Can you be both moderate AND a terrorist? | Dissecting "centrism" and false activity - why you should be a radical extremist now

 

    I: ON ANTIFA

    In the past years, there has been a huge debate in the USA regarding former president Donald Trump's decision to label Antifa as a terrorist organization. The conservatives came up with a thesis: "Antifa are terrorists". The liberals negated it with an antithesis: "Antifa are moderates who stand for common sense philosophy, like opposing fascism and other forms of right-wing extremism". How shall we situate ourselves towards these two statements?

    I will attempt to pull off a Johann Fichte here and and synthesize both statements. On one hand, yes, I DO agree that Antifa are a bunch of terrorists and thugs who loot down buildings and set fire to small businesses. On the other hand, I DON'T agree that they are a bunch of radical extremists. In fact, they are moderate centrists who preserve the status-quo!

    How is this possible? The synthesis is this: the status quo of the USA is one where everything is on fire. Therefore, if you set everything on fire, you are preserving the status-quo. The people who preserve the status-quo are called "moderate centrists" by most definitions.

    

    II: WHAT IS TRUE RADICAL EXTREMISM?

    I am a firm believer in radical extremism, which should be defended at all costs, pushing back against the horrible status-quo that the world is in right now. However, how does that look? I believe that in order to be a radical extremist, especially in the US, you need to have civilized, respectful discussions where you can agree to disagree and still be friends with someone from an 'opposing' political camp. If you do that, you are doing something different from what everyone else is doing, and you are pushing hard against the status-quo.

    However, if you murder each other on the streets based on political beliefs, or if you commit acts of terrorism, you are preserving the status-quo, you are making sure that things stay the way they are, and thus are a moderate and a centrist by definition. Intention is not relevant right here, since I care less about what people claim that they stand for, and more about their actions and their consequences. 

    III: ONE-UPPING AND THE OPPRESSION OLYMPICS - YES, PLEASE!

    Imagine you are at work and a colleague comes in the office after you and complains about what a hard day they had yesterday. You one-up them and say "Oh, YOU had it bad? Just wait until you hear about my day". Your colleague is jealous of you that you managed to suffer more than them (see: unconscious sado-masochism) and you keep arguing for one hour about who has it worse. After one hour of arguing about who has it worse, instead of doing work, your boss unexpectedly come into the office and scolds both of you: "What the fuck are you doing? Stop wasting time arguing about your day and get to work. You wasted one hour of your working day not doing any work. I will cut this from both of your salaries."

    Society right now needs a boss like this. Both the so-called "left" and the so-called "right" in America are doing the same thing: arguing about who has it worse. Do men have it worse? Do women have it worse? Are blacks killed by the police on sight? Are whites psychologically tortured into assuming guilt for other people's actions? My answer to this is: locked, because y'all can't behave. All the time that you have wasted arguing about who has it worse could have been better spent arguing about how to solve the problem instead.

    What if we really want to find an answer? Let's make a parallel to the (in)famous joke where the stewardess asks you "coffee or tea?" and you say "yes!". The only accurate answer to, for example, "do men or women have it worse?" is yes, please. "Yes", because they both have it horrible. "Please" because both of them secretly want to have it bad and fulfill their masochistic desire for suffering, in order to obtain the secondary benefit of virtue-signaling to the other about their victim status, obtaining a position of (presumed) moral superiority.

    The answers to "do whites or blacks have it worse in the US?" or "who is the most oppressed group in society?" are also the same: yes, please, and they all want more of it!

    This is why another way in which you can be a (good) radical extremist is to spend more time on finding solutions and less on who to blame or who has it slightly worse.

    The cynical and hard-to-accept conclusion here is that there is no solution that does not require you to sacrifice a certain amount of enjoyment*. The question to ask here is: do we sacrifice our enjoyment of not being oppressed, or do we sacrifice our enjoyment of the moral superiority that being an oppressed victim gives us? You can't have both, but the trend in politics lately seems to be to sacrifice the former.

    IV: OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS = FALSE ACTIVITY

    In psychology, we DO have a word for this sort of "false activity", this way of actively doing nothing. It is called "obsessional neurosis". One way it can manifest is what modern psychology calls "obsessive-compulsive disorder", where a person may wash their hands for hours on end, thus wasting time by doing nothing productive, but at the same time always being actively engaged in something. Another version of it is now called "obsessive-compulsive personality disorder", where a person may, for instance, be a perfectionist workaholic, who would take on an insane load of work that is impossible for a human being to finish, and thus make promises and commitments to everyone and disappoint at least some of those people. In other words, the person with OCPD may try to do everything at once and end up doing none of the tasks properly because it's just too much. And there are many other versions and examples of this, of "actively doing nothing at all" - but they all have in common the presumption or appearance of being busy, of always being engaged in something, with the paradoxical consequence of doing nothing productive at all.

    This is why I disagree with the likes of Jordan Peterson and such others, when they say that the "diversity, inclusion and equity" crowd are a bunch of "radical left-wing extremists who will destroy western civilization". But western civilization has been destroyed since long ago and is inherently defined by chaos itself, to reference another one of Peterson's themes! There was never anything to save. They are not radical extremists, they are preserving the status-quo, while only having the appearance of being radical! The status-quo right now is defined by arguing about who has it worse, by murdering each other based on differing political beliefs and by acts of terrorism. The only thing JP is right about here is that identity politics is to be avoided - the important question remains, what do we replace it with?

    V: RACE AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT: THE SELF-PERPETUATING MECHANISM OF IDEOLOGY

    The reader may be tempted to ask, why do I think that the American left and right end up standing for the same things in the end, why are they all moderate centrists who preserve the status-quo under the presumption of "radicality"? It is here that I must build upon section V of my article about the political games doomed to fail.

    Let us look at one popular (useless) American debate about who has it worse - racial statistics. Moderates disguised as "leftists" may pull some statistics like "The wealth gap between black and white people is huge and it needs to be reduced!" (with the implication of: see, I told you there is racial injustice!) while moderates disguised as "right-wing" may pull some statistics like "Despite making up 13% of the population, black people do 52% of the crime" (with the implication of: see, I told you it is their fault!).

    The only correct answer to this debate is to not participate in it in the first place, and disavow it. In order to do that, we must debunk the very foundation it is based on, arguing about the very rules/premises of the debate in the first place**. That is, we must engage in the "meta-communication" too, in the discourse about the discourse, we must not talk about race, but instead talk about how we talk about race.

    In order for any racial/ethnic statistic to be meaningful, it must have clearly defined terms. Most definitions of "white" and "black" that are used in calculating most of these statistics use some variation of the one-drop rule (which was created by racists to justify their slavery). "Whiteness" is defined as an exclusive category, where any "impurity" removes your status as white. "Blackness" is defined as an inclusive category, where you can counted as "African-American" in these statistics by having anything from very light brown to very dark brown skin. Some of the people that are counted as "black" in these statistics may even look identical to the so-called "white people"!

    Why is this important? Well, let us do a thought experiment, and then review the two statistics that were argued about previously from the so-called "left" and so-called "right". What if, hypothetically, in an alternate universe, "white people" included people with light-brown skin too, up to a certain shade of medium-to-dark brown. And "black people" included people that were only very dark brown. I am not saying that these definitions are better or worse than the definitions that the US is using right now, but are just a different configuration that we should pay attention to. What would happen?

    The so-called "left" would have less of a wealth gap to complain about, since the races were redefined such as to make it seem like the difference between the wealth of the <new definition of whites> and of the <new definition of blacks> is not as huge anymore. Similarly enough, the so-called "right" would have less crime statistics to complain about, since 13% of the population would now be arrested for less crimes. 

    Now, if we would return back to the initial definition that the USA uses right now, then suddenly, in official statistics, both the wealth gap and the crime gap would increase simultaneously.

    What is the conclusion? The conclusion is that race is a social construct, but I changed my mind about something: it is NOT an "arbitrary" social construct. In fact, it is not a bug, but a feature of what Zizek calls "ideology". The human races are precisely defined in such a way such as to reinforce the preconceptions of both the left and the right. Thus, the "configuration" of how to define the races is chosen in such a way such as to make both sides think they are right, reinforcing what they previously believed. This will, in turn, cause both sides to waste time arguing about racial statistics, distracting them from how the elite billionaire class is worsening the life of ALL "racial groups".

    This is how "ideology" functions. Ideology is the water that the fish swims in. You will very rarely realize you are in it, and the only escape is death. We must realize that inside capitalism, there is no more central authority that you can put the blame on, the system perpetuates itself. The definitions of "white", "asian", "black", "hispanic", etc. weren't necessarily defined by an elite of 20 people gathering around a table, conspiring against everyone else (such conspiracies were more common in previous economic systems, like feudalism). Instead they are the result of ideology, ideology being a result of capitalism. The "free" market of capitalism functions like a machine learning algorithm (which uses unsupervised learning): it randomly tries various strategies in the beginning, until it finds something that "sticks", that is reinforced by others, and then it becomes a self-perpetuating system with no central authority controlling it. The market works that way, but in the same way the "marketplace of ideas" functions by the same mechanism: the current configuration of racial and ethnic groups are simply what reinforced the enjoyment of the people in society the most right now.

    Now, one is left to question why the "left" and the "right" are even different categories in the first place, since they end up standing for the same thing in the end? They stand with ideology.

    In order to be a good radical extremist and oppose the status-quo here, you must refuse to engage in any discourse about race, and counter it with a meta-discourse. In other words, when someone wants to talk to you about race, you must-counter it with talking about how we talk about race. If a moderate hiding as "left" or "right" pulls some meaningless racial statistics in order to prove their point, the only correct answer is: "Why is your definition of whiteness the way it is? Why can't I redefine "black person" to mean something else? Why is your definition of "Asian" better than mine?". They will most likely not be able to defend it, rendering absolutely any "statistic" as meaningless.

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FOOTNOTES:

*: Enjoyment, or "jouissance".

**: These "meta-rules" of social interactions are what Lacan calls the "name of the father" or the "symbolic father".