Welcome back, our normal friend
If we are in fact welcoming you back, you know very well that this is another essay in our ongoing serial publication of DEEP SOCKS, the political self-help book that will deepen your thoughts and freshen your perspective.
This season, we focus on the SHALLOW WINTER. This is our name for the present condition. Shallow Winter is at once cold and extremely superficial, a real chilly saline bog of thought. As we push forward, we hope to find increasingly brackish water, and navigate out of the estuary into spring.
Today we present the final installation in POLITICAL GORGON, a three-part long look at fascism through its reflections. The two prior entries, on Jason Stanley’s “Spectrum” conception of fascism and Curtis Yarvin’s antifascist monarchism, concerned two specific glimpses of the fascist gorgon in mirrored shields. Now we will widen our lens and consider fascist paranoia more generally.
Fascist Paranoia – a brief description
This fear is a common thread in our politics today. Behold, paranoia:
And from here, we ask ourselves quite readily: how did these people come to think this way, simultaneously? The great miracle of American propaganda is the light, transparent touch of central coordination. People follow without being consciously aware of leadership. The hierarchy is invisible to the very participants in the chain of command. Soldiers who are never aware they’re digging latrines, merely cognizant of their desire to not shit where they eat, will dig excellent latrines.
Paranoia about fascism manifests most readily when you show the subject paranoiac a photo of Donald Trump. The immune response is immediate and powerful. A fever overtakes you! He’s a danger to our democracy! Coupist! Loser, fake billionaire, Drumpf, COME ON AMERICA, they will cry, increasingly incoherent, until they become a caricature of themselves, driven mad by a single thought, put into words: ORANGE MAN BAD.
It’s been called TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome. This is perhaps inaccurate, because it is akin to calling a fever Influenza Reaction Condition. At once overly specific and far from covering all the symptoms and responses. This is fascist paranoia.
It manifests first as intermetamorphosis, the apparent transformation of an object, often a familiar object, into another. Our society is adept at encouraging, stimulating, and maintaining delusions—they know this well, because they see MAGA Country as being in the grips of one. That they cannot see their own delusions, well, this is the primary symptom of delusion. Here, the Republican Party, the business community, history, all institutions, all cishet white people, which is the overwhelming majority of the nation and certainly the major component of its foundation; they morph into the Klan and the Brownshirts and the Freikorps. Where you see a gun club, I see a militia. Where you see protestors trespassing, I see coupists in a failed and poorly planned insurrection.
The paranoia of fascism is to see the nadir of the human condition, absolute evil, represented in all heterodox thought from a wholly imaginary progressive liberal consensus. It is necessary, virtuous, and just to use all means available to the state to do this. To aggressively censor their opinions, as they are unfit for public discourse. To propose ways to disenfranchise them and the regions from which they hail. To riot when a member of their group commits an offense. To threaten their ostensible or apparent leaders, to be rude, to separate from their property and income. To get the secret and not-so-secret police to turn their burning wrath upon them. To demand power and representation so that you may quash the threat their mere existence represents.
Antifascist Paranoia – a brief description
For those suffering from Trump Enslavement Syndrome (ORANGE MAN GOOD), we are faced with quite an opposite problem. Everywhere you look, you see conspiracy against you. Critical Race Theory is a thing that exists, you know it because you’ve seen your kid’s history textbook and heard their lessons during the months you spent under house arrest over Wuhan Flu. You know when you send your kid off to college, there’s even odds he’ll come back a Marxist or worse, a Democrat. He’ll tell you there’s no such thing as a Great Replacement, but 50 years ago the ethnic composition of the country was overwhelmingly European, and now both parties tacitly support an unlimited stream of migration from Mexico and Asia—for what, exactly? Because you demand higher wages, or because you vote the wrong way?
You saw what happened in 2021. Trespassing became a federal crime, protest became insurrection, when the powers-that-be didn’t like it. You’ve seen radio hosts get depersoned, kicked off of payment processors and given damnatio memoriae while still living, just for saying things that don’t sound so crazy when you think about it. What was Free Speech again? Oh, it doesn’t apply to banks and Visa and Mastercard? Or the President? I THOUGHT THIS WAS AMERICA!
You’re confused, because you’re seeing the welding of separate magisterial of power—the private, the state, the nonprofit, the education sector. And what’s worse, this obvious convergence, the obvious coordination, the obvious agenda and uniformity of movement, they’re calling you crazy. They’re asking you to get a new internal passport to verify you’ve been injected with a medicine, and it’s one you’ve seen them continually moving goalposts on, right there on the TV. If they didn’t know what it would do, why are they asking you to get it? Why are professional athletes complaining about heart trouble after the mandatory shot? And don’t get started about sports, what the hell is going on with all that nowadays.
Antifascist paranoia is a condition where you see the iron fist of the secret police and government connection to finance, endlessly conspiring to relegate you to the second rank of citizenry, to deperson you, and prevent you from propagating. You see culture, I see propaganda. You see private business, I see an ideologically motivated utility. You see terrorists, I see the secret police framing the gullible and weak.
Painful recursion
Fascist paranoia is the paranoia which causes you to behave as a doppelganger of a fascist. Your sincere fear of the political gorgon, an ultimate evil, is rooted in a mistaken identification of the past with the present, of your history with another’s. As a result, you are compelled to behave in a morally flexible manner, to empower a massive federal police, to seize power by any means necessary, to invent terrorism out of protest, to play victim to a group that is at a power disadvantage.
Antifascist paranoia is the paranoia where you perceive the political and social system replaced by an identical and malevolent double, through shadowy means. You imagine wealthy cabals, false dissolutions of rival states, dark networks of money and influence, racial and ethical subversions, a forsaking of a basic civic virtue. You see the secret police coming for you and your kind, causing increasingly wild and desperate behavior and identification with any figure that might save you.
Slippage
How is this recursion possible, where the fascist paranoia creates a mental state akin to the fascist, and the antifascist paranoia creates a mental state akin to the antifascist? The subject is completely altered by the paranoia into a recursive state. Paranoia is often progressive—your delusions, fears, and sense of knowing will only become more grandiose, more extreme, more certain as time goes forward.
This is because the paranoiac is holding tightly, too tightly, in fact, to a slippery concept. The very nature of politics in America is completely unaddressable by its name. What is anonymous is unknowable. What is unknowable is an object that produces kaleidoscopic shadow when any light is cast on it from any angle. Whatever angle seems comfortable and most real directs the thought.
The Fregoli Delusion
The Fregoli delusion is a mistaken identification disorder. Very simply, many individuals appear to be, in fact, one person, in disguise. Anyone with a similar face is taken to be the associated one. I see 10 people who look a bit like my grandpa, I see my grandpa, in disguise. This figure is persecuting you with their lies and dishonesty and trying to make you the crazy one. I see conservative nationalist politics, I see Hitler. I keep seeing Hitler! Why is everyone just Hitler wearing a fake moustache! Take off the top moustache, you’ll see the little one underneath!
This is the ultimate root of fascist paranoia. And antifascist paranoia, ironically, as well. You see the gestapo everywhere. You see Hitler, but it’s not Hitler. You’re being persecuted by the Big Other, either by this unstoppable mass movement of hatred, or this unmoveable state apparatus of punishment. And instead of seeing people, names, faces, you’re seeing forces, shadows, demons institutions and groups and populations—you can never address this fear appropriately with knowledge alone.
The Dali Method
Paranoiac-criticism is an interpretive method of meaning-production introduced by Dali as a method for interrogating concepts that Surrealists often found to be unacceptable, such as fascism. Surrealism, you must remember, was a method of radical critique of society, of exposing the baselessness and madness of the world. It succeeded, but sanity was not a preferred or necessary category for the operation of the society it critiqued.
Paranoia was as mighty an operative concept for the political thinker and artist in the 1930s as it is today. Where early Surrealist art focused primarily on ‘automatism,’ a method that attempted to paint directly from the subconscious, paranoiac-criticism as a method offered a higher degree of interpretive and political action to the painter, the ability to produce a Surrealist work that could in a deeper sense be about something and contain intentional, intelligible, communicable meaning.
… the paranoiac-critic method advocated a dynamic role for the artist and an active production of imagery in the service of social critique... First articulated in 1930, it was based on the idea that any given visual image was open to multiple interpretations. By linking this with a theory of ‘paranoid delirium of interpretation,’ Dali proposed to systematize these multiple possible accounts into an operative analysis of reality. He claimed that through a deliberate simulation of paranoia, anyone engaging in the paranoiac-critic method would be able to demonstrate that ‘reality’ was not a fixed entity to which an individual responded, but rather a construct born out of that individual's comprehension of the world. In this manner, the paranoiac-critic method pointed the way to a critique of the symbolic realm as an integral part of any interrogation of social relations. … Consequently, the paranoiac-critic method seemed to offer a way out of Surrealism's bind: it posited a strategy of active interpretation of social and political events through the conscious production of destabilizing imagery— a strategy which could … yet maintain the psychological and irrational aspects of visual interpretation dear to Surrealism's heart.
Robin A. Geeley, “Dali’s Fascism; Lacan’s Paranoia”
What promise does this hold for our subjects, afflicted as they are with the symbiotic circle of fascist paranoia and antifascist paranoia?
A creative way out, is one. Paranoia is a problem of subjective knowledge that can be resolved through the intensive and creative-confrontational focus on the object of the paranoia. Fascism, the mere word, is a thought-closer for most. It is a slippery, formless concept that fails to arouse actual critical response. It’s a monster with many heads and twice as many eyes. It freezes your brain to stone, as a Gorgon should. Dali confronted this exact same problem with the figure of Hitler. Why in the world could the Left of the 30s neither predict, counter, nor explain fascism?
Dali approached the problem through a relentless and paranoid—that is, through relentless identification and imaginative placement of himself as the subject, Hitler, to consciously transform his mind to what he thought and feared as Hitler. This took the form of satire, visual and literary. This took the form of reducing the image of Hitler to a postage stamp. This took the very particular and focused form of contemplation of the Big Other, the most unknowable and immutable force known to the mind, and inhabiting it.
So, don’t make fun of Trump. He’s not Drumpf, he’s not a clown, not like you think. Can you make fun of a clown? Point at his dumb shoes. Big red nose, so stupid. Look at you, clown, with your dumb shoes. The man is orange! Can you really mock him? He does it to himself! He’s got a gopher out there buying the bronzer cream. He’s got Top Secret clearance. And some druggist in DC saw this guy coming in buying the exact shade, week after week, for four years. He saw the dumb little WHITE HOUSE STAFF lanyard—do you think Trump’s gophers had opsec? Common sense? They were as clumsy as any idiot in that malaria swamp.
But that druggist, he kept his mouth shut. The same with all the women he’s sent dick pics to over the years. Trump, an innovator in sexual harassment if there ever was one, probably invented dick pics, the first dick pic sent over a mobile data network might have been his strange and special gonads. These people have nothing to fear (and nothing to gain) from the Donald—contemplation of their special knowledge inhabited a thousand stories and fantasies. They knew him better in these moments than he could know himself. Imagine, rubbing the bronzing cream over his/your lumpy, raw-turkey-colored flesh, anywhere a suit or a golf shirt might not cover.
And for all the hilarity of this special cream fantasy, this lurid photo dream, you must admit, obviously it’s working for him. Do what the druggist did, do what that woman with a million dollar jpg in her old Sidekick did, and make fun, as him. Inhabit his thoughts, seriously. What would you do? Can you consider the drive and thought, seriously? Can you work yourself into a delirium, and for a moment, occupy that space? You may not be any good at painting or writing, though this should not deter you from trying.
Our friend in the grips of antifascist paranoia, do this for your hated glowie, for the fed in your imagination, for AOC, can you not imagine her weird ginger gimp and their ridiculous personal life? Someone’s got her nudes on an iCloud server somewhere. Everyone makes mistakes! Make them yourself. Imagine Hillary back in 79, having an affair with some obese fishlipped fuck named Webb Hubbell in the old red brick office of the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Arkansas. Keep going, don’t stop—now imagine the awkward moment when he came inside and knocked her up with Chelsea instead of nutting on her creepy toothy face like she asked. The awkward, sweaty, robotic laugh.
When you take a step back from the delirium of this fantastical and shocking dream you’ve built for yourself, you will emerge the other side incapable of paranoia, terror at the thought of terror, at your knowledge being true. This is therapy by dreaming, by angling the mirror at the object of your hatred. It is how Perseus solved his problem. He was richly rewarded.
The soul of the method of paranoid-criticism is to debase the object-reality of your fear, and restore it with it subject-reality. To remove it from ‘the other’ and instantiate it firmly in the fenced in, knowable, tamable boundary of ‘the self.’ Fascism, and its shadow-self, antifascism, are close to empty signifiers. The Big Other lives in the empty voids, the slippery signifiers where you’re not quite sure where the signified is. Find the signified, the real object of fear, and live in it.
Don’t read the news—dream it.
We shall leave you this week with a quote:
As the years passed, I learned to think of dreams as an integral part of life. There are dreams that, because of their sensory intensity, their realism or precisely their lack of realism, deserve to be introduced into autobiography, just as much as events that were actually lived through. Life begins and ends in the unconscious; the actions we carry out while fully lucid are only little islands in an archipelago of dreams. No existence can be completely rendered in its happiness or its madness without taking into account oneiric experiences. It’s Calderón de la Barca’s maxim reversed: it’s not a matter of thinking that life is a dream, but rather of realizing that dreams are also a form of life. It is just as strange to think, like the Egyptians, that dreams are cosmic channels through which the souls of ancestors pass in order to communicate with us, as to claim, as some of the neurosciences do, that dreams are a ‘cut-and-paste’ of elements experienced by the brain during waking life, elements that return in the dream’s REM phase, while our eyes move beneath our eyelids, as if they were watching. Closed and sleeping, eyes continue to see. Therefore, it is more appropriate to say that the human psyche never stops creating and dealing with reality, sometimes in dreams, sometimes in waking life.
Paul B. Preciado, “An Apartment on Uranus.”