Absurd Nation:
Why Americans Can’t Change
- A flourish of words
Racism is the paradox of American democracy. And ironically, the most celebrated and cherished literary flourishes in the Declaration of Independence are responsible for it: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These Christian sentiments are frequently held up as evidence of the Declaration’s hypocrisy. The only thing self-evident is that some of the principle signatories of the Declaration owned slaves. The other “truths” are really God-granted ideals. Nevertheless, Americans have always believed in them as truths and, moreover, by taking them for granted, they have failed not only to make them actually true but also “to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Generation after generation of Americans have thus allowed a flourish of words to stand for actions not taken, while their democracy devolved into an absurd nation, lately led by politicos better suited to the Looney Tunes.
2. Hypocrisy and paradox
From the outset, America had only to right the ship of statehood to circumvent the existential flaw of racism that eternally consumes it. The hypocrisy would be non-existent if Jefferson had at least deleted his deistical axioms from the Declaration. Most conservative editors today would happily have done so on the grounds that his language is verbose and its content neither essential nor relevant to the purpose of the Declaration. That not done, to come of age as The Democracy of The Enlightenment, Americans simply had to live up to the secular implications of the Declaration’s ideals. But lacking the unanimity of reason to achieve that purpose, it has forever eluded and retarded them. Even after the bloodletting of the Civil War, the hypocrisy and paradox of the Declaration’s rhetoric of divine endowments persisted, fertilizing the rank and weedy racism that took root in the united sociopolitical and economic sediment of post-Civil War America.
Although racism developed in the North as well as the South, it seems present-day Americans believe angry Confederate sympathizers, like Lincoln’s assassin, were mainly responsible for and the initial champions of racism. Out of spite, these sore losers shamed by defeat took their revenge upon the nation by making the freed slaves the everlasting object of their contempt.
3. Shame and contempt
Racist aggression is a negative manifestation of discrimination, an otherwise benign instinct. It responds to both affect and reason to enable people to sense the difference between and make reasoned choices about what’s safe and what’s dangerous, poisonous things and healthy things, bad things or good things, friends and enemies, and so forth. However, when shame amplifies contempt, a person’s psychological response is to discriminate against whatever they perceive — whether rightly or wrongly — to be the stimulus for their feelings. Racism occurs when veiled hypocrisy or some other duplicitous subterfuge conceals the true stimulus of a person’s shame-amplified contempt, forcing them to look around for and identify the most convenient but least reasonable other to aggressively blame. In racist America, black Americans have always been that most convenient other.
4. Addiction
Racism is America’s most characteristic meme, a culturally-rooted inescapable mindset handed-down from generation to generation. As such, it also personifies a deep-seated psychotic anxiety, a mass phobia in part aggravated when white slave owners, hoping to preserve their “peculiar institution,” disseminated the plotline that freed slaves could rise up at any time in a fearsome insurrection and take vengeance against their former oppressors. The fear of such a scenario — which had already occurred in the South — made it all the more convincing and consequently created the anxiety that only the perpetuation of slavery could allay.
Although the passage of the 13th Amendment abolished slavery sans any provocative insurrections, it also had the knock-on effect of amplifying American racism in not only the South but also the North, where, despite abolitionist strongholds, many Americans had negative existential forebodings about life in an integrated society. Furthermore, despite ending institutional slavery, the 13th Amendment could not curtail industrial America’s tacit addiction to slavery, albeit in another form. This addiction, rather than slavery itself, fostered and intensified the persistence of racism after the Civil War. Wealthy industrialists contributed to the problem by pitting White, African American, and immigrant workers all against one another in their search for work. Inconceivably low pay turned laborers into wage slaves.
Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, industrialist, divisive, low-wage policies exacerbated the workers’ already rampant racist sentiments. But even staunch socialists, like Jack London, did nothing to stem the tide of racism. In fact, London, himself, was a white supremacist who cared nothing for the equality of the races. It’s a wonder that people aren’t burning his books (not something I’m advocating) the way they’re tearing down statues of long-since forgotten historical racists.
The American addiction to slavery has come to define its national character. Americans satiate this habit “to which they are accustomed” by feasting upon a myriad of consumer goods made available by economic globalization, turning a blind eye to globalization’s modern incarnations of slavery. For example, in China, where many of those consumer goods are manufactured, many students must endure long periods of “forced labor” as “interns” (read, slaves) at electronics manufacturing firms in order to graduate from university, regardless of their academic majors. “So what? Who cares? Don’t think about it. It’s not our problem They’re not Americans. They’re Asians,” go the refrains of the globalized, slavery-addicted, American racists. Thus, the addiction to slavery continues to undermine the American ideal of championing people’s unalienable human rights “everywhere in the world,” as Roosevelt’s progressive but less celebrated and less cherished rhetorical flourish declared.
5. Where difference does not exist
Hubris prevents Americans from recognizing their racist character as a mass psychogenic reaction to their addiction to slavery. Instead, they prefer to regard it as a less stigmatic sociopolitical problem, granting themselves moral outrage as an approach to solving it. They also alleviate some of their suppressed present-day culpability by condemning the Founders’ hypocritical Constitutional compromises, which sanctioned slavery in the first place. Ironically, by underwriting the American addiction to slavery rather than abandoning the cause of nationhood (the stakes were that high), the Founders wound up fertilizing the roots of American racism, which in the long run would end-up up-ending the country anyway. For those roots have grown so deep that racism cannot be uprooted without also uprooting the whole of American democracy, from the Constitution right on down to the municipal charter of the smallest city in America.
Congressional compromises over slavery continued to allow America “to serve the devil” of its addiction right up until the Civil War, after which Reconstruction, that brief unsuccessful period of detoxification from slavery, devolved into the psychotic South’s Jim Crow laws of segregation, its sociopolitical slavery-addition fix.
Racists are psychotics because they believe to be true a difference where difference does not exist, while at the same time they can neither recognize nor tolerate difference where difference does exist. Even Shakespeare, whose plays are frequently seasoned with bigotry, articulates an observation of this insanity when the King confronts the passion of it in Bertram: “Strange is it that our bloods,\Of colour, weight, and heat, pour’d all together,\Would quite confound distinction, yet stand off\In differences so mighty.”
6. A painful retreat
In the post-WWII era, the relatively innocuous, quasi-religious, clarion call for change inspired the civil rights movement and corresponding legislation. “Continue to work with the faith…that somehow this situation can and will be changed,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said. Likewise, nearly half a century later, the candidate Obama declared to cheers after his close loss in the New Hampshire primary, “Change is what’s happening in America,” and in response the crowd chanted, “We want change! We want change!” Upon leaving the Presidency eight years later, Obama Tweeted, “I’m asking you to believe. Not in my ability to create change — but in yours.” Now, in mid-2020 it is both apparent and not surprising that, relative to racism, things absolutely did not change during Obama’s presidency. In fact, racist bigotry defeated him.
Over the centuries American racism has evolved an immunity to change, which accounts for its virulence. Like its ideological cousin, conservatism, racism cripples the will to change in the very face of the desire for change.
On the other hand, the former President’s departing message also asserted that change is the people’s “ability to create change,” as opposed to change, itself. Creativity, then, and not equality, must be the true and preeminent endowment of every human being everywhere in the world. People must be free to create their equality, their liberty, their pursuit of happiness, their lives. They are not endowed with those things. Creativity is as much a part of humanity as is the impulse to live at all. And yet Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights fails to include creativity along with reason and conscience as among the endowments of humanity. Meanwhile, humanity has forgotten its right to create. It leaves that peculiar avenue of thinking to artists, whose works it either celebrates or derides. Humanity is also in the throes of enabling technicity to subvert its impulse to create, just as it has subverted the presence of the social into its absence.
Consequently, the present days’ spewing pustules of protest across American streets, all relentlessly calling for change, will eventually innocuously subside, just like all those comparable events over the past half century. The most that might be achieved is some measured alteration to the same hypocritical get-up of deceptive policies.
Despite the outrage triggered by unconscionable racist acts — now televised and “shared” — and that precipitate bursts of social protest, the latter will nevertheless remain a minimally effective mechanism in the quest to curb racism. Unlike the LGBTQ rights movement, which has Hedone on its side, the victims of racism and the Black Lives Matter movement have only Eleos as their advocate, and compassion in our time is little better than a smug simulation as opposed to a proactive palliative. Thus, protests mostly succeed only in venting steam and amplifying the ignorance of their opposition; although, they do in some cases effect pseudo-progressive reforms that have all the lasting sincerity of a promise from the CCP.
In the past, other more radical proactive organizations than are active today — such as John Brown’s abolitionists, CORE, and the Black Panthers — were inevitably labeled as terrorists, militants, and outside agitators, before devolving into mythological narratives about their struggles to abolish racism.
That said, people do have the right and responsibility to call out as specious, absurd, and insulting conservative arguments, such as that protesters are the cause of the aggression against them that their protesting engenders; which is the same as saying if you protest against injustice (i.e. racism), then we’ll deal with you unjustly.
The real significance of social movements and uprisings, like those happening in America (and Hong Kong and the rest of the world) is actually their cry for a more progressive mode of revolutionary intervention than street protests on their own can deliver. The Boston Tea Party (as much a racist event as a political one: Why dress up like Native Americans when dark hoods in the middle of the night would do just as well?) became a sociocultural meme of American protest; but it took the ensuing Revolutionary War to deliver the country.
The conservative Right’s assertion that the current Progressive spark is out to start a second revolutionary war is dubious. But the racists seem to be taking derisive joy in the division those assertions generate at the expense of the Right’s having any sincere vision of their own. Under the present conditions, a revolution would likely deliver an acceleration of the Federal Government’s present White Terror.
An anti-racist revolution is also unlikely because, as American history has so far demonstrated, Americans “are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Even when Americans do momentarily tire of suffering and take to the streets, crying out for “this time to be different,” the government’s order to use a militant force against them cows most protesters into retreating, leaving a manageable few to arrest, brutalize, gas, or “accidentally” kill on the spot.
If Americans do want this time to be different, if they do wish to create change in the continuous as opposed to the finite sense, they must first draw away the satin coverlet hiding the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite and see themselves for the ethically absent body politic they have become. Then, by allowing for the paradox of realizing the imaginary, they must beat a painful retreat back to Chestnut Street to face the existential prospect of a new beginning. Only this time, America must choose courageously to seize rather than compromise the truth, justice, and sanctity expressed in the flourishes of a progressive rhetoric. Clutching this second chance, America cannot afford to surrender again to the dark passion and perdition of slavery. To do so would be to enslave itself forever.
7. Despair
Psychologically, the despair of racism is that its social stigma frustrates a racist’s pride in being racist. Thus, they must absurdly continue to deny being what they are most proud of being. The consequential feelings of shame and amplifies their contempt, which intensifies the racist’s defensive sense of superiority. They simply can’t stop believing in, valuing, and dreaming about the self they cannot openly realize. This despair prompts the solipsistic anxiety that incessantly gnaws at the racist’s peace of mind.
A vertiginous discord of contradictions resounds through every racist’s psychology. They believe they are better, fearing they are worse. They believe they are normal but that no one around them measures up. They value equality exclusively for themselves. They profess love for what loathes them in return. They are the most un-American Americans to lay claim to America. Most tellingly, racists protect themselves by taking contemptuous action against the “other,” a flaw that feeds into their already anxiety-driven psychosis — the way the President acts with contempt for his predecessor rather than according to a reasoned position of his own.
It is not possible to put an end to racism. Racists and the racist societies of slavery-addicted nations are incurable and unchangeable. Radical interventions may manage the addiction before it destroys the addict, but relapses will inevitably follow periods of relative recovery because the condition is chronic. Racists are addicts, after all, whose shame and contempt have made slaves of reason and conscience.
