Black musings for Black Friday
by Tom Sullivan
As America heads off to its collective orgy of individual consumption, I ponder how much our belief in our own beliefs is self-reinforcing and a kind of faith both religious and secular.
At Naked Capitalism, Lambert Strether points to a three-part documentary, The Power of Nightmares 1: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (BBC-2004). From the Wikipedia summary:
The film compares the rise of the neoconservative movement in the United States and the radical Islamist movement, drawing comparisons between their origins, and remarking on similarities between the two groups. More controversially, it argues that radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organisation, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, is a myth, or noble lie, perpetuated by leaders of many countries—and particularly neoconservatives in the U.S.—in a renewed attempt to unite and inspire their people after the ultimate failure of more utopian ideas.
Interesting parallels between the religious radicals and the noeconservative project to make the Soviets the bogie man hiding behind every tree and under every bed:
This dramatic battle between good and evil was precisely the kind of myth that Leo Strauss had taught his students would be necessary to rescue the country from moral decay. It might not be true, but it was necessary to reengage the public in a grand vision of America's destiny that would give meaning and purpose to their lives.
The neoconservatives were succeeding in creating a simplistic fiction, a vision of the Soviet Union as the center of all evil in the world, and America as the only country that could rescue the world.
If the intelligence had to be cooked to show that the Soviets were a bigger threat than our intelligence services and military thought, so be it. With the Soviets gone, we had to find and/or create a new Evil Empire. (The same Washington players -- Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, etc. -- who hyped the Soviet threat later hyped Saddam, then al Qaeda. Now this season's Big Bad is ISIS.) Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian Islamic theorist the documentary proposes as a parallel to Leo Strauss, proposed a project to rescue the world from western culture's "state of barbarous ignorance" in which "you’re so corrupt that you can’t even know you’re corrupt," writes Strether. A kind of moral Dunning-Kreuger effect.
Watching the Donald Trump circus now, it is easy to see the effects of both. And it's hard not to see the parallels between the two forms of religion.