Odium Triumphans

"Hate triumphant"

At the time of writing, nearly two weeks after Trump's election victory, reports have come in across America of an alarming increase in hate crime. Gay people have been beaten up. Property has been vandalised with racist graffiti. Black and hispanic people have been threatened. Muslims have been victimised.

Trump's victory was delivered on a tide of hateful rhetoric, and so this victory has granted permission for bigots to indulge their prejudices and act violently in much the same way as the Brexit vote did in the UK. Every bigoted impulse is endorsed by his victory.

I understand that people felt ignored and wanted to challenge established power structures. But why should it only be possible to motivate people to do this by provoking aggressive, prejudiced tendencies? Why must we legitimise and enhance their bigotry and hatred in order to have something to harness? Why can change only be achieved by goading the basest instincts and then hijacking them to form a battering ram with which to assault the city gates? Why, in a democracy, cannot corrupt power structures be challenged with evidence and argument? Why, in a democracy, can we not simply deliver a reasoned verdict? And if the answer is, we do not live in a democracy, why can our revolution not be a celebration of our humanity, rather than a rejection of the basic humanity of so many of our fellow humans?

Not all collective decision making is, by definition, democratic. Democracy is not an outcome. Democracy is a process. What we have witnessed recently is not democracy. Democracy relies on mutual respect, not hatred. Democracy relies on evidence, not lies. Democracy relies on logic, not prejudice. Irrespective of the outcome, irrespective of the majority in favour of it, if it is not delivered on this basis, it is not democratic. If we see a crowd of children in a school playground cheering on a bully as he beats up some kid unfortunate enough to be a bit different and therefore to be considered a suitable victim by his peer group, we do not call it democracy. Would we yield to the democractic legitimacy of a wolf pack's decision to eat us? Democracy is the triumph of reason over reflex. What we have witnessed recently is not democracy. We have witnessed the triumph of hate.  

And power structures are not being challenged at all. Corporate lobbyists make up Trump's transition team. The only anti-establishment figures in it were excluded from the establishment for good reason, for example, like being white supremacists! Our energies are being dissipated in a struggle against each other to distract us from the abuse of power, as always. The people are not short of opportunities to challenge powerful interests, but they are only told about the most pointless and self-defeating ones by a media that serves those very same interests.

If you accept the idea that the only way to motivate and mobilise people to challenge corrupt power structures is to stimulate their hatred and then organise it into a battering ram, as so many Trump apologists seem to be doing of late, you are effectively accepting the justification for fascism given by Goering at Nuremburg. If we are going to ask people to have higher expectations of those in high office, we must teach them to have higher expectations of themselves. We must not encourage them to debase themselves with racism and misogyny and xenophobia. We must instill in them values and a desire to see these values articulated in public life and reflected in their own conduct. We must offer our admiration to our autodidacts and ragged-trousered philanthopists, not our celebrities and billionaires, as a way of raising our expectations of ourselves. The opposite of course is to elevate a hate-filled narcissist billionaire celebrity to the highest office in the land.

For decades now the concepts and vocabulary available to people to describe their problems and articulate responses to them have been systematically impoverished and degraded. Every option has been placed beyond the pale until all that has been left around which their rage can cohere is fascism. And all this has been deliberate. Everything that could form the basis of discussion, all language that could result in effective mobilisation in pursuit of common interests and the elevation of our ambitions beyond the meagre short-lived rewards of capitalism has been ridiculed with all the pejoratives used to dismiss left wing ideas until their credibility is eroded, not for want of sound argument, but lack of brute acceptability.

And the Left itself has failed miserably to prevent the ascent of Trump precisely because it has acquiesced in this impoverishment of concepts and language. It has consented to every diminution of people's capacity to articulate their interests, and to discuss and organise effectively in their pursuit, to cultivate instead some shallow popularity which they too have mistaken for democracy. It has abandoned all the armour with which it was invested by our grand-parents and great-grand-parents for grease-paint, to caper and cavort on the stage prepared for it by its enemies, and where it sought to entertain us, is simply lost our respect. And now it is reduced to closing the dressing room door on the chorus of boos and weeping over bad reviews.

But there is more to Trump's success than the cynical and irresponsible cultivation and manipulation of hatred, and the Left's historic abandonment of the dialectic of hope in its futile attempt to compete with the glamour of capitalism's false promises. Trump's fascism is a consequence of a kind of solipsism that is corrupting public discourse more profoundly, a solipsism that finds its seed in the self-gratification and hedonistic self-indulgence which capitalism has left us as the bereft lexicon of self-interest, and has germinated in the lurid online fantasy land we now navigate in our search for reality. We have seen many analyses of the filter bubbles and echo chambers in which people obtain most of their information and form most of their opinions these days. There is a more profound bubble engulfing the mind of late. The phrase "post-truth" is deployed as though it is a valid description of the terrain in which we now find ourselves. But how do you describe a post-truth world if you have dispensed with the possibility of fact? This is only possible in the solipsistic bubble where facts don't matter.

I get it, I really do. It is very tempting to subscribe to this solipsism. The country is run by an impenetrable clique of corrupt idiots who do not deserve to wield power. They don't notice you. They ignore you. They are pre-occupied with self-aggrandisement and mutual congratulation and back-slapping each other at cocktail parties. What better buttress is there for your slighted ego than being able to turn the tables, to say "the jokes on you," to believe you have access to a unique insight, that you haven't been fooled like everyone else, you know what's really going on. Every post-fact conspiracy theory is grist to the mill as you fabricate your new safe self, insulated from the world, ignoring the world that ignores you, thatching your coccoon with every delusion that lets you congratulate yourself to compensate for every time your real needs were ignored.

But solipsism destroys morality. If nothing in the world is real than every moral consideration about the world can be over-ruled. The permission granted by the series of victories won by Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism over the last few years, from the first Scottish Independence referendum, through the Brexit vote, to Trump's victory this month, is more problematic than simple permission to misbehave, to indulge every bigoted impulse without censure, indeed to contend this is somehow an act of empowerment. What has been permitted is the suspension of morality itself. We cannot reason with this solipsism. It does not disagree with us. It simply does not care. We have to talk to people who are interested to persuade them of our opinions. They are well past caring.

And once you subscribe to this solipsism, you must reject any intrusion reality makes into your experience. You must reject its pageant of diversity, because the only human condition that does not contradict your entire world view, that does not leave your cocoon in tatters, is one that it identical to your own. So you become angry and full of hate, and diversity poses an existential threat. And so you then pose an existential threat to diversity. And that is where we find ourselves now: pleading for our very existence with someone who does not recognise our right to have an opinion, while deprived of the legacy of words and concepts with which we would have articulated it. This is the moral and epistemological apocalypse of fascism.

But I would ask you to just consider one other point of view for me, to indulge for a moment one other, alternative fantasy. Instead of assuming only you exist and everything else is a lie, consider the possibility that you don't exist at all, other than as part of the Universe, and reality is invested in everything else. Imagine you have no separate, independent existence, and only exist by virtue of the connections you mediate between everything else, that your reality is the opposite of the solipsism I have described and that self-actualisation is only possible through altruism.

The "I" which you extend to a position of such prominence in your description of the world is then nothing more than a locus of points, a trajectory, from which the Universe may observe itself, along which the constellations retain their outlines. This locus of points, this trajectory, has no objective reality in itself, it exists only as perspective.

Let me elucidate my metaphor. Consider Orion's Belt for example, comprised of three stars that are apparently next to each other. This apparent proximity is a consequence of our line of sight. In fact, Alnitak and Mintaka are about 380 parsecs away, while Alnilam is nearly twice as distant at about 600 parsecs. If we moved a few hundred parsecs to the side, "Orion's Belt" would not exist. But what ceases to exist is the point of view from which we observed that structure, not the stars themselves. The object whose reality is contradicted by this second point of view is not "Orion's Belt," to the extent that this refer to the those three stars, it is the observation which we call "Orion's Belt."

The only structure we can perceive in reality is error. Have you ever found yourself speaking at cross-purposes with someone? While the cross-purpose persisted you both were absolutely certain you knew what the other was talking about. What if there are some cross-purposes that continue forever? What if the world, from the most distant quasar, to the minute quantum throb of the atoms of which you are comprised, were errors? What if physics is merely the rules that govern the persistence of error, the preservation of information without substrate?

The constellations of our perception are the cross-purposes that persist beyond the point of contradiction. All the patterns from which we infer our world view are inevitably false impressions, just as the stars in the constellations we observe do not sit next to each other in space in the way we imagine. This world is meaningless or miraculous only to the extent that we consider it bound together by love.

And so the final reality is love. Love triumphs. And though we die - though that trajectory we are on ultimately takes us past the point where the constellations buckle and dissolve in the heave and sway of parallax - the stars which briefly communed in our awareness will always shine, and that part of us will live forever, and hate can never prevail.