The Morbid Voice

“America is about to choose a president from the two most unpopular politicians in modern history. The Democrats have chided the Left and the ‘Bernie or Bust’ crowd for still not being ‘with her’ in the existential struggle against fascism. But it is worth considering how liberalism’s anti-fascism covers a libidinal lack. That is, an inability to define or, in Lacanian terms, ‘enjoy’ their political identity but through this fascist threat. Liberals are clearly not principled anti-fascists, the geopolitical compromises are too numerous to count, and there is an obvious cynical PR/fundraising logic to the fascist threat: ‘Can you spare $5 to defeat fascism?’ However, liberals are emotionally invested in the idea that they are the ones who can beat back the scourge of fascism. They construct anti-fascism as a class project but self-identify as the class of elites and experts that fascism uses to obfuscate actual class struggle.”
Olivier Jutel

“It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. Tranquilizers and anesthetics, private and corporate, become the largest business in the world just as the world is attempting to maximize every form of alert. Sound-light shows, as new cliché, are in effect mergers, retrievers of the tribal condition. It is a state that has already overtaken private enterprise, as individual businesses form into massive conglomerates. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.”
Marshall McLuhan

“According to Stuart Hall, the most important question regarding an ‘organic’
ideology is ‘not what is false about it but what about it is true’, namely what
‘makes good sense’, which is usually ‘quite enough for ideology’. This also applies
to ‘family-values’, which are, despite the obvious hypocrisy and bigotry of many
of their conservative proponents, not simply ‘false’, but represent, in whatever
displaced or distorted forms, longings for solidarity, closeness, and reliability in
a torn world, not least among the impoverished and marginalised, whose familylives
have been unhinged and destabilised.”
Jan Rehmann

“The gods perceive future events, mortals present ones, and
the wise perceive those that are imminent.”
—Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana

Adorno and Horkheimer both sensed a quality in post war America that they described as fatalistic, and tragic. The administered society was elevating something predictable and enforceable by the new technocratic society. Stereotypes were no longer on the road to cliche, but were becoming ideals of a sort. When McLuhan wrote from cliche to archetype, he was both right and wrong. He was only wrong, however, in that he leant it an ahistorical quality (somewhat paradoxically). McLuhan saw sensory input as already cliched in the sense that modernity had conditioned us to see and hear only what that with which we are already acquainted. For McLuhan, technological extensions were pre-cliched. They numbed perception. But he also believed that repetition on occasion led to something revelatory. And while I think this is not usually true at all, I think there is a seed of something correct in this idea. For Adorno there was a positivistic fatalism growing in post WW2 America and to some degree in Europe as well. And he was acutely aware that his own philosophy teetered on reproducing this aspect of the dominated society.

The mass culture of culture industry for Adorno and Horkheimer was clearly a creation of the owners of the cultural apparatus. The audience were the object of marketing schemes and testing and manipulation. But even so, there remained the residue of dissent and disruptive thought. I continue to return to the current electoral spectacle because it has been a period of revealing, rather than hiding. The liberal white bourgeoisie …as Jutel in his brief very good essay sites…is suffering a kind of sickness, a libidinal lack, that demands a sense of participation in the spectacle. Except they know well that have no role to play beyond voting. And this is segues in terms of psychological need, with the new Malthusian Greens who hysterically raise the evil of overpopulation. The longing for lost control and administration is expressed by a need to control the reproductive capacities of the global poor. The African and Asian and Latin American countries who disobey, tacitly, by having too many babies. This exterminationist dream is disguised under pseudo scientific graphs and statistical analysis. The carrying capacity of earth is at the breaking point, etc etc etc. The very language of the new colonialist greens is one of pop psychology mixed with TED talks and business school. The criticism of Adorno and Horkheimer is often quite telling in that they are sited for excessive negativity. And such criticism is itself an expression of the same libidinal lack that Jutel notes. This false optimism is one that self congratulates for its sober science based reason. The same reason that is used to justify sanctions against Iraq that killed millions of children. Maddie Albright famously said it was worth it. What she meant was that the calculus was correct. Suffering is incidental to calculus. Albright, and the rest of the US administration, were not being anything but optimistic. The green insistence on over population is a disguised desire for sterility masked as a love of Mother Nature.

This is also related to the criticism of Adorno and the entire Frankfurt School, really, that their focus on alienation was essentializing. That one must have an essence from which to be alienated. But this is wrong, in fact. The notion of what constitutes the subject is one that Adorno went to rather great lengths to study and teach, but one that is hugely complex…as any survey of the history of philosophy will tell you. But one may still be in this interrupted state, a state in which absence becomes predominant. Now there are tiers of this, to put it crudely but all the same there is an experience of missing unity, community, compassion and most of all belonging. And because belonging is felt so sharply, it is the first place the compensating mechanisms target, psychologically speaking.

Jan Rehmann points out that the one failing of the culture industry critique is that ideology has mutated into multiple simultaneous ideologies that serve to stabilize, in a sense, the economic contradictions of the superstructure. But I think it is wrong to question the power of marketing. And to suggest, as Rehmann does, that a difference exists between what he disdainfully calls high art and entertainment. The mirroring of industrial labor conditions in the realm of entertainment, while over simplified, is still basically true. And the interesting thing today is that the places where it is not true, are the places in which culture (and art) are most ephemeral and transitory. For Adorno saw that the appearance of what he called the culinary, in artistic critique and experience, was a sign of a dialectical reversal. Today the most reactionary movies made by Hollywood are the ones that praise the liberal’s heroism in the fight against the corporate bad guys. The narrative that pits the hero against the big bad corporations are always validations of exactly what they pretend to criticize.

“An alienated world presents itself to individuals as insignificant and meaningless, as rigidified or impoverished, as a world that is not one’s own, which is to say, a world in which one is not “at home” and over which one can have no influence. ”
Rahel Jaeggi.

This idea of not belonging has as its attendant symptom the experience of belonging to others and things. There are questions in all this having to do with ideology. And that word has changed meaning quite a lot over the last three hundred years. And one of the reasons for its indeterminacy is connected to the loss of subjectivity itself. Adorno said in a late lecture course on Negative Dialectics…

“Qualitative elements are what are filtered out by the usual objective methods of science. Elimination of the subject equals quantification. ”

And I want to tie this into what Adorno said of mimesis. For Benjamin was actually the first of the Frankfurt group (he was a marginal member) to suggest that the administered society damaged children’s capacity for mimicry. And that this repressed or buried mimetic impulse would eventually return, as repressed material tends to do, in aggressive and hostile form. So the process of maturation under late Capitalism is going to tend toward an experience of acute alienation, and instrumental reason and a draining of subjectivity. But this takes us back to what subjectivity means in such a context. And more, what ideology means. Speaking of Adorno and Horkheimer. Rehmann wrote…

“A defining feature of ‘instrumental reason’ was that it commanded and controlled its objects by ‘equalising’ what was different, by ‘excising’ the incommensurable,
by squeezing what is non-identical into a fixed identity.”

So in a way, the idea of alienation is less totalizing than it is instrumental itself. Alienation is the process of narrowing and interrupting experience. But this production of alienation — if one follows Adorno and Horkheimer — is almost a given for human beings born into societies of domination and more, of rigid class separation. For class cuts across this, as it also tends to do. If Horkheimer is right that instrumental thinking came with the first use of a tool, or at least the seed of its later completion, then the non instrumental resides in either prehistoric cultures, or it is a fugitive experience that appears on the far margins of the social. Alienation is also an aspect of absence, of this haunted sense of missing out, or having missed something we were supposed to experience.

“If we take into consideration the whole picture made up by the phenomena of masochism immanent in so many people, the negative therapeutic reaction and the sense of guilt found in so many neurotics, we shall no longer be able to adhere to the belief that mental events are exclusively governed by the desire for pleasure. These phenomena are unmistakable indications of the presence of a power in mental life which we call the instinct of aggression or of destruction according to its aims, and which we trace back to the original death instinct of living matter. “
Freud

From Freud’s point of view, aggression is not something learned necessarily, nor is it innate. It is rather the result of a basic conflict in the human psyche. We are in conflict with ourselves. And this then leads on to looking at the ruthlessness of the super ego. And the role of narcissism. One of things that I think is most difficult to grasp if looking at the political reality around us today is the gratuitous nature of so much institutional violence as well as individual violence. Why do fascist leaders desire more when they already have much more of everything than they, or anyone, could possibly need? The U.S. government could easily feed everyone in the country, provide them with homes and even cars and clothing. But they don’t even consider it. And even the most radical lives given to helping others (Dorothy Day comes to mind) are somehow in need of an ideological reason for their generosity and kindness. Others, the various celebrity driven photo op displays of charity are largely hypocritical. Why own six yachts? Or twenty five gold watches? Or five mansions? Many of the very richest people in the world simply believe they are better. But what does that mean, exactly?

This is why class is so significant. For on a basic level the class conflict is a reflection of interior conflict. And the ruling class in this dynamic is the most unwell. But perhaps the bourgeoisie are even more sick, for they embody both the masochistic and the sadistic. Richard Boothby, a very astute reader of both Freud and Lacan, wrote…

“Lacan insists that the death drive be understood in its original radically. Freud was not simply concerned to expose a general tendency toward aggressivity and destructiveness in human beings. The thrust of Freud’s idea was to conceive of a force of self-destructiveness, a primordial aggressivity toward oneself, from which aggressivity toward others is ultimately derived. To fail to see that it is one’s own death that is at stake in the death drive is to miss the point entirely.”

The most vulnerable in society today are not masochists. Nobody wants to be vulnerable or suffer dire material conditions, or to be exploited. But many in the ruling class *do* want to inflict suffering. And others are secretly happy that such suffering is being meted out. But to return to Lacan a moment in all this. Lacan’s genius was in seeing that language is linked with Death. His famous notion of the unconscious being structured like a language has given birth to a good deal of really fatuous pseudo Lacanian thinking (Zizek most notably) which entirely rather misses the point. For the key here is found in Freud’s early texts. Everything in his early work was focused on verbal expressions and mistakes, and even dreams were puzzles of a primarily linguistic nature. I always felt, when I first began to write plays, that I was transcribing something both unconscious but also morbid. I did not take any negative feelings away from this, for I felt this morbidity that was housed within the linguistic structure, was not relieved any by NOT writing. In fact the only relief was in allowing some kind of expression for this morbidity the better to manage it. I think most authors know the feeling of going back to re-read something written a day or two earlier and finding it completely alien. Not remembering what in the world you were thinking when you wrote it. This is both an experience of the uncanny, for it is never totally unfamiliar, but also an experience of something morbid. And that is because it hints that perhaps one never knows what one is saying or writing. Maybe everything we say, everything, is a stranger to us. When you first hear your own voice recorded, it is the same experience. WHO is that speaking? That’s not me. And almost everyone at that moment also hates the voice they hear.

“However we evaluate the relative importance of the imaginary and the symbolic in Lacan’s work, there is good reason why a discussion of his approach to the death drive must begin with the imaginary. This is so because Lacan’s treatment of the death instinct is closely bound up with his concept of *alienation.*”
Richard Boothby

And alienation is born of the imaginary, of that conflicted relationship with our idea of ourselves.

“The libidinal tension that shackles the subject to the constant pursuit of an illusory unity which is always luring him away from himself, is surely related to that agony of dereliction which is Man’s particular and tragic destiny.”
Jacques Lacan

Lacan saw aggressivity being interior in its generation. This is why I continue to say that depictions of violence (in Hollywood films for example) is not the real violence of humans, and that the violence of sentimentality and marketing and of false optimism is much for destructive. The idea of humans frustrated, or acting violently out of need is misleading. That happens, certainly, but the violence of which Lacan speaks is that between our ego and ourselves, in a sense. Our alienation from our idea of ourself. Sadism is not inverted masochism. There are no easy binary maps to why the world is awash in violence. We see ourselves as fictions, as a reflection — and this tenuous unity is always under threat. The threat of this unity falling apart however is not the source of aggressivity, but rather the aggression comes from a rebellion against this false self image.

“…the structured effect of identification with the rival is not self-evident, except at the level of fable, and can only be conceived of by a primary identification that structures the subject as a rival with himself’.”
Lacan

The rivalry though needs to be clarified a bit. The above comment is significant, I think, because of the idea of *fable*. The infant does not articulate to itself any of this, obviously. The existential quality of being is indefinable. Whatever that is, it is not the *other* that is helping define it. Boothby quotes Luce Irigaray….
“The specular image, visualization of the signifier, . . . well illustrates the neurological anticipation which it permits for the still immature infant, anticipation from which it finds itself constituted by the signifier as “one.” But this unification is also a disjunction. If the imaginary unifies, it [also] separates.. . . All structure supposes an exclusion, an empty ensemble, its negation, as the very condition of its functioning.”

This is crucial for understanding this intersubjective conflict. The unity betrays us by not being reliable. Rivalry is later expressed, in adulthood, through a fear of that which cannot be relied upon. If that sounds strange, I don’t think it really is. Distrust is partly also linked to narcissism. We grow up in our bodies, to use that metaphor, without ever experiencing it completely as unitary. There is something haunting about that. That which we cannot see. That takes place behind our backs. We miss that which goes on behind our backs. We are stabbed in the back. That original energetic or libidinal state of chaos is gradually forming itself into some idea of a self. Freud’s well known fort/da example was taken further by Lacan who saw the child less establishing the link, or transitional object (Winnicott) than a kind of reproduction of that separation from the Mother. And additionally, a kind of security in the absent Mother. And I am hugely simplifying because the point is the ambivalence created.

“What is most anxiety-provoking for the child, is that precisely this relation of lack on which he establishes himself, which makes him desire, this relation is all the more disturbed when there is no possibility of lack, when the mother is always on his back.”
Lacan, Seminar X

The suffocating mother. And I have often wondered at the culture of *quality parenting*. The bourgeois idea of ‘responsibility’ and of giving quality time to human relationships. I have always suspected a sadistic component to this project. There is in contemporary life a terror of being alone. But I digress. The sense of what makes for alienation is also linked to the super ego. And it was Otto Isakower who introduced the idea that the super ego was a voice. Actually Theodore Reik did first introduce the idea, but Isakower more developed it. And Lacan knew of Isakower. And he suggested, the linguistic foundation of sleep states and of waking. What wakes us from deep sleep? The authority of the voice of the Mother.

Darian Leader, in a great piece on Isakower’s work, writes…

“The infant’s cry would be interpreted by the caregiver and a meaning established: the code, as Lacan said, was that of the Other. Recent studies, indeed, have shown how the attribution of intentionality to infants is a prerequisite not only for their own intentional actions but for their very capacity for intentionality (Trevarthen 1977). The voice would be the remainder of these processes through which acoustic productions are given meaning. Logically, then, the voice would always be beyond meaning. It would be that part of the cry which wasn’t absorbed in the network of meanings.”

Now, Leader also mentions the famous 1962 study by Ruth Weir on crib speech. And the surprising percentage of imperatives in the speech of the child while in the crib alone. The second finding in her study was that these very early toddler speech acts were really dialogues not monologues. A dialogue by a single voice. This was a fascinating study, and later findings also suggested the importance of this speech taking place on the boundaries of wakefulness and sleep.

“Cross-cultural studies have shown how around seventy percent of mothers’ speech to babies consists of interrogative forms: ‘Are you hungry?’, ‘Do you want a drink?’, ‘Are you too hot?’ etc. The puzzle here is less the frequency of these syntactic forms than the fact that they were not mirrored in the eventual speech of the babies themselves. There is no demonstrated correlation between the frequency of interrogative forms in maternal speech and in that of the children.”
Darian Leader

One implication of this has to do with mimesis. The baby is learning what imitation is, but not itself imitating the voice of authority.

“The voice is the voice qua imperative, in so far as it calls for obedience or conviction, that it situates itself not with respect to music but with
respect to the word”
Lacan

The imaginary is based on a kind of alienation. It is constitutive as Lacan has it. But for the child’s psyche to develop it must reserve something of a space, to rely on that metaphor, to which it can send dissonant actors in this early drama. Kristeva develops this much further in her ideas of abjection. To create that mental space means rejecting a part of oneself. And I think this is exactly why the idea of writing — for the adult — contains so much morbidity. The voice of the judge and jury that is there on the borders of sleep, and the lives on in textual expression later. Writing is then a reminder of our basic alienated state. It is also, if we follow Lacan, the process of retrieving desire. But my point here is really the manner of mystification going on in contemporary culture. It is not just the political narrative of Trump and Hillary, it is the entire entertainment realm and the bourgeois domination of culture overall. The mis reading of, say, the racist state violence against black people is transformed into gun control discourse. Israel can murder children in a trend toward their own final solution for Gaza, but the narrative is clearly put in place by the U.S. and Israel alike to disguise this exterminationist tendency. Or the Iraq sanctions, or Fallujah, or even El Mozote or My Lai. The capacity for mass violence is cleansed. But that obvious propaganda is easy to spot. Less easy is the perhaps even more virulent psychic violence of corporate owned entertainment and its placement as a substitute for organic culture and art. What is expressed in an Aaron Sorkin TV show, for example, is the passive/aggressive bourgeois world view of white supremacist values and, more to the point, verbal cleverness that is a signpost for the repetitive as an action of regression. The very tone of Sorkin’s writing (in which everyone sounds the same) is sadistic and cruel. The cruelty is always petty, as well. And the self plagiarizing repetitivness is a kind of onanistic connation. It is the cthonic voice of a John Wayne Gacy clown come to life. The entire limited run of The Newsroom was like watching the shiny face of a serial killer convulsing.

The issue of language, and more, of textual production is one that is tied into alienation. And one of the problems with critiques that posit alienation as part of a totalizing out of date system is that, without meaning to be clever myself, it is an expression of this general instrumentalizing of reason. Again, like the new green eugenics, which creates pseudo scientific texts that demand obedience. One is always dangerously close to auto parodic immolation.

There is always in attacks on political opposition (from some leftist organizations on Stein/Baraka for example) an appeal to science of some sort. It is true on the right, too, though often it is instead a kind of Christian primitivism masquerading as reason. But the mechanisms are identical in their function. This particular election has elicited new levels of hysteria in the bourgeoisie. And the mania is barely even disguised now.

Rehmann quoting Habermas….

“Habermas argued, for example, that the productive forces ‘no longer function as the basis of a critique
of prevailing legitimations in the interest of political enlightenment, but become
instead the basis of legitimation’, he articulated a general consensus: ‘technocratic
consciousness’ not only became a ‘substitute ideology for the demolished
bourgeois ideologies’, but also ‘today’s dominant, rather glassy background
ideology, which makes a fetish of science’, and thus penetrates the consciousness
of the depoliticised mass of the population.”

The white bourgeois fear of Trump, which is reflexive and largely insincere, is exactly this glassy background ideology. Their grammar is the linguistic equivalent of a Conde Nast magazine. And it betrays its morbidity through the undisguised pleasure it is taking in this opposition (which was Jutel’s point in a sense). But more, it is the patently artificial nature of the Trump campaign that seems to be part of the enjoyment. When Trump kicks a mother and her crying child out of the hall in which he is giving a speech, it is a dumb show villain, a burlesque bad guy. On the Democratic side the morbidity is less music hall and a more deeply engrained pathology and love of war. This is Kristeva territory again. For it is the appearance of death (corpses, mutilated bodies, etc) that allow for that slight easing of psychic tension that serves to remind the viewer of their own road to termination. The lack of health in Hillary Clinton and most of the speakers at the Democratic convention, coupled to the jingoism and the constant reminders of death in the speeches was eerie to watch. Hillary Clinton herself appears ashen and almost frail, given to involuntary jerks and spasms. This was a tour of the underworld.

The memorializing of war death is, of course, a staple of fascist ideology. But it is what is underlying this spectacle in terms of culture that interests me. Darian Leader, discussing Lacan again and the *voice*…

“By delusion he means the interpellative aspect of auditory
hallucination, where the subject has the sense that someone or something is calling them,
addressing them, persecuting them and so on.”

Lacan said something to the effect that the whole world speaks to us. And not just in hallucination or some pathological state. Or, rather, language itself encloses an element of pathology at all times. And writing is really a process of listening.

“In inheriting the super-ego, the inheritance is voice, discourse, language. But not only these. The very ability of inheriting is also being inherited: we “inherit language to be able to attest that we are the heirs [que nous sommes des héritiers]. In other words, we inherit the ability to inherit. The fact that we inherit is not an attribute or an accident, but our essence, and what we inherit is this very essence. We inherit the possibility of attesting to the fact that we inherit, and this is language.”
Victor Mazin

The contemporary discourse, the daily *reality* of bourgeoise Western society is one governed by a newly super ruthless super ego. The voice we hear, the voice of the world, is one of command and of orders. The imperatives of crib speech for the child have, in earlier periods, been more mediated I think. Today, there is a demand involved. But it is not a demand to listen, paradoxically perhaps, it is a demand NOT to listen. It is toward a speech of deafness.

The rise of hyper surveillance in the West — a huge apparatus that mostly doesn’t work, suggests that the idea of what ‘working’ means needs to be reconsidered. It doesn’t matter if it works. The goal isn’t security, it is insecurity.

Victor Mazin, a Russian writer on things psychoanalytical, noted an interesting detail from Freud’s early influences…

“In 1910 Freud read The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words [Über den Gegensinn der Urworte] written in 1884 by Karl Abel, an expert in Egyptian philology. Freud gave so much importance to this work that undertook an action that was fairly out of his character—he wrote a review of this work and published it in the 1910 Yearbook of Psychoanalysis. Thus, apart from Abel’s “antithetical meaning of primal words” there’s their Freudian double-ganger. To Abel, Freud owed his linguistic conceptualization of two characteristics of dreams, namely a strange tendency of oneirowork [dream-work] to disregard negation and its preference for expressing contraries by identical means of representation.
Able notes two distinctive features of the ancient Egyptian language. First, he says that there is a multitude of words with contradictory meanings in this language. For instance, “strong” and “weak” are meanings of one and the same word. “Light” and “darkness” are expressed by the same word. Second, there are also compound words that consist of two syllables with contradictory meanings, viz… “closely-far”, “freely-bound”, “outwardly-inner”. The combination of two syllables does not form some new, third word, as it is the case with Chinese hieroglyphs, but preserves two contrary meanings.”

There is a quality of something remarkable, but hard to define, in Pharaonic Egyptian art and culture, as we know it today. Every time I visit the Met in New York, I end up in the Egyptian exhibit. Same with the Louvre. And it has to do with the sense I get of this non antagonistic relationship with Death. The movement, psychically, toward a reality of symbol and allegory and metaphor. But it is not that, quite. The metaphor that represents itself, in a sense.

“The servile condition of the evil will seemed to elude an essential
analysis of phenomena. So the only practicable route was that of a detour via
the symbols wherein the avowal of the fault was inscribed during the great
cultures of which ours is the heir : the primary symbols of stain, guilt and sin ;
the secondary symbols of myths of tragic blindness, of the fall of the soul, of
wandering or decline ; the tertiary symbols and rationalizations of the servile
will or of original sin.”
Paul Ricoeur

The non instrumental as it appears in Egyptian artifacts and medieval relics grows in power, today, I think. One experiences a sense of having found or re-discovered something in which the qualitative is allowed to be indeterminate. In Ricoeur, the symbol is, at least in antiquity, both embodies and signifies simultaneously. The sculptures of Bernini or Donatello, are curiously close on a certain level to an ineffable sense of tragedy that subsumes the idea of interpretation. They are perhaps the only two sculptors to ever reach such a merger (and maybe Cellini). Today, mass cultural product, and Hollywood in particular, are creating work that barely registers as either story or image. It is a kind of psychic teflon art.

“But if the narrative imagination recalls the forgotten ‘others’ of
history, it equally calls for a reinterpretation of the notion of the
‘self. Postmodern philosophy, as we have seen, rejects the model
of the humanist subject. Structuralism denounced it as an
ideological illusion or surface play of unconscious signifiers. And
some post-structuralists went further still in declaring the human
self to be a ‘desiring machine’ which exults in schizophrenic
disorder. One thus finds the self being portrayed as, for example,
a ‘dispersed decentred network of libidinal attachments, emptied
of ethical substance and psychical interiority, the ephemeral
function of this or that act of consumption, media experience,
sexual relationship, trend or fashion’.”
Richard Kearny

Contemporary mass culture fuels a kind of aphasic imagination. And there is a weird new mythology or mythologies, really, forming around this bourgeois mental condition of political voyeurism. A sadistic voyeurism. And this is connected to a shaming and stigmatizing posture toward the blue collar workforce and the poor. Overpopulation is now a topic where I hear people say, ‘it’s selfish to have children’. But they are actually deaf to what they are saying. The same kind of deafness surrounds the political spectacle at all levels. The U.S. government, for example, just sold a huge shipment of arms to Saudi Arabia, arms which will be used to further obliterate Yemen. And then later, perhaps, the U.S. will force regime change on Saudi Arabia, or not. Doesn’t matter. They will do it somewhere. Syria for certain. As Wes Clark overheard Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz say, circa 9/11, the goal was 7 countries in 5 years. Or maybe it was 5 countries in 7 years. Who cares anyway. They are behind schedule. And a Clinton presidency will preside over all this slaughter because Clinton is advised by the very same neo con militarists than advised Bush. And Americans, the bourgeois, will watch highlights on TV, much as they watch the Olympics this week. But they will find these abstract and vague topics, such as overpopulation, which mostly they know won’t affect them, more material for shaping their own dwindling sense of worth and morality…and then attach them to their own sadistic nature. But they will not actually project any figure of compassion or empathy toward the poor in Yemen. Or Iraq, or Syria. Or anywhere. The streets of Baltimore or Oakland or Laredo or Detroit. That voice of the super ego is somehow coupled to this selective memory and imagination. The voice that berates and bullies a very shrunken ego, finds itself encouraging this sadistic fantasy that has become political. People seem unable to think past the most rudimentary common sense models of the world. Gee, six crayons fit in my box, but there is no room for more. Lets sterilize the remaining crayons, which are colors I don’t like anyway.

There is an inversion that goes on as well, I think. The enemy *out there* becomes the enemy that infects me *in here*. As rhetoric insists more and more aggressively on subjects such as tolerance, the punishing super ego grows in power and severity. The use of the word *denier* is a part of this. You might be a *climate change denier*. Or a genocide *denier*. Asking questions is proof of your denial and justification for being put in the cyber stockade (and in their ideal world, a real stockade). One is less and less allowed disagreement. Even with erstwhile friends, one is always vulnerable to exclusion and shaming for holding the wrong opinion.

Now as a footnote of sorts, Jacob Levitch (whose book is coming out this year on Monthly Review Press, I believe, and which I recommend ahead of time since I know Levitch and there is no better analyst of this stuff) has written extensively on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and their activities in India and Africa. And this is the linkage I am speaking about in terms of coercive ideological consensus. Overpopulation is a hot topic just now, and it is almost always a stealth ruling class agenda masquerading as Green concern. And what is most disturbing in a sense is that I know several University professors (admittedly at discount Universities) who teach this ideology. And they do it as part of a construction of the house of identity. Let me quote Levitch at some length here…

“In a 2012 Newsweek profile, Melinda Gates announced her intention to get “family planning” back on the global agenda and made the dubious claim that African women were literally clamoring for Depo-Provera as a way of hiding contraceptive use from “unsupportive husbands.”89 Boasting that a decision “likely to change lives all over the world” had been hers alone, she announced that the Foundation would invest $4 billion in an effort to supply injectable contraceptives to 120 million women – presumably women of color – by 2020. It was a program so ambitious that some critics warned of a return to the era of eugenics and coercive sterilization.90
Bill Gates, at one time an avowed Malthusian “at least in the developing countries”91 is now careful to repudiate Malthus in public. Yet it is striking that Foundation publicity justifies not only contraception, but every major initiative in the language of population control, from vaccination (“When children survive in greater numbers, parents decide to have smaller families”92) to primary education (“[G]irls who complete seven years of schooling will marry four years later and have 2.2 fewer children than girls who do not complete primary school.”)93
In a 2010 public lecture, Bill Gates attributed global warming to “overpopulation” and touted zero population growth as a solution achievable “[i]f we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, and reproductive health services.” The argument is disingenuous: As Gates certainly knows, the poor people who are the targets of his campaigns are responsible for no more than a tiny percentage of the environmental damage that underlies climate change. The economist Utsa Patnaik has demonstrated that when population figures are adjusted to account for actual per capita demand on resources, e.g., fossil fuels and food, the greatest “real population pressure” emanates not from India or Africa, but from the advanced countries. The Gates Foundation is well aware of this imbalance and works not to redress it but to preserve it – by blaming poverty not on imperialism but on unrestrained sexual reproduction “in places where we don’t want it.”
From Malthus to the present day, the myth of overpopulation has supplied reliable ideological cover for the ruling class as it appropriates ever greater shares of the people’s labor and the planet’s wealth. As argued in Aspects No. 55, “Malthus’s heirs continue to wish us to believe that people are responsible for their own misery; that there is simply not enough to go around; and to ameliorate that state of wretchedness we must not attempt to alter the ownership of social wealth and redistribute the social product, but instead focus on reducing the number of people.” In recent years BMGF’s publicity apparatus, exploiting Western alarm about “climate change,” has helped create a resurgence of the overpopulation hysteria last experienced during the 1970s in the wake of Paul Erlich’s bestseller The Population Bomb.
Yet the sheer scale of BMGF’s investment in “family planning”” suggests that its ambitions reach beyond mere propaganda. In addition to the multibillion dollar contraception distribution program discussed previously, BMGF provides research support for the development of new high-tech, long-lasting contraceptives (e.g., an ultrasound sterilization procedure for men as well as “non-surgical female sterilization”). Meanwhile the Foundation aggressively lobbies Third World governments to spend more on birth control and supporting infrastructure. while subsidizing steep cuts in the price of subcutaneous contraceptives.
These initiatives lie squarely within the traditions of Big Philanthropy. The Rockefeller Foundation organized the Population Council in 1953, predicting a “Malthusian crisis” in the developing world and financing extensive experiments in population control. These interventions were enthusiastically embraced by US government policymakers, who agreed that “the demographic problems of the developing countries, especially in areas of non-Western culture, make these nations more vulnerable to Communism.” Foundation research culminated in an era of “unrestrained enthusiasm for government-sponsored family planning” by the 1970s. Less discussed but amply documented is the consistent support for eugenics research by US-based foundations, dating from the 1920s, when Rockefeller helped found the German eugenics program that undergirded Nazi racial theories,102 through the 1970s, when Ford Foundation research helped prepare the intellectual ground for a brutal forced sterilization campaign in India. { } …Population control is, in another sense, one of the instruments of social control. It extends ruling-class jurisdiction more directly to the personal sphere, aiming at “full-spectrum dominance” of the developing world. Like laws regulating marriage and sexual behavior, such interventions in the reproduction of labor power are not essential to capitalists but remain desirable as a means of exercising ruling class hegemony over every aspect of the lives of the working people. Whereas the ideology of population control is intended to turn attention away from the existing distribution of wealth and income that causes widespread want, population control as such directly targets the bodies and dignity of poor people, conditioning them to believe that life’s most intimate decisions are outside of their competence and control.
The relationship between bourgeois ideology and imperialist practice is dynamic and mutually supportive. As David Harvey has observed: “Whenever a theory of overpopulation seizes hold in a society dominated by an elite, then the non-elite invariably experience some form of political, economic, and social repression.” Seen in this light, BMGF’s promotion of population control is doubly pernicious because it is cloaked in the language of environmentalism, popular empowerment, and feminism. Melinda Gates may evoke “choice” in support of her family planning initiatives, but in reality it is not poor women, but a handful of the world’s wealthiest people who have presumed to choose which methods of contraception will be delivered, and to whom.”

(full link here. http://www.rupe-india.org/57/gates.html