Since most voters participate in democratic politics only as an expression of their fear and loathing of their cultural enemies, and since the only way they know of winning is to dominate the other side, the only story of victory they know is sadistic domination.
This is from Curtis Yarvin’s Gray Mirror. If somebody disagrees with this, I’d love to hear their argument, but it sounds like a very exact description of what’s happening to us.
We are people who can’t limit our appetites and tame our emotions. We are a raging maw of desire but our libidinal object is not the other but the self. We need constantly to prop up our belief that we are prescient and in control because without this skill the instability we inhabit becomes too scary. It’s not each other that we hate but the unpredictability. But we can’t put that into words or come close to this realization intellectually because the whole point is to deny that there is any unpredictability.
The sadism in our political space is a ritual burning of the mirror image of the self that didn’t figure things out flawlessly. The enemy is what the self could have been if disinformation / propaganda had their way with one.
The civil war we hear so much about is waged inside the self that is terrified of being discarded and punishes itself for being discardable.
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