the sadness of the zoo

 quantifying complicity/strongman

 

Part of the great political crisis we face in the world today is a failure to imagine plausible desirable futures. Moshin Hamid

Driven by the terror “of time being split, of the course of the day being suddenly interrupted, of the whole world irretrievably disintegrating,” we seek assurance in an order that can “overwhelm the discontinuous."(Calasso) Our perceptions of time and space are mapped into imaginal geographies determined by fixed boundaries to sustain these hopes.

The public buys into an abstracted and mythic vision of the future (MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN) held in place by a fear of impermanence that is “so tormenting as to make the continuity of time seem an improbable gift, and one that is always about to be taken away." The production of the future is thus relinquished to an omniscient narrator who sees history as a necessary chain of events and so claims to know how the story will end. He recounts a future that has already been determined by past events, one that is thus predictable and “overwhelms the discontinuous.” Charting the territory ahead into a single determined future, he inscribes a path over previous maps reducing all sightlines to a single trajectory.

[...]the illusion is that the strongman will unite the nation.  But an aspiring dictator will always claim that some belong and others don't.  He will define one group after another as the enemy.  This might feel good, so long as you feel that you are on the right side of the line.  But now fear is the essence of life.  The politics of us-and-them, once begun, never ends.  

Most likely you won’t be killed or be required to kill. But amid the dreariness of life under dictatorship is dark responsibility for others’ death [...] the knowledge of having been utterly complicit in the very worst in human cruelty but being without tools for quantifying that complicity. 

The Strongman Fantasy, Timothy Snyder

We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in such times another reflex is the longing for an authority figure selling certainty, claiming the fist to be a helping hand. It is a touchingly human impulse, primal and pacifying — children turn to the parent to remove the overwhelm and uncertainty of a world they don’t yet understand and cannot carry. It is also a dangerous impulse, for it pulsates beneath every war and every reign of terror in the history of the world. Marginalia

 

We are moving into a period of bewilderment, a curious moment in which people find light in the midst of despair, and vertigo at the summit of their hopes. It is a religious moment also, and here is the danger. People will want to obey the voice of Authority, and many strange constructs of just what Authority is will arise in every mind… The public yearning for Order will invite many stubborn uncompromising persons to impose it. The sadness of the zoo will fall upon society. Leonard Cohen

• Roberto Calasso, Ardor, Transl. by Richard Dixon, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,2014) 208-9.
  
• Marginalia 
• Cressida Leyshon, “Moshin Hamid On the Migrants in All of Us,” The New Yorker, November 7, 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-week-in-fiction-mohsin- hamid-2016-