The Viral Infection of Political Extremism & White Supremacist Democracies with Alice Creischer
Hosted by Hopscotch Reading Room

25.03.2022

Authoritarian governments, in seizing the apparatus of liberal democracies are more than able to subvert and corrupt them for their own means. But is democracy itself fatally flawed in this regard, and what might come after it?

The conversation at Hopscotch drew upon several central themes of Ricochet - Cultural Epigenetics and the Philosophy of Change. For example the idea of political extremism as a form of ‘mind virus’ as the meme world would have it.

Once inside the ‘cell biology of liberal democracy’ the virus of political extremism self replicates using the cells own replicating apparatus, broadcasting its destructive energy throughout the political body. (It is important to note that I am employing the biological mechanism here at work, not the ideas themselves and, clearly, not persons. Though extremists do.)

Is political extremism then, an inevitable consequence of the deeply rooted self interest if empire? When Professor Ibram X Kendi writes that “The actual foundation of racism is not ignorance but self interest’ he outlines, to me, a crucial means with which to look again at these histories, to the emergence of what we understand as racism and at the political extremism that has served to normalise White Supremacism today.

One must also observe the radicalised border policies of Europe as we welcome white skinned Ukrainians while refugees with a different phenotype starve to death on the Polish-Belarusian border. And needless to say the reporting on these two events. My point is that white patriarchal supremacism is baked into democracies. It is only a matter of how much and when, and therefore it is only a matter of time before it re-emerges, perhaps again in totalitarian form.

In response to the invitation Alice Creischer selected and discussed the following quotes from the 1924 novel The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann:

Time — yet not the time told by the station clock, moving with a jerk five minutes at once, but rather, the time of a tiny timepiece, the hand of which one cannot see move, or the time the grass keeps when it grows, so unobservably one would say it does not grow at all, until some morning the fact is undeniable — time, a line composed of a succession of dimensionless  points... had gone on, in its furtive, unobservable, competent way, bringing about changes. ...

That historic thunder-peal, of which we speak with bated breath, made the foundations of the earth to shake; but for us it was the shock that fired the mine beneath the magic mountain, and set our sleeper ungently outside the gates. Dazed he sits in the long grass and rubs his eyes — a man who, despite many warnings, had neglected to read the papers.

What is it? Where are we? Whither has the dream snatched us? Twilight, rain, filth. Fiery glow of the overcast sky, ceaseless booming of heavy thunder; the moist air rent by a sharp singing whine, a raging, swelling howl as of some hound of hell, that ends its course in a splitting, a splintering and sprinkling, a crackling, a coruscation; by groans and shrieks, by trumpets blowing fit to burst, by the beat of a drum coming faster, faster - There is a wood, discharging drab hordes, that come on, fall, spring up again, come on. Beyond, a line of hill stands out against the fiery sky, whose glow turns now and again to blowing flames.

About us is rolling plough-land, all upheaved and trodden into mud; ... Nude, branchless trunks of trees meet the eye, a cold rain falls. ... It is the flat-land, it is the war. And we are shrinking shadows by the way-side, shamed by the security of our shadowdom, and no-ways minded to indulge in any rodomontade; merely led hither by the spirit of our narrative, merely to see again, among those running, stumbling, drum-mustered grey comrades that swarm out of yonder wood, one we know; merely to look once more in the simple face of our one-time fellow of so many years ... we know so well, before we lose him from our sight.


Pages 702-712 The Magic Mountain, Thoman Mann (1924)

Thank you to all who attended and especially to siddhartha and Erin for the invitation at Hopscotch Reading Room Berlin.