easily see how there could be a future where these values became as irrelevant as is gravitas to the modern Italians or the need to respect the Hindu gods is to the modern Pakistanis.
They did this so successfully that at least one major form of Western self-abnegation seems to have developed as a secondary phenomenon: “deep environmentalism”. I can’t find any sign that this traces back to the usual Stalinist suspects, but it is rather obviously a result of generalizing suicidalism not just to culture but to species.
... and has the major irony that those who profess this belief clearly lack an understanding of Darwinian theory -- a subject key to all modern biology, and hence to serious ecology itself.
I think it’s important to understand that, although suicidalism builds on some pre-existing pathologies of Western culture, it is not a native or natural development. It is an infection that evildoers and their dupes created and then spread as part of a war against the West; their goal was totalitarian control, and part of their method was to talk the West into slitting its own throat.
I in part disagree with this assessment. The characteristic virtue of Western Christendom is mercy, which evolves into empathy and tolerance. The vicious mutation of this is unjust mercy, which betrays the victims (as we can see as early as Medieval Christianity!!!), which evolves into fawning favoritism toward the outsider at the expense of one's compatriots and co-religionists (as we can clearly see in the modern European Union). The tendency of Christians to take mercy too far long predates Marxism, let alone Stalinism.
Al-Qaeda’s goal is the restoration of the Caliphate and the imposition of shari’a law on the West so that the Dar al-Harb is abolished and absorbed into the Dar al-Islam. In other words, totalitarian theocracy. Western suicidalists have transferred their allegience from Communism to Islamofascism without a hitch. They’re doing their best to see that we lose - and their best is rather more effective than any bombing campaign.
Dead on target. And it shows why "suicidalism" is a good term for this attitude, for of course if the enemy actually won, and the West was absorbed into Islam, the very people who are now doing their best to see that we lose would suffer the worst at the hands of the new rulers. Christians and Jews, as fellow People of the Book, would suffer dhimmitude -- but atheists and pagans would suffer annihilation.