Cult Versus Cult

You may find yourself with a quite complex complex. Time to Stand Up, Part Two of Two.

Zoya Cherkassky, Breakfast in Ashes, 2023 (source)

“What’s going on at the art museums?” messaged a friend last week. It’s a fair question. Artists involved in a community event in February at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts turned it into an anti-Israel protest:

The artists’ demands included calls for the museum to boycott Israeli institutions and “remove all Zionist board members and funders.”

In the aftermath, the museum closed its galleries for a month and its interim chief executive, Sara Fenske Bahat, resigned.

“For me as an individual, the last weeks have been excruciating,” she wrote in her resignation letter. “Not just as a leader, but as a Jewish leader.” She wrote that the “vitriolic and antisemitic backlash directed at me personally” had made remaining intolerable. “I no longer feel safe in our own space, including due to the actions of some of our own employees,” she wrote.

As the Times notes, such protests have been directed at arts organizations internationally, including the Jewish Museum in New York, where pro-Hamas racists disrupted a talk between the museum’s director and artist Zoya Cherkassky.

What’s the answer to my friend’s question? Let’s start with conservatism.

Suppose you’re politically neutral except for one conservative position. For instance, perhaps you think immigration to this country should involve some kind of vetting process, rather than letting in seven million people willy-nilly in four years. In that case, you have no choice in the upcoming presidential contest except to vote for a populist cult of personality. Even reasonable positions thereby channel into an extreme project.

That brings us to progressivism.

Suppose, instead, you’re politically neutral except for one progressive position. For instance, perhaps social justice ranks important to you. In that case, you have no choice in the upcoming presidential contest except to vote for an authoritarian cult of death. You, personally, are probably not a death cultist, but the authoritarian death cult will have your support anyway. As David P. Goldman trenchantly noted:

Nietzsche’s “horrors of existence” haunt the post-Christian world, which has rejected the past and abandoned the future by refusing to have children. It can find purpose only in the concoction of identity in the present, and it does this with the obsessiveness of religious fanatics. That is what explains such anomalies as “Queers for Palestine,” a label that first appeared in a 5,000-person march in Berlin in 2019. At a Jan. 6 event near Wellesley College, “Transgender Palestinian poet and activist Yaffa … queer Palestinian-American performance artist Juliet Olivier, and queer Palestinian-American author and activist Hannah Moushabeck spoke about how indigenous peoples around the world were queer before colonists brought homophobia to their societies.”

Radical queer activists and Islamic militants have a deeper affinity, though: They know they have no future. The identitarian terrorism of the tide-pool tribes left behind by the great transformation of the world resonates with Westerners who also have no past and no future—only the tepid consolations of self-invention. Never mind that Hamas beheads gay Palestinians on the West Bank and ISIS throws gay men off buildings. The solidarity of the doomed is stronger than the survival instinct.

The museums, in their progressive lean, likewise belong to the authoritarian death cult. They won’t even defend the Enlightenment to which they owe their origins.

How did we get here? I have a Jungian explanation.

In Jungian psychology, thoughts, emotions, memories, and desires that individuals push out of their conscious awareness, due to psychological discomfort, form an aggregate of repressed material. That material remains active in the unconscious, affecting a person’s conscious thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Jung, following Freud, termed those aggregates complexes.

Complexes are emotionally charged psychic clusters associated with a particular theme or archetype. These complexes can influence behavior and perception, often leading people to react in irrational or exaggerated ways to certain stimuli.

We no longer have progressive or conservative political tendencies. Instead, we have progressive and conservative complexes. Just as a man with a mother complex might sabotage his relationships with women until he deals with his repressed feelings about his maternal upbringing, we will sabotage political life through perverse, self-defeating expressions of progressivism or conservatism until we deal with our repressed issues, if they don’t destroy us first.

What issues are we repressing? The biggest one is displayed in this recent chart from the Federal Reserve, titled “Federal government current expenditures: Interest payments.” This is interest paid on federal debt, and it is exploding. From 2020 to the present, it doubled from $500 billion to $1 trillion.

As Nellie Bowles put it last week,

That is a real chart. That should knock the socks off us. This used to be something American political leaders talked about a lot. Now there’s a bipartisan agreement to completely ignore it. I get the human impulse. I also ignore stressful situations (many family members, a suspicious mole, the number of annual subscriptions that I keep getting charged for and I have no idea what they’re for). But I am not the federal government. Anyway, this soaring interest is the special gift we leave our kids.¹

For that trillion dollars, spent in one year, we didn’t get anything to which we can point. Every political camp ought to hate this equally. We didn’t get a trillion dollars of healthcare for the poor. We didn’t get a trillion dollars of border security. We merely satisfied the conditions of the creation of capital ex nihilo. Note well, that trillion-dollar figure is only slated to grow, precipitously. Debt is to wealth what the devil is to souls.

The economy is fake. No electable leader of either mainstream party inclines to return it to reality. There’s an unelectable one who legally changed his name to Literally Anybody Else who would, but his campaign, to put it gently, is quixotic.²

We have the unserious politics of an unserious people. Events will continue commensurately until reality mounts motorcycles, light trucks, and paragliders, passes over and through the fences of denial, and forces seriousness upon us.

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The next entry of the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is The Sphinx and the Milky Way: Selections from the Journals of Charles Burchfield. Calendar is TBD but coverage will begin a week from Friday.

Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.

Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.

1. Another reason to refuse to have them, one might suppose.

2. Quixotic and awesome. “In the heart of America, amidst the classrooms of North Richland Hills and the fields of military service, a vision for a better country was born. Literally Anybody Else, a 7th grade math teacher and Army veteran, emerged from the fabric of our society with a fearless determination akin to the honey badger, ready to challenge the status quo for the good of all Americans. This campaign is more than a political bid; it’s a journey of courage, resilience, and hope,” says the website.