Playing at Society

“The fascist agitator is usually a masterly salesman of his own psychological defects.”
Adorno

“One important aspect to consider here is the shifts in approval of content via “thumbs up” “favorites” “likes” and now how Facebook has integrated this “reactions” system that has much more sinister marketing goals in mind rather than just showing your friends your reaction to their statuses by selecting a one dimensional emoji representation, as if that wasn’t alarming enough by itself. this seemingly minor shift in their interface development is pretty easy for them to seamlessly integrate without much deeper thought given to it by a conditioned user pool at large.”
K.F.

“The weakness of the ego nowadays, which beyond its psychological
dimension also registers the effects of each individual’s real powerlessness
in the face of the societalized apparatus, would be exposed to an
unbearable degree of narcissistic injury if it did not seek a compensatory
identification with the power and the glory of the collective.”
Adorno

“Physiology and psychology afford fields for scientific technique which still await development. Two great men, Pavlov and Freud, have laid the foundation. I do not accept the view that they are in any essential conflict, but what structure will be built on their foundations is still in doubt. I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology. . . Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called `education.'”
Bertrand Russell

There is a growing sense today of what Kariflack (at her blog) has called *weaponized narcissism*. And during this most cynical and propagandized election year in U.S. history, it is particularly relevant. And there is another blog posting (that I quote from at the top) by K.F. that touches on the imprint of social media structures on how we think.

The very good essay by Kariflack ( https://n0p3.net/2016/06/05/conceptual-fuckery/ ) points out one very clear strategy of mainstream media, whether conservative or liberal, and that is the constant streaming of news items presented in isolation from each other. There is rarely ever a discussion of the connections, the subtextual meaning that informs all of these news items. It is specialized information imparted in isolated capsule form. In other words there is an absence of ideological analysis, and usually only the most narrow and superficial historical context provided (also free of ideology). This is the logic introduced by and identified by Lyotard back in 79. The collapse of ‘grand narratives’ etc. And it signaled the arrival of an acceptance and even desire (in some quarters) for this erasing of context. Political will has been incrementally suffocated under a process of social atomization. And the problem here, is that while that is true, it is also not true. And when I write that I know its important to clarify because built into the post modern moment is the mediated language of constant ‘both/and’ neutralizing.

Adorno’s brief monograph on fascist propaganda begins (speaking of, specifically, American fascism) with this…

“It is personalized propaganda, essentially non-objective. The agitators spend a large part of their time in speaking either about themselves or about their audiences.”

I find today that almost all debate begins with one’s interlocutor talking about themselves. And this entails, as Adorno observed, fictitious details of their intimate lives. Now, this is also very like the new VICE style journalism one finds. Except there has been a merger between fictive intimacies and career branding details — one’s brand is predicated, partly anyway, on intimate details of a personal and not social nature. In Hollywood this confessional stance is exemplified by Lena Dunham, but god knows there are countless others and this also relates to reality TV. The normalizing of self shaming and humiliation as a kind of cleansing. There is a constant rehashing of personal sexual excess or indiscretion (which is of course nothing of the sort) in order to simply titillate but also to self label as bravely honest.

“All these demagogues substitute means for ends. They prate about this great movement’, about their organization, about a general American revival they hope to bring about, but they very rarely say anything about what such a movement is supposed to lead to, what the organization is good for or what the mysterious revival is intended positively to achieve.”
Adorno

This is of course Donald Trump in a nutshell. And I am reminded of Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd, a stunningly prophetic film. There is no political goal other than sustaining the propaganda itself. But both Clinton and Trump use the personalized intimate voice to reveal previously hidden information. The audience is being let in on special details and facts. This is a familiar Madison Avenue technique. Also, the fascist orator seeks identification with his or her image and that of the underdog or everyman. I am just like you. You are just like me. And the latter is more common today for reasons that will become clear.

“Cynical soberness is probably more characteristic of the fascist mentality than psychological intoxication. Moreover, no one who has ever had an opportunity to observe fascist attitudes can overlook the fact that even those stages of collective enthusiasm to which the term mass hypnosis’ refers have an element of conscious manipulation, by the leader and even by the individual subject himself, which can hardly be regarded as a result of mere passive contagion. Speaking psychologically, the ego plays much too large a role in fascist irrationality to admit of an interpretation of the supposed ecstasy as a mere manifestation of the unconscious. There is always something self-styled, selfordained, spurious about fascist hysteria which demands critical attention if the psychological theory about Fascism is not to yield to the irrational slogans which Fascism itself promotes.”
Adorno

This is where we reach the narcissism part, or the weaponized narcissism as Kariflack has it. And it is also (per the quote below) where the new crypto fascist operates (like Zizek, as the perfect example).

“It does not employ discursive logic but is rather, particularly in oratorical exhibitions, what might be called an organized flight of ideas. The relation between premises and inferences is replaced by a linking-up of ideas resting on mere similarity, often through association by employing the same characteristic word in two propositions which are logically quite unrelated. This method not only evades the control mechanisms of rational examination, but also makes it psychologically easier for the listener to follow’. He has no exacting thinking to do, but can give himself up passively to a stream of words in which he swims.”
Adorno

And this is modern electronic media. A certain similarity substitutes for ideological analysis and history. This is the similarity you see in toothbrushes for sale at Stater Bros. The constant never ending manufacturing of similarity. And this removal of a kind of thinking that requires inferring conclusions from stated premises has meant a new exalted but empty subjectivity is becoming the most common. The psychotic quality one finds in Hillary Clinton (and Trump somewhat, although his basic lack of intelligence mediates this) is shaped by the PR firms in her employ to be presented as ‘maturity’ and hyper competence. So the audience feels, ok, she organized a coup in Honduras to reinstate the far right wing ruling class, at least she got it done. She knows how make things happen. So for an increasingly psychologically and physically soft electorate, both coddled and under duress, the fiction of competence fits well with the pervasive cliche of ‘its a tough world out there’, a jungle, etc. A sort of cartoon Darwinism that is promoted by media as well. Not least, Hollywood. But this is also the identification with authority. Although, that itself needs further clarification. Adorno saw the performance of the Fascist leader providing a certain pleasure for the audience. And this audience repays, in a sense, with voting for this performer. In Trump’s case the real danger lies in the empowerment of his followers. Because ideologically he is far far less dangerous than Hillary Clinton. With Clinton there is a long history of not just bungled statecraft (quite opposite her manufactured image) and thievery, but dutiful following of orders. Her groveling speeches before Wall Street leaders is a case in point. But most of all it is the clear visible sadism of her personality. A vindictive and rabid punishing personality coupled to the natural subservient. She is both sadist and masochist. Which reminds me of the joke where the masochist asks the sadist to beat him more…and the sadist says *no*.

Adorno observed that the very educated German didn’t understand Hitler’s popularity because his speeches sounded so insincere. But it was exactly that insincerity that made them popular. And this is a crucially important observation. Trump’s insincerity is exactly why he is popular. He is, literally, a folk performer.

“We find similar manifestations regularly in drunkards who have lost their inhibitions. The sentimentality of the common people is by no means primitive, unreflecting emotion. On the contrary, it is pretense, a fictitious, shabby imitation of real feeling, often self-conscious and slightly contemptuous of itself. This fictitiousness is the life element of the fascist propagandist performances.”
Adorno

And culturally, this is really a large part of what I wanted to get at here. Thomas Kinkade, or Terry Redlin are not popular not because anyone thinks they are Da Vinci, but exactly because they are not. Kinkade’s paintings are pigment and canvas equivalent of a slobbering sentimental drunk. Trump is a figure of redemption to his followers for he is expressing their own lack of coherence and original thinking, their own inarticulate lack of logic (as was Reagan and Bush). Their own shallow emotions. Soap operas are popular because the audience sees themselves not in the characters but in the cheap emotional exaggeration. The characters of soap operas are melodramatic and their emotions disproportionate to the situation, just like the audience who watches them. And this is a kind of migration of narcissistic affect in a sense. The Trump base is racist and resentful, but also inarticulate and profoundly shallow. However, the Hillary follower is in a sense finding substitute gratification in the imperious condescension Hillary shows to her underlings. This is what her voters wish they could do. They would like to bully others the way they have been bullied. They don’t want an end to hierarchical social order, they want a step-up on that ladder. The follower of the fascist leader looks to the relief offered by institutions of social control — and as Adorno noted, the freedom to abandon responsibility for making mature decisions. And culturally, again, this is seen in Hollywood constantly. The offering of the most rudimentary and saccharine narratives, cliched and melodramatic is satisfying because the audience need make no effort to infer quality. Discrimination has come to feel a burden. And as with the violence of Trump’s followers, there is a violence in the kitsch sentimentalism of Kinkade or Redlin, or Norman Rockwell for that matter. And certainly the sentimentality of Hollywood TV drama, almost invariably including a military or police theme, reflects a savagery and cruelty at the heart of the Imperial American soul. The reading of narrative has come to secondary, if it is even really there at all, to the emotional form of the TV show or film, or theatre at times. And this cheap superficial emotional scaffolding is the perfect structural device for a culture of growing petty resentments and hurt feelings. It is absolutely breathtaking how many characters in film and TV from Hollywood act offended. All the time. And usually for offenses that are in fact immutable in the later 20th and now 21st century. Exaggerated offense is taken at even the smallest of lies. The kind of lies the viewer is coerced into telling every day of their life. The repressed anger at this finds expression in the constant heightened sense of victimage seen on US television.

Trump is the Thomas Kinkade of politics. But Hillary Clinton offers a far more complicated reading. For Hillary is also a fascist. And perhaps a more deeply ingrained fascist whose focus is, while hidden largely, on destruction. Her vision makes little distinction between foe and self, in fact. As long as destruction happens, Hillary is fulfilled. And this brings me back, again, to Ernst Bloch. There is a cogent couple paragraphs on Bloch by Tim Dayton that I quote because it is highly relevant, I think, to both narcissism (I will get to that, again, below) and the appeal of fascist aesthetics.

“Bloch’s analysis of the Fascist appropriation of utopian imagery is evident in his account of the notion of a Third Reich, a term familiar to us now as the concise expression of political horror. But Bloch traces the notion back to origins in the Old Testament, and to its re-emergence in the Middle Ages among heretical Christians and as the social theology of the peasant revolts.
Here, the notion of a third epoch served to figure a world in which reigned freedom and solidarity in a kind of restored primitive communism. Such a vision continued to inform emancipatory movements into the nineteenth century. Marx’s breakthrough, famously, was to wed such utopian visions to a concrete, scientific analysis of the dynamics of capitalism and class struggle. But by the end of the nineteenth century the two-sidedness of the Marxian synthesis was lost, in part because Capital, in requiring its opponents to think according to its own logic, captured the consciousness of those very opponents.
As a result, the notion of a third epoch, which retained its appeal among great sections of the masses, fell into the hands of the right, whose objectively false anticapitalism was nevertheless subjectively true: Drawing upon a utopian image from the past, fascism struck a chord the left refused to hear. The masses were abandoned to a “swindle of fulfillment.”
As his analysis of fascism reveals, Bloch argues that even the most ugly and reactionary moments in history have their utopian dimension, and it is the task of Marxism as the “concretely mediated utopia” both to ferret out these subterranean utopian elements and to make possible their actualization in the world.”

In differing ways this is a point I have tried to make recently for it feels increasingly significant. Bloch was attacked by the traditional Marxist left for his *romanticism*. It was no doubt more than a little frustrating for Bloch. He has suffered much the same fate as Adorno in fact. Bloch said famously “everyone lives in their own *now*”. But for Bloch, echoing Lacan in a curious way, the core subjective quality of everyone’s now is absence. Our self is linked to the feeling (!) of something missing. Now, this is partly Bloch’s complex analysis of Utopia, but the short version is that one thing clearly missing for everyone under Capitalism is freedom and autonomy. But one has to examine this unarticulated longing in light of the specific history of each person, and of each person’s group or class. And this gets quickly into Freud. But looked at culturally, again, the appeal of Redlin and Kinkade, of their idealized kistch nature landscapes, is going to be especially acute to an urban working class today. That appeal however is not conscious. Nobody wants to go live in rural Kansas because rural Kansas looks more like In Cold Blood than Terry Redlin. But the feelings generated are regressions. But regressions not to an earlier primitive state but to a ritual (per Adorno) or institutional authority. An authority that allows a limited de-sublimation of sorts. This is also the appeal of the uniform for those who want to be cops or soldiers. Im just following orders is perhaps the mantra of the late 20th century and now the 21st.

The uniform is less something you put on than something you discard. It is the putting away of difficult thinking and responsibility. And I sort of think there is an essay yet to be written about the effects on cops and soldiers during their off duty time when they take off their uniform. For their conduct tends toward an even more impulsive and irrational violence and destruction. For Bloch, Utopia is the present, not the future. It is found in those fleeting trace images one experiences, often just before sleep or when day dreaming. And perhaps paradoxically, for Bloch hated Jung (as did Fromm and Marcuse), these ideas contain a radicalized Lemarckian evolutionary echo. And I think probably, in this area at least, Jung is rather unfairly pilloried. In any event, the driving force of such thinking is a recognition of how modern Industrial (and post Industrial) society has fragmented the idea of the self. For Bloch, different classes retain different experiences of the present — that ideology has a deep historical memory of which people are only very dimly aware. And this partly goes toward explaining the attraction of fascist mythology. The Utopian dreams of earlier groups live on in trace imagery and desires of the descendants of these groups.

“The remains of ancestral life which are found in the unconscious consist in what ancestors have done.”
Jung

So in a sense, criticizing Jung for his ahistorcism is perhaps missing the point. Much as Bloch’s critics missed the point. And in this, at least, Adorno would agree. For the contemporary Capitalist West is one which has subsumed and appropriated not just language, but the gestural memory and ability to dream. And this in turn connects to ideas of today’s hyper narcissist personality.

“Nonsynchronous contradictions exist alongside synchronous contradictions, such as that between a class-conscious proletariat and a technocratic-capitalist ruling class — the kind of contradiction made famous in Marx’s brief outline of historical materialism in the 1859 “Preface to A Critique of Political Economy.” A synchronous contradiction, that is, is one whose origin lies in the developing conflict between the relations and forces of production. Bloch forthrightly affirms the reality and importance of the synchronous contradiction, but he also asserts that “nevertheless, it is not the only one there.”
Tim Dayton (Reclaiming Utopia; The Legacy of Ernst Bloch)

Bloch admonished the left, in the 80s, that they had fallen prey to the instrumental and quantitative logic of Capital even as they critiqued it. And I would add, that within that instrumental logic there always resides the seeds of authoritarian policing, of reflexive impulses of control. I constantly find this, and it is an internalizing of the generalized violence of contemporary capital. One that cannot be avoided, or rarely anyway. For the anal sadistic sentimentalism of Kinkade or Redlin, or a dozen other painters widely collected and hung on Motel walls, is the same repressed viciousness seen in Hillary’s cackling retelling of Qadaffi’s brutal murder. The literal toxic laughter of the plantation overseer thinking back on how that last slave revolt was squashed.

Funny stuff.

And this leads to something that I think lurks behind much contemporary discourse, an internalized apocalyptic delusion that goes back, probably, all the way to the Old Testament.

Anson Rabinbach writes…

“In The Postmodern Condition, for example, Jean-François Lyotard regards terror as the consequence of indulging in the ultimately nostalgic attempt, characteristic of all political and aesthetic modernism from Hegel to Proust, to render the unpresentable presentable. From this perspective, even in its most antitotalizing, nonidentical, and radical expression, Adorno’s later aesthetics, modernist art’s refusal of any reconciliation with its object remains parasitically fixated on the “ruin of totality.” Jacques Derrida has also argued that by its very insistence on terms like explosion, ruin, collapse, or dissolution, the rhetoric of modernism is fetishistically attached to a nostalgic figure of totality. He finds, in Benjamin, for example, the “longing for an architecture, a construction, that is irretrievably destroyed, but one in which the phantom of totality still haunts the ruins.” ”

Now, I’d see this rather differently than Rabinbach, because I think what he is calling fixated was rather simply the recognition of the loss of *totality*. That is another thing *gone missing*. It is another search that takes place by stealth without the individual’s conscious understanding. And when Rabinbach quotes Blanchot, I think he does so for reasons other than I would.

“Inasmuch as the disaster is thought, it is nondisastrous thought, thought of the outside. We have no access to the outside, but the outside has always already touched us in the head, for it is precipitous.”
Maurice Blanchot

The narcissistic personality sees other people as there to satisfy their needs — and in turn those needs must be recognized. Discourse revolves around that needs of the narcissist. And this is the appeal of fascist orators. The fascist leader recognizes, collectively, the importance of his followers. You are all so important. But these are always shallow needs.

“One of the intrinsic characteristics of the fascist ritual is innuendo, sometimes followed by the actual revelation of the facts hinted at, but more often not. Again a rational reason for this trend can easily be given: either the law or at least prevailing conventions preclude open statements of a pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic character, and the orator who wants to convey such ideas has to resort to more indirect methods. It seems likely, however, that innuendo is employed, and enjoyed, as a gratification per se. For example, the agitator says those dark forces, you know whom I mean’, and the audience at once understands that his remarks are directed against the Jews. The listeners are thus treated as an in-group who already know everything the orator wishes to tell them and who agree with him before any explanation is given.”
Adorno

But innuendo has deeper implications. The 19th century theatrical hysteric, as treated by Freud and other early psychoanalysts, reflected the artificiality, of a certain sort, seen on the stages of Europe at that time. Signs or symptoms of neurosis by the end of the 20th century were shaped by, firstly, the public’s generalized awareness of Freudian theory (even if badly understood) and a certain de-centeredness. Therefore the audience for the performance of neurosis, even disguised, is one of the detective searching out symptoms. The theatricality of the contemporary neurotic, in other words, is highly ironic and both self conscious and hyper consolidated. Buried deeper, this consolidated trauma is only accessed by an investment, emotionally, in the superficial. This is perhaps stretching the organic metaphor, but the political audience for social trauma, is both identifying with he or she who generates the trauma, and with the collective and highly superficial and shallow agreement. The murder of Qadaffi reads as equal parts an identification with Qadaffi as rock star Marvell Comics style villain, and with the TV cartoon military that is imagined, that saves the day. The sadism and violence is met with indifference. Netanyahu is called a rock star, and so is Hillary. Hillary is a *bad ass*. And this is her fan base, the hipster white liberal — who even if not hip, is aligned with those who gentrify and hold some economic authority. Trump is the clownish Hitler figure, insincere and funny. The orange hair and bad bottled tan. His lack of taste and vulgarity is not just in his opinion , or even his expression of it, but in his brand. The Trump Towers, and The Apprentice.

And this goes back, actually, to both the fragmenting of the personality in the West today, and in the deep identification with power and authority, and with violence. Hillary Clinton is admired for her ruthlessness, not shunned. Her planning and guiding of the right wing coup in Honduras is seen as competence not stony self interest. But these identifications are repressed. And Adorno said he feared the survival of National Socialism within democracy more than the continuance of National Socialism as an anti democratic force.

The aesthetic reading of the general culture of the U.S. today is that of Redlin landscapes or John Wayne Gacy clowns. The fake is not just appreciated for its fakeness, ironically, but the ironic appreciation of the fake is in turn valorized as populist discrimination. It is making naive vulgarity into ideology. And the reactionary tendency in this is clear; the ironic affluent younger political subject, insofar as they see themselves as political subjects, make everything that is material and historical into pure subjectivity (this is again, though I hate to keep hammering on about it, a quality of Zizek’s thought) and that pure subjectivity then concerns itself with its own definitions (like reading astrological forecasts) and leaving material conditions to Natural law.

Ulrich Plass’ introduction to Adorno’s Notes on Literature —

“For Adorno, an end of art or a fulfillment of art is conceivable only as a paradoxical negative fulfillment, because artworks do not adhere
to the commonsensical definitions of success and failure, and thus art’s negativity is never entirely bleak but always equivocal. One finds powerful examples for the paradox of fulfillment as unfulfillment, or success as failure, in his interpretations of poetry.”

And I think this is very important for any genuine appreciation of culture today. For I hear constantly the various refrains of commercial viability for artworks as a gauge of acceptance. An association with *loser* art is always to be avoided. In Hollywood, I remember producers always wanting to hear if anyone else liked a script. What was the *buzz*. And this is all of a piece, in a sense. The identification with shallowness is medicalized, and self help is mostly about this. Supermarket self-help books inscribe the authenticity and well being of shallowness. And that shallowness extends to an internalizing of powerlessness (accompanied by a dose of cyncicism) which suggests that common sense is the best way to go, trust good old common sense. And that further implies the comforting discarding of all deep values. And that discarding leaves the subject with bromide logic– the British DID build the railroads in India after all. Hitler wasn’t totally wrong. Ok, I don’t agree with everything Hillary has done but…

“…this game (playing at society) is the living principle of all civilization.”
Ernest Becker

Huizinga suggested society was always in play form (theatre form). The metaphor for theatre is therefore always valid, and the ascension of internet technology and the circulation of imagery has eaten away at the human capacity for metaphor. One of the reasons a Kinkade or Rockwell become so popular is that they present a metaphor free universe. If humans lacked the ability to narrate or create allegory, the world would resemble a Terry Redlin painting. And I suspect it would be acutely fascistic and cruel. I remember once suggesting that Nixon was the last allegorical president. And perhaps that was a smarter observation than I knew. This structurally resembles Adorno’s ideas on fulfillment. For failure is equivocal.

In the Capitalist society, the sense of abandonment is acute. Loneliness haunts the culture and is vigorously denied. So, even the most artificial and cartoon like sense of support is going to be welcomed. The fundamentalist Christian movement provides a fake sort of Kinkadian warmth, and even that is better than sleeping on the street, or the anxiety of overdue bills and foreclosure. Americans will today bask in the amber light of cheap artificial moonlight over fake fields saturated with Round-up before they will face the truth of a world free of illusions and hence stark denuded and cold. And this is understandable. But this internalized powerlessness is also partly playacting. Just as the concern over who wins the election. All the handwringing and outpouring of concern and even panic is just a performance. For the internalized powerlessness isn’t actual lack of power. It is social lack of power, but interpersonal relationships almost always contain qualities of power. And because this performance is so encouraged by the corporate ownership class, the actual power of the individual is repressed and hidden. I see people who manufacture personas of helplessness when, in fact, they do have some power, some affect and influence. And could have more. But nothing feels so impossible to contemporary Americans as organizing. And one must give a good deal of credit to the many who *do* organize. The prison reform movement, and groups like the Innocence Project are having actual concrete effects on people’s lives. But the electoral spectacle is there is substitute for actual material activity. The theatrical faux intoxication of group political rallies is just another form of of ‘playing at society’.

I was thinking of Ernest Becker this week, when I watched some of the coverage of the Presidential campaigns. The mock heroic and symbolic conquest of death via religious practices of immortality. I think so inured are people today to the constant religiousity of political speech that is passes almost unnoticed. But where once the Utopian element was a part of the religious rituals of daily life, today there is only empty ritual and an accelerated performance of same. Shallowness is god. Kariflack’s essay (or one of them) talks of Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkley. And it is indeed a contemporary parable of the habituating effects of electronic media (under conscious control of its creators and owners) and the desperate compulsion of a society that is acting out a soap opera of extreme superficiality. The fascist orator is partly replaced by the secret (except not) knowledge of the cyber technicians. Writing code is the contemporary version of secret elect Aztec priests throwing virgins off the top of Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan. Today even the secular priests of Silicon Valley are distilled icons of banality. Bill Gates is the mousey henpecked clerk in WW2 movies. But today he is another rock star. For shallowness encloses vitality, fecundity, and life.

Metaphors didn’t just fall out of the sky, man didn’t just arbitrarily decide to construct narratives that would help post graduate lit-crit students eons later. The human development, both collectively and individually, is intwined with mimesis, allegory, and symbol. And with metaphor — it is that mysterious but clear mirroring and echoing of our lives and the world around us, our memory, and collectively the rituals that come out of these interactions. The rapid onset of vast media platforms and giant telecoms and computer technology overall — in the hands of corporate marketing minded capitalists, has reversed the psychic development. It is the age of regression. The hyper narcissist is also the infantile narcissist and collectively the playing at society that allows for acute compartmentalizing, renewable projection, and a new more punitive super ego is participating in the manufacturing of a 21st century fascism in the U.S. This isn’t really all that great a leap mind you, but it is another step toward total breakdown.

“On the subjective side, in the psyche of people, National Socialism increased beyond measure the collective narcissism, simply put: national vanity. The individual’s narcissistic instinctual drives, which are promised less and less satisfaction by a callous world and which nonetheless persist undiminished as long as civilization denies them so much, find substitute satisfaction in the identification with the whole.[a] This collective narcissism was severely damaged by the collapse of Hitler’s regime, but the damage occurred at the level of mere factuality, without individuals making themselves conscious of it and thereby coping with it. This is the social-psychological relevance of talk about an unmastered past. Also absent is the panic that, according to Freud’s theory in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, sets in whenever collective identifications break apart. If the lessons of the great psychologist are not to be cast to the wind, then there remains only one conclusion: that secretly, smoldering unconsciously and therefore all the more powerfully, these identifications and the collective narcissism were not destroyed at all, but continue to exist.”
Adorno